Does a movie ever live up to the book?

    Critics gave the new film of The Great Gatsby luke warm reviews, disappointed it did not capture the essence of this enduringly popular novel. But weren’t they being a little harsh, after all, it would be just about impossible to please the gate-keepers of this classic America novel,sometimes described as the greatest American novel ever written.

     Regarded as Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, it embodies the conflicts between the established sources of economic and cultural power and those like Gatsby of humble origins who make good, becoming wealthy and powerful in the process; in other words, it embodies the American dream that anyone can make it against the odds of class, background and old money, an ideal which is the linchpin of American society from its founding days to the present.

Leonardo DiCaprio shines as Jay Gatsby

     Baz Luhrmann’s film captures well the prosperous 1920s era, known for bootlegged liquor, organised crime, the birth of jazz and the garish flapper culture. Fitzgerald’s themes of decadence and idealism are well defined and the film is a sensory feast with glorious settings and costumes which speak clearly of the opulence enjoyed by the wealthy, of which Gatsby so desperately wanted to be a part, to impress and possess the shallow Daisy.

Classic novels set the bar high

     I guess this is where the critics have a point. These in your face sights and sounds get in the way of the audience thinking too hard. They distract in a way that doesn’t happen in the silence of the mind when reading a novel. Reading The Great Gatsby is a cerebral, poetic experience, requiring the use of the intellect, watching the film is not. Fitzgerald’s delicate prose is littered with abstract and indirect subtleties impossible to recreate in film. The language of the movie is blunt and to the point. The vagaries of the novel which require input from the reader are spelled out in the movie so there is no opportunity to participate as you might with the novel.

     Luhrmann could have taken a different approach and exchanged   blatant reality for nuance, but then that’s not what he does best. He doesn’t do subtle. His version is long (142 min) but entertaining and never boring. Could he have kept his trademark shenanigans without losing Fitzgerald’s layers? It would be a fine thing to see Luhrmann exchange style for substance. As it is though, audiences and critics should accept a film will never live up to the novel we place on a pedestal and just enjoy Luhrmann’s artistic style, which does suit the prosperous era in which The Great Gatsby is set.
     To understand just how revered The Great Gatsby is, a first printing of an American first edition, with dust jacket, can be valued at up to US$750,000. Treated almost as holy writ, could any film maker do it justice? Luhrmann was brave to try. 

What can readers bring to the table?

     Harry Wallop, reporting from the UK’s most prestigious literary gathering, wrote in the Telegraph: "Howard Jacobson, the Booker Prize winning novelist, had said that readers are too often ‘not intelligent’ enough to understand books.

     Speaking at the Telegraph Hay Festival, he (Jacobson) said: Sometimes readers are quick to blame the novel that they, the reader, is not enjoying, whereas you have to ask yourself whether the reason that you don’t like the book is that you are just not good enough.

‘You have to be intelligent to like a book. The author has an obligation to please the reader, but the reader has an obligation to be intelligent.’"

     Jacobson was commenting on the humiliation and frustration of being a writer, the focus of his recent and amusing prize winning novel, Zoo Time.

It may sound more than a little smug and self delusional to blame the reader for not connecting with your novel, but for me, what he was really asking is, can writers expect readers to bring something to the table.

     Rather than ‘intelligence’ per se, it’s the difference between active and passive reading. Although we read for different reasons and purposes, passive readers seek instant gratification in the way of the quick sound bite. What they do read they fail to engage intellectually with so the extent of their understanding is limited to the sentence being read, rather than thinking beyond the text. Is that what Jacobson meant? If there’s no explicit language and action, the passive reader becomes bored.

Visitors to Hay Festival, The Guardian

     Active readers engage with the content and see reading as an ongoing process in which they make plentiful connections. They have the patience to wait for the pay-off instead of demanding to be entertained right now! For the passive reader, each book becomes a blind alley whereas the active reader sees an invitation.

     Is it down to intelligence? Maybe, maybe not. But at the very least, writers hope readers will not just sit at the table waiting to be fed. Rather, they will bring a willingness (and ability?) to participate in the feast.

Are fiction writers just dirty little liars?

