Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe" adapted for 21st century

EDINBURGH (Reuters) - In a bid to resurrect Walter Scott's historical novel "Ivanhoe", retired Scottish medical professor David Purdie unsheathed his scalpel to cut out the early 19th century verbiage and deliver a new edition for 21st century readers.

Ivanhoe is a romantic tale of fair maidens, bold knights-at-arms, merry friars, skulduggery, enmity between Saxons and Norman barons, and even a cameo appearance by Robin Hood during the reign of England's Richard I in 1194.

The first historical novel by Scott (1771-1832) set outside Scotland was hugely popular when it was published at the start of 1820. Its first printing of 10,000 copies sold out in less than two weeks and it set the scene for the rise of the historical novel in Europe.

Scott was widely read through Europe and North America.

Purdie, chairman of the Sir Walter Scott Club in Edinburgh, said the idea for his abridged Ivanhoe "came from repeated observations in the press that Scott was ‘difficult', above all, verbose...and out of touch with the attention span of a modern audience."

The punctuation style of 1820 just jarred, he said.

"I have shortened paragraphs and sentences, removed excessive commas, trimmed descriptions, especially of scenery, and adjusted syntax," Purdie told Reuters.

The new edition is published by Luath Press Limited in Edinburgh for sale at 9.99 pounds ($16.09).

Purdie, who is also editor-in-chief of the (Robert) Burns Encyclopaedia, said he had trimmed Ivanhoe to 95,000 words - about the length of a modern solid novel - from 195,000 words.

"As a former surgeon, I used the good old surgical discipline of only cutting where necessary, and then only removing extraneous matter, conserving the vital organs of the story while minimizing blood loss and keeping the patient alive," he said.

Graham Tulloch, professor of English at Australia's Flinders University in Adelaide and editor of the definitive 1998 Edinburgh Edition of Ivanhoe, told Reuters he would naturally like readers to peruse the original, but commended Purdie's efforts.

"David Purdie has gone to some trouble to make the book in size, cover, and page layout look like a modern historical novel. If this can attract more readers, then I am all in favor. If it means those readers go on to read the novel in its full version, then that is even better."

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Book Talk: "Fun" bestsellers a big switch for Justin Cronin

TOKYO (Reuters) - Justin Cronin was writing literary fiction when he and his daughter, then eight, dreamed up a vampire trilogy set in a post-apocalyptic world just for fun - until he belatedly realized what they'd put together, and sat down to write.

Cronin said he's still a little astonished by the success of "The Passage," which began the series, and now "The Twelve," which just came out last month, both of which have been bestsellers.

Cronin spoke with Reuters about the book, about writing, and what it was like to make the transition from literary fiction to genre writing.

Q: I hear the inspiration came from your daughter?

A: "The conversations that I had with my daughter were where we assembled the plot together, with only two rules, which were: everything in the story had to be interesting, and it had to have one character with red hair, because she has red hair. I think there are two things that made it work so well. One was that she's my daughter, we have a lot of chemistry, we're close. She's very smart, she's very well-read. She was eight years old at the time, but she was a kid who read a ton that early.

"The other thing that made it work well is that I had no intention of writing these books. We were just having fun. All the inner critics were silent, they had been sent out of the room. We made a great story. My intentions with this were simply to have a good time, and then I looked up and said, oh my God, look what we have. It's fantastic, I'm going to write this."

Q: Did it take a lot of time to go from having fun to actually writing it?

A: "There was almost no gap. We spent three months together doing this, always in motion. I was jogging, and she came on her bike beside me, and we spent an hour doing this. Monday through Friday, something like that. We'd pick up where we left off the day before and just keep kind of spitting it out, trying different ideas and throwing other ideas into the ditch.

"Then it got cold, it got dark early and the bicycle went into the garage. I said, this is good material, I don't know what I'm going to do with it but I should at least write it down for some future use. So I sat down at my computer and I looked up a few days later and I had 30 pages of notes, I had a really complete outline. I said wow, how often does this fall into your lap? But the book still didn't have a voice, I didn't know how it would sound. So I sat down and said look, I'm just going to write a chapter - and there was another chapter, and then another chapter. Next thing I knew I'd written 337,000 words."

Q: So, it was a gift.

A: "Yes. I don't want to say it came from above, but it felt like that."

Q: Was it all smooth sailing?

