Ishiguro's Story for London Film Fest

One of the films I'm looking forward to is the screen version of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel about the implications of human cloning - Never Let Me Go.  The screen version stars Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield and is apparently set to open this year's London Film Festival.

David Gritten in The Telegraph writes :

I make this confident prediction because I’ve already seen the film selected to open the LFF. Never Let Me Go is a perfect example of British film at its very best; it’s a sombre piece of work, yet its sheer quality will lift the gloomiest of spirits.

I so loved the book, and this trailer has really whetted my appetite for the movie version :

McCarthy on The Road

There's a fascinating interview with the normally reclusive Cormac McCarthy up at the Wall Street Journal, in which he talks among other things about how he feels about the filming of his novels and how conversations with his 11-year old son, John found their way into The Road. (BTW, if you are thinking that it would be nice to have an autographed copy of the book, the only ones in existence belong to John.)

The film was released a couple of days back, and you can see the trailer here.

Among quotable things McCormac says in the interview :

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It's more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it's just a matter of figuring out the wiring. Now there's a problem you can take to bed with you at night.

(So as Kim Stanley Robinson said the other day, sci-fi isn't as far removed from out lives as it once was.)

And on the length of books, a warning to writers of would-be mighty tomes :

... the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you're going to write something like "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Moby-Dick," go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don't care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

Books at the Oscars, Censorship by Astro

Now where would Hollywood be without novelists to dream the dream first?

I'm longing to see Slumdog Millionaire which swept the Oscar's yesterday. It's based (as if you didn't know!) on Vikas Swarup's novel, which was originally called Q&A.

In this interview with Alison Flood, which appeared a few days ago in The Guardian, Swarup describes his reactions to the film and describes how the novel was written.

It was born ... not "from Mumbai's meanest streets" but in "London's rather more genteel Golders Green" while Swarup was working as a diplomat for the Indian high commission in 2003.

His family left to go back to India early, and he had just two months before he returned himself :

After they had gone, I thought: 'Now is the time to write the novel.' But I'm not one of those writers who wants to spend four pages describing a sunrise. There are so many of them in India. I'm a sucker for thrillers and I wanted to write one. I'm much more influenced by Alastair MacLean and James Hadley Chase. I'm no Arundhati Roy."

and knew that he had to complete the novel withing that timeframe because he was due to take up a demanding new post :

He wrote quickly - one productive weekend yielded 20,000 words.

Gulp!

And he struck gold when his agent managed to negotiate a six-figure two-book deal :

I am the luckiest novelist in the world. I was a first-time novelist who wasn't awash in rejection slips, whose manuscript didn't disappear in slush piles. I have had a wonderful time.

Kate Winslet won best actress for her role in The Reader, and Bernhard's Schlink's novel on which it is based is one that made a deep impression on me. (I loved it so much - read it twice - that I am actually afraid of seeing the film.)

I mentioned F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button the other day. Now, according to Singapore's Straits Times it has encouraged girls to go looking for the book that has the lovely Brad Pitt in it! The Hollywood knock-on effect is great for encouraging reading.

The film Milk was based on The Mayor of Castro by Randy Shilts and is the story of the 70's gay activist Harvey Milk.

I didn't see the Oscar ceremony (forgot! duh!) but was horrified to hear this from Pang, via Facebook, and I reproduce it here at length because this kind of censorship is unacceptable :

I want to thank Astro* for screening this year's Oscars, which gave us the very heartwarming wins by the screenwriter and the lead actor of the movie "Milk". Congratulations too to the movie "Milk", about the first openly gay man elected to public office in California who was then assassinated, for winning Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor. The acceptance speeches by screenwriter Justin Lance Black and actor Sean Penn were both moving, bold and timely. They spoke up about the need for equal rights, to love, to share this land, and to be heard. This year, the Oscars celebrated the kind of diversity that the arts is able to champion; it's the kind of diversity that desperately needs championing in a world so overwhelmed by racism, war, and hatred.

