Now it lives by the sofa: dark, glossy, splendid.
Moreover, Dark's splendid precision in describing physical landscapes fails her when it comes to the cultural landscape, especially beyond Wynnemoor.
His other novels include Our House in the Last World, Empress of the Splendid Season, Dark Dude, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien and A Simple Habana Melody.
Hijuelos wrote eight novels, including "Empress of the Splendid Season," "Dark Dude" and a Mambo Kings sequel, "Beautiful Maria of My Soul".
But for his new video collaboration the director takes a much darker turn towards the splendid and the macabre.
Here it becomes "A Museum of Phrases" (that is the evening's subtitle), an almost random catalog of splendid fancies and dark thoughts from the writer Elias Canetti.
Harris and Madigan, a real-life husband and wife team who are both veterans of the dark dramas of Sam Shepard, are splendid as the quarreling Perches, each slowly revealing the true nature of their characters so that the final scenes come as a real shock.
Amadou Bagayoko, in splendid purple robes and dark glasses, calls "Est-ce que ça va?" at regular intervals, while his wife Mariam Doumbia, in matching robes and a headdress that would make Aretha Franklin think twice, solicits a "Ca va bien!" response.
Perhaps I'm too close – I lived there for a couple of years, until a girl disaster – but all resonated in this splendid refraction of writer Tom Rob Smith's dark mind.
Still, he said, Ms. Radvanovsky was "splendid," and Mr. Hvorostovsky sang "with his trademark dark sound and supple phrasing, which poignantly brought to life this suffering husband's love".
