On Film Adaptations and Atonement

A mistake I am known to make is rushing to read a book before the movie comes out. I say this is a mistake, because inevitably what ends up happening is the book is then too fresh in my mind when I see the movie, and all I can see are the differences. I know this is something that's happened to me several times, but the example I remember most clearly is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The beginning or very nearly the beginning of the movie is set somewhere toward the middle of the events in the book and features a character whom, in the book, we believe – at that point in time – may be dead. This infuriated me on first watching the film, on Christmas Day of 2011, five months after finishing the book. I've since watched the movie several more times. The book has grown more and more distant in my memory, and the movie I quite like. I almost never do it on purpose, but I honestly think the better order of things is to watch a movie before reading the book it was adapted from. You will almost always get more out of the book, so it's unlikely to disappoint. 

Last night, I watched the 2007 film Atonement, based on the Ian McEwan novel, which I read in 2003. In cases like this, when that much time has passed (or even half as much), between my reading of a book and the release of a movie, I find myself thinking I should re-read the book so it's fresh in my memory. I think I'm afraid seeing the movie will cancel out the book in my mind. But my experience watching Atonement suggests something else. 

I really liked the book Atonement when I read it. I went on to read three other Ian McEwan books on the strength of my feelings about Atonement, none of which I liked as well. Nearly 20 years on, I remembered very little. I wasn't particularly interested in the movie when it came out. I remember being aware that it came out, but I don't remember hearing much about it. I imagine I thought it couldn't stand up to the book. It was only much more recently that I heard anything at all about the movie that made me curious. Specifically, it was something about the green dress Keira Knightly wears in the film. I'm not sure if it was this article or another, but I remember being surprised to learn the film featured any costume that was now considered iconic, given how little I'd heard about it at the time. Anyway, I can't say I thought about it much again until I was scrolling on HBO last night, saw that it was streaming, and rather impulsively decided to watch it. I really enjoyed it. I felt like I remembered just enough of the story – or perhaps more accurately that I'd forgotten just enough of the story. 

I see on Goodreads I only gave Atonement 4 stars, but I suspect if I had rated it at the time I read it I would have given it 5. (In 2009, I went back and retroactively added and rated every book I'd read as far back as I kept records, so all ratings for books I read before 2009 are based on how much I remembered liking them in 2009.) I think my high opinion of the book faded a bit as acclaim for it grew. The other thing I see when I look up Atonement on Goodreads is a review by my ex-husband, written in 2007 – a year after we split up – though I am nearly certain he actually read the book while we were together. That this review exists is a surprise to me. I can only imagine that he meant to offend (maybe just to kid – maybe I'm thinking too badly of him) when he, apparently, suggested that Harry Potter fans would enjoy it. In any case, his middling opinion undoubtedly negatively affected my own feelings about the book (an unfortunate theme in our relationship). In any case, seeing the movie actually reminded me how much I once liked the book. Maybe I should watch more movies of books I read decades ago. 

Loving Day, by Mat Johnson

Mat Johnson is a writer I know of because of Twitter. I've followed him there for years, though I can't remember how I initially found my way to him. Several years ago, I found a copy of his book Pym at the thrift shop I used to frequent on my lunch break back when I worked in Murray Hill. I didn't buy it, a decision I found myself soon after when I read (again, I have no idea where, though likely also on Twitter) something that made me curious to read it. It has stayed in the back of my mind. Last year, when I was visiting the Bay Area over Thanksgiving, I found Loving Day at a San Francisco thrift shop and I saw it as an opportunity to correct my mistake. I came very close to starting it that week. I think I had in mind that if I finished it while I was there, I could leave it behind with the friend I was visiting, who is biracial. Knowing nothing about it besides the title, I thought it might be of particular interest to her (and indeed, while I was reading it, I thought that several times again). I'm having a hard time remembering any off the top of my head, though I'm sure I've read other books that center mixed race characters. But Loving Day is surely the only book I've read that is specifically about being mixed race. What's odd is that this is so remarkable. Loving Day is about a biracial man, recently divorced, who moves back home to Philadelphia where he discovers he has a teenaged daughter, whom he was previously unaware of. His daughter, the product of a relationship he had as a teenager with a Jewish girl, has been raised as a white Jew, though we eventually learn she had suspicions that she was part Black. This was a funny and sweet book.

