« SHAFAK SPEAKS | Main | MORE TERRORIST »

July 31, 2006

Comments

Tamara Kaye Sellman

But you never know. If a screenwriter could mire through it (even if inaccurately or tangentially), THE NIGHT LISTENER might end up serving well as the opposite of the famous "the book is better than the movie" scenario. The trailers look interesting. Now I'm curious.

At any rate, there are a few books on my own shelf I couldn't get through that I wish I could have (Durrell's JUSTINE, as one example). Now this is not to say Durrell's not a fab writer, because he is, to many people (to differentiate between Durrell and Maupin). I just didn't "get" the first 30 pages of JUSTINE and so left it behind. Maybe a movie would make a proper "translation" for the likes of me?

(That being said, I'll check into the likelihood; it seems natural there'd be at least a foreign film made of Durrell's QUARTET.)

So who knows? Maybe a movie will make a proper "translation" of THE NIGHT LISTENER as well. Just food for thought.

Jerry Sticker

Definitely looking forward to this movie!!

tod goldberg

That Robin Williams is the star of the film is enough reason for me not to go. Do you think he'll be really, really sensitive? Do you think he might call someone "chief" during the course of the movie? Do you think he'll have a beard? Do you think he'll over act to the point that you actually ask for Jonathan Winters to show up as a huge alien baby to save the movie? (And Maupin adapated the novel for the screen, too.)

On the other hand, I did enjoy the Tales of the City books Maupin did and the initial TV version with Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis.

Dave Worsley

I'll second that, Tod. I liked all of Maupin's other books, some quite a lot. But the Night Listener never made it for me either, though I would have left the restaurant with it. But Robin Williams takes away what little interest I had in seeing this on screen.
I wish movies wouldn't continually wreck good books. Surely Hollywood can butcher original scripts just as easily?

Keith Demko

That book is indeed a flaming bag of shite .. the only they could make the movie worse than the book is to put Robin Williams .. mission accomplished!

Julie

It's a shame you feel the need to trash the book on your blog when you've read only 20 or 30 pages of it. If I recall correctly, that was about when the book took a major turn and became unputdownable for me . . . and for every other person I know who's read it.

Putting down a book after 30 pages is your right, of course, but that means you've disqualified yourself from offering intelligent commentary on said book.

The comments to this entry are closed.

TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."