A Lovely Day in Zurich and a Disappointing Movie

     It’s been a month since my last posting. I plead post-vacation email catch-up as an excuse. Like so many people these days, I tried to keep up on my work-email while on vacation but all I managed to do was stem the tide. I’ve decided that for every week you take off, it takes an additional week of working extra hard to catch up. In my case, I took a month off. So it goes…

     My wife was traveling on business on Valentine’s Day so we didn’t celebrate it until the following Saturday. We then went to our favorite Zurich restaurant Tres Kilos (Rulon’s second favorite after The Desperado),– a wonderful, yes, Mexican restaurant only a few blocks away from the American consulate in Zurich. Those of you who read Einstein’s Trunk will remember that Tres Kilos is where Rulon took Yohaba after the killing in the Honggerberg forest.

     Before dinner we did a walking/window shopping tour of Zurich, stopped at the Storchen hotel for the best hot chocolate in the world (and at $9.50 for a somewhat small by American standards cup, maybe one of the most expensive) and then had some glazed, chocolate covered orange slices from a nearby Springli chocolate store.

     After dinner, as an extra treat, we saw a movie we’d been chomping at the bit to see ever since we heard about it: The remake of Tinker, Tailor… starring Gary Oldham as George Smiley, the aged, bespeckled, overweight spy, based on the novel by John LeCarre.

            Alas, the movie was a disappointment. I’m sure the producers, actors, and directors did what they thought was best, but the 1979 BBC Alec Guinness mini-series, I’m afraid, has set a very, very high bar. It was so unbelievably good. There were so many scenes in the six-hour BBC version that were so well constructed, that maybe this new two-hour movie never stood a chance. In any case, there wasn’t a single scene in the new movie that was as powerful as the comparable scene in the original. Also, while it must have been a real challenge for the movie to condense the book to only two hours, I felt they had superfluous scenes, that if they had not been there, they could have had more time for LeCarre’s priceless dialogue. The book was not about men staring silently while they tracked down the mole in British Intelligence. The book was about Smiley’s relentless interrogations of his co-workers to finally arrive at the truth. Again, we see that making good movies is extremely difficult. There are so many mistakes that can be made. When a team gets it right, they should be applauded.    

     Next week: for my birthday, my wife bought me an Apple Macbook Air. I will talk about my experience and wax lyrical on changes in the IT industry.  

Best regards,

Jim

Zurich

The joys and challenges of writing Einstein’s Trunk

        What I enjoyed most about writing Einstein’s Trunk was developing the characters, putting words in their mouths, and sometimes even sitting back in wonder at what they just did. When I first put the plot together, I had plans for two female leads, Yohaba, Einstein’s descendent, and Isabella, the South African agent contracted by the Russians. But I had no idea which one would end up betraying Rulon and which one would be his love interest. The decision was actually made by Yohaba when she threw herself at Rulon in her apartment. It was a total surprise even to me. I remember writing that scene and thinking to myself afterwards: Wow, never expected that! 

       Likewise, even later in the story, I still toyed with the idea of having Yohaba betray Rulon. But there was something about the way Yohaba waited outside his apartment after the fight in the Desperado restaurant and then ran up to Rulon in the rain that simply could not be denied. Eventually, Yohaba’s sincerity and honesty won Rulon’s heart – and mine. But Isabella may not be totally out of the picture. While she doesn’t appear in the sequel, I’m considering bringing her back in the third book.

       Far and away, the hardest part for me was writing the beginning. If you give too much description and background information in the beginning, you slow down the plot and bore your readers. If you don’t give enough information then people are confused - or too much information and you kill the suspense and erode curiosity. It’s a judgment call every step of the way.

      I also found it hard to write the physical descriptions of the locales and people. It was the same old question: How much do you describe, how much do you leave out, and how can you artfully include that information in the story without slowing down the action. The best beginning I’ve read where information, plot, action, and character development, were all woven together while keeping the story sizzling along and building interest was in Barry Eisler’s first John Rain book Rainfall.

      My next post will be about what I’ve learned about writing and getting published.  

Best regards,

Jim

Zurich, May 13, 2011