Roadside PicnicZona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room
2012; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 86; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wlt.2012.0202
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Tópico(s)Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life
Resumo68 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY reviews which the humanizing effect of her music is small recompense. Jim Hannan Le Moyne College Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky . Roadside Picnic. Olena Bormashenko, tr. Ursula K. Le Guin, intro. Chicago. Chicago Review Press. 2012. isbn 9781613743416 Geoff Dyer. Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room. New York. Pantheon. 2012. isbn 9780307377388 Its lighthearted title notwithstanding , Roadside Picnic (Piknik na obochine, 1972) is a serious inquiry into the consequences for humans of prolonged proximity to the Unknown, with all its marvels, dangers, and ineffability. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky tackle this centuries-old theme via one of the great stories of science fiction: First Contact, the first encounter of humans with entities not of this earth. More often than not, as in this story’s ur-text, H. G. Wells’s TheWaroftheWorlds (1898), the encounter goes badly. In Roadside Picnic, the aliens have come and gone. No humans knew. Only afterward did they discover six “Zones” where “Visits” took place. To humans, the detritus the visitors left behind is, variously, inscrutable , invaluable, or very dangerous. Regions of each Zone manifest deadly apparent violations of physical law. Some who live near a Zone are inexplicably infected with hitherto unknown genetic or phenotypic mutations. From a nearby cemetery, corpses rise to rejoin their families. Now, thirteen years later, entry to the Zone near the town of Hartmont is restricted. Those who enter legally are scientists or military. But others sneak in, seeking alien artifacts to feed the thriving black market that has sprung uparoundtheZone.Theyare“stalkers.” The Strugatskys focus on a single stalker, Redrick Schuhart. Red is hardly a conventional sf hero: he is ruthless, insolent, and addicted—to alcohol, nicotine, violence, and, especially , the Zone. Yet he genuinely loves his wife and mutant daughter and incessantly struggles with the rage seething inside him. He hates what the Zone does to people, the betrayals that have become coin of the realm around it, and “the foul scum that had grown on the Zone, gotten rich by the Zone, fed, drank, and fattened from the Zone, and didn’t give a damn.” Red’s adventures and development over the eight-year span of the novel culminate in its tragic and sublimely ambiguous ending. Even if you’ve read the earlier translation by Antonina W. Bouis (1977), treat yourself to this new one, which is based on the authors’ original text. Olena Bormashenko ’s myriad improvements in word choice, punctuation, and phraseology make her rendition more fluent, vivid, and substantive. When Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky adapted Roadside Picnic for his 1979 film Stalker, he dropped all the novel’s personae except Red, whose character he completely changed; threw out all its incidents; changed its themes; and eliminated all alien artifacts from the Zone. The result, Tarkovsky said, has “nothing in common with the novel . . . except for the two words ‘Stalker’ and ‘Zone.’” In thus transforming a literary, psychological sf novel into a metaphysical cinematic parable, Tarkovsky created the least science-fictional sf film ever, one some viewers find an unwatchable bore and many others (including me) consider an epiphanic masterpiece. Very little actually happens in Stalker. (Yet, bizarrely, this 161-minute art film spawned three highly popular first-person-shooter video games and a series of Russian pulp novels based on them.) As in his other late-period films, Nostalghia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986), Tarkovsky evokes meaning through images, facial expressions, dialogue, sound, silence, mise-en-scène, composition —all controlled by meticulous “sculpting in time.” That meaning is Perihan Magden Ali and Ramazan Ruth Whitehouse, tr. AmazonCrossing Ali and Ramazan is a tragic story of abuse and poverty in the city of Istanbul. Based on a short newspaper article, the story chronicles the love between two boys suffering from the hardships of living in an orphanage and on the streets. Liu Zhenyun Cell Phone Howard Goldblatt, tr. MerwinAsia Accidentally leaving his cell phone at home one day sparks a massive explosion in a popular television host’s happy home. Filled with comedy, social commentary, and romance, this novel mulls the implications of technology in the world’s largest population of cell-phone users, China. NOVEMBER...
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