This Boy’s Life ( 1989 novel/autobiography by Tobias Wolff 1993 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Barkin, and Robert De Niro). Gosse’s book recounts his painful relationship with his father, the self-taught naturalist and fundamentalist minister, Philip Henry Gosse. Carey’s novel was influenced by the 1907 memoir Father and Son by the literary critic and poet Edmund Gosse. The crux of the story concerns the transportation of a glass church made in Lucinda’s factory in Sydney to a remote settlement in New South Wales. These two lonely eccentrics meet sailing to Australia and discover that they are both obsessive and gifted gamblers. Oscar and Lucinda is the story of Oscar Hopkins (Fiennes), a young Anglican priest, and Lucinda Leplastrier (Blanchette), a young Australian heiress who buys a glass factory. Oscar and Lucinda ( 1988 novel by the Australian novelist Peter Carey, also the winner of the Booker Prize for that year 1997 film adaptation by Gillian Armstrong with Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchette): This is another beautiful movie, and though I haven’t read this novel of Carey’s, I loved Jack Maggs and The True History of the Kelly Gang. It is also a testament to the power of the imagination. Schnabel’s movie is breathtaking – one of the most visually lush, visceral film experiences I’ve had in a long time. The memoir recounts both the anguish of being locked inside a corpse (the diving bell of the title), and the liberating pleasures of the imagination (the butterfly) that allowed Bauby to escape the confines of his prison-like body. He wrote his book letter by letter, blink by blink, composing the whole in his head. An assistant slowly recited the special alphabet (the letters ordered by frequency of use in French) over and over again, and Bauby blinked when the assistant reached the correct letter. His memoir, from which Schnabel’s movie takes its name, was written using the French language frequency-ordered alphabet.
When Bauby awoke from the coma, he could only move was his left eyelid.
Bauby was 43 and the editor-in-chief of Elle magazine when he suffered a massive stroke and fell into a coma. We’ll start with Emily, who covers both fiction and memoir: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: This beautiful, lyrical movie, directed by American painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel, was based on a 1995 memoir written by the French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby. My idea about books to movies is to compare the two mediums so I suppose the movie adaptation would not have to be topnotch.Three of our contributors had some recommendations for Cathy. We read Homecoming so we will probably do The Reader. I thought about Wonder Boys and then heard The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is now a movie. Beloved is as far back as I would like to go. I would like to keep either the book or the movie fairly current. Kathy wrote in with this question:Our book club is focusing on books made into movies.