Word: novelization
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...great writers have a knack for bringing their characters to life. But only Ngugi wa Thiong'o could write a character so convincing he almost gets arrested. In 1986, while the author's native Kenya was suffocating under President Daniel arap Moi's oppressive rule, Ngugi wrote Matigari, a novel whose eponymous hero travels the country protesting against the regime. Because [an error occurred while processing this directive] Matigari posed questions Kenyans were afraid to ask, they talked about him as if he were real, the way soap-opera fans and comic-book lovers do. "The regime thought there...
Think of it as a pas de deux between audience and filmmaker. In Ana Kokkinos' last cinematic dance, she led. Adapting Christos Tsiolkas' novel about a young, gay Greek-Australian self-destructing over one nihilistic night, Head On was powered by an artistic urgency-a whirling dervish of emotion, with some audiences complaining of motion sickness. With her latest film, The Book of Revelation, Kokkinos follows. As suggested by the Biblical title it shares with Rupert Thomson's novel, it's all about divining truth from life's inherent mysteries. And for much of the film's two hours, time...
...With Thomson's original novel based mainly in Amsterdam, the Australian team set about translating the action to Melbourne, whose laneways have never looked quite so menacing or poetic, as well as fleshing out the roles of Isabel and her ex-husband Olsen (Colin Friels), a police detective specializing in "dark number cases" who investigates Daniel's disappearance. They also tested the limits of their R18+ rating. For audiences, that leaves the most thrilling dance to play out between the director (helped by choreographer Meryl Tankard) and her game troupe of actors...
...cultural observer. He was an early and vocal supporter of normalizing relations with Israel (some Arab countries banned his books in response.) His Children of Gabalawi, although set in modern times (it was published in 1959), features characters that loosely parallel figures in the Bible and the Koran. The novel's boldness attracted the attention of Islamic extremists, and in 1994 a young fanatic attacked him, stabbing him in the neck. Mahfouz survived, but lost much of the use of his right-and writing-hand. (His attacker fared worse: he was hung.) In his later years Mahfouz himself took...
Franzen is also working on a new novel. It's poor form to grill a writer about a work in progress, but I do it anyway, and he throws me a few cryptic crumbs. "The deep ecologists like to say that nature bats last," he says. "Whenever anyone is trying to say, mankind is smarter than nature ... we are of nature. And nature does therefore always bat last." So something political? "Certainly that's another thing I've been doing over the past five years. Being upset over the state of American politics...