They Continue Making Amazing Scary Books into Movies
April 7, 2008
Seems like the entire grim (but wonderful) corpus of Cormac McCarthy has recently been swept into movie lately (“No Country for Old Men”, the forthcoming version of “The Road”).
Looks like it doesn’t stop there. I stumbled across this preview of a screen adaptation of Jose Saramago’s Blindness: an epic, grueling work by a Nobel-prize-winning novelist. I read this book in early 2002 in Mexico. It wasn’t exactly a vacation read. I would actually put The Road and Blindness on my top ten list of most horrific settings–I can’t even imagine seeing this movie. I am, however, curious to see how gracefully the movie makes the adaptation to an American/English-speaking backdrop. Saramago writes in Portuguese and the European/Mediterranean feel of the book itself is palpable.
The premise in short: everyone but one woman goes blind in a mysterious epidemic. Cannibalistic and gore hilarity ensue. Lots of crazy. Dogs eating dead people. Stuff like that.
If you’re interested, there’s also a sequel to Blindness, called, not surprisingly, Seeing. It’s been sitting on my shelf for a few months while I build up the courage to read it.
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July 22, 2008
I constantly recommend The Road. Every now and again I will run into a patch of people who are fans. I don’t encounter that with other books I read.
Jose Saramago’s “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” is pretty interesting but slow moving. I wonder if the translator was the same as Blindness and Seeing, which I have not read. I will check them out.
I also loved The Road but I would never ever want to watch a movie based it. Unless they dramatically change the ending. And the middle. Bleak, so bleak.
I picked up The Road after seeing it recommended as “good contemporary sci-fi” in a Wired article. The prose got a bit too abstract and poetic occasionally, and I thought that detracted from the story, but the post-apocalyptic world he created was chilling to the core. The ending was at once utterly depressing and moving.
Now would I consider it movie material? Probably not. At least not anything with wide appeal.