This is part of Justin's speech:

"When I was 13 years old, my beautiful mother and my father moved me from a conservative Mormon home in San Antonio, Texas to California, and I heard the story of Harvey Milk. And it gave me hope. It gave me the hope to live my life. It gave me the hope one day I could live my life openly as who I am and then maybe even I could even fall in love and one day get married. I wanna I wanna thank my mom, who has always loved me for who I am even when there was pressure not to. But most of all, if Harvey had not been taken from us 30 years ago, I think he'd want me to say to all of the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told that they are less than by their churches, by the government or by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value and that no matter what anyone tells you, God does love you and that very soon, I promise you, you will have equal rights federally, across this great nation of ours. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you, God, for giving us Harvey Milk."

And this is Sean's:

"For those who saw the signs of hatred as our cars drove in tonight, I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect, and anticipate their great shame, and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes if they continue that way of support. We've got to have equal rights for everyone," said Penn.

However, if you caught the Oscars on Astro, you would have noticed something so bizarre almost to be ironic. The words "gay" and "lesbian" have been censored from both these speeches. For me, this act of censorship defeated the very victory won by these two men. The two moments of silence rang out like the gun shots that killed Harvey Milk.

We live in a time when understanding is needed, when artists need to be bold in addressing the manifold injustices of the world. Hence, such a movie had to be made, such acceptance speeches to be uttered. But by its act of censorship, Astro has sent a message to all Malaysians that gays and lesbians are still shameful things to be censored from the public's ears. As a gay man, I am truly offended. After all these years of contributing to the country through my work, of helping people regardless of their orientation, being proud of who I am and helping others be proud of who they are, I can assure you that the only thing wrong is how much hate gays have to endure simply for the way we love.

What is Astro trying to achieve with the censoring of the words "gay" and "lesbian"? Do they think these words will promote homosexuality? Let me assure you that homosexuality cannot be promoted, it just happens. Just as a person's sexuality becomes apparent to him or her when the hormones kick in in the teen years; you don't need sex promoted to you by the TV, your body does its own promotion.

Meanwhile, words like "terrorist", "rapist" and "murderer" gets passed and nobody gets their panties knotted over how these words might promote terrorism, rapes and murders. On the other hand, words like "gays" and "lesbians" that describe people among us who happen love the same sex get treated like it is a crime to even mention in public. Is Astro promoting hate over love? Just what kind of society does Astro want to be creating? One where people can talk about terrorism but not love?

You want to know what breeds social ills? It is the kind of insecurity and low self esteem that results from such continual shaming through the media, that then leads to machismo, violence, bullying, and other superficial ways with which men employ to compensate for their insecurity.

Does Astro not know that many of its own staff are gay? I won't name them, but trust me, I know many of them (and I congratulate Astro for smartly tapping into such a pool of talents). But is Astro now ashamed of its many talented gay and lesbian staff?

And does Astro not know too that a huge number of its viewers are gay and lesbian? Otherwise, why bother to screen "Brothers & Sisters", "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy", "Six Feet Under" and other popular TV series that show how gays and lesbians are not only part of society but play vital roles in shaping that society for the better? Is Astro ashamed of its gay and lesbian viewers? And if this is some national guideline, then Astro needs to question it if it hopes to be fair to its viewers.

Stop censoring the words that describe who I am. I am a Malaysian. I work hard for the right to be here, and I work hard for the right to love, just like everyone else. Thank you.

Pang Khee Teik

If you feel strongly enough about this, please do contact local news papers and you can share your comments with Astro here.

Postscript :

Sir Salman is not at all impressed with the book adaptations ...

Postscript 2 (26/2/08) :

*I'm grateful to Syukran for pointing out that it was STAR and not ASTRO that censored the words, and for providing this link.

All Work and No Play

Remember this scene from The Shining?

Now a fan of Stanley Kubrick's film and Stephen King's has completed Jack Torrance's book for him, and self-published it. Do go and preview it at blurb.com!

Midnight's Children for Big Screen

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, long considered to be unfilmable is to be brought to the big screen, and Deepa Mehta (known for her Elements trilogy) has been signed up to direct and co-write the adaptation with the author himself. Filming will start in 2010.

Gonzo Genius

Hunter S. Thompson fans (some of whom I know hang out on this blog) are no doubt going to be thrilled to hear about a new documentary of author's life, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. It won't make the local cinema circuit : (Nudity/Adult Language/Profanity/Sexual Situations/Drug Content) but I hope a copy finds it's way into my hands somehow.

