A Week of Reading and Seeing

Lagos can be a bitch that gives divination to what makes a writer at heart to become sparse reader of books, and medicine, the wife, is just as bitter and brutal.

But thanks to the NMA strike, I have had four days of unalloyed company with self. I have been watching interesting films and reading nice prose too, more often than not these expedition intersect in the most impossible ways.

I finally saw the film, The Cider House Rules. The book was an incredible read; it was my second favourite Irving novel(the first being A Widow for One Year). The way a film differs from a novel is so refreshing. The way characters are excised and the sub-plots are merged into a long flowing dominant theme. I eagerly searched for Melony but I could not find her, but it was a good film adapted from a great book nonetheless.

I also saw Play Misty for Me. Made in 1971, this Clint Eastwood film is about a radio disc jockey and significant womanizer who fell into the clutch of a really sick woman who had Borderline Personality Disorder. This was educating far more than the psychiatry texts I have read on the disorder. How dependent they are; how suicidal they could be, how homicidal. Little wonder, this disorder was referred to as Ambulant Schizophrenia. A harmless one night stand becomes a string of homicidal cases with deliberate self harm imbued into the picture and it all finally led to a rather fortunate murder.

Then I read Alice Munro’s The Bear Came Over The Mountain. Here is what James Wood has to say. I originally thought I was reading another story about dementia, something like Elisavietta Ritchie’s Flying Time but this story twisted on itself and became more of an exposition on circumstantial marital infidelity within the confines of complacency and illness. It reminded me in a strange way of The 158 Pound Marriage.