Gilbert Adair (1944–2011)
Author of The Holy Innocents
About the Author
Gilbert Adair was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on December 29, 1944. He wrote numerous books during his lifetime including A Night at the Pictures, Myths and Memories, Hollywood's Vietnam, Flickers, and Surfing the Zeitgeist. His novels, Love and Death on Long Island and The Dreamers, were adapted show more into films, the later by Adair himself. He also helped write the screenplays The Territory, Klimt, and A Closed Book. He won the Author's Club First Novel Award for The Holy Innocents in 1988 and the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for his book A Void in 1995. During the 1990s, he wrote a regular column for the Sunday Times. He died in early December 2011 at the age of 66. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Works by Gilbert Adair
The Real Tadzio: Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and the Boy Who Inspired It (2001) 49 copies, 2 reviews
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Adair, Gilbert
- Legal name
- Adair, Gilbert
- Birthdate
- 1944-12-29
- Date of death
- 2011-12-08
- Gender
- male
- Occupations
- novelist
poet
film critic
journalist
literary theorist
translator - Awards and honors
- The Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize (1995)
- Short biography
- Gilbert Adair was a Scottish novelist, poet, film critic and journalist. Born in Edinburgh, he lived in Paris from 1968 through 1980. He is most famous for such novels as Love and Death on Long Island (1997) and The Dreamers (2003), both of which were made into films, although he is also noted as the translator of Georges Perec's postmodern novel A Void, in which the letter e is not used. Adair won the 1995 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for this work.
In 1998 and 1999 Adair was the chief film critic for The Independent on Sunday, where in 1999 he also wrote a year-long column called "The Guillotine." In addition to the films made from his own works, Adair worked on the screenplays for a number of Raúl Ruiz films. Although he rarely spoke of his sexual orientation in public, not wishing to be labelled, he acknowledge in an interview that there were many gay themes in his work. He died from a brain hemorrhage in 2011.
(source: Wikipedia) - Nationality
- Scotland
UK - Birthplace
- Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland, UK
- Places of residence
- London, Middlesex, England, UK
Paris, Île-de-France, France - Place of death
- London, Middlesex, England, UK
- Map Location
- UK
Members
Reviews
For those of you who know your Agatha Christie, or the Golden Age of British crime, the title of this book will speak volumes. It is, as you would expect, a spoof of the great era of crime writing, and, in part, a homage to Christie's exceptional The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This book involves a British manor house, an amateur sleuth, the usual range of British upper class (and not-so-upper class) characters, and a locked room mystery.
It is rather amusing stuff, with a great meta-analysis show more feel as our amateur sleuth, Evadne Mount, is a writer of mystery novels herself, with some gentle fun being had at the expense of the genre. Lots of "oh, but when I wrote cheesy murder mystery title..." comments, and a general disdain of locked room mysteries, which Miss Mount would never write, oh no. Particular mention also has to be made of the map at the front of the book: completely useless and unnecessary, and then one of the characters gets to complain about completely useless and unnecessary maps at the front of murder mystery novels.
And the crime itself was rather good, I didn't guess whodunnit at all. I'd read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd a few years ago, and it was good having it sort-of-fresh in the back of my mind, but not essential to enjoyment of this book, I would think.
I won't rush out for the next Evadne Mount book, but will happily pick it up when I see it at the library. (And how does one pronounce "Evadne"??) show less
It is rather amusing stuff, with a great meta-analysis show more feel as our amateur sleuth, Evadne Mount, is a writer of mystery novels herself, with some gentle fun being had at the expense of the genre. Lots of "oh, but when I wrote cheesy murder mystery title..." comments, and a general disdain of locked room mysteries, which Miss Mount would never write, oh no. Particular mention also has to be made of the map at the front of the book: completely useless and unnecessary, and then one of the characters gets to complain about completely useless and unnecessary maps at the front of murder mystery novels.
And the crime itself was rather good, I didn't guess whodunnit at all. I'd read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd a few years ago, and it was good having it sort-of-fresh in the back of my mind, but not essential to enjoyment of this book, I would think.
I won't rush out for the next Evadne Mount book, but will happily pick it up when I see it at the library. (And how does one pronounce "Evadne"??) show less
Three quarters of this book is thrilling. After an appalling accident, that has left him sightless, famous author Sir Paul is ready to create again. But how to do it? Not realising that machines such as dictaphones are available, Sir Paul advertises for an amanuensis to do the actual writing for him. Sir Paul lives alone, with occasional help from a housekeeper, so the position is a residential. Enter John Ryder, a young day trader who admires Sir Paul's work and who gets the job.
As I say, show more for the first three quarters, the novel is a page turner. The different physical experiences of the blind and the adjustments needed to be able to work with and help them, are beautifully evoked. When I was a child I used to spend some holidays looking after my grandmother who was functionally blind and who explained to me what blindness, or near blindness in her case, is like. You do need to use the clock method to describe whats on a plate. You do need to use the squeeze method when walking with a blind person to quide them to the left or the right. The development of the two men's relationship from strangers to intimates is extremely well done. Sir Paul is ascerbic and waspish, John something of a blank canvas. As we read from Sir Paul's perspective its hard to define him. The things Sir Paul can't see, we can't see either.
And then small mysterious things start to happen. A tie is out of place. An obstacle is on the stairs. The housekeeper gradually disappears from view and John takes over Sir Paul's care.
