# Tropic of Cancer (novel)
One can live in Paris---I discovered that!---on just grief and anguish. A bitter nourishment---perhaps the best there is for certain people. At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of my rope. I was only flirting with disaster. \... I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love. I understood why it is that here, at the very hub of the wheel, one can embrace the most fantastic, the most impossible theories, without finding them in the least strange; it is here that one reads again the books of his youth and the enigmas take on new meanings, one for every white hair. One walks the streets knowing that he is mad, possessed, because it is only too obvious that these cold, indifferent faces are the visages of one\'s keepers. Here all boundaries fade away and the world reveals itself for the mad slaughterhouse that it is. The treadmill stretches away to infinitude, the hatches are closed down tight, logic runs rampant, with bloody cleaver flashing.
There are many passages explicitly describing the narrator\'s sexual encounters. In 1978, literary scholar Donald Gutierrez argued that the sexual comedy in the book was \"undeniably low\... but with a stronger visceral appeal than high comedy\". The characters are caricatures, and the male characters \"stumble through the mazes of their conceptions of woman\".
Michael Hardin made the case for the theme of homophobia in the novel. He proposed that the novel contained a \"deeply repressed homoerotic desire that periodically surfaces\".
Music and dance are other recurrent themes in the book. Music is used \"as a sign of the flagging vitality Miller everywhere rejects\". References to dancing include a comparison of loving Mona to a \"dance of death\", and a call for the reader to join in \"a last expiring dance\" even though \"we are doomed\".
Other than the first-person narrator \"Henry Miller\", the major characters include:


# Tropic of Cancer (novel)
Boris: A friend who rents rooms at the Villa Borghese. The character was modeled after Michael Fraenkel, a writer who \"had sheltered Miller during his hobo days\" in 1930.\
Carl: A writer friend who complains about optimistic people, about Paris, and about writing. Miller helps Carl write love letters to \"the rich cunt, Irene\", and Carl relates his encounter with her to Miller. Carl lives in squalor and has sex with a minor. The inspiration for Carl was Miller\'s friend Alfred Perlès, a writer.\
Collins: A sailor who befriends Fillmore and Miller. As Collins had fallen in love with a boy in the past, his undressing a sick Miller to put him to bed has been interpreted as evidence of a homoerotic desire for Miller.\
Fillmore: A \"young man in the diplomatic service\" who becomes friends with Miller. He invites Miller to stay with him; later the Russian \"princess\" Macha with \"the clap\" joins them. Fillmore and Miller disrupt a mass while hung over. Toward the end of the book, Fillmore promises to marry a French woman named Ginette who is pregnant by him, but she is physically abusive and controlling, and Miller convinces Fillmore to leave Paris without her. Fillmore\'s real-life counterpart was Richard Galen Osborn, a lawyer.\
Mona: A character corresponding to Miller\'s estranged second wife June Miller. Miller remembers Mona, who is now in America, nostalgically.\
Tania: A woman married to Sylvester. The character was modeled after Bertha Schrank, who was married to Joseph Schrank. It may also be noted that during the writing of the novel, Miller also had a passionate affair with Anais Nin; by changing the \"T\" to an \"S\", one can make out Anais from Tania by rearranging the letters. It may also be noted that in one of Nin\'s many passionate letters to Miller, she quotes his swoon found below. Tania has an affair with Miller, who fantasizes about her:


# Tropic of Cancer (novel)
O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed. I will send you home to your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and your womb turned inside out. Your Sylvester! Yes, he knows how to build a fire, but I know how to inflame a cunt. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent.
Van Norden: A friend of Miller\'s who is \"probably the most sexually corrupt man\" in the book, having a \"total lack of empathy with women\". Van Norden refers to women using terms such as \"my Georgia cunt\", \"fucking cunt\", \"rich cunt\", \"married cunts\", \"Danish cunt\", and \"foolish cunts\". Miller helps Van Norden move to a room in a hotel, where Van Norden brings women \"day in and out\". The character was based on Wambly Bald, a gossip columnist.

### United States
Upon the book\'s publication in France in 1934, the United States Customs Service banned the book from being imported into the U.S. Frances Steloff sold copies of the novel smuggled from Paris during the 1930s at her Gotham Book Mart, which led to lawsuits. A copyright-infringing edition of the novel was published in New York City in 1940 by \"Medusa\" (Jacob Brussel); its last page claimed its place of publication to be Mexico. Brussel was eventually sent to jail for three years for the edition.


# Tropic of Cancer (novel)
### United States
In 1950, Ernest Besig, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union in San Francisco, attempted to import *Tropic of Cancer* along with Miller\'s other novel, *Tropic of Capricorn*, to the United States. Customs detained the novels and Besig sued the government. Before the case went to trial, Besig requested a motion to admit 19 depositions from literary critics testifying to the \"literary value of the novels and to Miller\'s stature as a serious writer\". The motion was denied by Judge Louis A. Goodman. The case went to trial with Goodman presiding. Goodman declared both novels obscene. Besig appealed the decision to the Ninth Circuit of Appeals, but the novels were once again declared \"obscene\" in a unanimous decision in *Besig v. United States*.
In 1961, when Grove Press legally published the book in the United States, over 60 obscenity lawsuits in over 21 states were brought against booksellers that sold it. The opinions of courts varied; for example, in his dissent from the majority holding that the book was not obscene, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Michael Musmanno wrote *Cancer* is \"not a book. It is a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity.\"
Publisher Barney Rosset hired lawyer Charles Rembar to help Rosset lead the \"effort to assist every bookseller prosecuted, regardless of whether there was a legal obligation to do so\". Rembar successfully argued two appeals cases, in Massachusetts and New Jersey, although the book continued to be judged obscene in New York and other states.
In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court, in *Grove Press, Inc. v. Gerstein*, cited *Jacobellis v. Ohio* (which was decided the same day) and overruled state court findings that *Tropic of Cancer* was obscene.

### Other countries
The book was banned outside the U.S. as well:


# Tropic of Cancer (novel)
### Other countries
- In Canada, it was on the list of books banned by customs as of 1938. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police seized copies of the book from bookstores and public libraries in the early 1960s. By 1964, attitudes toward the book had \"liberalized\".
- Only smuggled copies of the book were available in the United Kingdom after its publication in 1934. Scotland Yard contemplated banning its publication in Britain in the 1960s, but decided against the ban because literary figures such as T. S. Eliot were ready to defend the book publicly.
- In Australia the book was banned until the early 1970s when the Minister for Customs and Excise, Don Chipp, largely ended censorship of printed material in the country.
- In Finland all printed copies of the Finnish versions of the book were confiscated by the state before the books were to be published in 1962. The book was not published there in Finnish until 1970, however the book was available in Swedish and English.

### Individual reviewers
In 1935, H. L. Mencken read the 1934 Paris edition, and sent an encouraging note to Miller: \"I read *Tropic of Cancer* a month ago. It seems to me to be a really excellent piece of work, and I so reported to the person who sent it to me. Of this, more when we meet.\"
George Orwell reviewed *Tropic of Cancer* in *The New English Weekly* in 1935. Orwell focused on Miller\'s descriptions of sexual encounters, which he deemed significant for their \"attempt to get at real facts\", and which he saw as a departure from dominant trends. Orwell argued that, although Miller concerns himself with uglier aspects of life, he is nonetheless not quite a pessimist, and seems to find that the contemplation of ugliness makes life more worthwhile rather than less. Concluding, he described *Tropic of Cancer* as \"a remarkable book\" and recommended it to \"anyone who can get hold of a copy\" Returning to the novel in the essay \"Inside the Whale\" (1940), George Orwell wrote the following:


# Tropic of Cancer (novel)
### Individual reviewers
I earnestly counsel anyone who has not done so to read at least *Tropic of Cancer*. With a little ingenuity, or by paying a little over the published price, you can get hold of it, and even if parts of it disgust you, it will stick in your memory. \... Here in my opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance....
Samuel Beckett hailed it as \"a momentous event in the history of modern writing\". Norman Mailer, in his 1976 book on Miller entitled *Genius and Lust*, called it \"one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century, a revolution in consciousness equal to *The Sun Also Rises*\".
Edmund Wilson said of the novel:
The tone of the book is undoubtedly low; *The Tropic of Cancer*, in fact, from the point of view both of its happenings and of the language in which they are conveyed, is the lowest book of any real literary merit that I ever remember to have read\... there is a strange amenity of temper and style which bathes the whole composition even when it is disgusting or tiresome.
In *Sexual Politics* (1970), Kate Millett wrote that Miller \"is a compendium of American sexual neuroses\", showing \"anxiety and contempt\" toward women in works such as *Tropic of Cancer*. In 1980, Anatole Broyard described *Tropic of Cancer* as \"Mr. Miller\'s first and best novel\", showing \"a flair for finding symbolism in unobtrusive places\" and having \"beautiful sentences\". Julian Symons wrote in 1993 that \"the shock effect of the novel has gone\", although \"it remains an extraordinary document\". A 2009 essay on the book by Ewan Morrison described it as a \"life-saver\" when he was \"wandering from drink to drink and bed to bed, dangerously close to total collapse\".


# Tropic of Cancer (novel)
### Appearances in lists of best books
The book has been included in a number of lists of best books, such as the following:
- In July 1998, the Board of the Modern Library ranked *Tropic of Cancer* 50th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
- In July 1998, students of the Radcliffe Publishing Course, at the request of the Modern Library editorial board, compiled their own list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, and the book was ranked 84th.
- Between July 1998 and October 1998, an online reader poll by the Modern Library placed the novel 68th among the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
- In a survey of librarians published in November 1998, the book was ranked 132nd in a list of 150 fiction books from the 20th century.
- *Time* magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.
- The novel was listed in the 2006 book *1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die*.
- It was one of the \"1000 Novels Everyone Must Read\" in *The Guardian* in 2009.
- It was included in the list \"The 75 Books Every Man Should Read\" (2011) in *Esquire*.

