"Ghost Light": A sharp, shrewd romance in the Irish theater world


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A French blog for Trois autres Malaisie and a new translation for The World of Suzie Wong!

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A French blog for my upcoming collection of short stories Trois autres Malaisie has already been set up by my publisher Editions GOPE for some advance publicity. Soon the translation of Transactions in Thai from Lovers and Strangers Revisited will be available free from the blog. Also Editions GOPE is giving new life to Richard Masons The World of Suzie Wong by launching a new revised, unabridged French translation. Chapter two, you may remember, takes place in Malaysia , in a rubber plantation. French translations of The World of Suzie Wong and Lovers and Strangers Revisited ( Trois autres Malaisie) will soon be side by side. I like that. The World of Suzie Wong was not only an international best seller, it ran for many years as a play on Broadway and in London, and the movie version won Nancy Kwan a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in the role of Suzie. Is there a film version for one of my short stories in the making? Or maybe my Penang-set novel The Expatriates Choice,...
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Monsieur Linh and His Child by Philippe Claudel review

The writer-director of I've Loved You So Long brings his oblique touch to a delicate study of friendship between two old men This novella, by an award-winning French writer (the author of Brodeck's Report , winner of last year's Independent foreign fiction prize) who is also the writer-director of the Baftawinning film I've Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t'aime), would be extremely difficult tomake into a film not only because itfeaturesa narrative "trick" that would translate awkwardly to the screen, but also because the author takes pains to avoid pinning down the story to one particular decade or location. The side-effect of this deliberately nonspecific narration is to give the story a hazy, romantic quality, like Vaseline on a camera lens or the sepia tint of an oldphoto. Lack of specificity can read, in other words, as sentimentality: sentimentality about Indochina, and about war, from which the protagonist, an old man named Monsieur L...
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Tame Jane

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Robert Gottlieb Laurie Sparham/Focus Features Mia Wasikowska in Jane Eyre , a film directed by Cary Fukunaga The new film version of Jane Eyre isnt all bad, but its all wrong. The story, despite a confusing flashback structure, is coherent. The dialogue is satisfying. The look is convincing. Whats lacking is Jane Eyre itselfCharlotte Bronts feverish inner world of anguish and fury. Instead, everything is pallid and sedate. Only the landscape projects some feeling: the director (Cary Joji Fukunaga) and the cinematographer (Adriano Goldman) are far more at home looking at moors than at people. Some viewers find the classic 1944 version over-melodramatic: Joan Fontaine too beautiful for plain Jane, Orson Welless Rochester over the top with his flaring cape and piercing eyes and ultra-resonant voice. Well, he is over the top but thats true to the nature of Bronts imaginings. And if Fontaine is too classically beautiful, her perfectly chiseled features more Hollywood than Yorkshire,...
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