Both brilliant and awful
937058
This book is a strange combination of the brilliant and the awful.  The plot is simple: a modern Harvard scholar, our heroine Miranda, is chosen by a posse of mysterious researchers who've invented an equally mysterious time traveling device to go back into first century AD Rome to do some kind of vaguely described research.  This happens within the first two pages, and our heroine is jettisoned back into days of yore by page three. She has a run of bad luck and is sold into slavery; fortunately she gets sold into the household of a rich (and hot) nobleman named Marcus Tullius.  Guess who Miranda happens to fall in love with?

Anyone not interested in this time period should stay away, because that's the chief strength of this book.  After years of reading schlocky swords-and-sandals books like Becky Lee Weyrich's "Rapture's Slave," this novel comes as a pleasant surprise.  First century Italy is described with astonishing accuracy- the nomenclature is correct, as are the descriptions of food, costume and other details of daily life- and the characters don't come across as 21rst century characters in togas.

I also liked the depiction of Marcus Tullius.  He's hot, but believably so- he's clearly a product of a wealthy hierarchy, with all the personal beliefs that might be expected of such a system, and is described to look like a man of the period, not like Steve Reeves or Russell Crowe.  His relationship with Miranda develops gradually and believably, and when he falls in love with her in the end, it feels genuine, not like a plot device- and I found it to be quite romantic, not the least because of the restraint exercised by Ms. East.  In fact, in many ways this book might be described as a Roman fangirl's ultimate wet dream.

Now, that is how the book is brilliant.  Its awfulness lies in the frequent sketchiness and repetitiveness of the prose, to the extent that some sections of the novel read like a barely finished first draft. Other reviewers have mentioned how the author repeats, to numbing effect, certain sentences; she also has a tendency to go off on tangents, retelling stories and events in great detail.  I didn't need to read a blow-by-blow retelling of "The Emperor and the Nightingale," and I certainly didn't need to read a three page speech about Boudicca's rebellion right in the middle of the book, especially since it doesn't come up again later.  Condensed versions would have sufficed.  It made me wish that the manuscript had been put into the hands of a competent editor.

My biggest disappointment, however, was that the time travelling aspect was not developed more.  I've seen this device used more ineptly in other books, but it could have been used so much more effectively, as in Susan Price's "The Sterkarm Handshake."  A return device is implanted in Miranda's arm, and during a particularly suspenseful sequence she finds that it doesn't work.  She resigns herself to staying in the first century, but then later on it seems to activate.  Although Marcus Tullius(by then her boyfriend) insists on cutting it out of her arm, nothing is done with it- and I don't think I'll be spoiling things for anyone when I say that everything ends perfectly happily, and she decides not to go back to the big mean twenty-first century.  I kept wondering where these mysterious researchers were, and how it would interestingly complicate matters if they decided to come back and fetch her.  Who were these people, and what were their motives?  None of these questions are answered, or even alluded to.  I found it frustrating.

Nevertheless, I would love to see "A.D. 62" revised slightly and published by a big publishing house.  Sure, it's amateurish in spots, but it's far better than a lot of crap I've seen churned out by publishers who should know better.  This author, I believe, has promise- I would certainly be very interested in a sequel.
4529326
The writing is so fine, this novel pulled me right in, delivering an original, horrifying, sometimes hilarious and ultimately lyrical reading experience. The deft tonal shifts reminded me of early David Lynch--a head bobbing between satire and horror--but here those shifts recalled what I remember feeling during what seemed like an explosion of national psychosis post 9/11.

At one point, the book's Mark Doten character says: "The natural order one year--what we thought was the natural order--is overturned, the next it's proved just one out of many possible arrangements."

A mad assemblage of obsessive characters, most named after familiar 'dramatis personae' from the war on terror--characters crippled by blindspots and narcissism--stitch together narratives and meta-narratives in the face of this dislocating truth. (Where is "the reality based community" when you really need it?) As told in The Infernal, their story is a literary Frankenstein monster. It lives. It's horrible and beautiful.

Their voices also channel our collective gasp in the face of this real horror--terror, and our shambolic answer to it. We observe ourselves responding to all of the absurdity, denatured bigotry, cruelty and madness the book so fertilely imagines. It's something we do these days, in the privacy of our own homes, on television, in video games, or visiting the grand theater of barking insanity known as cable news.