Jason Buchanan of All Movie Guide says of it :

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room director Alex Gibney turns his attentions from corporate scandal to Gonzo journalism with this tribute to the libido-driven, Wild Turkey-swilling writer who never knew the meaning of the word "excess." Comprised largely of never-before-seen archival materials, Gibney's film focuses on the years between 1965 and 1975, when Thompson was truly firing on all cylinders. Rare home movies, audiotapes, and excerpts from unpublished manuscripts combine to paint an affectionate portrait to the wild-eyed father of Gonzo journalism.

James Rocchi reviews it at Cinematical, and David Carr in The New York Times. The astonishingly tasty Johnny Depp (who you will remember financed Thompson's very appropriate funeral) reads the author's words, and many other famous political figures and authors are interviewed.

Here's the trailer and if that's not enough, more snippets can be found here :



(Picture at top taken from Cinematical.)

The Kunal Basu Interview Part 2: The Japanese Wife and Other Stories

(The Kunal Basu interview continued from yesterday.)

Although Basu realises that it is impossible, as an author, to strategise for film, one of his stories is finally making the leap to the big screen. He describes as “fortuitous” a meeting with Indian film director Aparna Sen in 2006 at an Oxford dinner party. In the course of the conversation Sen said that she would love to do a love story, except that love is so boring, and everything has been written about it.

Half jokingly, Basu told her that he had a love story that was completely different, and related the story of The Japanese Wife, a short story that had been lying in his desk drawer for ten years. It describes the tender relationship between a Bengali schoolteacher and his pen-friend, a Japanese woman. The two never meet, but agree to a marriage. “It is a relationship of great intimacy,” says Basu “but no domesticity.”

As soon as Sen read the story she was determined make the film and asked Basu to write the screenplay. He turned down the offer, feeling that it would find it difficult to revisit the story with his original passion. But he has remained involved with the production and says that he is very happy indeed with what he has seen of it so far.

“It’s not Indian cinema dubbed for a diaspora audience abroad, but world cinema like Pedro Almodóvar’s films and Il Postino, which people all over the world can relate to.” The film is scheduled for general release in October. Since it seemed strange to make a film from an unpublished short story, it was clearly the right time to bring out a whole collection.

Basu has always loved writing short fiction but says that it was always an uphill struggle to persuade his publishers that they were commercially viable. He says that he would like to debunk the myth that short stories don’t sell once and for all.

“All publishers need to do is believe in their short story collections. If you start out saying I don’t believe this book will sell, then it won’t. But if you believe in it passionately, then you can convey that passion to readers.” It is a viewpoint he’s in a good position to defend with this first collection currently riding close to the top of the bestseller list in India.

Basu jokes that his stories arise from “a sort of chemical imbalance in the brain. First, he must get himself into the right state of mind, which he describes as a relaxed state of free floatation.

Writers can’t get too anxious about getting their stories down to the page: “It’s like when you’re young trying to find a girlfriend. If you’re too purposive about finding a girlfriend you’ll never meet her. But if you’re totally loose in your life, if you’re totally relaxed, then you’ll bump into her.”

Stories might be sparked by the smallest of things, a chance encounter, snatches of conversation, a small newspaper article. If he’s struck with the starting point of stories he pushes them further asking “What would happen if?”, and exploring the possibilities.

He says he writes only those that keep him awake at night. “Take for example Grateful Ganga, the second story in The Japanese Wife. I was in India and I was reading a newspaper, cup of tea in my hand, and there’s this little story about Jerry Garcia. Apparently he had two wives and one of the wives came to India with a cask of ashes to immerse them in the Ganges. The story was that when she went back, the other wife said ‘How dare you disappear with my husband’s ashes?’ and they had this fight over them.

“I wasn’t interested in that, but in the whole image of this western woman on a plane with a cask of ashes, coming to India for the first time. All she wants to do is go to the Ganges, immerse the damn thing, and go back. Except that she gets waylaid by circumstances. On the plane she meets this middle-aged pot-bellied Punjabi business man who loves the music of Kishore. So I said, that’s interesting. What if this were to happen?, What if that were to happen? He’s going to be married and that’s going to create a few problems, how does he deal with that? How’s his wife going to react? On the one hand you’ve got great Indian hospitality for a guest. Except the wife suspects that this guest is having an affair with her husband. So how would that go? It’s important for me to keep day dreaming or float. Hopefully I would have seen something that later I would have on would become a story.”

