Bookbeat 27
the su nday g u a rdi an 2 0 : s u p p l e m e n t to th e su n day gu ar d ian | 28.12.2014 | n ew d elh i
Books that we can’t wait to see on the silver screen 2014 was a good year for literary adaptations onscreen, as evidenced by Inherent Vice and Gone Girl . Aditya Mani Jha takes stock of the most exciting book-to-movie adaptations lined up for 2015.
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mong the several reasons why you should be grateful for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is that it spawned a beautiful “now a major motion picture” cover for the novel. There, I said it. For most hardcore litnerds, the idea that a cinematic adaptation might add something useful or artistic to the world of a novel is anathema. But how could you not like the new cover for Inherent Vice, with, among other things, a fabulously stoned Joaquin Phoenix (he played Doc Sportello)? 2015 promises to be another great year for book-to-movie projects; and no, we’re not talking about the Fifty Shades of Grey movie. For starters, there’s Daniel Espinosa’s Child 44, based on the novel of the same name by Tom Rob Smith. Child 44 was a rare crime thriller that found itself on the Man Booker longlist, and deservingly s o. Th e b o o k f o l l ow s disgraced MGB agent Leo Demidov as he investigates the disappearance and subsequent murders of over 50 children in Stalin’s Soviet Union, a land supposedly free of crime. Espinosa has assembled an exciting cast for the film, with British actor Tom Hardy (Bane from The Dark Knight Rises) playing Demidov. Noomi Rapace, Gary Oldman and Vincent Cassel will also portray key characters. Joseph Delaney’s The Spook’s Apprentice was a smart and funny YA (Young Adult) novel that did not, for a change, dumb things down to a crawl for its readers. Tom Ward, the 12-year-old protagonist of the book, is the seventh son of a seventh son, a coincidence that enables him to see things that others cannot. Ward’s
Jeff Bridges in Seventh Son.
journey from a simple farm boy to becoming apprentice to a wizard known simply as “The Spook” is chronicled beautifully in Delaney’s novel. The book is being adapted into a movie called Seventh Son, with Sergei Bodrov (Mongol) directing and the ever-so-charismatic Jeff Bridges playing The Spook. With Bridges’ effortless dialogue delivery and his commanding screen presence, Seventh Son seems like a safe bet for fantasy fans. Another YA book that makes this list was never supposed to be a novel at all; it was supposed to be a whimsical picture book featuring a lot of strange-looking children. Thankfully, Ransom Riggs’ enterprising editor noted the potential for a cracking story here, and so we ended up with his debut novel, Miss Peregrine’s
One of the many Victorian-era novels that Penny Dreadful tackled so well was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. 2015 will see a fresh adaptation of the classic, called Victor Frankenstein, with James MacAvoy playing a young Doctor Frankenstein.
Home for Peculiar Children. Using the archival photographs as a starting point, Riggs tells us the story of the titular orphanage, where the protagonist Emma’s grandfather once lived; the place that holds the key to his unsolved murder. Ghosts, monsters, time travel and a spunky, resourceful young heroine; Riggs has all the ingredients of a blockbuster here and he brings a playful touch to his handling of this
somewhat routine material. We had been hearing some very exciting news about this book’s adaptation, and confirmation finally arrived at the end of 2014. Tim Burton will direct the live-action adaptation, while the brilliant Eva Green (Casino Royale) will play Miss Peregrine. On the back of a red-hot season of Penny Dreadful, it will be interesting to see how Green responds to the madcap world of Tim Burton.
