Movies made from books suck: Salman Rushdie

“Adaptation, the process by which one thing develops into another thing, by which one shape or form changes into a different form, is a commonplace artistic activity.” That helpful declarative statement opens Salman Rushdie’s recent meditation on film adaptations of works of literature, which he finds generally poor. (He does admit to admiring John Huston’s adaptations of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and Joyce’s “The Dead,” along with certain works by the Polish director Wojciech Has and the Indian director Satyajit Ray.)

Rushdie’s piece was apparently prompted by last week’s Oscar gala, where, you might remember, literary adaptations cleaned up. Rushdie claims that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is “not really an adaptation” of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story, but rather an original creation of screenwriter Eric Roth (the same man who was responsible for what in this Quillblogger’s estimation is an execrable adaptation of an execrable novel called Forrest Gump, which also did quite well at the Oscars).

Rushdie saves his greatest vitriol – and his best rhetoric – for a precision takedown of the overrated Slumdog Millionaire and Q&A, the uninspiring novel on which it is based:

The problems begin with the work being adapted. Swarup’s novel is a corny potboiler, with a plot that defies belief: a boy from the slums somehow manages to get on to the hit Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and answers all his questions correctly because the random accidents of his life have, in a series of outrageous coincidences, given him the information he needs, and are conveniently asked in the order that allows his flashbacks to occur in chronological sequence. This is a patently ridiculous conceit, the kind of fantasy writing that gives fantasy writing a bad name. It is a plot device faithfully preserved by the film-makers, and lies at the heart of the weirdly renamed Slumdog Millionaire. As a result the film, too, beggars belief.

Rushdie deserves applause for publicly saying what this Quillblogger has been hearing muttered in private for some time about a film that no one seems willing to admit isn’t very good. Herd instinct can be a terrible thing; thankfully Rushdie has never been one to go in for it.

Here’s hoping that the upcoming adaptation of Rushdie’s own Midnight’s Children doesn’t have him eating crow.

Canadian director tackles Midnight’s Children

The Indian-born Canadian film director Deepa Mehta is set to adapt Salman Rushdie’s masterpiece Midnight’s Children, which was twice selected as the best-ever Booker Prize winner.

The Guardian reports:

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s panoramic 1981 allegory of the birth of modern India, is heading for the big screen. Deepa Mehta is to direct and co-write the adaptation with the author, and the film is expected to start production in 2010, it was announced in New York yesterday.

Apparently, the two have been friends since meeting at the New York premiere of Water, the final movie in Mehta’s Elements trilogy, for which she is best known. The plan for the collaboration was hatched over dinner at Mehta’s Toronto home, when Rushdie was in town for a recent round of publicity.

As of yet, no studio has signed on to finance the famously unfilmable novel. But Mehta seems unfazed when it comes to tackling 650 pages of magic realist-steeped allegory.

“War and Peace has 1,000 pages and they made a movie of that,” she said, adding, “The great thing about film is that it can compress in a few images what takes 40 pages in a book to describe.”

Publisher of controversial Mohammed novel firebombed

As previously noted on Quillblog, publication of the novel The Jewel of Medina was canceled by Random House U.S. due to the possibility that it might offend Muslims and perhaps initiate attacks by those at the radical end of the faith. It was a dumb move – to pre-emptively censor oneself – but one dumb move always engenders another, and now the offices of the book’s U.K. publisher have been firebombed. And it gets worse.

From The Telegraph:

Hardline clerics said that further attacks would be “inevitable” if publication of the novel, The Jewel of Medina, goes ahead as planned next month.

Police moved in to arrest three men moments after a fire broke out at the London home and office of Martin Rynja in the early hours of Saturday.

The attack came days after Mr Rynja’s company, Gibson Square, bought the rights to the book by the American writer Sherry Jones, which has already been likened to Sir Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

Islam’s radical fringe has clearly decided once again  that the “dangerous Muslim” stereotype is better propagated from within. They’re like the drunken frat boys at a party who are determined to wreck it for everyone, or the former child stars who keep getting pulled over high on meth.

Random House blacklisted for The Jewel of Medina

The controversy surrounding Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina – which Random House U.S. decided to pull earlier this month, citing fears of terroristic violence – continues to grow. Two weeks ago, none other than Salman Rushdie, also published by Random House, weighed in on the matter, condemning his publisher for canceling publication of the book. This week, criticism hails from another, less high-profile source. The Guardian reports:

An American book prize has blacklisted Random House following its “cowardly self-censorship” of Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina. The Langum Charitable Trust, which awards two yearly $1,000 (£550) prizes, has said that until the novel is published, it “will not consider submissions of any books, for any of our prizes, from Random House or any of its affiliates.”

Describing Random House’s decision not to print the novel as a “threat to literature” deserving of “serious remonstrance,” the trust’s founder, David Langum, outlined his rationale:

“No one should expect that publishers print every piece of trash that comes into their offices, and The Jewel of Medina may be neither good literature nor good history,” he said. “That is beside the point since Random House had already paid a $100,000 advance, arranged for book club publication, and foreign publication. It changed course and self-censored solely on the political grounds of fear of offending Muslims or fomenting violence.”

