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Thursday, December 31, 2015

Why Ferrante's novels would translate well to movies or TV (and why Proust doesn't)

I suspect, despite my many reservations about her flat narrative tone and her steady accumulation of incidents w/out a lot of reflection or development, or maybe because of these reservations?, Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend (vol. 1 of her Neapolitan novels, not a trilogy as I had previously posted but at least 4 vols and maybe still counting) would make a pretty good movie or, even better, TV series. How can this be? Think of Ferrante's work as the polar opposite from Proust's narrative-fiction: in Proust, the events themselves are generally quite staid and superficially uninteresting - dinner parties, concerts, train rides, long conversations, salons - and what makes the work great are Proust's observations and perceptions throughout. Proust has been adapted into film, w/ no success - one I saw about 20 years ago about the Swann in Love section was so bad it was laugh-out-loud funny; I wrote about it at the time that only those who love Proust could possibly like this film and they will hate it. Ferrante, the opposite, has many scenes of action and social drama: street fights, a murder, a rather spectacular wedding, and many others. But few of these scenes are developed to any length and there is virtually no authorial insight - making the novel feel flat but giving rich opportunities for a screenwriter to open up the material and show the action, bring it alive. Similarly, Proust has relatively few central characters, and (aside from confusion resulting from the use of titles sometimes and not at other times) they're pretty distinct in behavior and easy to keep apart in your mind while reading; Ferrante's characters blend into one another - there's little physical description and it's hard to remember who's in what family, who loves whom, who's seeking revenge against whom - problems much easier to resolve on screen, when we can much more easily  identify each character by their features, voice, behavior = they're not just "names" (in fact it's often hard to remember the names of secondary characters in movies/tv). If the Neapolitan novels haven't yet been optioned, I'd say it's only a matter of time. I can wait.

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