### Influences on Miller
Critics and Miller himself have claimed that Miller was influenced by the following in writing the novel:
- Louis-Ferdinand Céline, especially *Journey to the End of the Night* (1932), his semi-autobiographical first novel featuring a \"comic, antiheroic character\". Nevertheless, George Orwell wrote \"Both books use unprintable words, both are in some sense autobiographical, but that is all.\"
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, especially his *Notes from Underground* (1864).
- James Joyce. Nevertheless, Orwell felt that the novel did not resemble Joyce\'s *Ulysses*.
- François Rabelais.
- Henry David Thoreau.
- Walt Whitman, who wrote in a similar style about common people. The poet is mentioned favorably in the novel several times, for example: \"In Whitman the whole American scene comes to life, her past and her future, her birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in America Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be said.\"


# Tropic of Cancer (novel)
### Novel\'s influence on other writers
*Tropic of Cancer* \"has had a huge and indelible impact on both the American literary tradition and American society as a whole\". The novel influenced many writers, as exemplified by the following:
- Lawrence Durrell\'s 1938 novel *The Black Book* was described as \"celebrating the Henry Miller of *Tropic of Cancer* as his Durrell\'s literary father\".
- It has been claimed that the novel impressed the Beat Generation writers in the 1960s such as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.
- Erica Jong wrote \"\...when I was searching for the freedom to write the 1973 novel *Fear of Flying*, I picked up *Tropic of Cancer* and the sheer exuberance of the prose unlocked something in me.\" In turn, Miller praised *Fear of Flying* in 1974, comparing it to *Tropic of Cancer*.
The novel was adapted for a 1970 film *Tropic of Cancer* directed by Joseph Strick, and starring Rip Torn, James T. Callahan, and Ellen Burstyn. Miller was a \"technical consultant\" during the production of the movie; although he had reservations about the adaptation of the book, he praised the final movie. The film was rated X in the United States, which was later changed to an NC-17 rating.
Literature


# Tropic of Cancer (novel)
### Novel\'s influence on other writers
- In his 1948 autobiography, poet and writer Robert W. Service wrote a few comments about *Tropic of Cancer*, for example, \"Of course the book shocked me but I could not deny a strange flicker of genius in its wildest fights.\"
- In chapter 2 of William Gaddis\'s 1955 novel *The Recognitions*, set in Paris in the 1930s, an artist complains \"I\'ve got to show these pictures, I\'ve got to sell some of them, but how can I have people coming up there with him there? He\'s dying. I can\'t put him out on the street, dying like that . . . even in Paris\" (63-64), which echoes the scene in *Tropic of Cancer* where the artist Kruger tries to get the sick Miller out of his studio so that he can exhibit his pictures. \"People can\'t look at pictures and statues with enthusiasm when a man is dying before their eyes\" (Grove ed., 195).
- In his 1960 short story \"Entropy\", Thomas Pynchon begins with a quote from this novel.
- In the 1965 novel *God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater* by Kurt Vonnegut, Lila reads the book \"as though\... it were *Heidi*\".
- In the 1969 novel *The Seven Minutes* by Irving Wallace, the book and the trial are mentioned.
- In the 1994 play *Pterodactyls* by Nicky Silver, the novel is mentioned by the character Emma: \"She reads poems by Emily Bronté and I read chapters from *The Tropic of Cancer* by Henry Miller.\"
- In Carl Hiaasen\'s 1995 *Stormy Weather* a character quotes a line from the novel.
- In the 1998 nonfiction book *Rocket Boys*, Quentin shows Sonny a copy of *Tropic of Cancer* and asks him \"You want to know about girls?\"
Music


# Tropic of Cancer (novel)
### Novel\'s influence on other writers
- Satirical songwriter and mathematics instructor Tom Lehrer stated that he intended to write a million-selling math book which he would call *Tropic of Calculus*.
- The 1980s British band The Weather Prophets was named after a line in the opening paragraph of the novel: \"Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet.\"
- Frontman Henry Rollins of the hardcore punk band Black Flag was heavily affected by the book as well and frequently made references to it in his songs, often taking lyrics directly from Tropic of Cancer. He would also read passages of it to his audiences mid-show.
- In the song \"Delirium of Disorder\" by punk band Bad Religion, the opening verse quotes the novel, \"Life is a sieve through which my anarchy strains resolving itself into words. Chaos is the score on which reality is written\...\".
- In the song \"Protest Song 68\" by Refused, the opening verse quotes the novel, \"To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs\...\"
- In the song \"Ashes of American Flags\" by Wilco, one phrase from the lyrics is taken from the novel: \"A hole without a key.\"
- In 2012, the American grindcore band Pig Destroyer used a passage from the book on tape, read by Larry King, as the introduction to their song The Bug on their album entitled Book Burner.
Film and television


# Tropic of Cancer (novel)
### Novel\'s influence on other writers
- In a 1962 episode of the TV series *Perry Mason* (\"The Case of the Bogus Books\"), a character tells another that \"*Tropic of Cancer* is not a medical book. Far from it.\"
- In the 1985 film *After Hours,* the protagonist Paul is reading the book in a coffee shop when a Marcy comments on it from the table across, setting the events of the film in motion.
- In the 1963 film, *Take Her, She\'s Mine*, adapted from Phoebe and Henry Ephron\'s play of the same name, Jimmy Stewart, as Mr. Michaelson, reads the (soon to be banned by the mayor) book written by Henry Miller. Sandra Dee, Stewart\'s daughter in the film, has organized a sit-in style protest against banning the book.
- The novel is read and discussed in *After Hours*, a 1985 film by Martin Scorsese.
- In the 1991 version of *Cape Fear*, also directed by Scorsese, the characters of Max Cady and Danielle Bowden discuss the book briefly.
- In the 1991 *Seinfeld* episode \"The Library\", Jerry is accused of never returning a copy of the book to the public library after borrowing it many years before, during high school, in 1971. It is revealed that the book was stolen by the gym teacher while a gang of jocks were beating up on George. In the present day, the gym teacher still holds the library book, despite being homeless and insane.
- In the 1990 movie *Henry & June* the first draft of the book is referenced and discussed by Henry and friends.
- In the 2000 romantic comedy film *100 Girls*, the characters Dora and Matthew read an excerpt from *Tropic of Cancer* together: \"Your Sylvester! \... After me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St. Bernards.\"
- At the beginning of the 2000 movie *Final Destination*, Clear (Ali Larter) is reading *Tropic of Cancer* upon arrival at the airport.
- In the 2010 telenovela *¿Dónde Está Elisa?* a copy of the book is found in Elisa\'s locker at school.
- In Season 2 of the television series *Ozark* Jonah reads an explicit excerpt of the book to Buddy.


# Tropic of Cancer (novel)
### Novel\'s influence on other writers
The typescript of the book was auctioned for \$165,000 in 1986. Yale University now owns the typescript, which was displayed to the public in 2001.
- Censorship
- *Henry and June* (1986 book)
- *Henry & June* (1990 film)
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# Tipping the Velvet
***Tipping the Velvet*** (1998) is a historical novel by Sarah Waters; it is her debut novel. Set in England during the 1890s, it tells a coming of age story about a young woman named Nan who falls in love with a male impersonator, follows her to London, and finds various ways to support herself as she journeys through the city. The picaresque plot elements have prompted scholars and reviewers to compare it to similar British urban adventure stories written by Charles Dickens and Daniel Defoe.
The novel has pervasive lesbian themes, concentrating on eroticism and self-discovery. Waters was working on a PhD dissertation in English literature when she decided to write a story she would like to read. Employing her love for the variety of people and districts in London, she consciously chose an urban setting. As opposed to previous lesbian-themed fiction she had read where the characters escape an oppressive society to live apart from it, Waters chose characters who interact with their surroundings. She has acknowledged that the book imagines a lesbian presence and history in Victorian London where none was recorded. The main character\'s experiences in the theatrical profession and her perpetual motion through the city allow her to make observations on social conditions while exploring the issues of gender, sexism, and class difference.
As Waters\' debut novel, *Tipping the Velvet* was highly acclaimed and was chosen by *The New York Times* and *Library Journal* as one of the best books of 1998. Waters followed it with two other novels set in the Victorian era, both of which were also well received. Reviewers have offered the most praise for *Tipping the Velvet*s use of humour, adventure, and sexual explicitness. The novel was adapted into a somewhat controversial three-part series of the same name produced and broadcast by the BBC in 2002 and a stage play in 2015.
The Night Watch\'\', at a book signing in 2002


# Tipping the Velvet
When Sarah Waters was 19 years old, she joined a student house in Whitstable, Kent, sharing a bed and then falling in love with another young woman. They lived there for two winters in what became a six-year relationship. She recalled, \"It was cold, isolated, romantic and so intense---quite special.\" In 1995, Waters was at Queen Mary and Westfield College writing her PhD dissertation on gay and lesbian historical fiction from 1870 onward when she became interested in the Victorian era. While learning about the activism in socialism, women\'s suffrage, and utopianism of the period, she was inspired to write a work of fiction of the kind that she would like to read. Specifically, Waters intended to write a story that focused on an urban setting, diverging from previous lesbian-themed books such as Isabel Miller\'s *Patience and Sarah*, in which two women escape an oppressive home life to live together freely in the woods. She said to herself at the time, \"there\'s so much more to lesbian history than that\".
Waters was drawn to the Victorian era because of the (mis)understandings of what social norms existed during the period. As she stated, \"I find it a fascinating period because it feels very close to us, and yet in lots of ways it is utterly strange: many of the things we think we know about it are stereotypes, or simply wrong\". Considering herself part of gay and lesbian literary heritage, Waters was influenced by Oscar Wilde, and Chris Hunt, who wrote *Street Lavender*, an historical novel with gay male themes also set in the Victorian era. She has stated that *Tipping the Velvet* is a female version of *Street Lavender*, with a plot similar to *My Secret Life* by \"Walter\".


# Tipping the Velvet
Waters pitched *Tipping the Velvet* to ten British publishers, but after they all rejected it, she began considering American publishing houses. Although she was picked up quickly by a literary agency, the agent spent almost a year trying to sell the book to a mainstream publisher. By the time *Tipping the Velvet* was accepted by Virago Press---one of the ten that had previously passed on the project---Waters had already begun work on her second novel.
Nancy \"Nan\" Astley is a sheltered 18-year-old living with her working-class family and helping in their oyster restaurant in Whitstable, Kent. She becomes instantly and desperately enamoured with a \"masher\", or male impersonator, named Kitty Butler, who performs for a season at the local theatre. They begin a friendship that grows when, after Kitty finds an opportunity to perform in London for better exposure, she asks Nan to join her. Nan enthusiastically agrees and leaves her family to act as Kitty\'s dresser while she performs. Although Kitty and Nan acknowledge their relationship to be sisterly, Nan continues to love Kitty until a jealous fight forces Kitty to admit she feels the same, although she insists that they keep their relationship secret. Simultaneously, Kitty\'s manager Walter decides that Kitty needs a performing partner to reach true success, and suggests Nan for the role. Nan is initially horrified by the idea, but takes to it. The duo become quite famous until Nan realises she is homesick after being gone from her family for more than a year. Her return home is underwhelming, so she returns to London early to find Kitty in bed with Walter. They announce that the act is finished and they are to be married.


