See This Book at a Screen Near You

With the Academy Awards® looming next month (the winners will be announced March 23), readers may be tempted to turn to the silver screen instead of the page for entertainment. But now they don't have to choose. Here are some great fiction and nonfiction titles that have been turned into terrific films, with very little lost in the translation. Many of last year's movies touted by the critics as potential Oscar™ nominees were based on notable books, some of which are highlighted here along with older works. [If you have a video/DVD collection, you also might want to display the film versions with the books.]

The theme of an ideal suburbia gone awry runs through Jeffrey Eugenides's brilliant first novel, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (Warner. 1994. ISBN 0-446-67025-1. pap. $12.95; LJ 4/15/93). Narrated by a group of neighborhood boys, it tells the story of the five Lisbon sisters, who are slowly suffocating under the weight of their exceedingly sheltered lives in suburban Detroit. Their controlling mother is just one of their captors; the other guilty parties include religion, lust, and, simply, unrealized life. Eugenides's detached tone is perhaps the most disturbing element of the novel, perfectly capturing the paralysis of numbed emotions. Like the neighborhood boys, readers are left to wonder what went wrong.

At first glance, the premise of Scott Spencer's elegant and romantic WAKING THE DEAD (Berkley. 2000. ISBN 0-425-16962-6. pap. $13.95; LJ 5/15/86) might not appear to be entirely believable. Fielding Pierce is a young politician who thinks his liberal activist girlfriend, supposedly killed in a car explosion, is still alive. While campaigning for the Senate, he tries to prove to himself that he is not crazy and that Sarah's death was staged to throw off those who wanted to kill her and the Chilean exiles she was helping. There are several stories running through this novel, all which drive Spencer's ultimate intent, which is to reveal a passionate and unyielding love that never surrenders, even in death.

The woman behind the famous man has long been the object of fascination, but it is the rare subject who has been able to warrant her own full-fledged biography. Hayden Herrera captures one such tortured soul in FRIDA: A BIOGRAPHY OF FRIDA KAHLO (HarperCollins. 2002. ISBN 0-06-008589-4. pap. $24.95). The Mexican surrealist artist, who as a teenager sustained lifelong physical injuries in a bus crash, was often overshadowed by her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. His success dictated her life, as they traveled and moved to places where Kahlo would have rather not been. She survived by capturing her stories on canvas. Any gaps the paintings leave in her history, Herrera's well-researched homage fills in.

Nora Barnacle, the often ill-perceived wife and muse of James Joyce, was never given a full voice in any biographies of him. Enter Brenda Maddox, whose masterly research has yielded NORA: THE REAL LIFE OF MOLLY BLOOM (Houghton. 2000. ISBN 0-618-05700-5. pap. $14). Although not always a flattering portrait, Maddox's study gives a more accurate account of Barnacle's life than any other previous source. Tracking Barnacle's story from when she first met Joyce, then back to when she was born and then forward again, Maddox takes the narrative focus away from Joyce and gives it to Barnacle, with every trip, apartment, and situation presented from her perspective. A moving and unique portrait.

Norman Maclean's A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT AND OTHER STORIES (Univ. of Chicago. 2001. ISBN 0-226-50072-1. $22; pap. ISBN 0-226-50066-7. $12) is about love and loss of family. His tale ends with the line, "I am haunted by waters," and after reading this beautiful and moving paen to his father, brother, and a childhood spent fly-fishing in Montana's Big-Blackfoot River, it is easy to see why. In spare yet evocative prose Maclean reveals that even though people go on living after a loss, they never fully move on.

Among the almost dozen films that were released at the end of 2002, two of the most acclaimed were adapted from award-winning and highly praised books. Michael Cunningham's THE HOURS (Farrar. 1998. ISBN 0-374-17289-7. $23; pap. Picador USA: St. Martin's. 2002. ISBN 0-312-30506-0. $13; LJ 10/1/98) won the Pulitzer Prize for its moving story of three women living in separate times and all linked by Virginia Woolf's great novel Mrs. Dalloway. (The Hours was Woolf's original title.) Opening with Woolf's 1941 suicide in which she drowned herself in a river, the novel jumps to Laura, a 1940s housewife who is desperately unhappy, and then moves on to Clarissa, a book editor living in the present and shopping for flowers for her friend's party. Seamlessly flowing from one character to the next, Cunningham's book effortlessly blends fact with fiction and fiction with fiction, combining an original narrative idea with perfectly rendered emotions.

In THE PIANIST (Picador USA: St. Martin's. 1999. ISBN 0-312-24415-0. $23; pap. 2003. ISBN 0-312-31135-4. $13; LJ 8/99), Wladyslaw Szpilman recalls simply and honestly how he survived as a Polish Jew during the Holocaust. Amidst the fear and hatred that blanketed Europe, the author's passion and talent for the piano saved him both literally and metaphorically. In an era defined by an absence of humanity, his stirring memoir stands as a testament to the resolve and beauty of the human spirit.