     When do readers expect fiction to be “true”? OK that’s a contradiction in terms. Fiction is about imaginary events and people; invented or fabricated as opposed to fact. So why do we sometimes want to hold writers to account and complain their description of a certain place is inaccurate or an event does not ring true?

     I came to this subject through Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, which I read on first publication in 1986/7. It is not clear which year it first came out. I enjoyed this novel and admired Chatwin. On the Black Hill ranks as an all time favourite. Set in Wales, it evokes rural farm life and the small surrounding community. Chatwin amalgamated real places and people into his storyline but I didn’t think for a moment the story was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

     Why then did I feel such disappointment when I read in an interview with Chatwin at the time of Songlines’ publication, that he had never visited Australia. In the novel he describes a trip through the Australian Outback in which he researches Aboriginal song and its influence on nomadic travel. His convincing descriptions led me to believe he was writing from personal experience. Yet he was actually writing from thorough research. Shouldn’t I have been happy that his research was so impressive and detailed it gave flight to the first half of the book.

     Over many years it kept niggling whenever I saw the book on my shelves. How could someone write with authenticity about the Outback and Aboriginal culture, without having first-hand experience. Well, writers do that all the time. But perhaps because Chatwin was using Aboriginal culture in his novel the idea he was working purely from research didn’t sit well with me. In 1987, post publication, Chatwin seems to have made a hastily arranged visit to the area north of Adelaide, but so many years after the event, it is hard to verify the actual facts. Does it matter anyway? On reflection, I think I was taking the book too personally. Here was an outsider writing about my country. Just like friends and family who recognise elements of themselves in novels and take umbrage at perceived inaccuracies, I felt there must be something false in Chatwin’s work.

     

     The truth is, out of necessity and creative drive, writers invent, imagine and create. Sadly, not many of us are that interesting, nor do we enjoy lots of interesting encounters or experiences. Many are saddled with dull personalities lacking in intellect etc. You get the picture. So in order to present interesting characters and plots, writers combine a snip from here and a snip from there, shaping their stories through the real and the imagined. Readers need only be concerned if something untrue is intentionally represented as true. It’s fine to fabricate, as long as it’s fiction. Though there have been plenty of non-fiction fabrications too.

Howard Jacobson gives a monkey's about writing

     Reviews of Howard Jacobson’s, Zoo Time were not universally good, but I found it to be one of his most entertaining books and actually snorted with laughter a few times. His comments on Henry Miller, whom he appears to hold up as a role-model, were very funny if offensive to many, I dare say. Yes, it was typical Jacobson me me me, but it included a fair amount of self-criticism (more me me me) and at least he doesn’t take himself too seriously.

     What I really like about Jacobson is his easy style and mastery of language. His is prose stripped bare, lacking flowery pretension; clearly he just loves to write. OK, he’s a bit of a smart arse and cretinously patronising at times, but he is colourful, entertaining and literary, if not profound.

     Reading and the demise of books is one of his themes and the main character, Jewish novelist Guy Ableman (me me me) despairs fiction might be dead as his book sales dwindle.

In fact, in the UK we are actually reading more. Book sales have gone up and though e-readers are increasing, they have not detracted from book store sales. So that ought to give hope to all the writers out there despairing at low returns or lack of a publishing deal – people are still interested in reading.

     The story or plot isn’t the point here. Jacobson is a writer writing about writing and he has a lot to say about both writing and reading in Zoo Time, perhaps best summed up by the following self enlightening moment after his wife (Guy Ableman’s) publishes her own novel: “Now she was just another practitioner. One of thousands, millions even. Hush and you can hear them; listen, on a quiet night anywhere on the planet, and you can hear the scratch of their pens or the dead click of their keyboards, as innumerable as the sand which is by the seashore.”

1 May 2013 

British publishers have reported record sales for 2012, despite the recession and the rise of e-readers.

Total spending on printed and digital books rose 4% to £3.3bn last year, the Publishers Association said.

The digital revolution really took hold in 2012 with sales up 66% to £411m, and fiction e-reading growing even faster, up 149%.