In a great review in The Millions, Adam Petty notes that:

"In The Inferno, Dante Alighieri placed all his enemies from 14th-century Florence in Hell, where they gave accounts of their sins while suffering elaborate, ironic punishments. Doten wants to place these historical figures in his fiction where they will be forced to explain themselves, as this is unlikely to happen in the real world."

This seemed pretty accurate to me. But the design of the book pushes the point back at us as well. We're creating The Inferno that we're all trapped in. If the results are obscene, well, they're our doing. Are we having fun yet?
3490313
Garth Marenghi -- think Stephen King or Dean Koontz, but with no discernible talent and an ego that could eat Tokyo.

So as you can guess, "Garth Marenghi's Darkplace" is horrendously wretched -- it collapses under the weight of wooden acting, stupid plots and pompously silly direction. This deliberately terrible metaparody (supposedly a lost horror-drama from the 80s) is brilliantly terrible from start to finish and is crammed with false comedy, contrived tragedy, and wonderfully sick humor.

The plot: a fluff-brained new doctor named Liz Asher (Madeleine Wool, as played by Alice Lowe) arrives at Darkplace and has a psychic vision of something terrible about to happen. The brilliant Dr. Rick Dagless (Marenghi, played by Matthew Holness), who is also an ex-warlock, realizes that something is horribly amiss in Darkplace -- exploding patients, zombies, and a possible portal into hell.

And it's not the last problem that Dag has to deal with, with the assistance of the womanizing Dr. Lucien Sanchez (Todd Rivers, played by Matt Berry) and Thornton Reed (Dean Learner, played by Richard Ayoade). Among their problems -- telekinetic attacks, a mysterious alien cloud that transforms people into broccoli, hospital personnel devolving into ape-men, a giant eyeball-baby that Dag becomes emotionally attached to, and a Scottish mist that has a personal beef with Dag.

The entire idea behind "Darkplace" is that the series was created in the 1980s, but was shelved (according to Garth Marenghi) because it was too cutting-edge for the masses. Every single episode is peppered with interviews with Garth, Dean and Todd ("In Black Fang I asked: What if a rat could drive a bus? And what if it and its rat brethren took over and ate Parliament?").

The actual story itself is a mad hybrid of "X-Files" and "E.R.," and is handled in the most cheesily melodramatic fashion possible -- gloriously sick humor (just see how the baby eyeball plot is concluded), dramatic speeches, terrible jokes ("She's gone bananas!"), and too much slow-motion. Most of the hilarious stuff is from the intentionally ghastly dialogue ("I ran the only way I knew how: by placing one leg in front of the other in quick succession"), and the way the plots are handled in a totally deadpan manner.

Holness is simply awesome, to the point where I actually forgot he was playing one character playing another -- Marenghi is a deliciously deluded hack writer. And Dag is basically his Mary Sue: a gunslinging, oh-so-tragic genius that everyone worships -- even though he's actually incredibly wooden and pompous... not to mention arrogant ("We're doing all we can. but I'm not Jesus Christ. I've come to accept that now").

And the rest of the cast is brilliant at being wooden, weird and producing forced laughter -- Ayoade is especially awesome as the flat-voiced Dean, Lowe is blank-eyed and hilariously fluffy, and Berry is absolutely gutsplitting even in the most absurd situations ("Cordless iron... friggin' smarts").

"Garth Marenghi's Darkplace" is like something written by Stephen King... only really, really bad and stupid, and not even remotely scary. However, it's a truly hysterical metaparody that ends way too fast.
1363222
Mstislav Rostropovich on cello and Emmanuel Pahud on flute are the central figures in these two recent works by Sofia Gubaidulina, one of the best composers of our time.  "The Canticle of the Sun" (1997) is a religious work which uses the text of the title by St. Francis.  The London Voices intone the words reverently, without inflection.  As the composer says, "This is the glorification of the Creator and His Creation by a very humble, simple Christian friar.  I tried, therefore, to make the choral part very restrained, even secretive and to put all the expression in the hands of the cellist and the percussionists."  Rostropovich is certainly expressive, and this is a unique and uniquely powerful 45-minute work, a great example of Gubaidulina's singular vision.

 "Music for Flute, Strings and Percussion" is a very dramatic work, radically different from "Canticle," with huge menacing tuttis from the orchestra, and bold, loud passages for the flutes of Emmanuel Pahud -- he plays flute, alto flute, bass flute and piccolo.  In this 30-minute work, Gubaidulina has divided the orchestra into two halves, one half tuned a quarter-tone lower than the other.  These represent light and shadow, yet another device found by Gubaidulina to express her metaphysical vision.  "Music for Flute" comes closer to the traditional concerto form than "Canticle," but it is another highly original work.