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ne of the many Victorian-era novels that Penny Dreadful tackled so well was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. 2015 will see a fresh adaptation of the classic, called Victor Frankenstein, with James MacAvoy playing a young Doctor Frankenstein. Daniel Radcliffe will play the hunchbacked assistant Igor while Mark Gatiss (the cocreator of Sherlock, who also plays Mycroft Holmes on the show) will also be seen in a supporting role. The film will be helmed by Paul McGuigan, who also directed The Hounds of Baskerville, considered by many to be the best episode of Sherlock. If you are a fan of either Khaled Hosseini or Dan Brown, or both... we won’t judge you (for now). In fact, you are in for a treat, because both these authors will see
their recent bestsellers on the silver screen. Inferno sees Tom Hanks reprising his role as symbologist Robert Langdon for the third time, while A Thousand Splendid Suns will be the second Hosseini movie adaptation after The Kite Runner. A non-fiction adaptation that has generated a considerable amount of buzz is that of A Walk in the Woods, a typically humorous travelogue by Bill Bryson, where the author attempts to walk across the Appalachian Trail along with his friend. The film will be directed by Ken Kwapis and Bryson will be played by Robert Redford. The 78-year-old Redford was last seen as a comic-book villain in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a film he admittedly participated in just to experience firsthand how SFX works. To be fair to Redford, he also gave us the unusual and riveting All is Lost, where he was the sole actor onscreen, in a film almost devoid of dialogue. Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn was one of the most acclaimed novels of 2009, being longlisted for the Booker and winning the Costa Prize. His novel is being adapted into a screenplay by British novelist Nick Hornby. Tóibín’s writing style isn’t exactly cinematic and he is not particularly interested in plot progression, so Hornby and director John Crowley have their task cut out here. There are two separate adaptations of The Jungle Book in the works, the next Hunger Games movie will also be released, which is not to forget the PR hailstorm headed our way when Fifty Shades of Grey finally hits theatres. It’s the relatively lesser-known lit adaptations, however, that could make a big impression on the box office as well as the awards season in 2015.
The best books to gift your children this winter The Lost Whit and Wisty Allgood team up to save their city from an evil magician. James Patterson and Emily Raymond Little, Brown Books for Young Readers Price: Rs 1,146
You Can’t Make This Up Al Michaels HarperCollins Price: Rs 1,845
Dirty Pretty Things A collection of illustrated short stories with an erotic theme. Michael Faudet Michael Faudet (self-published) Price: Rs 1,082
Sons of Anarchy Tara Bennett Time Home Entertainment, Inc. Price: Rs 1,906
When Books Went to War How 1,200 titles played their part in World War II. Molly Guptill Manning Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Price: Rs 1,591
DANIEL HAHN
Oliver Jeffers’s Once Upon an Alphabet (HarperCollins, £20) isn’t simple, exactly; yes, it’s an alphabet book of sorts, but for each letter there’s a tiny crafted story, sometimes very funny and always pleasingly odd. “Out on the ocean there is an owl who rides on the back of an octopus (…)” starts one. “Danger Delilah is a daredevil who laughs in the face of Death and dances at the door of Disaster…” begins another. It’s immensely charming, but you’ll mostly buy it for Jeffers’s inimitable artwork, because this book is a very, very beautiful thing. Following on from Jeffers’s A-Z, we have a Shirley Hughes January-to-December book, A Year of Stories and Things to Do (Bodley Head, £19.99), a collection of her stories, some popular and others less well known, plus an array of suggested “things to do” for each month, all brought together for the first time into a big hardback, a great gift book to share with someone small. Meanwhile, another fine illustrator, Tony Ross, has contributed to the advent spirit by assembling a treasury of old Christmassy stories, The Nights Before Christmas (Andersen Press,
A page from Once Upon an Alphabet.
