Suddenly Last Summer - Tennessee Williams BOOK REVIEW (Spoilers)

BUY HERE:
amzn.to/45vZuzI
SUPPORT / PATREON:
/ booksarebetterthanfood
INSTAGRAM: @booksarebetterthanfood
/ booksarebetterthanfood
MUG:
www.zazzle.com...
SOURCES:
1. Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.o...
2. Vidolatry: • Vidalotry: #6 Tennesse...
3. Waiting for Gateau: www.waiting-fo...
4. Center for Hellenic Studies: • Video
5. Tennessee meets Hemingway: / ernest-hemingway-meets...
-----------------------
PATREON INFO:
For $5+ per video Patrons you'll receive (in addition to all below):
Entered in the Book & Coffee Jar
For $1+ per video Patrons you'll get access to:
Patron-Only Reviews
All Reviews Ad-Free
Discord Channel
Better Than Friday Newsletter (5 things I'm interested in sent to you every Friday)
-------------------------------
PATRON ONLY REVIEWS:
The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus
/ myth-of-sisyphus-80534135
H.P. Lovecraft - The Call of Cthulhu (Halloween Special)
/ call-of-cthulhu-74055549
Hamlet: Poem Unlimited by Harold Bloom
/ 66203438
10 Books to Be Read 2022:
/ 63010254
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
/ 60574022
The Necrophiliac by Gabrielle Wittkop - Halloween 2021
/ 58073911
Death in Midsummer by Yukio Mishima
/ 55759685
Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard
/ 53139833
The Key by Junichiro Tanizaki
/ 51134117
Platforms by Nina Power
/ 48914140
Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk
/ 45465524
Bookshelf Tour 2020:
Part 1: / 41287302
Part 2: / 42817306
Part 3: / 43783138
The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat
/ 38823138
Margery Kempe by Robert Glück
/ 38645694
Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov
/ 37527267
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
/ 35574016
11 Books to be read in 2020:
/ 33921584
Atomic Habits by James Clear
/ 32697977
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
/ 30969884
The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
/ 29515320
Reading is Expensive (A Rant)
/ 29065141
White by Bret Easton Ellis
/ 26771749
A Room on the Garden Side by Ernest Hemingway
/ 21573550
The Return by Roberto Bolaño
/ 21019229
Darkness Visible by William Styron
/ 20276630
"Blindness", an essay by Jorge Luis Borges
/ 19529985
The Alligators by John Updike
/ 18428537
The Diaries of Adam and Eve by Mark Twain
/ 17281418
Animal Crackers in My Soup by Charles Bukowski
/ 16924023
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
/ 16133547

[@Ben-O25]

One of my favorite Tennessee Williams plays and film adaptations. Haunting.

[@AgrippaPetronius1903]

Sublime as ever, just watched the movie, Montgomery cliff was sublime, it’s the nuances in his portrayals that can go unnoticed.

[@kingfisher9553]

I'm always surprised to find someone who enjoys Tennessee Williams. Williams is my literary god . . . but probably not for the same reasons as most fans. Anyhoo, my fav (as a film) is Night of the Iguana. Highly recommend "The Unknown Tennessee Williams" by Lyle Leverich.

[@macy1914]

Night of the Iguana 🦎 enjoying it knowing Liz was stalking the set protecting her man made the sexual tones of the film funny

[@sarpkaya5850]

unrelated but your moustache in this video is so good man

[@matthewjaco847]

You always have killer recommendations. I can’t wait to check this one out.

[@mungoslade]

I've been watching your videos for months and what I love the most is the variety of work you find that all seems to have dark themes running through them. Your videos are super effective at inflating my TBR, man

[@SabrinaHawk]

Reading suddenly last summer and the glass menagerie in freshman year of high school is what made me fall back in love with reading fiction - two of my favorite plays to get films as well

[@dailyversace5546]

Hey Buddy! Thanks for your Videos, be happy and healthy, love ya! Trying to implement more regular small reading sessions into my everyday routine, youre inspiring!

[@JohnCavendish-ql4jc]

This play is about two Worldviews. Sebastian's and his mother (Katherine Hepburn). Sebastian thinks that our world is bad, unfair and cruel whereas her mother sees it through rose tinted glasses. He wants her to see the World as it is and stop harbouring unrealistic expectations. Tennessee Williams characters are ofren trapped without any way out, any consolation.Both in " Suddenly..." and " The glass menagerie" the mothers don't get it. They are enthusiastic. They have projects. And that's what creates that horrible sadness when children fail to live up to their mother's expectations.