 I highly recommend this disc to anyone interested in the music of Sofia Gubaidulina.

 There are a couple of minor problems with EMI's production that should be noted.  First, the tracking was not done correctly.  "Canticle" has 11 movements, and "Music for Flute" has 3, for 14 total, but the disc only has 9 tracks.  So track 9 includes the last 3 movements of "Canticle" (about 8 minutes worth), and the entirety of "Music for Flute."  This is annoying, because it means it is impossible to program either piece separately.

I would also like to go on record as saying that EMI's art department should be replaced.  This is another terrible cover for an EMI disc, with an atrocious font and the titles splayed in the ugliest possible way, superimposed on a drab background.  Worse, there is actually a pile of letters at the bottom of the front of the booklet, and another on the back of the booklet -- whoever thought this was a cutting edge design concept should not be allowed near the production area again.  Luckily the music inside this ugly package is radiantly beautiful!
4548240
There is something marvelous about reading the work of a superb writer at the peak of his form, and Roth's prose is so delicious one is hard put to criticize this work; yet "The Human Stain" must be criticized because it has many fundamental failures; so many, in fact, that in the end the book fails to convince or to satisfy.
The author starts testing the contract with his readers by asking us to believe in this hardly credible platform: a perfect black child, valedictorian of his class, great athlete, superb boxer (unbeknownst to his family), intellecually brilliant, without racial hangups, with green eyes and a skin white enought to "pass," aims for and succeeds in a brilliant career in academia with a specialty in Greek and Roman classics, all along pretending to be a Jew. Well, maybe. In the course of the book the contract is further encumbered by dozens of improbable details, unlikely coincidences, and unbelievable misunderstandings (which cannot be cited here without interfering with the enjoyment of the book by others), until one can no longer participate in the suspension of belief the writer asks from us. The big picture that undelies this novel is surely not believable; but the details? Ah, the details are masterfully drawn, so that the reader proceeds, no longer trusting the ground on which he is stepping, but loving the meticulously crafted scenery that strokes and lulls all his senses so precisely. There is much to learn and to love in those details, even if the plot fundamentally fails.
I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and would not want to have deprive myself of its many pleasures. If in the end I was left unsatisfied, it was because it had an effect similar to that encountered in a flight simulator: one receives the milliard sensory imputs, and one's body and mind reacts realistically to the flight conditions; but one leaves the machine knowing full well that it never got off the ground. This book will not fly you, either, although at times you will feel for sure that you are in the air.
410858
When author and essayist Gilbert Sorrentino passed away on May 18, 2006, it was a tragedy that didn't even gather headlines outside the literary community. There were no accolades and praise of the kind that followed the deaths of Douglas Adams or Hunter S. Thompson, or that will surely salute the death of Kurt Vonnegut.

This lack of tribute is insulting, for Sorrentino has done as much with the English language as any of the more public authors. In over 30 collections of poetry and prose Sorrentino mastered the art of experimental fiction, with titles such as "Mulligan Stew" and "Odd Number" cutting a manic swathe of words in a way to make any creative writing major fall to their knees.

Thankfully, Sorrentino left a final masterpiece behind to seal his legacy: the harrowing and poignant novel "A Strange Commonplace." Named for a William Carlos Williams poem, Sorrentino's work replicates the poem's image of "Long, deserted avenues with unrecognized names at the corners" with a dreamlike version of his native Brooklyn.

In the vein of his darkly entertaining "Little Casino," "A Strange Commonplace" blends elements of poetry, short fiction and the novel to create a book that can be read all at once or in various intervals depending on mood. The book, split into two sections of 27 short chapters - each section using the same 27 titles - follows the private lives of adulterers, criminals and the disillusioned.

Human folly is Sorrentino's medium, and he is unrelenting in how many snapshots he can take. In "Cold Supper" a woman bakes a gourmet meal and dresses in her best, then proceeds to lock her son outside and walk out the front door to never return. An old man decides to kill himself if he draws a flush in "An Apartment," while three young men devour their meals and molest a waitress simultaneously in "In the Diner."

Much like the cut-up surrealism of William S. Burroughs, Sorrentino has several recurring elements in each of his pieces. However, while Burroughs used sadistic doctors and rusted revolvers to show junk sickness, Sorrentino's images are tied with heartbreak - a pearl-grey homburg hat, Worcestershire sauce, a children's jungle story. These elements give the novel an odd sense of continuity, each possessed by a pained character.

