They ask me every time one of my novels is brought to the movies or TV (or whatever): “Are you satisfied with the adaptation?” And also: “Is it faithful to the work?” To the first question I always answer yes. The answer usually disappoints, especially if the questioner belongs to the journalistic profession, which is very fond of arguments between writers and filmmakers; In fact, a journalist once told me that I always gave that answer because I didn’t give a damn what they did with my books, which is false. It could happen, however, that in this matter I resemble Colm Tóibín, who, speaking about the adaptation of one of his novels, confessed to me: “When someone is interested in what I do, I completely lose my critical sense.” It is possible. It is even possible that the : caught too close. It is possible, but there are also other possibilities.
To begin with, a truism: a novel is a novel and a film is a film. Although cinema historically emerges from the novel and is related to it, the material of the novel and that of cinema are different: a film is composed of images, sounds and words; a novel, only of words, and cannot be emancipated from them: adapting involves altering; In other words: every adaptation is a betrayal. The mere idea of a film entirely faithful to a novel is absurd; true to its letter, I mean: it can be true to its spirit, whatever that may be, but only by betraying its letter. My favorite example of that blessed disloyalty is , an often conceited and pretentious filmmaker who nevertheless found in Lampedusa’s novel of the same name the instrument of a masterpiece: there is no doubt that the unfathomable Sicilian melancholy of the book survives in the film; nor that the lyrics of the latter are, in key points, opposite to those of the former: in the film, the young Tancredi is in love with the exuberant Angelica, while at the end of Lampedusa’s work we understand that, in reality, he has always been in love with his unfortunate cousin Concetta. Another truism: a novel is not better because a filmmaker decides to make it into a movie; When a real filmmaker adapts a novel, he doesn’t do it just because he likes it, but above all because he detects something in it that concerns him, that in some way belongs to him. Nine years ago, which had been published almost secretly, with the title The mobilealmost four decades ago; Naturally, when the director told me about his project I thought I was crazy, until I remembered that his last film was about a cannibal who devours human flesh and who The mobile is about another cannibal: a novelist who devours human lives to write his novels. This means that, almost 40 years before Martín Cuenca released The authorI had already written his score without him or I knowing. That is a novel: a score that the reader interprets internally; The filmmaker is another reader, except that, in addition to interpreting the score internally, he transfers it externally: to the screen. “Will we see on the screen what we have read in your novel?” they also often ask me. “Impossible,” I reply. “What you have read has only been read by you; however,.” That’s the beauty of literature: in it, it is not an image that is worth a thousand words, but a word that is worth a thousand images.
That said, you will understand that a server does not have the slightest sense of ownership over his novels (except financially, of course: I love getting paid for what I write). The reason is simple: once a novel is published, he is the one who finishes the books and the true protagonist of literature. Just because our time has forgotten it doesn’t mean it stops being true.