Home Reading Service, by Fabio Morábito

Last Friday evening, I started Vladimir by Julia May Jonas, a book I found recently in the Little Free Library near my apartment. (At the same time, I also found a copy of Lolita, which I read some 25 years ago and grabbed anyway because I own nearly every other book by Nabokov and I figured I should round out my collection. I wondered if the two books may have been left there by the same person, at the same time.) I found myself really enjoying it. I was drawn in by the narrator's voice, by a familiar self-loathing heterosexuality and disgust with the physical body. Over the next couple days, I read 150 pages and then on Sunday around 5pm I had to stop reading abruptly as I saw what was about to come (which should have been quite clear to me from the beginning, and yet hadn't stopped me then). Around 2am that night, I woke up feeling anxious about the book and fretted about it for an hour or so before I could fall asleep again. Monday morning, I stared at it on my coffee table. I was only about 80 pages from finishing it, but I couldn't face it. 

Instead I picked up another book from my coffee table, which I had found in that same Little Free Library just two days earlier: Home Reading Service by Fabio Morábito. I didn't know anything about this book or its author before I found it. It seems not much has been translated into English, but this book was the recipient of Mexico's 2018 Premio Xavier Villarrutia and was released in English* last year. Set in Cuernavaca, the book is narrated by Eduardo who — in the wake of a never-described driving accident — has been mandated to perform community service. A priest friend of his sister's arranges for him to do this in the form of serving as a reader in the homes of the old and infirm. He has five clients: a pair of elderly brothers, a retired military man, a deaf family who read lips, a partly paralyzed aspiring opera singer, and a couple who appear to be in perfect health and of means, so that he has no idea why they've been offered his services. The book follows a trail of funny, unexpected events, intrigues, and tragedies among these characters and others in his life as Eduardo comes to terms with himself. This was a really fun read.

* Here's a fun interview with the book's translator. 

Garden by the Sea, by Mercè Rodoreda

Garden by the Sea is the third book I've read by Mercè Rodoreda. I read A Broken Mirror in 2018, which is unfortunately a year I took off from writing about the books I read. I say "unfortunately" because today I find it hard to remember much about it. I have images in my mind (it must have been a very visual book!) of the house in Barcelona where the story takes place, the garden with its fountain, the wall outside the house, the foyer, the staircase, the bedrooms; images of a jeweler's shop, a brooch, a carriage, a street. I do remember bits of the story, but more I remember the general mood: aching, melancholic, nostalgic. I loved it. I named it one of my favorite books I read that year. 

About a year later, I read Rodoreda's most famous book, The Time of the Doves. I have a lot of lingering mental images from this book too— most distinctly, a room on the top of a building filled with pigeons— and the memory of a mood: poverty, privation, war in the distance. But I didn't love The Time of the Doves the way I did A Broken Mirror. I found the story sometimes hard to follow and the narrative style — sort of stream of consciousness — a bit disengaging. Most of all, there was something about the relationship between the narrator and her husband that never quite clicked for me. I couldn't understand why she loved him, why she put up with him, why she let him fill that room at the top of their house with pigeons! It never felt like he loved her in return. And, I mean, I know such relationships exist; I was just unconvinced by this one. 

So I guess you could say that going into Garden by the Sea, I was hopeful that I would find another A Broken Mirror and a little wary that I might find instead another The Time of the Doves. I'm pleased to report it was the former. I knew within just a few pages that I would love this book. Garden by the Sea is narrated by the aging gardener at the seaside estate that serves as the summer home for a wealthy young couple from Barcelona. The reader develops an affection for the gardener and we do learn a little about his story and quite a lot about his lifestyle, but the main story he tells us is of a love triangle between the Senyora of the house, her husband, and her childhood sweetheart, who shows up, suddenly a wealthy, married man, on the neighboring seaside estate. The book has an upstairs/downstairs quality, where the reader gets to listen in on the gossip of the gardener, cooks, and housekeepers. It's been a very long time since I read The Remains of the Day — and the gardener is a very different kind of narrator (a different kind of person) from that book's butler — but I found myself thinking of it as I read Garden by the Sea with its secondhand plot. 

Like the other two Rodoreda books I've read, Garden by the Sea is also an intensely visual book. Flowers are ever-present, defining each moment of the season as they bloom and die, or are picked for a bouquet or trampled at a party or under attack by aphids or unearthed and repotted. But there are so many other visual details as well: the specific color of the dresses the gardener's long-dead wife wore; the rowboat, with its red paint peeling over the years, and then repainted; the old eucalyptus tree; the little beach at the bottom of the stairs below the garden; the swimming pool on the neighboring estate that is lit from inside(!); the sunflower wallpaper at the local inn that the gardener buys to repaper his own kitchen; the handmade envelopes where the gardener stores his seeds. I can picture all these things. I have such a strong, tangible image of this lovely seaside villa and the Catalonian town where it stood, and it's stunning.