Of course, not all readers will be entranced at the start by Sorrentino's style, as the experimental prose requires a careful reading to obtain full understanding. Often, as in the ethereal "In Dreams," his characters become unstuck in reality, the world changing the minute they look away. Additionally, the work's dark tone leaves not a single character happy at the end, sucked into alcoholism and untimely death.

But happiness is not the image Sorrentino is trying to pull off in this book - these stories are 52 "magical route[s] to oblivion." In many ways it fits the original meaning of commonplace, a book designed to compile all different forms of knowledge that capture the author's interest - and at the very end of his life, Sorrentino was trying to compile the sense of "the man in the casket is the same ... as the man at the casket."

It is very depressing that Sorrentino is no longer around to write fiction of this caliber, but anyone who is sucked in by "A Strange Commonplace" can be comforted by the fact that he left a vast body of work behind to explore. As Sorrentino's final work, "A Strange Commonplace" is like the last bite of an exotic dessert - not suited for every palate, but for those who acquire a taste for it indescribably delicious.
3325705
This should be in the poetry section of the bookstore, only then no one would buy it. Part fairy tale, part magical realism, part comic book, part poetry--it's hard to classify this astonishing book.  Freddie's nightmarish  year and attempts to keep his sanity by thinking about nature made me cry  many times, and I cheered for him to get through it.  Visceral, raw,  terrible and beautiful. Wow.
2960474
The first pages of this novel are so fascinating and succulent and lyrical it literally feels like slipping into a dream. You're walking through vapor like a phantom, when suddenly a man appears -- a taciturn man with 'a face as pitted as the moon'. Two pregnant girls catch your eye in the distance. You watch them steal from this man and follow him back to his orchard with its maze of  trees all choked with fruit. Who are these girls? Why are they both pregnant and hiding on the orchardist's land? For about 150 pages you lurk in the orchard. Waiting and wondering and then suddenly, it's as if your alarm goes off and all the apples and apricots start smearing and the orchardist's pitted flesh begins to peel away. Honestly, I have never been so hurled out of a book before. Once the pregnant girl's story is revealed the books plot lurches and sputters and veers off in the most implausible and incomprehensible ways. Talmadge, the intriguing orchardist who we meet on page one could walk right off his property and we probably wouldn't even notice his absence. He's such a captivating character in the beginning but it's as if Coplin suddenly lost interest in him. Talmadge sulks, smokes, ails and falls asleep a lot. Another main character is basically furious, periodically deranged and winds up destitute, homicidal and imprisoned. I was stunned that the plot grew so morbid and stagnant after such an invigorating and engrossing beginning. Personally, I don't care if a book is morbid however after about 300 pages of misery I feel one character should either remain alive, not go bananas, or not wind up sleeping in the mud. Coplin is a brilliant writer. Absolutely brilliant. The first half of this book is totally gripping and masterfully executed. Unfortunately, the second half of the book was just too tedious and exasperating. A seasoned editor should have chopped this manuscript in half and encouraged the author not to overload it with unrelenting anguish because the book is there and it's damn good. This is Coplin's first novel and I plan to look for anything else she writes because she is an incredible new talent and the beginning of The Orchardist is truly remarkable.
1163235
In the case with both of his masterpieces,  "The Constellation of Vital Phenomena," & "The Tsar of Love & Techno," I listened to these books DESPITE the awful readers, who didn't seem to know what they were reading. Anthony Marra is an incredible writer & deserves better.
1896742
I've been sick to frigging hell of eponymous record titles ever since the release of a double-record called THE BEATLES. Me & 40 million other people. Which might explain why the aforementioned double-record is better known as THE WHITE ALBUM. And I begrudge Junkster for indulging in that same unimaginative shtick.