“That form of cowardice will only lead to more and more of this form of self-censorship and is an attack on the integrity of literary publication,” Langum continued. “We must stand up to it, in whatever ways are available to us. The form that was available to our small foundation was to put Random House out of the running for our prizes.”

While it’s hard not to admire Langum’s pluck, his indignation at Random House’s “political” manoeuvering does seem a little out of place. Surely, condemning an author because of the actions of his or her publisher is also a threat to “literary integrity.”

Bookmarks: Solzhenitsyn, Kafka, Rushdie, Meyer, and more

Some book-related links:

• Russians conflicted over Solzhenitsyn’s legacy (The New York Times)
• Apparently, Kafka liked the hot stuff (Times Online)
• Salman Rushdie threatens to sue over bodyguard’s memoir (CNN.com)
• Stephenie Meyer’s newest breaks sales records (USA Today)
• Speaking of Meyer and things being broken: Vancouver woman hit by car while waiting in line for Breaking Dawn (The Globe and Mail)
• Afghanistan’s biggest bookseller launches web site (CBC.ca)
• This week in cutthroat bookselling: Ann Arbor bookseller accused of hiring drug addicts to steal from competitors (Mlive.com)

Man Booker 2008 longlist

The Man Booker Prize has released its longlist for 2008:

• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
• Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold
• The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
• From A to X by John Berger
• The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
• Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
• The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
• A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
• The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
• Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
• The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
• Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
• A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

No Canadians this year. And word has it that Rushdie has ordered vanity plates that read “MN BKR MN.”

Rushdie may put fatwa in the, er, crosshairs

From the BBC News site:

Sir Salman Rushdie says he may write a book about the fatwa imposed on him 20 years ago after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses.

The author, who went into hiding for nine years, told BBC’s Newsnight he had found the experience “very difficult”.

“I guess there’s a story there,” he said. “Various people [are] encouraging me to tell it, and maybe I will.”

Iran’s late Ayatollah Khomeini imposed the fatwa over The Satanic Verses‘ reference to the prophet Mohammad.

Some possible titles for the book:

• Fatwa This
• Leaving the Safe House
• Death Proof
• That’s SIR Infidel
• Missed Me, Missed Me
• Jesus Wasn’t So Hot, Either
• Mullahs are Nothing, It’s the Reviews That Really Hurt

Bookmarks: McMurtry on book collecting; Rushdie on latest Booker win; “indecent sunbathing”

Some book-related links:

• Larry McMurtry’s new book about book collecting (The New York Times)
• Salman Rushdie on Midnight’s Children‘s third Booker win (The Guardian)
• Booker judge thinks future winners should be determined by public (Sydney Morning Herald)
• Christian Science Monitor looks at Google Book Search (The Christian Science Monitor)
• U.K. publishing professional arrested in Dubai for nude sunbathing (The Daily Telegraph)
• U.K. publishing professional fears being made example of (The Daily Telegraph)
• U.K. publishing professional “wasn’t wild enough” for ex-boyfriend (The Daily Telegraph)

Booker loves Rushdie

Salman Rushdie has scored a Booker hat trick. His 1980 novel Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize the year it was released, and also picked up a “Booker of Bookers” nod in 1993. And today, the same novel was unveiled as the winner of the “Best of the Booker” prize.

The Best of the Booker was decided by public voting – after a panel of judges chose six previous Booker winners to form the shortlist. Rushdie beat out Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, and Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist.

Guardian blogger Sam Jordison argues today that the public made the right choice. And when the Canadian-free shortlist was unveiled a couple of months ago, Toronto writer (and Q&Q contributor) Flannery Dean offered some local perspective on the CBC Arts site.

To read or e-read: that is the question

There seems to be no shortage of opinions in the press lately on e-book readers. In a column today, veteran New York Times writer and editorial board member Eleanor Randolph weighs in with her take on the Kindle. While she’s certainly not alone in musing that the reader isn’t the best way to tackle a weighty novel, she may be the first to suggest the device could help solve the eternal dilemma of a bookish household’s endless clutter:

My family has an unhealthy love of books. They attach themselves to us like pets, and our apartment has so many volumes that I worry about the entire eccentric library crashing suddenly through the floor and resettling itself on the neighbor downstairs. So, an electronic book makes sense. One small thing that contains a bookcase full of stories and recipes and solutions for world peace would seem to offer a very advanced solution to our family’s housekeeping problem.

Or several small things, unless you don’t mind some fighting over who gets the household book collection after dinner. Anyway, after giving the Kindle a spin, Randolph isn’t entirely convinced that the future of reading lies in a little handheld gadget:

It is easy to see that the e-book has its place — like on an airplane. There are also times when it doesn’t belong. For reading at the beach or in the bathtub. Or for [reading] Salman Rushdie, there is still nothing like a good old-fashioned hardback.