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Once Upon a Time in Hollywood review – Tarantino’s debut novel shines

The director’s pulpy novelisation of his most recent film is entirely outrageous and addictively readable

Quentin Tarantino made a career alchemising movie trash into gold: with a connoisseur’s ecstasy, he worked with B-movie language and grindhouse rhetoric. Now he’s done the same with a genre the literary world wrinkles its nose at, the pulpiest of pulp fiction – the novelisation. This is normally the lowliest kind of movie brand promotion, which had its heyday before the VHS age, targeted at film fans who wanted a way to relive the experience.

Tarantino has turned his most recent film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, into a novel: messing with the timeline, cranking up the backstories, mulching up reality and alt.reality pastiche, ladling in new episodes. The result comes packaged in something like those New English Library paperbacks that used to be on carousel displays in supermarkets and drugstores. In the endpapers he cheekily includes ads for old commercial paperbacks real and imagined, such as Erich Segal’s Oliver’s Story, sequel to Love Story (“Soon to be a major motion picture”).

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3A7FgMV
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