# Tipping the Velvet
Astonished and deeply bruised by the discovery, Nan wanders the streets of London, finally holing herself in a filthy boarding house for weeks in a state of madness until her funds run out. After spying the male costumes she took as her only memory of her time with Kitty, Nan begins to walk the streets of London as a man and easily passes. She is solicited by a man for sex and begins renting, but dressed only as a man for male clients, never letting them know she is a woman. She meets a socialist activist named Florence who lives near the boarding house, but before she can get to know her, Nan is hired by a wealthy widow with licentious tastes named Diana. Although realising---and initially enjoying---that she is an object to Diana and her friends, Nan stays with her for over a year as \"Neville\", dressed in the finest men\'s clothes Diana can afford. The relationship erodes, however, and Diana throws Nan into the streets.
Nan stumbles through London trying to find Florence, whom she eventually does; Florence is now melancholy, however, with a child. Nan stays with Florence and her brother Ralph, working as their housekeeper. Nan and Florence grow closer during the year they live together, and Nan learns that the previous boarder with Florence and Ralph had a child and died shortly after giving birth. Florence was deeply in love with the boarder but her affections were not returned. During an outing to a women\'s pub, Nan is recognised by former fans, to Florence\'s astonishment, and Nan divulges her own spotty past to Florence. Cautiously, they begin a love affair. Putting her theatrical skills to use, Nan assists Ralph in preparing a speech at an upcoming socialist rally. At the event Nan jumps onstage to help Ralph when he falters, and is noticed once more by Kitty, who asks her to come back so they can continue their affair in secret. Realising how much shame Kitty continues to feel, how much of herself was compromised during their affair, and that her truest happiness is where she is now, Nan turns Kitty away and joins Florence.

### Style
The story spans the London districts of Brixton, Smithfield, Leicester Square, St John\'s Wood and Bethnal Green, shown here in a map from 1911.


# Tipping the Velvet
### Style
The greatest literary strengths in *Tipping the Velvet*, according to reviewers and literary scholars, are the vibrant portrayal of the districts and streets of London, and Waters\' ability to create sympathetic and realistic characters. Her use of synaesthesia in lush descriptions particularly interested Harriet Malinowitz in *The Women\'s Review of Books*. For example, Malinowitz cites the scene when Nan first meets Kitty, removing her glove to shake Kitty\'s hand. Very much an oyster girl, Nan\'s hands are covered with \"those rank sea-scents, of liquor and oyster-flesh, crab-meat and whelks, which had flavoured my fingers and those of my family for so many years we had ceased, entirely, to notice them\". Nan is mortified that she smells like a herring, but Kitty assuages her fears, kissing her hand and telling her she instead smells like a mermaid. Malinowitz includes this and other descriptions of sights, sounds, and smells in Victorian London as examples of elements that are \"breathlessly and wittily detailed\".
Although Waters was born in Pembrokeshire, Wales, she considers herself a London writer because of her intense affection for the city, due in part to her immigration to it. Specifically, Waters is moved by walking through London and seeing remnants of many historical eras: \"It\'s \... almost like it\'s peopled with ghosts---again, jostling up against each other or passing through each other. I find that very exciting\". Her love for the city is apparent to many reviewers. In the *Lesbian Review of Books* Donna Allegra writes, \"She summons the era\'s attitudes and ambiance projecting them onto the screen of the reader\'s mind with Dolby wrap-around sound such that you feel you\'re vacationing on all points between Chelsea and the East End\".


# Tipping the Velvet
### Style
Miranda Seymour in *The New York Times* remarks on the \"breathless passion\" of the narrator\'s voice as being absolutely convincing, citing as an example Nancy\'s statement to her sister at the start of the book about why she continues to visit Kitty Butler:\... It\'s like I never saw anything at all before. It\'s like I am filling up, like a wine-glass when it\'s filled with wine. I watch the acts before her and they are like nothing---they\'re like dust. Then she walks on the stage and---she is so pretty; and her suit is so nice; and her voice is so sweet\... She makes me want to smile and weep, at once\... I never saw a girl like her before. I never knew that there were girls like her.
Donna Allegra and Christina Patterson in *The Observer* also praise Nan as a passionate and captivating character. Patterson and Mel Steel in *The Independent* compare her resourcefulness to that of Moll Flanders. Of her three Victorian-set novels, Waters uses humour and \"an attractive lightness of touch\" most effectively in *Tipping the Velvet*, according to Paulina Palmer. Nan the narrator describes the irony of her \"curious gaslit career\" as a rent-boy only to end up---in Diana\'s words---as her \"tart\". Waters had such fun writing the novel that she told Robert McCrum from *The Observer* in 2009 that if she had no obligations to meet stemming from her subsequent success as a writer that she would continue writing Nan\'s story.

### Genre
Waters responded to the many comparisons of her books to Charles Dickens\' by saying \"I\'m not like Dickens\... To write these faux Victorian novels is quite different.\"


# Tipping the Velvet
### Genre
Nan\'s path through the plot indicates that *Tipping the Velvet* is part *Bildungsroman*, and her journeys through the streets of London invoke elements of a picaresque novel. Scholar Emily Jeremiah characterises the story as a *Bildungsroman*: a coming-of-age adventure but one that far surpasses a simple coming-out story. Stefania Ciocia in *Literary London* writes that the plot has classical elements of a fairy tale as it follows the main character\'s growth and progression, and has a moral ending that includes a course of events where Nan forsakes three suitors for her---in this case---Princess Charming. Nan finds true love with Florence, who is a bit dowdy, somewhat stout, certainly not wealthy, and driven to improve the world; the least likely of all the characters. A review in *Publishers Weekly* states that the series of events leading to Nan finding love are \"unpredictable and moving\".
Nan\'s experiences eventually reveal serious faults of the society she moves through, the primary element of a picaresque novel. For this and other reasons, Waters\' books are frequently compared to stories by Charles Dickens; the reader follows Nan\'s movement from sheltered naif to exuberant theatre performer to rent-boy to mistress to housewife then socialist orator, showing allegiance to none of these professions or ideals. Michael Upchurch in *The Seattle Times* writes that Nan\'s inability or unwillingness to adhere to any profession or setting, remaining malleable until the end of the novel indicates she is her own worst enemy. Likewise, Marianne Brace in *The Independent* considers Nan selfish and unsympathetic.


# Tipping the Velvet
### Genre
Ciocia writes that with half the novel taking place in theatrical settings, Nan may be playing a role as character in her own life or a play on a stage set in a theatre or the streets of London. She starts as a spectator watching Kitty onstage, and later with Kitty, watching how men move and behave to improve their act. She becomes a performer, with Kitty, as a renter and again for the predatory Diana and her friends. Finally she takes the role of director as she assists and impels Ralph to perform his speech. At this point, she is able to reconcile her identity and the story ends. Waters consciously chose to create a complicated plot, and was impressed with Iris Murdoch\'s claim that she herself had entire stories worked out well in advance of writing them, a method Waters used with *Tipping the Velvet*.

### Sexuality
Sexuality and sexual identity is the most prevalent theme in the novel. The title is an obscure Victorian pornographic slang reference to cunnilingus. Nick Rennison in *Contemporary British Authors* characterises *Tipping the Velvet* as an \"unabashed and unapologetic celebration of lesbian eroticism and sexual diversity\". Donna Allegra writes with appreciation of how the existence of Waters\' characters in a heterosexual existence forces an analysis of closeted positions. The sexism of the period puts a stranglehold on women, forcing readers to compare women in the Victorian era with present-day sexual attitudes. Nan never has difficulty accepting her love for Kitty Butler and other women; Kitty\'s union with Walter, however, \"reeks of lesbophobia\", according to Allegra. Music halls could be rough in some areas, but Kitty is shown handling drunken and rowdy audiences with humour and grace. The only instance where she is overcome and flees the stage is when a drunken patron shouts a euphemism for a lesbian at her. This episode leads to the final scene of Part I when Nan stumbles upon Kitty and Walter in bed. Kitty does not display any pleasure in their union, but rather complacence tinged with shame. Allegra compares Kitty\'s desire for normality overshadowing her desire for love with Nan to \"compulsory heterosexuality \... emblematic of and particular to lesbian existence\".


# Tipping the Velvet
### Sexuality
Scholar Paulina Palmer asserts that Waters, in *Tipping the Velvet* and her two following novels also set in the Victorian era---*Affinity* and *Fingersmith*---is establishing a literary tradition that has not existed: \"Women engaging in same-sex relationships in the Victorian era were on the whole invisible and we have little knowledge of their literary interests.\" Waters, however, acknowledges that accuracy about lesbian life in the Victorian era is not her primary goal: \"My purpose was not to be authentic, but to imagine a history that we can't really recover.\" Short bursts of lesbian-themed literary activity occurred in 1920s with authors such as Natalie Clifford Barney and Djuna Barnes. Another surge of activity published as lesbian pulp fiction occurred in the 1950s and early 1960s, during which several notable lesbian authors such as Ann Bannon and Valerie Taylor helped to establish lesbian literary identity. These fictions helped to inform readers about the lives and cultural landmarks of lesbians when very little information existed. Waters states that she is not on a deliberate crusade to write about lesbians, but that it is a reflection of what she knows: \"Lesbianism is at the top of the agenda for my books because it\'s at the top of the agenda for my life. It would be bizarre not to write about it.\" In 2009, as she reflected on her reasons for writing *Tipping the Velvet* and *Fingersmith*, Waters said she was searching for her own identity as a lesbian writer.


