What?

by Roman. POLANSKI

91 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published January 1, 1973

Reviews

[Matthew Wilder · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Polanski and Brach’s blithe and very literary novelization of the diminutive Pole’s libertine movie while listening to Terrence Malick soundtracks...Well, that was weird. The strange non-story of Roman’s film, in which a Little Annie Fanny type ducks all manner of sexual assault in a half poshy, half muzzy palazzo that belonged to WHAT? producer Carlo Ponti, is told with the same confidence, the same baffling abstraction, the same coolness in the face of fairly self-evident silliness as the movie. Unlike most novelizations, WHAT? does not try to make WHAT? make sense as a novel. It protects the beautiful, half sheerly sensual and half jokily smutty surface of the picture and lets it flow over us like so many buckets of Gulf of Mexico saltwater.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book/film is something involving Marcello Mastroianni and Polanski in 1973

and suppossedly it's like some sub-basement psychologicals of Alice in Wonderland, where there is escape from rapists and Mastroianni plays a pimp