I recently finished two novels. One is by Glenn Arbery,
Boundaries of Eden. It’s a thoroughly engaging story set in the history-haunted South. One part Dickens in its arresting characters, one part Tom Wolfe in its splendid eye for social reality, and one part Faulkner in its evocation of the encroaching darkness of our sin-soaked past,
Boundaries of Eden is a must-read.
The other novel I recently read is
The Idiot by Elif Batuman. The opening pages feature mordant observations about elite miseducation that can be very funny. Batuman is a writer’s writer, creating a character who sees but does not know, observes but does not understand. Unlike the odious Jean-Paul Sartre, whose fiction is far too “philosophical,” and not unlike Walker Percy, Batuman captures the “lostness” of the human condition as a reality, not an idea.
“The Sisters left Darjeeling in the last week of October. They had come to settle in the General’s Palace at Mopu, which was now to be known as the Convent of St Faith.”
There is nothing in the innocent opening sentences of Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel Black Narcissus to suggest that the subsequent film version would be butchered by censors, banned, and eventually hailed as “one of the first truly erotic films” by one of the world’s great directors Martin Scorsese.
That movie was made by an English director and a Hungarian-born writer-producer: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The celebrated cinema partnership is revered for a series of groundbreaking and influential British films, of which Black Narcissus has become one of the best-loved. Now, there is a new adaptation, this time a joint BBC-FX production made for the small screen and starring Gemma Arterton and Aisling Franciosi.
Black Narcissus, BBC Two, Saturday, 1.15pm Whether you loved, loathed or (more likely) were completely underwhelmed by the BBC s adaptation of Rumer Godden s 1939 novel about a group of nuns trying to set up a school in a remote Himalayan palace, you ll find an interesting contrast in the much-admired 1947 film version. Black Narcissus won an Oscar for its cinematography – the great Jack Cardiff was behind the camera – and it s thought by many to be the gem in the Powell and Pressburger portfolio, an already rich collection of films which includes I Know Where I m Going, A Matter Of Life And Death, The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp and the resolutely peculiar A Canterbury Tale.