# Tipping the Velvet
### Sexuality
Among Waters\' Victorian-set novels, depictions of sexual encounters are also, according to Palmer, the most vivid in *Tipping the Velvet*. A review in *The Advocate* calls the book \"riotously sexy\", and *The Seattle Times* suggests the scene where Nan shows Kitty how to open and eat an oyster is evocative of *Tom Jones*. This follows a marked difference in recently written fiction by and for lesbians. Frank depictions of lesbian sexuality specifically penned by women have been quieted by censorship that equated lesbian sex with aberrant mental behaviour, or employed it as an erotic element controlled by, and for the benefit of, men. Lesbian literary scholar Bonnie Zimmerman writes, \"Lesbians have been reticent and uncomfortable about sexual writing in part because we wish to reject the patriarchal stereotype of the lesbian as a voracious sexual vampire who spends all her time in bed. It is safer to be a lesbian if sex is kept in the closet or under the covers. We don't wish to give the world another stick with which to beat us\".

### Gender
Nan not only experiences a series of misadventures and lesbian relationships, but also shifts from female to male at the same time, giving the reader an opportunity to view London society from multiple perspectives. Gender masquerade and reaction to it permeates the novel. According to Harriet Malinowitz, Waters uses the symbolism of clothing such as skirts, pants, stays, braces, bonnets, ties, and chemises \"with the sort of metaphorical significance that Melville gives to whales\". Stefania Ciocia declares that in all of 19th-century English literature, the only type of character who was able to enjoy adventures native to the picaresque novel were males who acted as the observer or stroller, walking through the city from one district to the next. The single exception to this was Moll Flanders, a prostitute. Nancy Astley behaves as both, giving her the ability to offer her perceptions of London society as both a man and a woman.
Vesta Tilley, here in costume, was one of the most popular male impersonators of her time.


# Tipping the Velvet
### Gender
Music halls, where both Nan and Kitty are employed---and put on display---as male impersonators, allow about half the novel\'s action and commentary on gender to take place, according to scholar Cheryl Wilson. When Nan puts on trousers for the first time to perform as Kitty\'s partner and realises the impact of their double act together, she states, \"whatever successes I might achieve as a girl, they would be nothing compared to the triumphs I should enjoy clad, however girlishly, as a boy\". Male impersonation is common in the world of the novel, and some performers are quite popular. Only certain types of depictions of men, however, were acceptable in reality. Nan and Kitty pretend to be London \"swells\": gentlemen on the town who sing about their sweethearts. Wilson provides evidence that such depictions were supported by class divisions, as poorer music hall patrons enjoyed the fun poked at the upper class, and the upper class generally found it harmless enough to laugh at themselves. Mashers such as the famed Vesta Tilley capitalised on the fact that both men and women were able to laugh at common perceptions of femininity and masculinity.
Writing in 1998 about a period more than 100 years before, Waters employs a continuity between the past and present, particularly as it relates to an outsider\'s view of sexuality and gender. Diana bestows Nan with the finest gift she had ever received, an expensive watch that requires no winding. She has nowhere to be except at Diana\'s beck and call, and never leaves Diana\'s mansion without her. Emily Jeremiah uses this as an example of how *Tipping the Velvet* fits Judith Halberstam\'s declaration that homosexual historiographies \"produce alternative temporalities\". Gay and lesbian stories do not use the same rites of passage that most mainstream stories do, leaving aside the importance of birth, marriage, reproduction, and death. This transcendence of time is evident in the narration of the novel. It is Nan\'s first-person account of her own past, told many years later. When Nan divulges her past to Florence, Waters uses the first line of the novel to signify where she begins, cycling the story.


# Tipping the Velvet
### Gender
Even the novel\'s language bridges this divide. Waters often employs the word \"queer\" to describe the unusual or remarkable, instead of its post-1922 connotation to refer to homosexuality. She also uses the term specifically to highlight what is unusual as it applies to gender, or Nan\'s own emotions toward Kitty. Nan\'s father uses the symbol of the oyster, what he calls a \"real queer fish\" that exhibits both male and female characteristics, and compares it to Kitty who sits before them in feminine attire though they have seen her on stage dressed as a man. The landlady of the boarding house where Kitty and Nan are staying appraises Nan\'s first male costume, and is troubled by the \"queerness\" of it because she looks too much like a man, instead of a woman pretending to be a man. Donna Allegra suggests that by using the contemporary term for prostitutes, \"gay girls\", Waters is winking at her readers.

### Class
Starting as a working-class girl and experiencing music halls, prostitution, luxury, and a socialist struggle for utopia, Nan\'s journeys through the class system in *Tipping the Velvet* are as varied as her gender portrayals and love affairs. Aiobheann Sweeney in *The Washington Post* notes, \"like Dickens, Waters digs around in the poorhouses, prisons and asylums to come up with characters who not only court and curtsy but dramatise the unfairness of poverty and gender disparity in their time\".
Paulina Palmer sees the reading material available in the various locations of Nan\'s settings as symbols of the vast class differences in Victorian London. Specifically, Diana keeps a trunk full of pornographic literature which she and Nan read to each other in between sexual encounters. She is an extremely wealthy resident of the London neighbourhood St John\'s Wood, and identifies as a Sapphist---a contemporary term for a lesbian. Nan uses the euphemism \"tom\" throughout the novel, particularly to refer to herself and other working class lesbians. Although \"tom\" was used as a Victorian reference to lesbianism, Waters admits it was probably not as prevalent as her characters suggest it was.


# Tipping the Velvet
### Class
Waters includes a historical reference to the medical profession starting to acknowledge and identify female homosexuality in the 19th century when a friend of Diana\'s named Dickie reads aloud during a party from a medical text describing the histories of several acknowledged lesbians, including Dickie\'s own. One story discussed among the wealthy women at the party is about a young woman with a large clitoris, which they consider congenital in lower-class women. They attempt to prove their point with Diana\'s maid Zena, but Nan prevents this humiliation, which precipitates her final rift with Diana. Using Dickie\'s book to strike Nan across the face, Diana gives her a black eye and bloody cheek before throwing her out into the street with Zena. Nan goes to Florence\'s house, which is filled with socialist literature. Although Diana is a supporter of women\'s suffrage, she discourages Nan from reading such literature, confiscating any political material Nan picks up. In contrast, Nan feels hopelessly uninformed when Florence and her friends engage in heated political debates. She asks questions, but feels stupid about not knowing the answers. Florence introduces her to the writings of Walt Whitman, Eleanor Marx, and Edward Carpenter, which they sexualise by using as an introduction to intimacy.
*Tipping the Velvet* was critically acclaimed upon its release and Waters\' writing style highly praised. Harriet Malinowitz wrote that the story is an \"utterly captivating, high octane narrative\" and Mel Steel of *The Independent* wrote, \"Could this be a new genre? The bawdy lesbian picaresque novel? Whatever it is, take it with you. It\'s gorgeous\". *Kirkus Reviews* also praised it, writing \"Waters\' debut offers terrific entertainment: swiftly paced, crammed with colorful depictions of 1890s London and vividly sketched Dickensian supporting characters\", comparing the depiction of Nancy\'s parents to the fishing community in *David Copperfield*, and adding that it \"pulsates with highly charged (and explicitly presented) erotic heat\". John Perry in *The San Francisco Chronicle* stated that it \"has the qualities of an extravagantly upholstered armchair. Tricked out in gaudy fabric and yards of fringe, it offers a sensual experience that leaves the reader marveling at the author\'s craftsmanship, idiosyncrasy and sheer effort\". Perry did acknowledge, however, that modern optimism was probably the impetus driving Waters\' vision of a lesbian past.


# Tipping the Velvet
### Class
Miranda Seymour in *The New York Times* wrote that the (American) cover is troubling, curious, titillating, and distant at once: a \"clever preparation for the yearning opening pages\".
Christina Patterson called Waters \"an extremely confident writer, combining precise, sensuous descriptions with irony and wit in a skilled, multi-layered pastiche of the lesbian historical romance\". Renee Graham\'s review in *The Boston Globe* characterised the novel\'s style as \"plush and inviting---delicious, even\". In *The New York Times*, Miranda Seymour drew attention to the scene when Nan dresses up as Hadrian\'s lover, the page Antinous who was drowned in the Nile, for a masquerade benefiting Diana\'s friends in a hedonistic bacchanalia that ends violently with Nan cast out of the house into the cold, highlighting it as a passage of \"startling power\". Although Seymour was disappointed with the ending, she wrote, \"If lesbian fiction is to reach a wider readership---as much, though far from all, of it deserves to do---Waters is just the person to carry the banner\".
Several reviewers compared *Tipping the Velvet* to Jeanette Winterson\'s *Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit* for a similar story of a woman\'s sexual awakening. Waters credits Winterson as an influence in lesbian writing, but states that the books are quite different and her writing is not like Winterson\'s at all. Waters suggests that reviewers have bracketed them together because Winterson was the only other lesbian author they could recall.
The popularity of her first novel cast a standard for *Affinity* to follow, which Waters consciously made darker, set in a women\'s prison with a character who connects with spirits of the dead. Waters found it daunting to follow the success of *Tipping the Velvet* and reviewers marked the differences in the main characters: where Nan adventurously seeks out and states her desires, Margaret in *Affinity* is compelled by desire, but internally struggles with it.


# Tipping the Velvet
### Class
*Tipping the Velvet* won the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian fiction in 2000, and the Betty Trask Award, given to Commonwealth citizens who have produced their first novel before reaching the age of 35. *The Library Journal* chose it as one of their Best Books of the Year for 1999, and *The New York Times* included it on its list of Notable Books of the Year.

### Television
*Tipping the Velvet* was adapted into a BBC television drama serial of the same name, originally screened in three episodes on BBC Two in 2002. It was produced for the BBC by the independent production company Sally Head Productions, and starred Rachael Stirling as Nan, Keeley Hawes as Kitty, Anna Chancellor as Diana, and Jodhi May as Florence. The BBC had previously adapted *Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit* in 1990 and some other scenes in dramas to follow, but none had been so explicit. Sally Head Productions defended the decision to air the entire program uncut. Waters was quite surprised that the BBC chose to produce and broadcast a television adaptation that faithfully followed the relish and detail of sexual escapades in the book. Stirling thoroughly enjoyed the role, despite her avowed heterosexuality: \"To counteract any hard-core sex within it, there\'s a huge sense of humour and a huge sense of fun and frivolity and joy of life. It was so utterly believable that you never for a moment thought, Fuck, there\'s no reason why I\'m standing here naked.\"
Screenwriter Andrew Davies said he was attracted to the story because it featured a girl transitioning into womanhood and it included his interests in Victorian erotica; he compared it to *Pride and Prejudice*---for which he wrote the BBC screenplay---\"with dirty bits\". Both Waters and Davies were concerned about the use of dildos in scenes with Diana, but the BBC allowed it.