Basu continues to find inspiration in the unlikeliest of places. He describes how, on a recent trip to Beijing, once again wearing the hat of academic, he was invited to a banquet by one of his former students, now the director of a school for public health, attached to one of the biggest schools for Chinese medicine. He almost declined the invitation fearing that the evening would be boring, but civility won out. After the meal, his student told him that there was a museum of traditional Chinese medicine upstairs and asked whether he would be interested in seeing it. He was. As he walked around the two floors of exhibits that the got the idea for his next novel, about a young Portuguese doctor seeking a cure for syphilis.

He’s interested in particular with the philosophical underpinnings of the contrasting eastern and western attitudes to health. It’s this scholarly thoroughness and a willingness to deal with deeper intellectual issues that marks out Basu’s novels from most other historical fiction, and thus it comes as something as a surprise that he hasn’t yet enjoyed the commercial success his work deserves, or been nominated yet for literary prizes. But he’s quite sanguine about that.

“You cannot simple lead an authors life thinking when will the bells ring for me and when am I going to win an award?”

“We are in a domain where there are no defined measures of success and the marketing hype of books often times surpasses real appreciation. We’ve commoditized everything in life, you know, including the arts.

“ I’m much more of a traditionalist in that regard, and if my books stay on bookshelves twenty-five years after I’ve died and different people read them, then I will think that I have succeeded.”

Perfect Pitch

Author Garth Nix can now count Erna as one of his fans (after Daphne Lee introduced her to his works, via her reviews of his books in Starmag!)

Erna emailed me to pass on this little tidbit from Publishing News. Usually an author of a best-selling novel waits until Hollywood comes knocking. Not Nix, who has assembled :

.. an A-list dream team in order to bring Sabriel, the first book in his Old Kingdom trilogy, to the screen.

and plans to pitch the project directly to the studios himself. Talk about taking control! Perhaps other authors with some bestselling clout will take a leaf from his book?

The Talented Mr. Minghella

Another sad passing today, that of filmmaker Anthony Minghella who turned some of my favourite books into films (The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley) that were certainly as good as, if not better than, the original.

Minghella was only 54, and died from complications from surgery he had a week ago for tonsil cancer.

Here David Carr in the New York Times looks back on his career.

Tie-In Titles and Hollywood Respect

Movie adaptations give novels that have slipped into the backlist a new lease of life, and this year's Academy Awards feature a bumper crop of literary adaptations, including No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood, The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly, Atonement and and foreign-language film Beaufort.

In the Bookseller Anna Richardson interviews publishers and bookshops to find out the challenges in producing the film tie-in.

It's interesting then that:

Booksellers are divided on the attractiveness of and are aware of a certain snobbery among book buyers. Some welcome them with open arms, while others are rather more sniffy. ... Foyles’ Jonathan Ruppin says: “[There are] people who wouldn’t be seen dead with a film tie-in—at Foyles we rarely even bother with tie-in editions.” Nic Bottomley of Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath thinks that “some of the [tie-in] covers are howlers”, and tries to “avoid them like the plague”. Keeping the original cover running alongside the tie-in version is vital, Bottomley says, and a film can have a noticeable effect on book sales.

I have to admit my own snobby prejudice here ... if given a choice between a tie-in edition and another edition, I'd go for the latter every time! I'd hate to people to think that I'm reading a book just because the film is coming out! And I'm discerning enough to make up my own mind about what I want to read and when.

(Well okay okay, it happened recently with No Country for Old Men and Atonement ... but you know the reasons.)

But I'm also thrilled to bits to see readers picking up really good fiction because they've seen the film, so film tie-ins are a mighty good thing.

And talking about films based on books, David L. Ulin in the Los Angeles Times talks about the marginalisation of authors in Hollywood, a situation that is particularly ironic given the number of movies that have their roots in literary work. But he argues convincingly that now:

Hollywood may be developing a more consistent approach to literature ...

Let's hope so.