Junkster's THE ONLY ONE is just the sort of thing that could only have been created by congenitally depressed and overrefined Europeans. It's a brilliant slice of creepy melancholia. Unfortunately, most of the other tracks are bland mainstream-rock tunes. Although I do love TWISTER and CLOWN (a Chrissie Hynde soundalike). I'm overrating this record with 4 stars because THE ONLY ONE is such a frigging masterpiece.
2384161
This book's epic poetic reporting of a massive social evil as old as humanity inspires me to become an author, journalist, writer. I struggle for the words to convey sufficient praise on Emily Chang's reporting and writing style. I've not read a book or a page of anything physical for nearly 5 years, fed in brief by apps and casual freebiees, but on my commute, I voraciously blew thru dozens of pages then my stop unable to not read the next harrowing depraved chapter of that which every woman lives daily. The detailed deconstruction of casually wrong ideas like women are biologically unsuited for computing work, they're disinterested in it, they're not socially dangerous enough for it, etc. is methodical, marvelous, detailed, credible, and justly destructive. Emily lays waste to the casual sexism that pervades the history of computing as greedy men and institutional sexism installed ever higher barriers which brings us to today's pitches in a hot tub, a practice which even on Wall St would be  egregiously wrong but given no 2nd thought in Brotopia. Emily's command of journalism and entertaining writing style for this cause to wed tech and news and social advancement is compelling, historic, and utterly crucial for you to read, too.
3081852
This hilarious mess manages to belie almost every principle of design espoused within its pages, with its frankly ugly, workmanlike design, errors in proofreading, and strange choices in content. The layout is slapdash and the printing quality is dodgy-anyone wanting typography to match the content of the book should be looking at Robert Bringhurst's essential Elements of Typographic Style, or any other  Hartley&Marks book on typography, instead. If typography is the art of overweening attention to minute details, this book is certainly a betrayal of that art.

Keeping that in mind, several of the essays contained within are classic (anything Beatrice Warde or Stanley Morison has to say about type is essential reading), and Heller has done his usual job of hitting the high points, without going into any great depth. His own contribution to the volume is typical of the limited attention span he brings to a lot of his editing projects: a thinly-researched polemic on blackletter type and fascism that manages to omit some key details that would totally change the thrust of his argument were they to be acknowledged. I have, and like, other Heller books, and he's a charismatic public speaker, but this is not his finest effort.
1695923
Why is it that so many prominent reviewers are so utterly unable to distinguish the facile from the real, and endlessly mistake the decorative for the good?  Prague is clever, arch, self-aware, eurudite, sometimes witty, and often well-written.  It is also precious, mannered, false, cliched, and tedious. Phillips watches himself oh-so-knowingly transpose the lost generation into the modern world, winking all the way, and it's too clever by half. Good books actually step up to the plate, take real emotional risks, and don't apologize for it.
984503
They thought Fear and Loathing could never be made into a film - and to an extent, they were right. But Terry Gilliam's film is no turkey, rather a flawed classic. Transferring the crazy ramblings of the written page to the screen was obviously no easy task, but there are moments of genius here. The tone veers wildly from farce to horror - one minute Thompson is taking copious amounts of drugs, the next his companion is plunging into a mental nightmare as the narcotics take their terrifying effect. Depp and Del Toro are excellent in the two main roles, managing to anchor a film which could so easily have flown completely off the rails, but don't expect a nice easy narrative to follow. Criterion have created a lovely package, although the third commentary with the now sadly deceased Hunter S Thompson suffers from some terrible sound quality. The BBC feature is incisive, and there's a very interesting piece on who got the screenwriting credit plus an intriuguing alternate ending which is rather downbeat considering the previously madcap pace. It's also a pricy DVD, but then you sometimes have to pay for quality. In the end, it's about as near as anyone will get to putting Thompson's gonzo journalism onto the silver screen, and is 100 times more interesting than your average multiplex crowdpleaser. Don't think it's an easy ride though.
2811781
As a longtime columnist for outlets as diverse as Slate, Food & Wine, Saveur, the Financial Times, and the Economist, Michael Steinberger is something of an enfant terrible when it comes to food and wine.  Steinberger can leave targets withering at his wrath and those who agree with his blunt honesty will likely find little to criticize.  Many recall him becoming persona non grata following his Slate article "Grape Rot: The New Wine Spectator's Distinct Aroma of Fishiness." back in 2002.  Steinberger continues in a similar vein here, and much like Benjamin Wallace's "The Billionaire's Vinegar," "Au Revoir" criticises what the food world holds to be sacrosanct: French cuisine.  Steinberger criticism of French cuisine serves as a metaphor for the broader ossification and decline of French society and culture over the past twenty five years, the period following the Trente Glorieuses.

As someone who has read much on France, many of the thoughts and observations Steinberger expresses are ones that have crossed my own mind and which I've read elsewhere.  Whereas once French cuisine set trends and initiated innovations it has now become rigid, inflexible and frozen in time.  Whether restaurants, wineries, bistros, fromageries or farms, France has ceased to be cutting edge and instead is in a decline that appears to be accelerating at a frightening pace.  Steinberger points out many of the usual suspects for this decline but uses illustrative examples to make his point, and to make that point quite persuasively.  Indeed, Steinberger's writing and arguments are concise and most persuasive.  Rather than focusing solely on the restaurant world, Steinberger takes a broadfield socio-cultural approach that incorporates economics, sociology, history and politics in looking at what has lead France to this place.  The result is, sadly depressing and patently true.  No matter how much I wanted to dispute or denounce his observations they are painfully obvious for all to see.