I won't go any further than this, because for me the last quarter of the book is a disappointment. Needlessly cruel, sadly predictable but yet still highly unlikely. You also have to accept a couple of jangling irritants. Firstly, why not get a dictaphone and dictate your book? Secondly, would a blind person really accept a total stranger to live in their house? My grandmother did have people come to help her - but they were people she knew, or more often, the children of people she knew. Thirdly, would you really do no background checks at all? So there are some issues
But also, I did finish it in two sittings show less
As I say, show more for the first three quarters, the novel is a page turner. The different physical experiences of the blind and the adjustments needed to be able to work with and help them, are beautifully evoked. When I was a child I used to spend some holidays looking after my grandmother who was functionally blind and who explained to me what blindness, or near blindness in her case, is like. You do need to use the clock method to describe whats on a plate. You do need to use the squeeze method when walking with a blind person to quide them to the left or the right. The development of the two men's relationship from strangers to intimates is extremely well done. Sir Paul is ascerbic and waspish, John something of a blank canvas. As we read from Sir Paul's perspective its hard to define him. The things Sir Paul can't see, we can't see either.
And then small mysterious things start to happen. A tie is out of place. An obstacle is on the stairs. The housekeeper gradually disappears from view and John takes over Sir Paul's care.
I won't go any further than this, because for me the last quarter of the book is a disappointment. Needlessly cruel, sadly predictable but yet still highly unlikely. You also have to accept a couple of jangling irritants. Firstly, why not get a dictaphone and dictate your book? Secondly, would a blind person really accept a total stranger to live in their house? My grandmother did have people come to help her - but they were people she knew, or more often, the children of people she knew. Thirdly, would you really do no background checks at all? So there are some issues
But also, I did finish it in two sittings show less
Flickers was published in 1995 to commemorate the centenary of cinema. It consists of 100 movie stills, 1 per year from 1895 to 1994, each accompanied by a short essay about the specific film, but more often branching off into considerations of the director, the genre, or cinema as a whole. What immediately attracted me to this book when I saw it on the shelf of the University Co-op bookstore in Austin, Texas, were the profuse illustrations (often a deficiency of books about film), then the show more fact that some of my personal favorites (Lawrence of Arabia, The Color of Pomegranates, 2001, Black Narcissus, Citizen Kane) were included, and then Adair’s lapidary prose style (which is impossible to boil down to brief extracts, Adair would have never tweeted), coupled with startling judgements (some unusual: an insistence that silent movies should be projected silent, without score) but quite a few that, to my mind, are absolutely correct. For example, on film noir (1956: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt):
“There is, though, a most curious paradox in the film noir. I yield to no one, as they say, in my love for the genre and I recognize the pertinence of much that has been written about its inherent pessimism. Yet I must confess to never having found that pessimism very convincing. No one in the forties ever went to a film noir with a sense that he was about to submit to a harrowing but salutary dose of existential nihilism (a nihilism that isn’t just a matter of critical interpretation but is quite perceptible in both narrative detail and visual texture), just as no one ever need recoil from watching one on television now. Films noirs are great fun, for God’s sake, great fun primarily because they never really do persuade one that the despair that they portray is ultimately a truth of the human condition—in the way that, at least while one is experiencing it, a film by Bergman does, or a novel by Kafka, or an opera by Berg. For most of us, I suspect, their fabled negativity is precisely that: a negative (in the photographic sense of the word) of the fundamental American positivity and optimism. The people who made them (and who were usually, as I’ve said, European exiles) loved America, just as did the people who watched them. Secretly, I believe, they were not even meant to convince.”
Since first reading Flickers, I have always turned to it after checking off another of its films that I hadn’t seen before. (And strangely enough, the one film I thought I would never see, Bardelys the Magnificent, which Adair uses as an example of the many lost silent films, was found, and I watched it on TCM.) Flickers reminds me of the old slogan for Jay’s potato chips, “You can’t eat just one.” You cannot just read one line or page. It must be devoured. show less
“There is, though, a most curious paradox in the film noir. I yield to no one, as they say, in my love for the genre and I recognize the pertinence of much that has been written about its inherent pessimism. Yet I must confess to never having found that pessimism very convincing. No one in the forties ever went to a film noir with a sense that he was about to submit to a harrowing but salutary dose of existential nihilism (a nihilism that isn’t just a matter of critical interpretation but is quite perceptible in both narrative detail and visual texture), just as no one ever need recoil from watching one on television now. Films noirs are great fun, for God’s sake, great fun primarily because they never really do persuade one that the despair that they portray is ultimately a truth of the human condition—in the way that, at least while one is experiencing it, a film by Bergman does, or a novel by Kafka, or an opera by Berg. For most of us, I suspect, their fabled negativity is precisely that: a negative (in the photographic sense of the word) of the fundamental American positivity and optimism. The people who made them (and who were usually, as I’ve said, European exiles) loved America, just as did the people who watched them. Secretly, I believe, they were not even meant to convince.”
Since first reading Flickers, I have always turned to it after checking off another of its films that I hadn’t seen before. (And strangely enough, the one film I thought I would never see, Bardelys the Magnificent, which Adair uses as an example of the many lost silent films, was found, and I watched it on TCM.) Flickers reminds me of the old slogan for Jay’s potato chips, “You can’t eat just one.” You cannot just read one line or page. It must be devoured. show less
A murder at the Reichenbach falls, at a Sherlock Holmes-tribute / murder mystery writers' convention, written by a murder mystery writer who has used one of the other murder mystery writers as a detective in his fiction and who becomes the detective in this 'fictional' account... Ah, the postmodern metacritique! What's fun is that the book takes the mickey out of its own stylistic affectations, which gives the critical reader lots of 'in joke' laughs. I really enjoyed this, despite watching show more the text contort itself to disappear up its own cleverness at times. show less
Lists
Unread books (1)
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 25
- Also by
- 7
- Members
- 1,694
- Popularity
- #15,157
- Rating
- 3.6
- Reviews
- 37
- ISBNs
- 114
- Languages
- 14
- Favorited
- 6