29 May, 2007

Quick catch-up

I'm in the middle of exams and frantically busy so here's a quick catch-up list of what I've read recently and I'll try to do a better post a bit later:

The devil wears Prada [28]
Martin Walker's The cold war [29]
Les liaisons dangereuses [30]
Dreams and dilemmas, collected essays and early writings by Sheila Rowbotham [31]
The selected poems of Yehuda Amichai [32]
The certificate, by Isaac Bashevis Singer [33]
Inventing God, by Nicholas Mosley [34]

4 comments:

Phil said...

What did you think of Les Liaisons Dangereuses? And was the Mosley good?

woodscolt said...

I loved Liaisons Dangereuses, I thought it was stupendous. Tight, witty, suspenseful, just brilliant. I saw the film with Glenn Close and John Malkovich too, but I think it's difficult to make an epistolary novel work as a film, although I thought Glenn Close was very good as Merteuil.

The Nicholas Mosley I had trouble getting into and didn't really enjoy. I find it difficult to get used to his way of writing dialogue. Like Hopeful Monsters, I think I ought to give it another chance.

Phil said...

Other films of Les Liaisons Dangereuses worth checking out are Cruel Intentions (1999 - with Buffy and Reese Witherspoon), Valmont (1989 - with Colin Firth), but best is Roger Vadim's 1959 version, with Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Louis Trintignant and a score by Thelonious Monk, set in a very cool 50's Paris: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053002/

Phil said...

I'd seen Dangerous Liaisons several times before I read the book, so didn't appreciate that in the book the protagonists only meet once. The book is fantastic, not least because the use of letters is entirely internally justified and consistent. But plainly that can't work on screen, so Christopher Hampton (and Frears) did a very good job changing it, but replacing it with a sexual tension in the encounters between the two.