#House of sand and fog andre dubus movie#

The pleas, threats, arguments, and suggestions of each individual are incomprehensible to the others, escalating to a tragic and inevitable conclusion. The three main characters come from different cultures, religions, and social settings. The legal machinery grinds on slowly too slowly for the humans involved. Meanwhile, the house is sold at auction to Colonel Behrani, who hopes to resell it at enormous profit to help finance his return to his easy life in prerevolutionary Iran. Lester Burdon, the deputy sheriff who evicts her, also falls for her and vows to help her get the house back. Her marriage is over, her recovery from drug addiction is tenuous, and her income is almost nonexistent. Through a careless bureaucratic error, Kathy Nicolo is evicted from her three-bedroom home in the California hills near San Francisco. His wife captures Kathy's dispassionate disbelief with a flat distance that is as effectively realistic as it is palpable. Dubus's performance as the hot-headed Behrani is frightening in its intensity.

The reading by the author and his wife is sublime.

Emotions take precedence over ethics, logic, love and the law as their paths collide in a surprising and tragic conclusion. Once a wealthy and powerful man in Iran and a colonel in the army under the Shah's rule, Behrani is now a struggling immigrant who hopes that he can sell the house for a large profit, so that he can once again provide his family with a lifestyle like the one they enjoyed in Iran. When her house in the California hills is mistakenly seized by the county for back taxes and sold at public auction, she finds herself living out of her car and on the brink of desperation. Kathy Nicolo is a recovering addict whose husband has left her and who is making her way in the straight world with her own cleaning business. ( Audio version.) Dubus has created a novel that is nearly perfectly suited to the audio format. Xamines what happens when ordinary men and women move across the tenuous barrier between the normal and the irrational.a story.about how people.are repeatedly trapped by circumstances and transformed.īill Sharp - The New York Times Book Review His father, Andre Dubus (1936-1999), was a well known writer of short stories and novellas, and his cousin is the mystery writer James Lee Burke. He currently is on the adjunct faculty at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he teaches general writing, fiction, and directed study courses. He lives in Newbury, Massachusetts, with his wife, dancer and choreographer Fontaine Dollas, and their three children. program in the theory of social change at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then roamed the country working at a variety of jobs, including carpenter, construction worker, bounty hunter, bartender, counselor at a treatment center, and actor, before settling upon being a fiction writer. He started his college career at Bradford College (Massachusetts), where his father taught, before moving on to study sociology at the University of Texas. He was one of three finalists for the 1994 Prix de Rome given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It has also been included in 'The One Hundred Most Distinguished Stories of 1993' and The Best American Short Stories of 1994. Dubus's work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and the 1985 National Magazine Award for Fiction.

His other books include Bluesman, a 1993 novel, and The Cage Keeper and Other Stories from 1989.

#House of sand and fog andre dubus movie#

Currently-lives in Newberry, MassachusettsĪndre Dubus III is an American writer best known as the author of the novel House of Sand and Fog, which was a National Book Award finalist in 1999 and was made into a movie in 2003.Awards-Pushcart Prize National Magazine Award-Fiction,.Combining unadorned realism with profound empathy, House of Sand and Fog marks the arrival of a major new voice in American fiction. Sheriff Lester Burdon, a married man who finds himself falling in love with Kathy, becomes obsessed with helping her fight for justice.ĭrawn by their competing desires to the same small house in the California hills and doomed by their tragic inability to understand one another, the three converge in an explosive collision course. Kathy Nicolo is a troubled young woman whose house is all she has left, and who refuses to let her hard-won stability slip away from her. In this riveting novel of almost unbearable suspense, three fragile yet determined people become dangerously entangled in a relentlessly escalating crisis.Ĭolonel Behrani, once a wealthy man in Iran, is now a struggling immigrant willing to bet everything he has to restore his family's dignity.