En été, il arrive que certains, sur la plage, s'adonnent au jeu des diiférences qui meuble tel ou tel magazine.
La suite sous peu.Page to Screen: Thomas Pynchon on Film? and David Ellis's Newest Thriller
By Rachel Deahl -- Publishers Weekly, 6/25/2009 7:40:00 AM
This week in Page to Screen—PW's weekly column tracking film rights circulating and sold in Hollywood—CAA shops the new Thomas Pynchon, and Stephen Moore takes out an Edgar winner's newest thriller.
After something of a lull in Hollywood, with fewer book manuscripts circulating around town—it could have been a post-BEA malaise or the unshaky afterglow of the William Morris-Endeavor merger—a number of books started making the rounds this week. Though a rep from CAA would not comment about it, we hear Bob Bookman at the agency is shopping the film rights to Thomas Pynchon's August-dropping new novel from Penguin, Inherent Vice. The notoriously reclusive Pynchon, whose biggest flirtation with Hollywood was his pixelated cameo in The Simpsons (complete with bag-over-head), has never had any of his complex postmodern prose turned into a film, so who knows what the fate of Vice will be in Tinseltown. The book, which bloggers started chattering about back in November after some outlets, like the L.A. Times, got hold of Penguin's digital jacket copy, is promised to be leaner and less weighty than some of Pynchon's previous efforts. (It's less than 400 pages, which is something for Pynchon, who's penned 1,000-plus-page tomes.) About a billionaire land developer in late '60s L.A., per Penguin, the novel might be the author's least serious. As Wired noted: "Inherent Vice sounds less like the fractal paranoia of Gravity’s Rainbow and more like the deranged sunshine noir of The Big Lebowski." Certainly Lebowski might sit better with execs than Gravity's Rainbow, right?
Another book making the rounds is David Ellis's Hidden Man. Stephen Moore at Paul Kohner is shopping the film rights to the book, which Susanna Einstein at LJK sold to Putnam in June 2008—the book pubs in August. The first in a new series featuring a Midwestern everyman attorney, Jason Kolarich, Hidden Man spins around Kolarich being hired by a third party to get one of his childhood friends off the hook for a 30-year-old murder. Ellis, a Chicago lawyer who won an Edgar for his first novel, the 2002 Line of Vision, is a new client for Moore, who said after just taking out the manuscript that he's got "serious" interest from two producers, both of whom are looking to attach a screenwriter to the project.
Just finished it, the most fun I've had reading a novel in ages. Pynchon-lite (like a psychedlicized Elmore Leonard novel), but still vintage Pynchon. Second half gets a little darker--occult intimations, legends of Lemuria, talk of invisible powers and "agencies of command and control"--but all wonderfully done. Except for lack of ukeleles. Bummer.
Histoire de baver un peu, voici ce que l'on trouve ici :
We have been contacted by a bookseller in the UK who received galleys of Inherent Vice about a week ago.
Here's the big-print lead on the back cover:
"He's back.... the most important and elusive writer of his generation returns with a magnificently crazy and compelling psychedelic yarn about the sixties, featuring new noir hero, private eye Doc Sportello"
We were sent the text of the first paragraph:
She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to. Doc hadn't seen her for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always sandals, bottom half a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe & the Fish t-shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered, looking just like she swore she'd never look.
'That you, Shasta?'
'Thinks he's hallucinating.'
'Just the new package I guess.'
They stood in the street light through the kitchen window there'd never been much point in putting curtains over and listened to the thumping of the surf from down the hill. Some nights, when the wind was right, you could hear the surf all over town.
'Need your help, Doc.'
'You know I have an office now? just like a day job and everything?'
'I looked in the phone book, almost went over there. But then I thought, better for everybody if this looks like a secret rendevous.'
Okay, nothing romantic tonight. Bummer. But it still might be a payin gig. 'Somebody's keepin' a close eye?'
'Just spent an hour on surface streets trying to make it look good.'
'How about a beer?' He went to the fridge, pulled two cans out of the case he kept inside, handed one to Shasta.
'There's this guy', she was saying.
On ne manquera pas de noter quelques différences avec le premier extrait apparu ici et ailleurs il y a peu :
La suite sous peu.
Vient de tomber sur les téléscripteurs :am reading the galleys now. . . funny as a Cheech and Chong movie, and with just as many dope references. . . very cleverly written, great Gaddisian dialogue. . . lots of 60s trivia, great fun for those of us "making the scene" back then. . . more when I finish. . .
This group is about reading Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon.
Add pictures
- of your copy of GR
- you with GR
- you reading GR
- reacting to GR
- what you're doing INSTEAD of reading GR
- re-enacting scenes from GR
Déjà évoqué il y a quelques temps de cela : le mystérieux Temporel et ses commentaires énigmatiques.
Une fois qu'il s'en fut rendu compte, sa curiosité fut en éveil ; il en détournait les yeux, puis les reportait sur la copie, la complétant dans son esprit ; puis il la regardait de nouveau, comme si, en l'absence momentanée de son regard et par la force de sa propre imagination, elle avait pu être achevée. Mais chaque fois qu'il y revenait, elle était légèrement différente de son souvenir, refusant cet achèvement qu'il avait lui-même accompli.
-- Pourquoi ne veux-tu pas la terminer ? finit-il par demander.
-- Il y a quelque chose dans un... une oeuvre non terminée, une... une chose comme ça où... tu vois ? Où la perfection est encore possible ? Parce qu'elle est là, elle est là tout le temps, tout le temps qu'on essaie de la faire apparaître...
William Gaddis - Les Reconnaissances