Rory Cellan-Jones reports.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22363952

Told by an Idiot

Faulkner in Paris 1925 by WC Odiorne

   I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it. These humble words of American writer William Faulkner resound with the depth and sensitivity of his novel and short story writing.

   It made me wonder, is it because their thoughts are only clarified in writing, that writers feel compelled to write. Maybe that’s why many writers are not good at self-promotion and talking up their novels on promo tours. You need the gift of the gab to be an effective salesperson; do writers have the gift of the written word instead.

   When I first read Faulkner’s, The Sound and the Fury, I remember closing the last page and thinking, wow, how did he do that. It was one of those profoundly moving novels that imprint themselves on the psyche; long after you’ve forgotten the plot details, you remember that moment of revelation; this writer is different to everyone I have read before. I think it inspired me in many ways to want to be a writer myself.

   The novel is about the Compson family in a fictional southern county of the USA and is told from four different perspectives, each equally convincing. Faulkner’s ability to feel and then relate events from different points of view marked him as a future Nobel in Literature winner. It also indicated a lack of ego, something useful in a writer, but not so useful on a publicity tour. Though having said that, I have met many successful writers with massive egos.

   Faulkner also advised to write from the heart about things that matter, like Shakespeare did. That’s why the universal truths in Shakespeare’s plays still resonate. That search for significance and meaning in existence takes time to construct.

   As writers weave ideas from heart and mind to the page, shape-shifting thoughts into sentences, rewinding passages and playing them over again, their thoughts eventually clarify and what they really think emerges.

  Writers seek more than an instant opinion which is all too often told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Best Australian Books

     Lists of best anything are problematic because tastes and ideals vary so much. First Tuesday Bookclub recently published their 10 Australian Books to Read Before You Die and what a strange compilation it was. Cloudstreet at number one and Picnic at Hanging Rock at number ten. What lay in between was just as erratic, from South African Power of One to The Slap. Norman Lyndsay's Magic Pudding even managed to jump in there! How does that make sense.
     Lists are subject to human nature...that might mean voting for a book you read and loved as a child, so you give it a tick, even if you haven't re-read it for many years. The way a child judges a book may not be the same from an adult perspective. I really wonder about the inclusion of The Slap and if it has benefited from the recent television series. And so many brilliant works are missing.
     I admire The Secret River and A Fortunate Life,but my vote for number one would have been The Book Thief, skillful, uplifting and original. On watching Tuesday Bookclub, I was amazed to hear some of the panel being a little restrained in their praise for this exceptional novel. There is just no accounting for taste!

Here is the list. What do you think?

The way I remember We of the Never-Never is as a classic
innovation in Australian Literature.
Yet it didn't make the list. Do you agree or disagree?

10. Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay

9.   The Secret River by Kate Grenville

8.   The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

7.   The Magic Pudding by Norman Lindsay

6.   Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey

5.   The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay

4.   The Harp in the South by Ruth Park

3.   A Fortunate Life by Bert Facey

2.   The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

1.   Cloudstreet by Tim Winton

Three Day Book Sale

Make the most of this sensational opportunity to download the books below in the next three days. December 6-8 only. All are greatly reduced to just 99cents. Three days only.


Check time zones to be sure of prices.

Reviews for Place of Many Birds

"Whilst I've never been to Australia I have read many books set there, Nevil Shute and Colleen McCullough both spring to mind and the descriptive language of these short stories, reminded me very much of the mood and sense of place that these authors give.

The tales are gently unfolding and there is a lazy moodiness which sets the tone and suits the subject matter of the stories.

The characters, wildlife and scenery are all brought vividly and expertly to life. Very enjoyable."

Sophia Gampton

" This is an excellent book, really well done! I don't tend to read short stories all that much and after reading this wonderful book, wonder why? I bought it because Australia interests me. The stories take place there and the reader is transported to a different time and place through them. To be able to create a story with a minimum of words that is compelling, gives the reader a complete sense of people, place and time, I think is sheer genius. If you're a fan of story stories, if you're interested in Australia, or if you simply want a good read, this one delivers. I can't recommend it highly enough!"

 Dianne Harman