[@modernoverman]

I'm glad you did this review. I've needed an excuse to pick up Williams. I've always felt a strong connection to him, as he was my grandmother's cousin.

[@BetterThanFoodBookReviews]

No kidding! Did she have any good stories about him?

[@George15732]

It’s crazy how many of the books I love you’ve reviewed. Keep up the good work, man. A book that I want to recommend to you is a classic of Romanian literature. It’s called “Rakes of the Old Court” by Mateiu Caragiale, translated by Sean Cotter who translated Cartarescu. It’s quite short, around 150 pages. The book was voted by romanian critics as the best of the 20th century. It follows four characters as they drink and gamble their way through the bars and brothels of Bucharest. It’s probably the best written book in Romanian that I’ve read and I’m glad it got translated.

[@kingsleydrew2818]

Just went to a production of it here in Sydney. And, despite the distractions of the actor playing the dr being a last minute replacement and having to use a small notebook as cover for not knowing his lines in combination with my wife, needing to pee and the theatre too small to escape unnoticed, checking the time on her phone next to me every 5mins - thought it was f’ing great! Streetcar being one of the greatest films ever made I figured I was always going to love it. Still. Nice to see it pop up here for review so recently after seeing it performed.

[@havardwarnes769]

Your channel is very heimlich. I often find myself substituting breakfast say, or lunch, for a video or two, forgetting time and place, seeping down into the collective unconscious of literature that your channel portrays so well! Better than food

[@BetterThanFoodBookReviews]

Thank you very much, glad you’re enjoying

[@PhilipWeisman-dl4ik]

Always thought with Sebastian getting the idea to go to Cabasa del Lobo, House of the Wolf, in a garden above Amalfi, that it was located in Sardinia. The word picture of Sebastian changes as the play progresses, from Violet's effete intellectual, to Catherine first describing a sweet gentle, passive Cousin to seeing a cynical vicious person who wanted control but wasn't able to coordinate it although he had the potential. "That was how Sebastian described people, as if they were items on a menu. Because l think he was half starved from living on salads. That one is delicious looking. And that one is appetizing, or that one is not appetizing. Fed up with the dark ones, famished for the light ones. All the travel brochures were for blond northern countries. Blonds were next on the menu. Fed up with the dark ones; famished for the light ones. Well, he never got to walk under those cold northern lights. I never saw the Aurora Borealis. Who was it who said we are all of us children, in the vast kindergarten of Life, trying to spell God's name, with the wrong alphabet blocks?

[@macy1914]

Very good

[@juliasweeney3479]

I can’t believe I found you. O Joy! So excited to explore more and more of your videos.

[@dinkpress4214]

Paul Bowles actually wrote the scores for many of Tennessee’s plays. Very interesting music, even when you disregard the composer’s later (brilliant) writings.

[@zenape619]

Love this one! The turtles on the beach scene is burned into my memory. Beautiful and haunting and terribly sad.

[@trudyvaccaro1560]

Symbolism

[@estebanroussel1618]

This film was made after Montgomery Clift’s car accident, which disfigured his face and left one side (his left) practically paralyzed. This made it difficult for him to make facial expressions, and the camera often favors his right side since his left side barely moves. His best post-accident role was Justice at Nuremburg. But if you really want to see what all the fuss was about regard Clift, check put A Place in the Sun, which was pre-accident. He and Taylor are off the charts in that one.

[@adobe4578]

Cliff, Have you read any Sam Shepard? I feel like he has a vibe you'd be down with. A handful of his plays are pretty sublime. The short fiction is good too.

[@littledebby365]

I thought about Sam Shepard too. I actually visited Paris, Texas because of "Paris, Texas". lol

[@schumanhuman]

Taylor, Burton and Noel Coward (seeminly drunk out of his mind) are in a crazy film flop called 'Boom!' adapted by Williams from his own play 'The milk train doesn't stop here anymore'. It's frankly dreadful pretentious guff, yet so bizarre as to be a fascinating (milk) train wreck. According to John Waters, Divine took great inspiration from Taylor's OTT performance here and when they met told her as much, but far from being flattered Taylor was apparently somewhat offended having already pretty much disowned the film.

[@MR._OMAR_KING]

Kate Hepburn and Liz Taylor performance in Suddenly Last Summer are transfixing.

[@ellelala39]

You tell a great story, Cliff; even one as brutal- sounding as this one. There is cruelty in the animal kingdom, a fact I sometimes forget when thinking about how cruel humans can be.

[@joejs7659]

If you enjoy dramatic writing, then you should check out some of Strindberg’s work. I’ll recommend The Father. His novels such as The Defense of a Fool are also great. Wonderfully gloomy, humorous and contradictory stuff.

