They might be quiet, like the Low Anthem, a Rhode Island trio that played somber songs pondering fate and eternity.
When the aliens attack in the 21st-century version of "War of the Worlds," there's no one around to supply explanations, theories and plans of action, to stare with furrowed brow at exotic instruments and make complex calculations, to consult with military leaders and heads of government, or even to issue somber pronouncements on the fate of the human race.
While "21 Grams" is as jagged and corrosive as "Sand and Fog" is smooth and somber, it suffers a similar fate: it wants to find tragedy in randomness and disconnection and winds up making its contrivances all the more glaring.
They exchanged somber, silent glances, aware that their fate was already somehow tied together, but each in a private shroud of misery.
Marilynne Robinson's new novel, "Home," is a kind of bookend to her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "Gilead" (2004), a companion piece exploring the same themes of fathers and sons, faith and familial fate, but in a more somber and effortful fashion.
PAGE B1 SHARDS OF A FAMILY'S PAST Marilynne Robinson's new novel, "Home," explores the same themes as her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "Gilead" -- fathers and sons, faith and familial fate -- but in a more somber and effortful fashion.
When I visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam several years ago, the somber concreteness of the Annex and the dread fate of its inhabitants were nearly erased by a final multimedia display in which the Holocaust was calculatedly eclipsed by invocations of every contemporary example of racial and social injustice the museum could formulate.
But he sounded more somber than he did even a week ago, and seemingly resigned to his fate.
Tonight the independent television channel NTV scrolled the names of the Perm dead in a somber tribute, and it noted that there was a bitter twist to the fate of its militia.
Above all, it's a modern tragedy in which the war, like the somber moors in "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," becomes a metaphor for cruelty and injustice, for fate itself.
