"In 1976," notes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, "the year that Marilyn Monroe would have turned 50, Larry McMurtry wrote that she 'is right in there with our major ghosts: Hemingway, the Kennedy brothers — people who finished with American life before America had time to finish with them.' Almost a half-century after her death, the world, or at least its necrophiliac fantasists, still haven't finished with Monroe and try to resurrect her again and again in movies, books, songs and glamour layouts featuring dewy and ruined ingénues. Maybe it's because it's so difficult to imagine her as Old Marilyn that she has become a Ghost of Hollywood Past, a phantom that periodically materializes to show us things that have been. The latest attempt at resurrection occurs in My Week With Marilyn, with Michelle Williams as the Ghost."
"The 'my' is Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), a wet-eared assistant director on...
"The 'my' is Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), a wet-eared assistant director on...
- 11/26/2011
- MUBI
A novel based on the records of Monroe's analysis is grimly fascinating
It is hard to know by what standards the author of this book can claim it to be a novel. Certainly it does not have the shape, tone or atmosphere of a crafted piece of fiction. What it most resembles is one of those immensely long Vanity Fair articles which start off with screaming headlines and lurid cross-heads, but which after a short distance one has to pursue into the ad-less wastes of the magazine's back pages. One keeps reading in the hope of finding shocking revelations, scurrilous imputations or at least good low-grade gossip, all the while suspecting that one is wasting one's time, which would probably be better spent watching Some Like It Hot on DVD.
This is not to say that Marilyn's Last Sessions is a bad book, but it is such a strange hybrid...
It is hard to know by what standards the author of this book can claim it to be a novel. Certainly it does not have the shape, tone or atmosphere of a crafted piece of fiction. What it most resembles is one of those immensely long Vanity Fair articles which start off with screaming headlines and lurid cross-heads, but which after a short distance one has to pursue into the ad-less wastes of the magazine's back pages. One keeps reading in the hope of finding shocking revelations, scurrilous imputations or at least good low-grade gossip, all the while suspecting that one is wasting one's time, which would probably be better spent watching Some Like It Hot on DVD.
This is not to say that Marilyn's Last Sessions is a bad book, but it is such a strange hybrid...
- 11/23/2011
- by John Banville
- The Guardian - Film News
The novelist picks through the mountain of books about the tragic star to find the ones where she emerges as a person, not 'a sex idol'
Michel Schneider is the author of three novels, including Marilyn's Last Sessions, which was the winner of the Prix Interallié (2006) and has now been translated into English by Will Hobson, published this month by Canongate. He has also written many essays on psychoanalysis, music, literature and the psychopathology of politics.
Buy Marilyn's Last Sessions by Michel Schneider at the Guardian bookshop
"Hundreds of books have been written about Marilyn. My personal reasons for writing a novel about her were probably quite different from those which had previously inspired so many biographers and authors. My interest was: why was she so intensely caught between public and private, words and images, trying to escape from the icon she became and cure herself with her own words?...
Michel Schneider is the author of three novels, including Marilyn's Last Sessions, which was the winner of the Prix Interallié (2006) and has now been translated into English by Will Hobson, published this month by Canongate. He has also written many essays on psychoanalysis, music, literature and the psychopathology of politics.
Buy Marilyn's Last Sessions by Michel Schneider at the Guardian bookshop
"Hundreds of books have been written about Marilyn. My personal reasons for writing a novel about her were probably quite different from those which had previously inspired so many biographers and authors. My interest was: why was she so intensely caught between public and private, words and images, trying to escape from the icon she became and cure herself with her own words?...
- 11/16/2011
- by Michel Schneider
- The Guardian - Film News
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