[@keithtalent852]

Thanks for another interesting vid Cliff. I was very saddened to hear of the death of Martin Amis last week. I think England lost its finest writer. Were you aware of him and any of his works? I think many of his darkly humorous novels would fit perfectly on your channel. 'Money' is often considered the best and might be of particular interest to you since its about someone trying to get a film off the ground.Not that I'd compare you to the hilariously odious John Self! RIP Martin

[@thebasedgodmax1163]

I had no idea he'd died wtf

[@BetterThanFoodBookReviews]

Yes, it's a shame, RIP. I've been wanting to read his work for some time and have heard great things. I was surprised to discover he was a fellow Floridian. 'Money' is on my shelf, I'll get to it asap. Thanks for your kind words and comment.

[@ryanmacfarlane1831]

Just bought and read this today based off your review, what a read

[@sophiawarrilow]

I saw a production of Suddenly Last Summer in London in 1999 with Rachel Weisz as Catherine (before she was famous). I must have been about 14 and it really stuck with me. RW was exceptional. The best actress I've ever seen perform live.

[@chriscarbone2466]

Please review more plays!

[@kendn01]

If all you've done is watch or read the screen play of the Hepburn movie adaptation - you are definitely missing something. I recommend watching the later movie version which was pretty much word for word a performance of the original play, it starred Natasha Richardson and Maggie Smith. The second version gives you a much better idea of William's word play and brilliant use of language. Plus, Maggie Smith is more appropriately cast as Violet Venable - I always thought Hepburn was just too young to play that part. This is Williams at his best, I have to say, though the subject matter, even in Gore Vidal's opinion - is outlandish. He tells a story in one of his books of how he sat down once with a group of the street kids who Williams portrays as cannibals in the play, and the boys thought the whole movie was hilarious.

[@nadagabri5783]

I do not get why the boys committed murder by cannibalism, gay or not. This does not make sense, at least to me. I wish someone would explain that to me as if I was a 3 year old.

[@trudyvaccaro1560]

I agree 💯 I don't understand it either

[@macy1914]

For me it was an odd spiritual flourish where the poor summon the gods for vengeance against the abuse from the wealthy. It felt like an overblown stretch but hey , it Williams

[@nozecone]

I watched the movie on TV one afternoon when I was home from school, sick - grade five, maybe - not old enough to know what was going on, but old enough to be really creeped out by it. I can still see Sebastian stumbling along with all those boys after him (shudder!).

[@n4ni323]

I am Greek and I find the English pronunciation of Bacchae so funny (but also cute, no hate here)

[@ronaldwilliams2456]

The Shaffers were indeed brothers. Anthony Shaffer actually wrote Sleuth as well as The Wicker Man.

[@usmnt4423]

Ah! He said the thing! 5:10

[@thisfoodhits6205]

Please do another Thomas Pynchon book! His stuff after Gravity’s Rainbow had much more heart. Highly recommend doing Vineland.

[@nozecone]

Funny - I've read everything else (I think) of Pynchon's, but didn't make it through Vineland; just found it a bore, as I recall (that was decades ago). To each their own! ... Okay, I just looked at a Pynchon bibliography to check the spelling of Vineland (thought it was 'Vinland'), and discovered I hadn't covered nearly as much of Pynchon's oeuvre as I'd thought ....

[@thisfoodhits6205]

@@nozecone Yeah it’s definitely not for everybody, makes it a tough one to recommend which is hard when people ask my favorite books and it’s at the top of the list 😅

[@marcdilorenzo]

Spring storm is a good one

[@raultabu]

Review suggestions José Saramago's Blindness António Lobo Antunes's The Land At the End of The World

[@jeffreywillstewart]

My first trip

[@isaiahbasaldua924]

I have only way the film which was excellent very good film with queer themes especially during the haze codes.I would love to read it

[@bobcabot]

...just in and out: you "need" to read " The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness"

[@markthomas6703]

It was off Broadway, not on Broadway till the 1990s

[@bjwnashe5589]

That is quite a book cover.

[@eshaibraheem4218]

I think the part of the doctor is a thankless one. It's the women who are the stars.

[@macy1914]

Darkest themes that ive seen in a classic. The evils that money can buy. The hospital, the relatives where all ready to destroy the womans brain for profit. The young repressed gay man using money to satify lust. Complex. It does pander to the outdated notion that men become gay due to overbearing mothers. Aside from Night of the Iguana its my favorite from Tennessee

[@riverajasmina41]

your so cute