LooseLeaves: Who says people don't read the book if they've seen the film? Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha (Vintage) and John le Carré's The Constant Gardener (Hodder) have leapt back into the limelight as a result of the film adaptations of each currently in cinemas.
Both books were in the top 50 bestseller lists last month and, given the eight Oscar nominations Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain got this week, no doubt the tie-in edition of the book by Annie Proulx, featuring the short story on which the film is based, is also set to reach vast numbers of readers. First published in the UK by Fourth Estate in 1999 in a collection called Close Range: Wyoming Stories, it has now been retitled Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and Other Stories (Harper Perennial. £7.99) with the dishy, Academy Award-nominated, Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal gracing its cover. Brokeback is there with 10 other stories and Proulx's introductory note in which she reveals that short stories have always been very difficult for her though she found it interesting and challenging to work again in the medium: "The idea of a collection of short fiction set in Wyoming seized me entirely."
Visits to the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, the 10,000-acre Ten Sleep Preserve on the slope of the Big Horns in Wyoming and gripping aircraft rides over the landscape all informed the collection. "The elements of unreality, the fantastic and improbable, colour all of these stories as they colour real life. In Wyoming not the least fantastic situation is the determination to make a living ranching in this tough and unforgiving place," writes Proulx. Be that as it may, seduced by those wondrous mountain scenes in the movie, the multitudes may soon be flocking to Wyoming in a way not seen since the masses descended on the Greek island of Kefalonia in the wake of the adaptation of Louis de Bernière's Captain Corelli's Mandolin. It's no coincidence that compelling movies have emanated from compelling books.
Inevitably, readers drawn in by Brokeback will move on to more Proulx, not just The Shipping News, which has already had its lacklustre film version, but to the rest of the short stories and Postcards, with its unforgettable tale of the haunted Loyal Blood. Who knows, Truman Capote may soon find a whole new generation of readers intrigued after seeing Bennett Miller's Capote, which opens here on February 24th.
A literary list
Joyce's Ulysses for children? Yes, said the British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion this week when he included it on his list of 10 books that children should be expected to read before they leave school (the list also included Homer's The Odyssey, Milton's Paradise Lost, Henry James's Portrait of a Lady and TS Eliot's The Waste Land). JK Rowling and Philip Pullman were among the other writers who responded to the call for recommendations by the Royal Society of Literature in Britain in an attempt to set a children's canon on which people could draw.
While some writers approached didn't approve of the exercise and wouldn't take part, Motion advocated his heavyweight line- up by saying the books were works of art and he could see no intrinsic reason why children shouldn't read them. JK Rowling was probably much more on the button with her list which included JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.
Dawe on Donnelly
Philip Larkin and Patrick Kavanagh are among those whose work will be explored at a continuing series of lectures run by Trinity College Dublin's school of English, but the spotlight will also fall this month on a less well-known figure - the poet Charles Donnelly (1914- 1937). On February 14th, poet and academic Gerald Dawe will lecture on Donnelly, who was a native of Co Tyrone. A revolutionary social activist and emerging writer in 1930s Dublin, he became a defining figure for his intellectual contemporaries when he was killed in the Spanish civil war.
The Donnelly lecture and others in the series, which continues until Mar 7, take place in the Uí Chadhain Theatre, Arts Building, TCD on Tuesdays at 7.30pm. Cost per lecture: €5.50, or €3.50 concession. Tel: 01-6082885.