A walker in NY City...

A Literary Visitor Strolls in From the Airport
By CHARLES McGRATH

Will Self’s new novel, “The Book of Dave” (Bloomsbury USA), is about a London cabdriver who inadvertently founds a religion when a ranting diatribe he buries in the garden of his ex-wife is dug up five centuries later, in a now post-apocalyptic world, and becomes a sacred text. Mr. Self’s own text is immensely learned in cabbie lore and even creates a cab-based “Clockwork Orange”-like language, in which the sun is the “foglamp,” for example, and the moon an “édlite.”

When Mr. Self recently traveled to New York, however, he did not take a taxi from his house in South London to Heathrow. He walked the whole 26 miles. Upon arriving in New York, he walked from Kennedy Airport to the nearby Crowne Plaza Hotel — a journey more perilous than he expected, because it involved a nighttime traverse of expressways with no curbs.

The next morning Mr. Self, who is unusually tall and very thin and has a long, melancholy face that he once described as looking “like a bag full of genitals,” packed his knapsack, rolled a cigarette and, puffing from a Hunter Thompson-style cigarette holder, set off on foot for Manhattan. More

Film at eight

A Solitary Ingmar Bergman on Life, Love and Death, in Documentary Style
By STEPHEN HOLDEN

“Not a day has gone by in my life when I haven’t thought about death,” Ingmar Bergman muses in the extended interview that forms the spine of “Bergman Island,” an extraordinarily revealing documentary portrait of this Swedish director at his home on the desolate Baltic Island of Faro.

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Yes, Soldiers of France, in All but Name
By A. O. SCOTT

“Days of Glory,” the English title of Rachid Bouchareb’s new film — called “Indigènes,” or natives, in French — has a rousing, somewhat generic war-movie ring. And Mr. Bouchareb, a French director of Algerian descent who has made four previous features, sticks close to the conventions of the genre as he follows a small group of World War II infantrymen from North Africa through Italy and across France into Alsace. His combat sequences are filmed with exquisite precision and edited with admirable economy, and the quieter moments that allow the characters of the men to emerge find a perfect balance between dramatic impact and psychological authenticity.

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The Trippy Dream Factory of David Lynch
By MANOHLA DARGIS

There are, in the movies, few places creepier to spend time than in David Lynch’s head. It is a head where the wild things grow, twisting and spreading like vines, like fingers, and taking us in their captive embrace. Over the last three decades these wild things have laid siege to us even as they have mutated: the deformed baby of “Eraserhead” evolving into the anguished distortions of “The Elephant Man,” the Reagan-era surrealism of “Blue Velvet,” the serial home invasion in “Twin Peaks” and the meta-cinematic masterpiece “Mulholland Drive,” a dispatch from that smog-choked boulevard of broken dreams called Hollywood.

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Food, Glorious Food

Honoring R.W. Apple in Words and Food
By FRANK BRUNI

WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 — There were those at the Kennedy Center memorial on Tuesday for R. W. Apple Jr. who contended that he would have been touched most by what the current and former leaders of the free world had to say — or rather how many of them said it.

Of the five living American presidents, all but Gerald R. Ford, who is ill, sent letters of admiration to be read from the stage in honor of Mr. Apple, who died on Oct. 4 at 71 after an extraordinary journalistic career at The New York Times. More

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