£19.99); 24 short pieces each perfect for bedtime readingaloud, from Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” to the opening pages of Little Women, from a 1914 cable about the Christmas Truce to (of course) “A Visit from St Nicholas”, and all of them, naturally, with Ross’s lively, lovely illustrations. Talking about reading aloud, how about some poetry? Faber & Faber, the publishing home to much of the 20th century’s best poetry, has just produced some attractive reissues of classic collections: there’s
T S Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (£14.99), with colour illustrations by its original artist, Nicolas Bentley, and Lear’s Nonsense Limericks (£9.99), newly illustrated by Arthur Robins. They’re both as fresh as ever they were, so many generations later. (And there’s more to come, too: Walter de la Mare’s Peacock Pie (£6.99), with the Edward Ardizzone illustrations, will follow on New Year’s Day.) Linda Newbery’s The Brockenspectre ( Jonathan Cape, £12.99) is a slim, beautiful piece of writing,
about Tomas, a boy who lives with his family in the Alps. When his father goes missing on a mountain hike, Tomas decides to find him, though he knows it’s dangerous, not least for the shadowy Brockenspectre that looms over the mountains. On his quest, Tomas learns something about Pappi, and also much about himself. With a timeless quality enhanced by Pam Smy’s illustrations, it’s a haunting but ultimately warm-hearted story, and a lovely, wintry gift. THE INDEPENDENT
Bookworm Alley KATE WILLS
‘Are You There, Twitter? It’s Me, Judy’
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iscovering Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, under the covers, with a torch, aged nine, was one of those rare moments in life when reading a book feels like a form of telepathy. As if the writer has wormed their way into my brain, swept up my innermost thoughts and transplanted them on to the page in front of me. Americanisms and anachronisms aside (“belted sanitary napkins”, anyone?) here were 149 pages which precisely captured how it felt to be me, at that exact moment. Spoiler alert: confusing and not that fun. Drop Judy Blume into a conversation with almost any woman of a certain age and I guarantee that you will be rewarded with a similar soliloquy, whether their particular doppelgänger happens to be Deenie (“Scoliosis! Masturbation!”) Blubber (“the smelly whale of Class 206”) or Katherine in Forever (“her Judy Blume boyfriend has a penis called Ralph!”). Blume has sold more than 85 million books, in 32 different languages, and is also, somewhat incongruously, one of the most banned authors of the 21st century. So cult-like are her fans that they hold an alternative “Blumesday” every year. Musician and author Amanda Palmer has written a song about her and Lena Dunham has said that “it’s impossible to overstate” the author’s influence on her. It has also been 16 years since Blume published a book for adults, 1998’s tale of friendship and lesbianism-lite, Summer Sisters, which explains why the news that she will publish a new novel in June has triggered a flurry of rapture, nostalgia and “I thought she was dead” tweets. Blume, who is still alive and now 76, made the announcement about In the Unlikely Event on Twitter this week, to her 1,18,000 followers. Her Twitter biog, by the way, reads “Are You There, Twitter? It’s Me, Judy”.
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hen I interviewed Blume last year, she was as friendly, smiley and wise as I’d always imagined her, and incredibly gracious when I droned on about how I was Margaret, a variation of a story she’s no doubt heard more times than it should be humanly possible for one person to hear the same story from a stranger without self-combusting. She was in the middle of writing In the Unlikely Event, which she had been researching since 2009 (“I’m really, seriously trying to finish it”), and gave me the impression that no one was more taken by surprise by this new book than she was. In the Unlikely Event was, itself, a pretty unlikely event. “I thought Summer Sisters was the last book I’d ever write,” she said. “I thought it would absolutely do me in. I wanted to burn it so many times, I don’t know how I kept going. It was three very intense years of trying to get it right and then just before it came out I would say to George, my husband, ‘We have to buy that book back from the publisher. We can’t let that book be published, it’s going to the end of a wonderful career’ and instead it was my best, a bestseller. George says I’m like that every time and I’m sure with the new book, should I ever finish it, I’ll be feeling the same way. No, don’t let Tackling “the truth” is it come out. No! No! Help! what makes Blume’s It’s just pure anxiety.” In the Unlikely Event is books so beloved — based on Blume’s expeperiods, bullying, sex, rience of several plane racism, death — nothing crashes that happened in her hometown of is off limits. And it’s Elizabeth, New Jersey fitting that the woman in the 1950s. “It’s a decade I thought I never, who gave a voice to so ever wanted to return many people’s teenage to, because it was a decade during which I was experiences is finally a teenager. But I’m findrevisiting her own. ing that writing about it is very different to when I was living through it. It was a decade of secrets and a lack of honesty and nobody ever told kids anything. And the stuff that we were inventing because no one was telling us the truth was probably worse than whatever the truth was.” Tackling “the truth” is what makes Blume’s books so beloved — periods, bullying, sex, racism, death — nothing is off limits. And it’s fitting that the woman who gave a voice to so many people’s teenage experiences is finally revisiting her own. Expectations will be high for In the Unlikely Event — Summer Sisters sold more than three million copies and spent five months on the New York Times bestseller list. But if it even comes close to recreating the magic of Margaret begging god for boobs, my inner nine-year-old is pre-ordering a copy already. THE INDEPENDENT
words of wisdom
“Freedom of expression has no meaning if divorced from the freedom to offend.” Salman Rushdie