Whatever suspense the play has hinges on two questions: Will the woman, who has recognized the novelist, dare to read his latest book (also titled "The Unexpected Man") in his presence?
The most revered of French novelists recognized the need for P.R. "For artists, the great problem to solve is how to get oneself noticed," Balzac observed in "Lost Illusions," his classic novel about literary life in early 19th-century Paris.
Ms. Jaoui effortlessly (and to some extent unconsciously) depicts France as a land of cultural refinement and diverting social complication -- a place where a famous novelist is recognized on the street by a voice teacher, and where a less famous novelist (the voice teacher's husband) is spotted by a housepainter who saw him on a "literary broadcast" on television.
For John Updike, in the eighties, Howells was the original and still unvanquished prophet of the "anti-novel" — the American novelist who recognized the middling nature of American society, and who, rejecting both romantic hysteria and a too inward-turning formalism, made all that could be made of the commonplace life of the American middle classes.
Along the way I also became a locally recognized newspaper columnist and novelist, the name "Barton Grover Howe" attached to all of them, it was more than a name and byline, it was a brand.
One of Brazil's great 20th-century playwrights and novelists, Nelson Rodrigues, recognized that the sport trumped even his own craft in defining the nation.
D.H. Lawrence was first recognized as a working-class novelist showing the reality of English provincial family life and in the first days of psychoanalysis as the author-subject of a classic case history of the Oedipus complex.
Although this strategy is known in the literature of many cultures in many ages, the term magic realism is a relatively recent designation, first applied in the 1940s by Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, who recognized this characteristic in much Latin-American literature.
When his novel "Cakes and Ale" appeared, in 1930, all of literary London recognized the fawning, sycophantic hack novelist Alroy Kear — "I could think of no one among my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent," the novel's narrator says — as a stand-in for Hugh Walpole, an acquaintance of Maugham's.
