Category: Book and Film Pairings

Book and Film Pairing: Conclave

Yes, I am still reeling from that ending that I never saw coming!

…and yes, Cardinal Benitez is undoubtedly Filipino in the novel; and predominantly Roman Catholic Philippines is at a loss as to whether they are relieved or not that the filmmakers made him Mexican. I, for one, would have preferred the Benitez in the film to be Filipino.

But both book and film are powerful and bound to ruffle feathers. I like how the book brings one into the mind of Cardinal Lomeli/Lawrence, and how it is attuned to the art of its setting; but I’m also impressed by how the film treated the pertinent material.

Striking passages from the book:

“It is not you who has sinned, my child, it is the Church.”

Lomeli/Lawrence: That is an extraordinary allegation. The Church is not merely an institution, as you call it, but the living embodiment of the Holy Spirit.

Benitez: Ah, well here we differ. I feel I am more likely to encounter the embodiment of the Holy Spirit elsewhere – for example in those two million women who have been raped as an act of military policy in the civil wars of central Africa.

Lomeli/Lawrence: This ghastly business of shutting our eyes to sexual abuse, for example… How many of our colleagues failed to take the complaints of the victims seriously, but simply moved the priests responsible to a different parish?

His dialogue with Benítez had disturbed him profoundly. He was unable to get it out of his mind. Was it really possible that he had spent the past thirty years worshipping the Church rather than God?

‘I want a Church that is poor,’ the Pope had complained more than once in Lomeli’s hearing. ‘I want a Church that is closer to the people…’

…and it struck him what an imperfect, arbitrary, man-made instrument the Conclave was. It had no basis in Holy Scripture whatsoever. There was nothing in the reading to say that God had created cardinals. Where did they fit into St. Paul’s picture of His Church as a living body?

Striking passages that appear both in the book and the film:

My brothers and sisters, in the course of a long life in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end. “Dio mio, Dio mio, perché mi hai abbandonato,” He cried out in His agony at the ninth hour on the cross. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.

‘You know that he had doubts himself, by the end?’

‘The Pope had doubts about God?’

‘Not about God! Never about God!’

‘What he had lost faith in was the Church.’ 

Book and Film Pairing: Spadework for a Palace | The Brutalist

an author named Laszlo and an architect named Laszlo

a character who is a librarian and a character who builds a library

postmodern literature, modern architecture

asymmetry in form, symmetry in symbolism

stunning imagery and visuals; flashes of genius; wanting, plot-wise

striking passages from the book:

“…art is a cloud that provides shade from the sweltering heat, or a flash of lightning that splits the sky, where, in that shade’s shelter, or that lightning’s flash, the world simply becomes not the same as before.”

“…libraries (as I wrote near the end of my first notebook) are the most exceptional and exalted works of art…”

“Resist the idea that architecture is a building.”

striking passages from the film:

Van Buren: So, answer me one question; why architecture?

Laszlo: Is it a test?

Van Buren: Not at all.

Laszlo: Nothing can be of its own explanation – is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction? You know, some years ago, in March, a stranger knocked at the classroom door of the university where I frequently lectured. At once, all that was familiar and important to us was gone. We were too well-known at home. I thought my reputation might help to protect us but- it was the opposite. There was no way to remain anonymous; nowhere for my family to go. There was a war on, and yet it is my understanding that many of the sites of my projects have survived and are still there in the city. When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe have ceased to humiliate us, I expect them to serve instead as a political stimulus, sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood. I already anticipate a communal rhetoric of anger and fear; a whole river of such frivolities may flow un-dammed, but my buildings were devised to endure such erosion of the Danube’s shoreline.

Erzsebet: Losing a mother – it’s an unfathomable loss, you see. To lose one’s birth mother is to lose the very foundation on which we stand. The mind may not know its loss but the heart does.

Erzsebet: I suppose that deep inside, he worships at the altar of only himself…

Zsofia: We are going to Jerusalem… Binyamin has family there.

Binyamin: My older brothers relocated with their families in 1950. They became citizens.

Erzsebet: Life is difficult there. Have you thought this through?

Zsofia: It is our obligation.

Laszlo: To whom?

Book and Film Pairing: Women Without Men

…because I would immediately pick up a novel of/from Iran without any prodding.

It took me almost halfway through to get into the book’s rhythm, however: Apart from being surprised that it is not set in contemporary Iran but pre-revolutionary Iran (and horrified to think that things have only gotten worse for women in post-revolution Iran), one main character irked me, and I kept weighing it up against another Iranian work of magic realism that remains unsurpassed in my books. But as I read on and the threads of the story came together, I came to appreciate Women Without Men for its own merits. It is, after all, about women overcoming hardships and breaking free from the conventions that Iranian society imposes on them. It is therefore no surprise that it was banned shortly after its publication.

The lives of Iranian women and the experiences depicted here are not isolated cases, and they bring to mind a line from Universal Compassion, an essay by Natalia Ginzburg: “We have come to recognize that no event, public or private, can be considered or judged in isolation, for the more deeply we probe the more we find infinitely ramifying events that preceded it…” Thence the problems that the characters face are not merely personal. In an ideal world, these are issues that an entire civilization must address.

The book naturally ushered me to the screen adaptation. The director, who wrote the preface for this edition, worked closely with the author and the collaboration seems to have led to a beautiful fleshing out of ideas. Being a fan of Iranian cinema — because no one does cinema like the Iranians! — I am tempted to say that I like the film more than the book. But for an exceptional experience, allow me to suggest a book-movie-pairing instead; because what was ambiguous and abstract in the novel became poetry in the film; and if not for the book, there would be no film.