# Tipping the Velvet
### Television
Waters especially appreciated the way Davies interpreted Kitty\'s ambivalence about being in love with Nan. He wrote the line for her, \"I hate the way you make me feel\", which according to Waters crystallises Kitty\'s complicated emotions well. The music in the adaptation was written for the film. Waters wrote song titles but not lyrics in the music references in the novel. For one song, during Kitty and Nan\'s first performance in the adaptation, Davies wrote a composition that had Kitty show Nan---dressed and performing as brothers---how to pick up girls in the park. It involved Kitty teaching Nan how to kiss, which they do onstage in front of audiences who are watching women, dressed as men, who are in reality having an affair with each other beyond the view of the audience. Waters wrote a similar description as Nan compares their act to their relationship; their sexual encounters to their performance onstage, noting the irony that Kitty insisted on absolute secrecy yet there they performed in front of thousands: \"*You are too slow---you go too fast---not there, but here---that\'s good---that\'s better!* It was as if we walked before the crimson curtain, lay down upon the boards and kissed and fondled---and were clapped, and cheered, and paid for it!\"
A persistent rumour claims a film adaptation of *Tipping the Velvet* will be directed by Sofia Coppola, starring Beyoncé Knowles and Eva Longoria. However, Longoria insists that everything about the rumour is false, right down to quotes cited to her and Knowles. Knowles also wonders where the false quotes and story originate from.
In 2009, UK playwright Amanda Whittington wrote a stage adaptation of *Tipping the Velvet*. It was showcased by Guildhall School of Music and Drama at The Bridewell Theatre, London, in October 2009. Directed by Katharine Rogers, the production featured original music hall songs and was praised for its authentic interpretation of the novel.


# Tipping the Velvet
### Stage
On 14 April 2015, it was announced the play would receive its world premiere the same year and would begin previews at the Lyric Hammersmith on 18 September 2015, with an official opening night on 28 September, booking for a limited period until 24 October. Following its premiere production the play transferred to the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, as part of the 50th anniversary season of the Royal Lyceum Theatre company, where it ran from 28 October to 14 November 2015.
*Tipping the Velvet* has been adapted for the stage by Laura Wade and is directed by Lyndsey Turner, with choreography by Alistair David, design by Lizzie Clachan, lighting design by Jon Clark, music by Michael Bruce and sound by Nick Manning.
- References in *Tipping the Velvet* correspond to: Waters, Sarah (1 May 2000). *Tipping the Velvet: A Novel*: New York City: Riverhead Trade.


# Mardi
***Mardi: and a Voyage Thither*** is the third book by American writer Herman Melville, first published in London in 1849. Beginning as a travelogue in the vein of the author\'s two previous efforts, the adventure story gives way to a romance story, which in its turn gives way to a philosophical quest.
*Mardi* is Melville\'s first purely fictional work. Although Melville and his publishers presented his first two books, *Typee* and *Omoo*, as nonfiction, enough critics were able to identify plagiarism in them (especially *Typee*) from other works, both fiction and nonfiction, that their veracity and Melville\'s integrity were always points of contention. As a preface to *Mardi*, Melville wrote somewhat ironically that his first two books were nonfiction but disbelieved; by the same pattern he hoped the fiction book would be accepted as fact.
Much as did *Typee* and *Omoo*, *Mardi* details the travels of an American sailor who abandons a whaling vessel to explore the South Pacific. Unlike the first two books, however, *Mardi* is highly philosophical and said to be the first work to show Melville\'s true potential. Although not as cohesive or lengthy as *Moby-Dick*, it is much longer than *Typee* and *Omoo* and has much more in common stylistically and thematically with *Moby-Dick* and other works of his maturity.


# Mardi
The tale begins as a fairly simple escape and survival narrative. It briefly becomes romance when the narrator falls in love with a mysterious woman he has questionably rescued from a difficult situation. After the woman mysteriously disappears, the novel presumably becomes a quest for her among the innumerable isles of the newly \"discovered\" archipelago of Mardi, isles with many different symbolic and allegorical meanings. As the main characters continue their search for the woman, the novel switches again, now focusing on more than travelogue-style reporting of the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells to be experienced in Mardi. The social conventions, political structures, religious practices, odd histories, and other aspects of each isle and its inhabitants spark philosophical discourses between four main characters, with two previously main characters no longer in the story and the narrator receding so far into the background that he does not even participate in the philosophical discussions. The quest for the woman continues but is barely mentioned, serving at least to get the main characters traveling through Mardi faster.

### Influence of Rabelais and Swift
The voyage from island to island echoes Rabelais\'s Gargantua and Pantagruel, especially the last two books. According to scholar Newton Arvin,

:   The praise of eating and drinking is highly Rabelaisian in intention, and so in general is all the satire on bigotry, dogmatism, and pedantry. Taji and his friends wandering about on the island of Maramma, which stands for ecclesiastical tyranny and dogmatism, are bound to recall Pantagruel and his companions wandering among the superstitious inhabitants of Papimany; and the pedantic, pseudo-philosophy of Melville\'s Doxodox is surely, for a reader of Rabelais, an echo of the style of Master Janotus de Bragmardo holding forth polysyllabically to Gargantua in Book I.

Arvin also recognizes the influence of *Gulliver\'s Travels* by Jonathan Swift:

:   \... there is something very Swiftian in Melville\'s Hooloomooloo, the Isle of Cripples, the inhabitants of which are all twisted and deformed, and whose shapeless king is horrified at the straight, strong figures of his visitors from over sea.


# Mardi
### Influence of Rabelais and Swift
The emotional center of the book, Arvin writes, is the relation between Taji and Yillah, the \"I\" and the mysterious blonde who disappears as suddenly as she appeared. Taji begins a quest for her throughout the islands without finding her. Though Arvin finds the allegory of Yillah \"too tenuous and too pretty to be anything but an artistic miscarriage\" in the poetic sense, he also finds it \"extremely revealing\" in connection with the whole Melville canon. Yillah, associated with the lily in the language of flowers, is \"an embodiment of the pure, innocent, essentially sexless happiness\", and Hautia, \"symbolized by the dahlia\", embodies \"the sensual, the carnal, the engrossingly sexual\". The middle portion of the book is taken up by \"a series of forays in social and political satire, and by quasi-metaphysical speculations\" that are, if at all, at best \"only loosely and uncertainly related to the quest for Yillah\". The only way to perceive any fabric holding the book together, Arvin feels, is by recognizing \"a certain congruity among the various more or less frustrated quests it dramatizes\--the quest for an emotional security once possessed, the quest for a just and happy sociality once too easily assumed possible, and the quest for an absolute and transcendent Truth once imagined to exist and still longed for.\"
For Arvin, in *Mardi* Melville rejects not \"the profounder moralities of democracy\" so much as \"a cluster of delusions and inessentials\" that Americans have come to regard as somehow connected to the idea of democracy. Arvin recognizes three delusions to the cluster:
- \"that political and social freedom is an ultimate good, however empty of content;
- that equality should be a literal fact as well as a spiritual ideal;
- that physical and moral evil are rapidly receding before the footsteps of Progress.\"


# Mardi
### Influence of Rabelais and Swift
The philosophical plot, Arvin believes, is furnished by the interaction between the intense longing for certainty, and the suspicion that on the great fundamental questions, \"final, last thoughts you mortals have none; nor can have.\" And even while one of the characters says, \"Faith is to the thoughtless, doubts to the thinker\", Arvin feels that Melville struggles to avoid a brutality of what Melville himself calls \"indiscriminate skepticism\", and he got closest to expressing \"his basic thought\" in Babbalanja\'s speech in the dark: \"Be it enough for us to know that Oro\"---God\--\"indubitably is. My lord! my lord! sick with the spectacle of the madness of men, and broken with spontaneous doubts, I sometimes see but two things in all Mardi to believe:\--that I myself exist, and that I can most happily, or least miserably exist, by the practice of righteousness.\"

### Contemporary reviews
*Mardi* was a critical failure. One reviewer said the book contained \"ideas in so thick a haze that we are unable to perceive distinctly which is which\". Nevertheless, Nathaniel Parker Willis found the work \"exquisite\".
Nathaniel Hawthorne found *Mardi* a rich book \"with depths here and there that compel a man to swim for his life\... so good that one scarcely pardons the writer for not having brooded long over it, so as to make it a great deal better.\"
The widespread disappointment of the critics hurt Melville yet he chose to view the book\'s reception philosophically, as the requisite growing pains of any author with high literary ambitions. \"These attacks are matters of course, and are essential to the building up of any permanent reputation---if such would ever prove to be mine\... But Time, which is the solver of all riddles, will solve *Mardi*.\"


# Mardi
### Later critical history
In the description of Arvin,

:   \... the thoughts and feelings he was attempting to express in Mardi were too disparate among themselves and often too incongruous with his South Sea imagery to be capable of fusion into a satisfying artistic whole. In the rush and press of creative excitement that swept upon him in these months, Melville was trying to compose three or four books simultaneously: he failed, in the strict sense, to compose even one. Mardi has several centers, and the result is not a balanced design. There is an emotional center, an intellectual center, a social and political center, and though they are by no means utterly unrelated to each other, they do not occupy the same point in space.
Giordano Lahaderne has proposed that *Mardi* may have in part been influenced by the Book of Mormon (1830). The opening sequence of each is an \"Old Testament in reverse\" and *Mardi*\'s second volume includes a discourse on \"an illustrious prophet, and teacher divine\" named Alma, a name shared by Alma, one of the major prophets and missionaries within the Book of Mormon.
- Arvin, Newton (1950). *Herman Melville,* available for borrowing at the Internet Archive.


