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screen to page It took just one day for me to read it, but that didn't take away from my enjoying the book. The book in question is Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Some time ago I had seen the film based on the book and wondered if I would enjoy reading the source material. I know that this is not the normal sequence of events. Usually people tend to read the book first and then see the movie and this may in fact be the first time where I read a book after seeing a movie made from the book. Having seen the movie first, there were no real surprises for me on the page. Scenes and sometimes entire pieces of dialogue that I had heard months ago surfaced again in my head as I read. On the screen it had been a moving story for me so it was pleasant to revisit certain emotions. I guess that also speaks highly of the film that it was so true to the novel. There were no added characters or compressed scenes. Then again the entire book is only one hundred and eighty five pages long so there is little that could be cut. The only major difference that I could see between the film and the book was an ending set in the present that was not part of the book. Where the book ends with the Little Chinese Seamstress leaving the mountain village never to return, the narrator of the novel goes back to the village decades later to see what became of her. In my opinion, this additional scene does nothing to change the overall tone of the story. It still speaks of escape through great literature and the human will to endure. ... In an effort to save money, I went an entire month without placing a single bid at eBay. Today I ended that streak by winning three different auctions from the same person. Soon I will be receiving the Keira Knightley version of Doctor Zhivago, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Trainspotting on DVD. |