Never-ending Books

A friend comes to visit. Yes, I know that’s what last week’s post started with. And what do we talk about? Books. Yes, we still talk about books. Not ones we have read, but those we have listened to or watched. These are books we have “seen”, and include a third person, not just the author and the reader (me) but whoever transposed them to the screen. We now see them from someone else’s point of view which will never be as we imagined as we read the book.

That is why I have refused to watch the TV series of Gentleman in Moscow. I knew what Count Rostov looked like as I read the book. I knew how he thought and expressed himself. Some of which I agreed with, or made me want to say: Hey, but have you ever thought it might be the other way around? My friend feels the same as I do.

As we read the books, struggling at times with the Sicilian/Camillerani dialect, Montalbano, the police commissioner, looks like Luca Zingaretti, as he is shown in the TV series. The descriptions of place, seen and read, overlap each other, real and otherwise. They are on the whole not unlike what we may have imagined them to be. We have also been told that they are a sort of pastiche of various towns and venues.

It doesn’t bother me that Dino Buzzatti’s fortress and Steppes have become a movie. The vastness of the steppes and the enemy army slowly creeping up are not all that different, whether on the printed page or on the screen. Although I may wonder if the Lieutenant Drogo the director recreated was like the young officer I had imagined on reading the book. One of my favorite memories is how on his way to his post in the fortress he had an overnight stop and heard the beams of the inn creaking at night. Did that come through in the movie?

Do I need to see Olive Kitteredge as someone else imagined her?

I’d rather not.

Some books perhaps are already visualized as taking place on a TV screen or as a movie. Can I still read Il Gattopardo without immediately calling up Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinal? Some though like Little Women are equally effective in their various cinema versions. As I suppose is Wuthering Heights and Jane Austen.

Perhaps what we have here is another category and I can list cinema versions which often are masterpieces by themselves. Mine include All the Mornings in the World and a fleeting encounter with Pirandello and his The Light in the House across the Street. The first of these I cannot imagine in printed form while the Pirandello was initially a gripping short story.

Sometimes an interpretation of something we think we know well, will provide a new insight. Judy Dench reciting Shakespeare. Had we ever thought of Hamlet’s mother as such a vulnerable figure. Or Paola Gassman and Ugo Pagliai reciting the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet. That it is in Italian and the fact that the actors are in their 60s and 70s makes it all the more tender and marvellous for someone who has read Shakespeare’s words in English so many times.

So we have books we want to share, and those whose images have become entrenched in our minds. We still want to share them, but it is not simply a book we are sharing, but a book as someone else saw it and as we too have come to love it through them.

One of the bases of friendship is sharing. And what better way than through books.