# Requiem for a Dream (novel)
***Requiem for a Dream*** is a 1978 novel by American writer Hubert Selby Jr., that concerns four New Yorkers whose lives spiral out of control as they succumb to their addictions.
This story follows the lives of Sara Goldfarb, her son Harry, his girlfriend Marion Silver, and his best friend Tyrone C. Love, who are all searching for the key to their dreams in their own ways. In the process, they fall into devastating lives of addiction. Harry and Marion are in love and want to open their own business; their friend Tyrone wants to escape life in the ghetto. To achieve these dreams, they buy a large amount of heroin, planning to get rich by selling it.
Sara, Harry\'s lonely widowed mother, dreams of being on television. When a phone call from a game show casting company gets her hopes up, she goes to a doctor, who gives her diet pills to lose weight. She spends the next few months on the pills, wanting desperately to look thin on TV and fit into a red dress from her younger days. However, the casting company does not notify her about the details of her show. She becomes addicted to the diet pills and eventually develops amphetamine psychosis after her life continues to go downhill. She eventually ends up in a mental institution, where she undergoes electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).
Harry, Marion, and Tyrone become addicted to their own product. Eventually, when heroin becomes scarce, they turn on each other, slowly hiding the drugs they obtain from the other two members. On their way to Miami, Harry and Tyrone are arrested, convicted, and sentenced to jail. Harry\'s arm has become infected from repeated injections, and has to be amputated. Left alone, Marion becomes a prostitute to support her addiction. In jail, Tyrone faces frequent abuse from the guards due to his race.
The novel was later adapted into a critically acclaimed eponymous film, released in 2000. The film was directed by Darren Aronofsky and stars Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans and Ellen Burstyn. Burstyn was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Sara.
- Paperback -- , published in 2000 by Da Capo Press.


# Mizukagami
`is a Japanese `*`rekishi monogatari`*`. It is believed to have been written in the early Kamakura period around 1195.  It is widely credited to Nakayama Tadachika but the actual writer is unknown.  It is the third book of the four mirror series.`
It deals with the oldest time-period, starting with the legendary Emperor Jimmu and ending with Emperor Ninmyō. It is told by a fictitious old woman who is visited by a bhikkhu while staying at Hase-dera. All the facts are taken from ca. 1150 AD by Kōen, the teacher of Hōnen.
In its modern framework Mizukagami refers to the reflective pool in Japanese gardens, in which can be seen such things as bridges and sakura (cherry blossoms) in its reflection.
- *Ōkagami*
- *Imakagami*
- *Masukagami*


# Tropic of Capricorn (novel)
***Tropic of Capricorn*** is a semi-autobiographical novel by Henry Miller, first published by Obelisk Press in Paris in 1939. A prequel of sorts to Miller\'s first published novel, 1934\'s *Tropic of Cancer*, it was banned in the United States until a 1961 Justice Department ruling declared that its contents were not obscene.

### Writing
During a three-week vacation from Western Union in 1922, Miller wrote his first novel, *Clipped Wings*, a study of 12 Western Union messengers. It has never been published; only fragments remain, although parts of it were recycled in later works, including in the brief portraits of Western Union messengers in *Tropic of Capricorn*.
In the spring of 1927, Miller was living in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights with his second wife June Miller and her lover, Jean Kronski. He had recently obtained a new job working for the Parks Department. One day, he returned home to find a note saying they had taken a boat to Paris. Soon after, Miller moved back in with his parents in Brooklyn. One night in May 1927, Miller stayed at the Parks Department office after work and typed up a 32-page document he called *June*, outlining the details of their relationship. He would use the document as source material for *Tropic of Capricorn* as well as *The Rosy Crucifixion* trilogy. Miller would also repurpose numerous scenes into *Tropic of Capricorn* from his unpublished third novel *Lucky Lesbians* (later retitled *Crazy Cock*), which he worked on from 1928 to 1930 and which was ultimately published in 1991 (over a decade after his death).


# Tropic of Capricorn (novel)
### Writing
Miller began writing *Tropic of Capricorn* in earnest toward the end of 1933 while living in Paris. At the time, he was also writing *Black Spring*, and putting the finishing touches on *Tropic of Cancer*. Early on, he referred to *Tropic of Capricorn* as \"the June book.\" His biographer Robert Ferguson called the book Miller\'s attempt at \"retrieving in written form as much as possible of the disappearing past.\" Although referred to as \"the June book,\" his second wife is more of an influence than a primary character, making only a short appearance. The book is dedicated \"To Her,\" in reference to June.

### Publication
*Tropic of Capricorn* was published in France, in English, by Obelisk Press in February 1939. A French translation appeared as *Tropique du Capricorne* in July 1946. Sales of the book, along with *Tropic of Cancer*, were boosted by the controversy surrounding their censorship, with complaints against Miller and his publisher on charges of pornography. In the 1940s and 1950s, Miller\'s books were hard to find and expensive. The banned books were occasionally smuggled into the US, although they were often seized by Customs. In 1944, accompanied by his soon-to-be third wife Janina Martha Lepska, Miller read excerpts from *Tropic of Capricorn* and *Black Spring* at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.


# Tropic of Capricorn (novel)
### Publication
*Tropic of Capricorn* was banned in the United States until a 1961 Justice Department ruling declared that its contents were not obscene. After Grove Press published the novel in the US in September 1962, Miller gained a new, younger generation of readers for his work, which coincided with the sexual revolution of the 1960s. He was seen by many as a champion of the new sexual freedom, and was endorsed by well-known literary figures of the time, including Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac.
The novel covers Miller\'s growing inability and outright refusal to accommodate what he sees as America\'s hostile environment. It is autobiographical but not chronological, jumping between Miller\'s adolescent adventures in Brooklyn in the 1900s, recollections of his first love Una Gifford, a love affair with his nearly-30-year-old piano teacher when he was 15, his unhappy marriage to his first wife Beatrice, his years working at Western Union (called The Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company in the book) in Manhattan in the 1920s, and his fateful meeting with his second wife June (known in the book as Mara), who he credits with changing his life and making him into a writer. *The Rosy Crucifixion* continues the story of June, in greater detail, over the course of nearly 1,500 pages, and also described the process of Miller finding his voice as a writer, until eventually he sets off for Paris, where the activities depicted in *Tropic of Cancer* begin.


# Birdsong (novel)
***Birdsong*** is a 1993 war novel and family saga by the English author Sebastian Faulks. It is Faulks\'s fourth novel. The plot follows two main characters living at different times: the first is Stephen Wraysford, a British soldier on the front line in Amiens during the First World War, and the second is his granddaughter, Elizabeth Benson, whose 1970s plotline follows her attempts to recover an understanding of Stephen\'s experience of the war.
Faulks developed the novel to bring more public awareness to the experience of war remembered by WWI veterans. Most critics found this effort successful, commenting on how the novel, like many other WWI novels, thematically focuses on how the experience of trauma shapes individual psyches. Similarly, because of the parallel narratives WWI and 1970s Britain, the novel explores metahistorical questions about how to document and recover narratives about the past. Because of its genre, themes and writing style, the novel has been favourably compared to a number of other war novels, such as Ian McEwan\'s *Atonement* and those in Pat Barker\'s Regeneration Trilogy.
*Birdsong* is part of a loose trilogy of novels by Sebastian Faulks, alongside *The Girl at the Lion d\'Or* and *Charlotte Gray*; the three are linked through location, history and several minor characters. *Birdsong* is one of Faulks\'s best received works, earning both critical and popular praise, including being listed as the 13th favourite book in Britain in a 2003 BBC survey called the Big Read. It has also been adapted three times under the same title: for radio (1997), the stage (2010) and television (2012).
Faulks signing The Convention on Modern Liberty
Faulks wrote the novel partly because he felt that the First World War had not been discussed enough in both literary and historical contexts. Reflecting on the novel twenty years later, Faulks felt that the published version did not fully do justice to the experience of war: it did not provide readers with \"a full appreciation of the soldiers\' physical experience; and, perhaps more importantly, a philosophical understanding of what it meant to be part of the first genocidal event of the century -- the one that made the others imaginable\".


# Birdsong (novel)
Because Faulks felt that much of the extant World War I literature was deeply influenced by World War II literature, he deliberately avoided research with secondary documents, such as historical monographs, instead focusing on veteran interviews and period primary sources.
The novel was a success, with international impact and attention. The hardback print-run, first issued in 1993, sold 14,000 copies. The novel featured in many \"Best of the Year lists\" in the United Kingdom during 1993. Subsequently, the novel has become one of the most checked-out works from British libraries.
Though Faulks\'s third published novel in the United Kingdom, *Birdsong* was only his second republished in the United States. In New Zealand and Australia, the novel was popular, reaching best seller and \"what\'s hot\" lists. The novel was also sold in translation in Italy, France, Spain, Latin America, Germany, Portugal, Brazil, Denmark, Poland, Israel, Sweden, Estonia, Japan, Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Finland and the Netherlands. Globally, sales were strong, and as of 2010, the novel had sold over 3 million copies.
*Birdsong* has an episodic structure, and is split into seven sections which move between three different periods of time before, during and after the war in the Stephen Wraysford plot, and three different windows of time in the 1970s Benson plot.

### France 1910
A plaza with trolley in pre-War Amiens.
The first stage starts in pre-war Amiens, France. Stephen Wraysford visits and lives with René Azaire, his wife Isabelle and their children. Azaire teaches Stephen about the French textile industry. He witnesses a comfortable middle class life in Northern France alongside industrial worker unrest. Azaire and the significantly younger Isabelle express discontent with their marriage. This sparks Stephen\'s interest in Isabelle, with whom he soon falls in love. During one incident, Azaire, embarrassed that he and Isabelle cannot have another child, beats her in a jealous rage. Around the same time, Isabelle helps give food to the families of striking workers, stirring rumours that she is having an affair with one of the workers.


# Birdsong (novel)
### France 1910
Stephen\'s love of Isabelle transforms into a passionate affair. Isabelle confronts Azaire with the truth of their relationship and Azaire evicts Stephen. Isabelle leaves with him, running away to Southern France. There she becomes pregnant, and momentarily loses faith in her relationship with Stephen. Without telling Stephen, she flees, returning to her family home and the one constant in her life: her sister Jeanne. Later, Isabelle\'s father makes a deal with Azaire for her return to maintain her honour; Isabelle is forgiven but soon regrets leaving her true love, Stephen. However, she does not reach back out to Stephen.

