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The International Fiction Review. Michael Bywater - Karoo by Steve Tesich. It is the day after Christmas.
Saul Karoo, script doctor, stands in the McNabs’, swish apartment on the seventh floor of the Dakota Building chatting merrily about the fall of the Ceaucescus. But something has gone wrong with him. He has lost the ability to get drunk. He has no idea why. “Something had snapped off or screwed off or come undone inside of me... There are those who pray for such a deliverance; not Saul Karoo. Odd that a masterly exercise in that apparently most Dionysian of forms, the picaresque satirical novel, should begin with such an Apollonian curse as the inability to get drunk. The story it tells is, superficially, straightforward enough. The consequences are predictably terrible, artistically and emotionally; the Old Man’s masterpiece is figuratively destroyed and lives literally so.
Karoo has been compared to Herzog and A Confederacy of Dunces, but it is a more complex text than either of those. “There is no up or down. Steve Tesich, 53, Whose Plays Plumbed the Nation's Identity - Obituary; Biography. Steve Tesich, the Yugoslav-born playwright and Academy Award-winning screenwriter whose popular movies and not-so-popular plays plumbed his own changing attitudes toward the United States, his adopted country, and Americans, died yesterday in Sydney, Nova Scotia, where he was vacationing with his family.
He was 53 and had homes in Manhattan and Conifer, Colo. The cause was a heart attack, said Sam Cohn, a longtime friend who was also his agent. Mr. Tesich's most recent play, "Arts and Leisure," completed an Off Broadway run last month at Playwrights Horizons. The work, about a theater critic in life crisis, presented the main character satirically, as a representative American, one who lives life as a spectator or a member of the audience, unable to get truly involved. "Breaking Away" was about a group of teen-agers, post-high school "townies" in Bloomington, Ind., and their rivalry with the more privileged college students at nearby Indiana University. Mr. Mr. Karoo: A Novel by Steve Tesich - Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists. Karoo by Steve Tesich. Please note that this book reaction was written by Shauna McKenna (editor of Moonshinestill).
I recently heard that the word “interesting” no longer means anything. I would venture the same about the word “important.” But there it is, still in our lexicon, and I’m sorry, I’m going to have to ask you to reach back to a time when important things still made you sit up and pay attention, and tell you that Karoo, by Steve Tesich, is one hell of an important book. Set in the early ’90′s, when Communism was crumbling and good thinking people were wondering what good thoughts to think, the novel is at once perfectly grounded in its history and timeless. Doc Faustus. Open City. $14 / Order Cover art: page 6 from Steve Tesich's screenplay, Breaking Away with a new introduction by E.
L. Doctorow Saul Karoo thinks. Calamity and comedy follow shambolic Saul Karoo as his life breaks down. "Scathing, hilarious, and glorious. " — The New York Times“Fascinating—a real satiric invention full of wise outrage.” — Arthur Miller “A powerful and deeply disturbing portrait of a flawed, self-destructive, and compulsively fascinating figure.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred) “Early in this hilarious novel, readers will be laughing out loud, but Tesich is ultimately quite serious about reminding us that moments or years of ‘unlove’ can never be set right.” — Publishers Weekly (starred) “Tesich creates a memorable monster . . . Steve Tesich wrote many plays and screenplays, including the Academy Award–winning Breaking Away and The World According to Garp. KAROO (excerpt) A novel by Steve Tesich with a new introduction by E.
Steve Tesich. Career[edit] Steve Tesich was born as Stojan Tešić (Serbian: Стојан Тешић, pronounced Tesh-ich) in Užice, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) on September 29, 1942, but immigrated to the USA in 1957 with his family when he was 14 years old.
His father died in 1962. His family settled in East Chicago, Indiana. Tesich graduated from Indiana University in 1965 with a BA in Russian, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity. He went on to do graduate work at Columbia University, receiving an MA in Russian Literature in 1967. He had been an alternate rider in 1962 for the Phi Kappa Psi team in the Little 500 bicycle race. His play Division Street opened on Broadway in 1980 starring John Lithgow and Keene Curtis and was revived in 1987. Death[edit] After achieving critical and box office success writing for both stage and screen in the 1970s and 1980s, he died following a heart attack at the age of 53 in Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada on July 1, 1996. Posthumous[edit] Honors and awards[edit] Movies[edit]