Anyway, here's a list of this year's movies with film release dates so you can get your reading in first! :

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury) / 26th Dec (2007)
PS I Love You by Cecelia Aherne (Harper) / 4th Jan
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (Picador) / 18th Jan
The Water Horse by Dick King-Smith (Puffin) / 8th Feb
Jumper by Steven Gould (HarperVoyager) / 14th Feb
Oil! There Will Be Blood by Upton Sinclair (Penguin) / 15th Feb
The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory (Harper) / 7th Mar
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (Penguin) / 21st Mar
Beaufort by Ron Leshem (Harvill Secker) / 28th Mar
The Ruins by Scott Smith (Corgi) / 18th Apr
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (Cape) / 25th Apr
The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martínez (Abacus) / 25th Apr
Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? by Morgan Spurlock (Harvill Secker) / 9th May
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne (Black Swan) / 20th June
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian by C S Lewis (HarperCollins) / 27th June
Angus, Thongs and Full-frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison (HarperCollins) / 25th July
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (Penguin) / 12th Sept
How to Lose Friends & Alienate People by Toby Young (Abacus) / 3rd Oct
The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella (Black Swan) / 24th Oct
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink (Phoenix) / 26th Dec
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (Vintage) / 9th

Which are you most looking forward to seeing or reading? I love Schlink's The Reader, so that's a must-see for me. I've never read Brideshead Revisited and should do, so maybe that's a useful nudge.

Postscript :

I found this very interesting post about Upton Sinclair's Oil on the Abebook's Reading Copy blog.

Death at the Flip of a Coin

He did close his eyes. He closed his eyes and he turned his head and he raised one hand to fend away what could not be fended away. Chigurh shot him in the face. everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother's face, his First Communion, women he had known. the faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a road-side ravine in another country. He lay headless on the bed with his arms outflung, most of this right hand missing. Chigurh rose and picked the empty casing off the rug and blew into it and put it in his pocket and looked at this watch. The new day was still a minute away.

I actually didn't mean to read Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men next, especially not as I have half a dozen other books on the go. But I bought it in Singapore and then thought I'd just glance through a page or two when I was at the airport.

And then the damn thing wouldn't let go of me.

It was all very well for Kaykay to laugh at me the other night about the book being so not "my thing", being very much a blokes book, being a modern day western, being so unremittingly violent and all that.

But this book is excellent.

Any synopsis of the plot is going to make the book look like pulp fiction. But what makes the book absolutely remarkable is the terse, spare writing, the crisp dialogue and the way that each page crackles with tension. It's so cinematographic that I can't think that the Coen brothers had to do too much work to bring it to the screen. (Although they seem to have done a pretty good job!) :



Then there's the depth of characterisation, and the deeper questions about free will versus determinism, and the nature of good and evil.

Anton Moss, a welder and ex-Vietnam vet, is out hunting antelope in the arid scrub near Rio Grande when he stumbles into the aftermath of a gun battle in which the members of a drug convey have been slaughtered. And then he finds a suitcase with a cool $2.4 million inside.

Soon he is a fugitive fleeing from the hired gun, sent to retrieve the money, an icy-cold psychopath called Anton Chigurh (the name rhymes with "Sugar" ironically) who has a perverted sense of moral justice, a real angel of death who models himself on God. Chigurh decides the fate of his victims with a flick of a coin and calmly dispatches them with a stungun of the sort used in slaughter houses.

And then there's Bell, a small town sheriff struggling to do the duty he is entrusted with in a world that seems to be changing steadily for the worse. He is also doing his best to track Moss down before it's too late. The narrative of the novel alternates between omniscience and chapters where Bell is given free-reign to talk about his own history and philosophy of life in monologues that read like something from Studs Terkal's classic oral histories. Bell is a good man but he doesn't really have his finger on why the world is going to hell in a hand basket, even though he can see that it is.

To complicate matters, a special forces agent employed by a powerful cartel is also hot on Moss' trail. (This is the guy who meets his sticky end in the extract above!) And there's Moss' young wife, who also needs to do a runner with her dying mother to avoid being picked off by Chigurh.

Although The Road was probably the most powerful novel I've read this year, I think this novel is far better from the technical point of view. And although McCarthy's use of punctuation is every bit as eccentric here, it seems to fit with the way the Texan dialect is written and doesn't grate as it does in The Road. (I did though sometimes get lost in dialogues, since there is no indication of who is speaking.) And thankfully, there are fewer choppy sentence fragments of the kind that had me gritting my teeth.