### France 1916
A picture of preserved tunnels constructed as part of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. Stephen supports a crew building similar tunnels.
The second section rejoins Stephen, when he is a lieutenant in the British Army at the start of the war. Through his eyes, Faulks tells the reader about the first day on the Somme in July 1916 and the Battle of Messines near Ypres in the following year.
Several episodes depict a downtrodden Stephen whose only respite is his friendship with Captain Michael Weir and his men. Stephen gains the reputation of a cold and distant officer. He refuses all offers of leave, because he is committed to fighting the war.
His story is interleaved with that of Jack Firebrace, a former miner employed with the tunnelling companies of the Royal Engineers in the British trenches to listen for the enemy and plant mines under the German trenches. In one expedition across No-Man\'s Land, Stephen is badly injured but survives.
mines on the Somme in 1916. These men were of a similar company to the characters represented in the novel.
During these episodes, Stephen feels lonely and writes to Isabelle, feeling that there is no one else to whom he can express his feelings. He writes about his fears that he will die, and confesses that he has only ever loved her.

### England 1978
Alongside the main story, there is the narrative of Stephen\'s granddaughter, Elizabeth, who, whilst struggling with her already married boyfriend, Robert, unearths Stephen\'s journals from World War I and seeks to learns about his experiences at Marne, Verdun and the Somme. She discovers that Stephen\'s journals are encoded, but tries to decipher them.


# Birdsong (novel)
### France 1917
Sikh cavalry passing through the streets of Amiens in 1916.
Stephen has a chance encounter with Jeanne, Isabelle\'s sister, while on leave in Amiens. During this encounter, Stephen persuades her to allow him to meet with Isabelle. He meets her but finds her face disfigured by a shell with scarring from the injury. Stephen discovers that Isabelle is now in a relationship with Max, a German soldier.
Stephen returns to England briefly, and finds relief at being able to enjoy the Norfolk countryside away from the trenches. When he meets Jeanne again on the way back, he tells her how he dreads returning to the front line after leave. Weir, Stephen\'s closest friend, is eventually killed by a sniper\'s bullet while in a trench out on the front line.

### England 1978--1979
Elizabeth continues researching the war and talks to war veterans Gray and Brennan (who knew Stephen) about their experiences. During this period, she also becomes pregnant with Robert\'s child.

### France 1918
A mine exploding at Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt. A similar explosion traps Stephen and Firebrace below ground, before being rescued by German miners.
The WWI plot ends with Stephen and Firebrace trapped underground after a German mine explosion; with their way out blocked, they talk and share their experiences, with Firebrace grieving for his dead son John and Stephen telling him of his former love for Isabelle. Stephen finds some explosives and Firebrace, himself close to death, tells him how to lay them in order to blast their way out of the tunnel. Before Stephen completes the task, Firebrace dies. The explosion successfully clears a way out for Stephen, and he is rescued by Levi, a Jewish German soldier, as the war ends.

### England 1979
Elizabeth finally decides to reveal her pregnancy to her mother Françoise, who, to Elizabeth\'s surprise, is supportive. Over dinner, she learns her mother was raised by Stephen and Jeanne, who married and settled in Norfolk after Elizabeth\'s grandmother Isabelle\'s premature death due to the postwar influenza epidemic. Elizabeth and the still-married Robert go on holiday to Dorset, where she goes into labour and has a son, naming him John (after Jack Firebrace\'s late son). The book ends with Robert walking down the garden of the holiday cottage and having an immense sense of joy.


# Birdsong (novel)
### France: 1910
- **René Azaire** -- Factory owner in Amiens. He states that Stephen will go to Hell for his affair with his wife Isabelle. Embarrassed by his inability to have a child with his wife he beats Isabelle.
- **Isabelle Azaire (Madame Azaire)** née **Fourmentier** -- René\'s wife. Isabelle has an affair with Stephen Wraysford while stuck in her unhappy marriage to René. However, after this brief affair Isabelle agrees to return to René (after Rene is convinced by Isabelle\'s father) and she is forgiven by the family. She is the mother of Françoise by Stephen, though she raised her daughter originally with a German soldier named Max.
- **Lisette** -- Sixteen-year-old daughter of Azaire, and step-daughter of Isabelle. Lisette is attracted to Stephen, to whom she is nearer in age than Isabelle. She makes suggestive remarks to Stephen throughout his time at the house in Amiens, but goes on to marry a man named Lucien Lebrun.

### France 1916, 1917 and 1918
- **Jack Firebrace** -- A tunneller or \"sewer rat\". He survived until 1918 when he became trapped while tunnelling and died.
- **Captain Weir** -- An officer close to Stephen Wraysford killed by a German sniper.
- **Jeanne Fourmentier** -- Isabelle\'s sister who forms a relationship with Stephen Wraysford.

### England: 1978 and 1979
- **Elizabeth Benson** -- Granddaughter of Stephen Wraysford. Elizabeth has a job in company which manufactures garments. She wants to find out more about World War I and her grandfather\'s actions. She does this by phoning elderly servicemen, visiting war memorials and translating Stephen\'s diary.
- **Françoise** -- Elizabeth\'s mother, the biological daughter of Stephen and Isabelle who was raised by her father and aunt Jeanne.
- **Irene** -- A colleague of Elizabeth.
- **Bob** -- Irene\'s husband. He offers to translate the code used in Stephen Wraysford\'s war diaries for Elizabeth.


# Birdsong (novel)
### Recovering history
The novel deals explicitly with the contemporary act of recovering the memory of WWI, and compiling contemporary understanding of those narratives---a function common to works of historiographic metafiction, like Pat Barker\'s Regeneration Trilogy, A.S. Byatt\'s *Possession,* and Ian McEwan\'s *Atonement*. The literary scholar Jerome de Groot calls *Birdsong* one of the first novels of its kind, creating a trend in the 1990s of literary fiction rethinking and reflecting on the World Wars and their historical legacy.
Michael Gorra, a professor of English literature, argues that Faulks seeks to demonstrate that \"the past can be recovered, its code can be broken; it can be used to add meaning to contemporary life. Its limitations can be overcome and its promises fulfilled because we know it can heal.\" The deliberate hiding of Stephen\'s stories, remaining silent to his family after the war\'s end and encoding his journals, mirrors the actual loss of record and stories from veterans in post-war Britain. Elizabeth\'s search for that history is a process of recovering that memory in order to gain a greater emotional relationships with her grandfather, to whom she had never felt connected. Writing in the *British Medical Journal*, the medical doctor Paul Slade described reading about this investigation of another person\'s history to illuminate how \"superficial\" his own patient histories practice had been.
Gorra described the novel\'s split into parallel narratives as the critical fault in the reading experience of the novel. For de Groot, however, the split structure provides one of the most sophisticated elements of the novel. De Groot writes that Benson\'s investigation of personal history allows Faulks to examine the difference between the two perspectives on the memory, highlighting the \"unknowability of the horror of war\" and of history more generally.

### Trauma
C. R. W. Nevinson, 1917.


# Birdsong (novel)
### Trauma
Like other novels documenting WWI, the shock and trauma of death is embedded throughout the book\'s depiction of the war. John Mullen, reviewing the book for *The Guardian*, described the depictions of the Battle of the Somme particularly brutal. According to scholar Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż, Faulks treats the war as a way to \"test human endurance\" and explore the effect of carnage on the psyche. A reviewer for *Kirkus Reviews* also highlighted this theme, writing that \"the war, here, is Faulks\'s real subject, his stories of destroyed lives, however wrenching, only throwing its horror into greater relief and making it the more unbearable\".
The contemporary historian Simon Wessley describes the novel, alongside Barker\'s *Regeneration*, as an exemplar of contemporary fiction which uses the experience of the World War I trenches to examine more contemporary understandings of PTSD. De Groot argues that this reinvestigation of a traumatic history mirrors a growing interest among both literary authors and historians in trauma as a thematic subject.
The historian Ross J. Wilson noted that this reinvestigation of the traumas of the World Wars revisits and revives the experience of trauma within contemporary culture. Faulks uses both different narrators and different narrative perspectives (first, third and omniscient) on the death in the trenches to explore the trauma of death in numerous and challenging ways. For Mullen, this gives the effect of \"the novelist painfully manipulating the reader\'s emotions.\"
The novel frequently changes narrative perspectives, using a significant amount of interior monologue, direct speech and dramatic irony. Though employing an omniscient narrator who occasionally describes the events from a broad perspective, the novel tends to shadow a handful of characters closely, principally Stephen Wraysford, Isabelle Azair, Michael Weir, Jack Firebrace and Elizabeth Benson.


# Birdsong (novel)
### Trauma
Pat Wheeler, a scholar of literature, describes the narrative style as \"both naturalistic and realistic and very much in the manner of the nineteenth century writers Faulks cites as literary influences\"---Wheeler notes Émile Zola, Charles Dickens and George Gissing among these. Wheeler emphasizes that the naturalistic tendencies of the narrative allow treatment of the war setting without an idealization of the \"human\" parts of the narrative. Consistently, reviews emphasize the novel\'s imagery of the battle experience in and amongst the trenches. For Slade, the novel \"produces a vivid and traumatizing description of the sights and sounds of life and death in (and under the trenches)\"; the principal cause of this, he says, is \"the pure fury and intensity of the imagery created page after page\".
*Birdsong* is one of Faulks\'s best-received works of fiction, both by the public and amongst reviewers. The British press offered considerable praise, with positive reviews from *Today*, *The Guardian*, *The Observer*, *The Daily Mail*, *The Mail on Sunday*, *The Sunday Express*, *The Sunday Telegraph*, *The Times Literary Supplement*, *The Spectator* and *The Scotsman*. American and other international press reviews were similarly positive.
The novel\'s popular reception was similarly positive. *Birdsong* came 13th in a 2003 BBC survey called the Big Read, which aimed to find Britain\'s favourite book. It received an \"Also Mentioned\" credit in *The Observer* 2005 poll of critics and writers to find the \"Best British book of the last 25 years\" (1980--2005). *Birdsong* was listed in *The Telegraph* as one of the most consistently high selling books of 1998--2008, continuously in the top 5,000 sales figures.


