Month: January 2008

When I was a young, nerdy teenager, I never missed Bernard Pivot‘s Apostrophes, the famed French chat show about literature. It was informed but not stuffy, and Pivot really did read the 3 or 4 books that were discussed each fortnight (imagine that!). I never understood why there wasn’t something similar in the States. I like Charlie Rose, but his PBS show is usually a one-on-one interview with no opportunity for discussion among different writers of the same genre. But now comes word that Daniel Menaker, former editor at the New Yorker and at Random House, is going to start an online TV show called Titlepage.

“Titlepage” will combine elements of “Apostrophes,” a popular French literary program; “The Charlie Rose Show” on public television; and “Dinner for Five,” in which a group of actors discussed their craft, on the Independent Film Channel.

I am so excited about this. I hope the show is good.

From Achebe’s second novel, A Man of the People:

Max began by accusing the outgoing government of all kinds of swindling and corruption. As he gave instance after instance of how some of our leaders who were ash-mouthed paupers five years ago had become near-millionaires under our very eyes, many in the audience laughed. But it was the laughter of resignation to misfortune.”

The book was published in 1966.

(Photo credit: Frank May)

When the Oscar nominations were announced last week, I was a bit surprised to hear that the film adaptation of Atonement had earned a nod for Best Picture. In some ways, the beauty of the novel rests on its use of language, its psychological depth, and a rather odd structure, which Ian McEwan somehow manages to pull off. The first third of the book takes places over the course of one day and is told from the points of view of several characters: the young, impressionable Briony Tallis, who wants to be a writer; her older sister Cecilia, who just returned from Cambridge; their inept mother, Emily; the teenage Lola, a house guest who is raped that evening; and Robbie Turner, the son of the Tallises’ charlady, who also just returned from Cambridge with a ‘first-class degree,’ and stands accused of the crime. The second part of the book is set during the Second World War, in which Robbie serves. Through flashbacks, we find out what happened to him, and learn more about his romantic relationship with Cecilia, and his fight to clear his name. The third part of the book is told through Briony’s point of view. She is now training to be a nurse, and works at a London hospital where a huge number of wounded soldiers are sent. There is also an epilogue, written in 1999 by a now elderly Briony.

In Joe Wright‘s adaptation, the first third of the book is rendered beautifully and the shifting points of view work well on screen, but the entire project falls apart as soon as Robbie is whisked off to jail. The war scenes inevitably recall in the spectator’s mind the work of Steven Spielberg–and the comparison is not to Wright’s advantage. Where the book is subtle (in France, Robbie sees a single human leg hanging from a tree), the adaptation hits you over the head (a whole group of Catholic school girls dead under a tree.) The parts that are set in the hospital feel bogged down and irrelevant. Saoirse Ronan (who plays Briony as a child) and Vanessa Redgrave (who plays an old Briony) manage to rescue the scenes in which they appear, and the cinematography is certainly breathtaking, but I thought Atonement just didn’t hold together as a film. (In sharp contrast to, say, the Coen brothers’ adaptation of No Country for Old Men.)

Photo: Atonement film still (link.)

A few weeks ago, in my Beginning Fiction class, we read John Cheever’s short story “The Enormous Radio,” which was published in the New Yorker in 1947. I’ve always liked that story, and it still seems relevant today, what with MySpace and YouTube. Now I just came across this 1956 radio adaptation from CBS Radio Workshop. It’s interesting to see what choices were made in the course of turning the story into a radio play; for instance, Cheever barely paid any attention to the maid in the story (the reader doesn’t find out her name is Emma until the very end), and certainly he doesn’t give any idea about her race, but in the radio adaptation she is played by someone who is clearly going for a black character. Both the avoidance of race in the story (no one’s is mentioned) and the recourse to stereotypes in the adaptation seem to me to be reflections of the times, and I wonder what people will say in fifty years about today’s stories, and about our blind spots.

The picture above is of my own, enormous radio: An old Philco we picked up at an antiques store in Portland a few years ago.