Summary: Devdas and Parvati (Paro) are childhood playmates and next-door neighbours who declare their love for each other just before Devdas leaves for Calcutta (England, in the 2002 version) for his education. On his return, Paro’s family approaches Devdas to secure their daughter’s marriage to him. Devdas’ father however rejects this proposal on the grounds…
Delicatessen – Summary and Analysis
Summary: In a (probably) post-apocalyptic future, ex-clown Louison answers an advert for a handyman and arrives, pushing his taxi, at the apartment building of delicatessen owner Monsieur Clapet. Clapet sells meat for the only currency worth having in this dystopian landscape – corn. Offered a job with room and board, Louison enters the surreal world…
Deewar (1975 Movie): Summary and Analysis
Summary: Deewaar is the story of two brothers, Vijay and Ravi Verma, who follow widely divergent paths as adults – Vijay is a dockyard worker and later smuggler, while Ravi is the honest cop. When the management threatens to harm his family, their father an honest trade union leader is forced to sign an agreement…
The Decline Of The American Empire – Summary and Analysis
Summary: Eight friends, four women and four men, most of them academics, spend a sunny September day chatting about culture, history, food and sex – mainly sex. The men, history professors Rémy and Pierre, their gay friend Claude, an art historian, and teaching assistant Alain, spend the afternoon in a comfortable country house by the…
Daughters Of The Dust – Summary and Analysis
Summary: Daughters of the Dust is a 1991 American film written and directed by Julie Dash. Set at the turn of the twentieth century in the Gullah Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, Daughters of the Dust is the fictional account of the Peazant family on the eve of some members’…
Lady With A Lapdog – Summary and Analysis
Summary: For many viewers of this cinematic adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s 1899 short story, the plot is familiar before the film begins. The middle-aged Dmitrii Gurov (Aleksei Batalov) meets the young Anna Sergeevna (Iia Savvina) while vacationing in Yalta. Their friendship quickly transitions into a romantic affair. Gurov’s unconcerned snacking on watermelon following their first…
In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried: Analysis
What is most striking about “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,” widely considered one of Amy Hempel’s finest and most moving stories, is its compression and its pain. The writing here is terse; much is left out. The parts left out are what give the story its emotional power. This same minimalist style…
In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried: Setting
California in the 1980s Hempel’s writing, particularly her stories in Reasons to Live, evoke a lifestyle that is Californian in nature. Despite the fact that they were written in New York, most of her stories take place on the West coast, including “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried.” Hempel frequently uses cultural references…
In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried: Literary Devices
Narrative Voice Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” is told in the first-person point of view by an unidentified female narrator. At times the voice telling this story seems to move into a narrative technique known as stream-of consciousness—the literary attempt to reproduce the pattern of a mind in unchecked thought,…
In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried: Themes
“In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” begins with the narrator’s reluctant visit to a dying friend but evolves into an elegy for the terminally ill woman and a confession of the narrator’s own fear of dying. Fear of Death Readers never know exactly what illness the sick friend dies of or precisely what…