# Birdsong (novel)
### Trauma
Reviews of the novel often focus on the fluid reading experience as well as the novel\'s effective treatment of \"\'real\' people\" within the trauma of war. Gorra describes the novel as mostly a strong WWI novel, characterising it as \"superb\" with prose that is \"spare and precise\". The review published in *Kirkus Reviews* was glowing: \"Once more, Faulks shows his unparalleled strengths as a writer of plain human life and high, high compassion. A wonderful book, ringing with truth.\"
Consistently one of the greatest critiques of the novel concerns its 1970s plot-line. For example, Gorra found that the addition of a parallel narrative \"ran into problems\"---especially concerning Elizabeth Benson, whom he \"stopped believing in as a character\". Unlike other reviewers, the critic Sarah Belo did not question the historical investigation plot, but the depiction of Elizabeth\'s experience as a 1970s woman in England. On the other hand, almost all of the reviewers describe the novel\'s war sections as excellently written; for example, the review in the *Los Angeles Times* called the sections \"so powerful as to be almost unbearable\".
The novel has been favourably compared to other World War I and II novels, including *All Quiet on the Western Front*, *The Young Lions* and *War and Remembrance.* Gorra described the novel as even more original than Barker\'s *The Ghost Road* and the rest of her Regeneration Trilogy. Kate Saunders, reviewing *Birdsong* for *The Sunday Times*, praised the novel and described it as \"without the political cynicism that colours more modern treatments of this catastrophe\". Reviewers have also compared the novel to other literary works; for example, for one critic, the lead up to the Somme was as persuasive as the \"scene in *Henry V* before the Battle of Agincourt\", while the novelist Suzanne Ruta writes that Faulks creates characters with a similar depth to those in Thomas Hardy novels.
*Birdsong* was adapted as a radio drama of the same title in 1997, and as a stage play in 2010. The play adaptation was first directed by Trevor Nunn at the Comedy Theatre in London.


# Birdsong (novel)
### Trauma
In 2012 it was adapted as a two-part television drama for the BBC. The production starred Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Wraysford and Clémence Poésy as Isabelle Azaire, and was directed by Philip Martin, based on a screenplay by Abi Morgan. The historian Edward Madigan favourably compared the television adaptation to Steven Spielberg\'s *War Horse* as a successful evocation of the experience of the World War I trenches.
In both 2013 and 2014, Faulks indicated that a feature film adaptation was in development. The screenplay is by Rupert Wyatt, and the film is expected to star Nicholas Hoult.
In 2020, Original Theatre produced an online film version of the novel, that featured Faulks as the narrator.


# Popcorn (novel)
***Popcorn*** is a 1996 novel by the British writer Ben Elton. It shares themes with a number of movies from the mid-1990s, most notably *Natural Born Killers* by Oliver Stone and *Pulp Fiction* and *Reservoir Dogs* by Quentin Tarantino. The play version of the novel is used by the IEB (Independent Education Board) In South Africa as one of their Postmodern set-work plays for Dramatic Arts.
The book takes place in different parts of Los Angeles, California. The date is never actually specified, but various clues suggest it is set in the near future. Mostly the story takes place in the centre of Hollywood. The book depicts the differences between different social groups in America, from rich people with guards like Bruce Delamitri to poorer people Wayne and Scout.


# Popcorn (novel)
The protagonist, Bruce Delamitiri, is an artist who works in the motion picture industry. Many people in the US think that, by making these movies, Bruce makes killing cool. Numerous characters throughout the book imply that he encourages everyone who\'s watching these movies to kill for fun. Bruce, on the other hand, defends himself by telling everyone that he doesn't think he encourages anyone to do anything. He says that there has always been violence but humans are not like robots; seeing something on the screen does not necessarily make us want to do it ourselves (p. 13 \"people get up from the movie theatre or the TV and do what they just saw\"). He also claims that he is just showing existing violence. Unfortunately for Bruce, Wayne and Scout (a pair of psychopaths known in the media as the \"Mall Murderers\") have formulated a plan to hold him hostage and have him publicly announce that his movies are responsible for their crimes so they can avoid the death penalty (Wayne has a lengthy speech giving examples of how in America it is possible to be guilty and innocent at the same time.) As the novel progresses, Bruce and a critically injured Brooke Daniels are joined inside his house by his wife and daughter and a TV camera crew. The siege reaches its climax as Wayne holds a ratings monitor and announces on live TV that he will spare the hostages if everyone stops watching the siege in the next few minutes - however, this does not happen and he begins firing as the LAPD begin a frantic attempt to subdue him. Many of the characters die in the ensuing violence and the epilogue of the story reveals grim details as to how all the survivors have found a way of escaping responsibility for the tragedy using varying routes from lawsuits and finding religion to making documentaries which explicitly blame everyone else. The book ends with the line \"No one has taken responsibility\" --- echoing an earlier rant by Bruce that we have created a blame free society in which any problem or shortcoming can be blamed on others rather than accepting responsibility for our own actions.


# Popcorn (novel)
- Bruce Delamitri -- the main protagonist, an egocentric filmmaker who has become controversial for the celluloid violence he produces.
- Wayne -- A cruel and immoral killer.
- Scout -- Wayne\'s lover and confidant.
- Brooke Daniels -- A vaguely abnormal model and aspiring actress.
- Velvet Delamitri -- Bruce\'s estranged daughter.
- Farrah Delamitri -- Bruce\'s estranged wife.
- Karl Brezner -- Bruce\'s agent.
It won the 1996 Crime Writers\' Association\'s Gold Dagger Award.
Elton penned a play based on the novel, which premiered at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1996, and later played in London\'s West End.


# El Túnel
***The Tunnel* ()** is a dark, psychological novel written by Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato about a deranged porteño painter, Juan Pablo Castel, and his obsession with a woman. The story\'s title refers to the symbol for Castel\'s emotional and physical isolation from society, which becomes increasingly apparent as Castel proceeds to tell from his jail cell the series of events that enabled him to murder the only person capable of understanding him. Marked by its existential themes, *El Túnel* received enthusiastic support from Albert Camus and Graham Greene following its publication in 1948.
The story begins with the main character introducing himself as \"the painter who killed María Iribarne\" before delving into the circumstances that led to their first encounter. Castel\'s obsession begins in the autumn of 1946 when at an exhibition of his work he notices a woman focusing on one particularly subtle detail of his painting \"Maternidad\" (\"Maternity\"). He considers this observation deeply significant since it is a detail that he values as the most important aspect of the painting but to which nobody besides him and the woman pay any attention.
Missing out on an opportunity to approach her before she leaves the exhibition, he then spends the next few months obsessing over her, thinking of ways to find her in the immensity of Buenos Aires, and fantasizing about what to say to her.
Ultimately, after seeing her entering a building which he presumes to be her place of employment, he considers how to go about asking her about the detail in the painting. He approaches her and learns that her name is María Iribarne. Following their discussion about the painting, Castel and María agree to see each other again. It later becomes clear that she is married to a blind man named Allende and lives on Posadas Street in the northern part of the city. As Castel continues to see María, however, their relationship comes to be dominated by his obsessive interrogations of her life with her husband, why she does not take her husband\'s last name, and of her inner thoughts, questions she is unable to answer to his satisfaction. Out of this disconnect, Castel\'s obsessive thoughts lead him to all sorts of irrational doubts about the love he has come to believe that they have for one another.


# El Túnel
This anxiety intensifies after he and Maria make a trip to an *estancia*, a country ranch in Mar del Plata owned by Allende\'s cousin Hunter. The atmosphere, the presence and attitudes of the other visiting relatives, and realizing Hunter\'s jealousy all feed into Castel\'s paranoia, forcing him to flee the ranch with little more than a word to one of the service staff.
While waiting at a station to leave the region, Castel expects María to figure out he has left and to come stop him. She never arrives, confirming his negative feelings. Upon returning home to Buenos Aires, Castel passionately composes a hurtful letter, accusing her of sleeping with Hunter, which he immediately regrets upon mailing to her. He angrily but unsuccessfully attempts to convince a postal worker to retract the certified letter and later concludes that fate has decided it should reach its destination.
Later, Castel reaches María by phone: she reluctantly agrees to meet with him again, although she tells him that it will likely do them little good and, in fact, probably cause him more harm. When she does not arrive in Buenos Aires, he decides that María is, in fact, a prostitute who cheats on her husband not only with him, but also with Hunter and other men. In a fit of rage, he drives out to the *estancia*. There he waits hidden outside for guests to leave the large house. Meanwhile his anxiety grows to the point where he envisions himself and María passing each other through life in parallel passageways or tunnels, whereas he is \"a single tunnel, dark and solitary: mine, the tunnel wherein passed all my infancy, my youth, my entire life.\"
Eventually, Castel enters the house, approaches María in her room, where he accuses her of leaving him alone in the world, and stabs her to death.
Following the attack, Castel shows up to Allende\'s office to tell him that he has murdered María for sleeping with Hunter, only to discover that Allende is well aware of his cuckold status. Crying out again and again that Castel is a fool, Allende sadly, and ineffectually, tries to fight Castel, who leaves and later turns himself in to the police.


# El Túnel
- *El túnel* (1952), directed by León Klimovsky, with Laura Hildago and Carlos Thompson.
- *El túnel* (1977, TV movie), directed by José Luis Cuerda
- *El túnel*, also known as *The Tunnel* (1988), directed by Antonio Drove, with Jane Seymour and Peter Weller.
- *The Passion of Martin* (1990), directed by Alexander Payne. A comic adaptation of *El túnel* for his film school thesis project about a photographer who becomes obsessed with a girl he notices studying his work in a gallery.


# The Town and the City
***The Town and the City*** is a novel by Jack Kerouac, published by Harcourt Brace in 1950. This was the first major work published by Kerouac, who later became famous for his second novel *On the Road* (1957). Like all of Jack Kerouac\'s major works, *The Town and the City* is essentially an autobiographical novel, though less directly so than most of his other works. *The Town and the City* was written in a conventional manner over a period of years, and much more novelistic license was taken with this work than after Kerouac\'s adoption of quickly written \"spontaneous prose\". *The Town and the City* was written before Kerouac had developed his own style, and it is heavily influenced by Thomas Wolfe (even down to the title, reminiscent of Wolfe titles such as *The Web and the Rock*).
The novel is focused on two locations (as suggested by the title): one, the early Beat Generation circle of New York in the late 1940s, the other, the nearly rural small town of Galloway, Massachusetts that the main character comes from, before going off to college on a football scholarship. Galloway represents the town of Lowell, Massachusetts, which the Merrimack river runs through, and where Kerouac was raised. The experiences of the young \"Peter Martin\" struggling for success on the high school football team are largely those of Jack Kerouac (he returns to the subject again in his last work *Vanity of Duluoz*, published in 1968).