I guess I'll be reading backwards through some of those earlier novels now.

A very good review of the book on the Citypaper website.

Cheapies and Freebies

I know you want to hear about where to go to get cheap books!

Click on the posters to enlarge.

And what's better than something really cheap? Something for free, of course.

If you missed Eternal Wanderer's comment on the previous post, KL Weekly has free tickets for tomorrow night for the film of Atonement, based on the Ian McEwan novel of the same name. This is one I think I really will drag my lazy self out for. How about you?

I'm a Raccoon!

As I was reading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy, I was much taken with the idea of "daemons" - creatures which are manifestations of the human soul. I wondered (as all readers surely must) what my own daemon must be. I fancied a cat because I aspire to felinity (but know that I fall way short of those exacting standards).

Anyway, I was overjoyed to find on Dove Grey Reader's blog a link to The Golden Compass movie website which let's you find out which creature your daemon is.* Mine is a raccoon.

Or at the moment it is, because depending on whether blog readers agree with my self-assessment, my form might change over the next 12 days before becoming fixed. Dove Grey Reader's began as a fox and changed into a lion.

(I'm not too unhappy with the assessment, by the way, as I do like raccoons, though the only one I've ever met was in a cage outside a petshop on Aman Suria and got his claws snagged in my skirt when I tried to pet him.)

The film looks very good and I'm fairly aching to see it.

Wired magazine has a very interesting piece on the making of the film.

Meanwhile there is of course the controversy which surrounds the film and books as Nury explains.

To which this blogger says: It's fiction. Get over it.

*(Click on Daemons link and then Meet Your Daemon.)

Kite Runner Controversy

The filming of Khaled Hosseini's best selling novel The Kite Runner has run into controversy in Afghanistan where it is set, according to a report on the BBC website.

And if you've read the book, I'm sure you can guess which scene has caused the furor.

The novel has sold more than eight million copies worldwide. In the UK where it has sold more than a million copies, it's success is largely due to it's popularity among book clubs. It was voted the best book club read of the year for the second year running by members of the public and entrants of the 2007 Penguin/Orange Broadband Readers' Group prize according to the Times.

(The photo is from the BBC website and shows Ahmad Khan who plays Hassan.)

Betrayal on a Greek Island

I'm constantly acquiring new books, and find there's always a pressure to read the newest, the latest ... particularly as I review. And since I also belong to a book club at least one book a month is decided for me!

Consequently, books that don't get read immediately tend to be get buried on my "to-be-read" shelf, a.k.a. "the shelf of good intentions". I was happy for the TBR Challenge to prod me into making a covenant with at least 12 of these books to read 'em before the year is up.

Sadly, I've only just finished my second-TBR of 2007. It's Pascali's Island by Barry Unsworth which has been patiently waiting its turn since I bought it via Amazon, prompted by catching the excellent film (starring Ben Kinsley, Helen Mirren, Charles Dance) for a second time on ASTRO.

The novel is set on a small Greek island in 1908. The Ottoman Empire is about to fall, but in this remote outpost a government informer pens his last report to the Sultan. Basil Pascali, an outsider of mixed-race, has loyally reported on the activities of the people of his community for twenty years, each month receiving a tiny stipend, but never a single response. As a writer he begins to take liberties with his reports, taking enormous pride in his ability to depict events with great clarity and flair.

When Englishman Anthony Bowles arrives on the island, he and Pascali become rivals for the affection of Lydia, a Viennese artist who has been living there for some time. Pascali suspects that Bowles may not be honest about his claim to be an archeologist (it takes a practiced confidence-trickster to recognise another of his kind, after all), so what is he doing there?

The atmospheric short novel is superbly plotted, there isn't a scene out of place. Nothing is as it seems and Pascali's Island keeps you guessing right up to the tragic ending as the characters become enmeshed in layers betrayal and deceit.

Literary fiction honestly doesn't come much better than this and I am actually surprised that the novel didn't win more recognition at the time.

It was shortlisted for the Booker in 1980, but was eclipsed by William Golding's win for Darkness Visible and Anthony Burgess' masterpiece Earthly Powers. I've read several other novels by Unsworth which I've greatly enjoyed and admired (Morality Play, Rum and Sugar, Losing Nelson, and Sacred Hunger, which finally did won Unsworth the Booker) but I like this by far the best. (I still have his latest novel A Ruby in her Navel to be read.)

