THE CONQUISTADORES’ ARRIVAL, REIMAGINED in a playfully serious tale that darts as kaleidoscopically as a hummingbird between culture and culture and between the empires of past and present. Powerfully visual, sardonically witty. SOLID A
AT THE INTERSECTION OF MAGIC AND THE EVERYDAY, this fluid and mythical tale traces the mourning journey of a Diné (Navajo) man across the colonized continent. Lovely and poetic prose rich with imagery. A MINUS
"Of all the games, I prefer the one about the other [me]. I pretend that he comes to visit me and that I show him my house.... With great obeisance I [speak] to him.... Sometimes I make a mistake, and the two of us laugh heartily."
"You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity.... The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened."
Many authors depict the Minotaur sympathetically. For example, Borges presents a lonely, melancholy figure yearning to escape the Labyrinth while Jim Henson's "The Storyteller" presents a bestial child struggling to learn concepts such as "sunlight" or "family."
"My loneliness does not pain me, because I know my redeemer will finally rise above the dust.... What will he be like? ... A bull or a man? A bull with the face of a man? Or will he be like me, [a man with the face of a bull]?"
Despite its sensationalist pulpy title and #ColdWar premise, Jack Arnold's adaptation of the #RichardMatheson novel is an existentialist treatise.
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) plays with the understanding of what it means to be acknowledged as a human, and one's place in the world. The story is told through the eyes of the titular Shrinking Man – Scott Carey – who after being exposed to strange fog, finds himself increasingly lost in this world.
A Walloon language professor and his French set designer fiancée are at an impasse. While his Flemish students vocally protest against more Walloon influence at their uni, the couple - who superficially speak the same #language, #French - struggles to find the right words. They meet, part ways, then find each other again on a train that at morning turns out to be standing still in the middle of nowhere. The man, now without her, disembarks and with two acquaintances who also were on that train tries to find out where he and she are. André Delvaux's Un soir, un train (1968) is a masterpiece about finding the right language in a fractured world.