[By Truffaut's creative re-doing of Henry James's story "Altars of the Dead" into La Chambre verte (The Green Room)] he has offered what James himself considered the ideal form of criticism: "to criticise is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticised thing and make it one's own." (p. 78)

"The Altar of the Dead" is the only serious fictional attempt by James to present his idea of an afterlife which he thought of as an extension of the lives of the dead through relations with the living, depending for its force on the consciousness of the remembering person. (p. 79)

[A] view of the immortality of the soul is beautifully conveyed to us by Truffaut's variation that gives a dazzling reality to the American writer's notion of the only kind of immortality possible—our conscious attempt to keep "them" within...