Pascali's Island reminded me of several other novels I've greatly enjoyed : E.M. Forster's Passage to India, L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, and the episode about the smugglers in Lermentov's A Hero of our Time ... all of them written much earlier.

Would I recommend it? Whole-heartedly ... for literary fiction lovers. (And I'm sure I will be rereading it.) Others will still enjoy the film - just watch out for repeats on ASTRO.

Adaptation

Books provide filmmakers with ready-made plots on which to base screenplays (useful when plagiarism claims start to fly), and a proven audience. But unless they are global mega-sellers like Dan Brown, J K Rowling or Michael Crichton, the actual authors are lower on the food chain than the screenwriter ...

Danuta Kean talks about the real deal is for authors when their novels are "optioned", in a piece written for Myslexia and reproduced in the Independent.

Some time ago we talked about the film adaptations we liked and those we thought sucked. Great clearly minds think alike (!) and one or two of Kean's choices echo my own. (Captain Corelli's Mandolin is a clunker, and Mingella's take on Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient is so good it actually does the novel a favour.)

She also highly recommends another film of the book which I think is the cleverest adaptation from book to film I've ever seen - Adaptation:

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman turned Susan Orlean's 'unfilmable' book The Orchid Thief into a jaw dropping satire about writer's block.

and which is itself about the whole process of adaptation from book to screenplay!

Kean also points to the large number of novels which have made it to the big screen this year. I'm pretty dreadful at getting myself out to the cinema and my conscience hurts when I buy pirated DVD's ... but I am so looking forward to seeing the adaptations of Zoë Heller's Notes on a Scandal (one of my favourite novels) and Giles Foden's The Last King of Scotland (which I still have to read). I'll probably catch them on Astro a year or two down the line.

Postscript:

Leon also has a post up about adaptations he's looking forward to.

Little Book of Delight

Read a book in just twenty minutes yesterday over a cup of tea.

It was Auggie Wren's Christmas, another of Paul Auster's, and it came free with a copy of his new novel Travels in the Scriptorium, but can be bought separately.

Auster was asked by the New York Times to write a Christmas short story for the Op-Ed page.

He went on to write a story about a writer who is asked to write a short story for the New York Times to appear on Christmas morning. Stumped for what to write about, he receives some unexpected help from the tobacconist whose shop he frequents, a colourful character called Auggie Wren.

Wren offers to tell the author the best Christmas story he has ever heard in exchange for lunch. And in the diner he weaves a tale ... which is unsentimental, has no santas or angels, or trees or snow, but even as it overturns all expectations and blurs moral lines, still touches the heart.

Now if you don't feel like running out and buying the book, and would still love this taste of vintage Auster, you can read the whole thing online, here.

But then, you'd be missing a dimension, because this limited edition print version has funky illustrations by Isol throughout, and is a bit like a kids' book for grown-ups! (Isol's Auggie Wren, right.)

The little story inspired Wayne Wang's 1995 film, Smoke, for which Auster wrote the screenplay and created one of my favourite movie characters . (Blue in the Face features the same cast of characters and was entirely improvised, and filmed on the back of Smoke in just five days.)

Here's Auggie Wren's monologue from the film script and left, a picture of Harvey Keital in the film role.

And am much tickled reading the cast list, to discover that the book thief was played by Auster's twenty-year old son Daniel! As if it isn't bad enough that Auster keeps wandering inside the frame of his own stories, he wants his family in there too!

Is it too early to start your Christmas shopping for 2007?

Banned Unbanned Banned ...

When things are banned, it’s pathetic. Who bans things? People who are frightened. It’s fear. So what are they frightened of? Of people writing or saying something? And why are they frightened? When someone bans something, it’s very revealing ...

says Paul Theroux in an interview with Kristina Tom in today's Star. He was referring to the Singaporean government's banning of the film of his novel Saint Jack.

The film has just been unbanned and Ben Slater who has written a book about the making of Bogdanovich's film comments:

One thing I say in the book is that Singapore has changed radically, so that was never in doubt! Censorship is still a daily reality in Singapore, but I feel that the unbanning of Saint Jack is a very crucial symbolic act - the film stands in for a past that Singapore's authorities have spent 28 years trying to eradicate, so by saying "You can watch it now", it is finally accepting that it's OK for people to reconsider those times. But the fact remains, the world of Saint Jack has disappeared. You can't go back there, but you can now take a look at the movie".