Quite unintentionally I read this book at the same time as Susan Pinkard's equally wonderful "A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine" and found them to be appropriate bookends for each other.  Pinkard traces the emergence and evolution in French cuisine (and France's society and culture) and Steinberger charts its zenith and decline.  Ultimately the decline of French cuisine and society is hardly surprising; the same thing is occurring elsewhere as the pace of life changes and evolves, and in that respect Pinkard and Steinberger both make the same prescient observations: changing circumstances resulting in changing tastes.  As Steinberger proves French society cannot hold back this sea change in individual tastes and preferences, chef and restaurateurs will have to adapt and change with the times or find themselves out of a job.  In the end there is no salvation for preserving things in stasis.  If you want to enjoy the old style of French haute cuisine you had better hurry before it is time to say au revoir.
1383159
To reduce this Victorian style tour-de-force Dicken's would be proud masterpiece to the label of lesbian fiction does a great disservice to the incredible talent that is Sarah Waters.  Yes, the two main characters in Fingersmith are lesbians, but more importantly, they are thieves, victims, pickpockets, connivers, lovers, and a dozen other complex and intriguing character types that make this book such a compelling and intriguing work.
  The story starts off in the back alleys of London- that dirty, seedy, criminal underbelly of a bustling city where the ability to survive depends on wits and quick thinking as much as it does on luck.  A plot is hatched among a handful of life long petty thieves to aim big and go for more than the meager earnings from a day's work of pickpocketing and petty thieving.  Young Sue Tinder is convinced to play a major role in the lengthy scam, moving into the country in the guise of a maid to befriend and ultimately betray a more well to do young lady.
  To give away much more would ruin the sheer surprise and unpredictability of this Waters' masterpiece.  Let's just say that the old adage, "One good turn deserves another" applies, and just when the plot looks like it is safely headed in one direction, it turns around and heads in the exact opposite.  There is no honor among thieves in mid-nineteenth century London.
  This is Charles Dickens at his best written with the sensibility and intelligence of a late twentieth century woman.  Lesbian fiction? Yes, but it is way more than that.
2027291
I saw this when came out, as a high school student with a girlfriend.  Needless to say, we both found it beyond shocking, truly horrible in its angst and rage and cruelty.  Brando, a damaged and unhappy man whose life is in ruins, meets an empty and inexperienced girl, who submits to his sado-masochistic "numbers" with incomprehensible passivity.  Perhaps she is bored, perhaps she wants relief from her bourgeois life - a clinging mother and unbearably insipid boyfriend - or wants to experience something raw and new, it is impossible to say.  It is like she is an empty vessel, an object, for the horrible things he does to her.  There is plenty of nudity, some iconic scenes like the butter one, but few normal human emotions.  The Brando character is pure despair and loneliness in an extraordinary performance.

He sets the rules:  they meet in an empty apartment for sexual experimentation.  They are to tell eachother nothing of their outside lives, not even their names.  Their brutal meetings are interspersed with scenes from their lives, he in despair over the suicide of his wife, she on the path to a life with a filmmaker of the most idiotic pretension, filming their life yet afraid of any honest emotion with her.  They are both empty and lost.  It is pathetic.

Gradually, they begin to learn about the other, in particular in descriptions by Brando of his unhappy childhood.  She is an innocent, too inexperienced to understand how Brando is using her and why, merely going along for the ride.  Schneider is beautiful, but her character is shallow, perhaps because of her acting she is not at all interesting beyond being a pleasure object.  When he tries to take it to another step, to meet outside the apartment, the ending didn't quite ring true to me, except for the casual indifference he felt towards his impending death.

Seeing it again as a man older than Brando and after so many imitations and overly brainy conversations about it, I thought that the film was still quite good.  I didn't "freak out" the way I did at the first viewing, but the sadness of it all remains deeply affecting.  Sex and despair are no longer shocking to filmgoers as they were when I was young, but it is great art house cinema and worth a viewing for any film buff who is interested in the history of the medium.

Recommended.  This is like a modern equivalent of Balzac in its magical realism.