Just as one country loosens up about its past, another clamps down. Read yesterday in the Star that the Malaysian government's decision to ban Amir's The Last Communist has been made final. Home Affairs Minister Datuk Seri Mohd Radzi Sheikh Ahmad said:

It will be like allowing a film portraying Osama Bin Laden as a humble and charitable man to be screened in the United States. ... People who don’t know about Chin Peng will think what a ‘poor old man’ he is.

A plausible reason? Are Malaysian audiences so undiscerning - particularly those gullible arty-farties who go to see Amir's films? Or does this banning also speak most loudly about the insecurities of the banners?

Your comments as always greatly appreciated.

Related Posts:

The Lost Communist (13/5/06)
Too Many Amirs and Two Minutes of Fame (23/5/06)
Index: On Censorship

Great Adaptations

A couple of weeks back, on the back of the debate about the best film-from-book adaptations of all time, the Guardian featured several articles on the subject. I know that some of you are film-makers or film-maker-wannabe's, so forgive me for taking so long to post the links.

Screenwriter Deborah Moggach talks about the process of moving a story from page to screen:

Adaptation has to be both brutal and tender. You have to be brutal, to turn the noun into the verb. You have to reassemble the story, as a film. To find a strong narrative you might have to jettison characters, pull a comb through the dialogue, create new dialogue, conflate scenes, create new scenes, radically reorganise the story. But this must be done in a spirit of love, which means keeping faith with the spirit of the original story. This is not the same thing as being retentive.

Peter Bradshaw argues that some of the best films have come not from novels, but from short stories:

There are distinct advantages to working from a short story that are not available when you are translating a novel. There is not the same quart-in-a-pint-pot problem; the screenwriter need not feel the headachey compression of material, or the need to axe characters and storylines without which the novel works logically, but loses much of the flavour which made it attractive in the first place. A short story is a platform, a challenge, a coiled spring of potential.

Elsewhere, Andrew Pulver looks at the tricky question of casting, Suzie Steiner considers the movie-tie-in book cover, and Giles Foden considers the books which have never made it to screen.

Which begs a couple of questions: which books do you think would be impossible to film, and which hitherto unfilmed books would you like to see made into movies?

Related Posts:

The Film of the Book (12/9/05)
Best Film Adapatations? (21/1/06)

Best Film Adaptations?

The Guardian has drawn up a list of the 50 best film adaptations of all time, as determined by "a panel of experts". The British public will have the chance to vote for their favourites in branches of Waterstones and Borders, before the winner is revealed at the Guardian Hay Literary Festival at the end of May. And the nominations are:

1984
Alice in Wonderland
American Psycho
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Brighton Rock
Catch 22
Charlie & the Chocolate Factory
A Clockwork Orange
Close Range (inc Brokeback Mountain)
The Day of the Triffids
Devil in a Blue Dress
Different Seasons (inc The Shawshank Redemption)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Bladerunner)
Doctor Zhivago
Empire of the Sun
The English Patient
Fight Club
The French Lieutenant's Woman
Get Shorty
The Godfather
Goldfinger
Goodfellas
Heart of Darkness (aka Apocalypse Now)
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Jaws
The Jungle Book
A Kestrel for a Knave (aka Kes)
LA Confidential
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Lolita
Lord of the Flies
The Maltese Falcon
Oliver Twist
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Orlando
The Outsiders
Pride and Prejudice
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The Railway Children
Rebecca
The Remains of the Day
Schindler's Ark (aka Schindler's List)
Sin City
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
The Talented Mr Ripley
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
To Kill a Mockingbird
Trainspotting
The Vanishing
Watership Down

So what's missing? I just know that the Visitor is going to drop by and exclaim "Where's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?" And Jane Sunshine is going to lament the leaving out of Angela's Ashes.

And which of the above would you vote for? Forced to choose one I might go for The Talented Mr. Ripley. But it's a tough choice.

Some readers' opinions in the Guardian blog, and here are some of my thoughts about film adaptations in an earlier post.