A: "Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can't figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times. Writing is 10 percent inventiveness and creativity, and 90 percent stamina, especially for long books like these. Of course there were bumps in the road, there were days when I was frustrated, but for the most part the thing was a gas to write, and that was true for the second book as well. I hope it's true for the third."

Q: What's it like to go from literary to genre fiction?

A: "The question that I had going into this was, would I write differently, given the fact that I was going to write a book that had certain kinds of plot elements that I'd not worked with before - a lot of action sequences, things like that. And what I found very quickly was, you write how you write. I didn't end up writing differently from the way I would write anything, my interests were roughly the same. I had a very robust plot to work from, which was a gas, but I realized very quickly that I was writing about people, and the things that are important to me. Things like the bonds between parents and children - I'm a dad, so that comes up everywhere.

"What I had was a great way for exploring this stuff, because it seems true to me that people who are running for their lives can't help but be themselves. It's just a characterization tool. I found myself back in the presence of all my concerns as a man and my habits as a writer. It gave really clean lines to what I was doing."

Q: Was that kind of transition easy all the way?

A: I had to learn how to do some new stuff, basically the big action sequences. I wanted to write some scenes in which simply enormous events occur, with a lot of kinetic energy - a runaway train. In the second book, an attack on the refugee processing center where there's all these different story elements and points of view operating simultaneously, and you have to see things from several angles at once, and you have to find a rhetoric that still makes it feel like it's moving quickly. All this technical stuff. That was a real challenge, I had to sit down and really think about that one. One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career.

Q: Any advice for aspiring writers?

A: "Just like any other job, you need to show up for work. You need to read a lot, you need to be wise, you need to watch people. If you try to write 1,000 words a day, as I do, after 100 days you'll look up and have a book. It may be a mess, and you may have to revise it 50 times, but you can't revise it if you haven't written it."

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"The Racketeer" jumps to top spot on U.S. bestseller list

NEW YORK (Reuters) - John Grisham's "The Racketeer" soared to top of Publishers Weekly's bestseller list on Thursday.

The list is compiled using data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide.

Hardcover Fiction Last Week

1. "The Racketeer" by John Grisham (Doubleday, $28.95) -

2. "The Casual Vacancy" by J. K. Rowling (Little, Brown, $35.00) 2

3. "The Panther" by Nelson DeMille (Grand Central, $27.99) 1

4. "The Bone Bed" by Patricia Cornwell (Putnam, $28.95) 3

5. "NYPD Red" by James Patterson and Marshall Karp (Little, Brown, $27.99) 5

6. "Back to Blood" by Tom Wolfe (Little, Brown, $30.00) -

7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn (Crown, $25.00) 7

8. "Angels at the Table" by Debbie Macomber (Ballantine, $18.00) -

9. "Winter of the World" by Ken Follett (Dutton, $36.00) 6

10. "The Bridge" by Karen Kingsbury (Howard, $19.99) -

Hardcover Nonfiction

1. "Killing Kennedy" by Bill O'Reilly (Henry Holt, $28.00) 1

2. "No Easy Day" by Mark Owen (Dutton, $26.95) 2

3. "Guinness World Records 2013" (Guinness World Records) 5

4. "Rod: The Autobiography" by Rod Stewart (Crown Archetype, $27.00) -

5. "Clients First" by Joseph Callaway (John Wiley & Sons, $21.95) -

6. "Bouchon Bakery" by Thomas Keller (Artisan Publishers, $50.00) -

7. "America Again" by Stephen Colbert (Grand Central, $28.99) 3

8. "God Loves You" by David Jeremiah (FaithWords, $23.99) 7

9. "I Declare: 31 Promises to Speak" by Joel Osteen (FaithWords, $21.99) 8

10. "Who I Am: A Memoir" by Peter Townshend (Harper, $32.50) 6

Week ended October 28, 2012, powered by Nielsen BookScan (c) 2012 The Nielsen Company.

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"Argo" rises above "Cloud Atlas" as Sandy spooks

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Acclaimed Iran hostage thriller "Argo" brought home its first box-office win over a quiet weekend, leading movie charts with $12.4 million in U.S. and Canadian ticket sales as would-be moviegoers hunkered down for Hurricane Sandy.

The tally for "Argo," directed by and starring Ben Affleck, topped the $9.4 million for new sci-fi drama "Cloud Atlas". Halloween-themed animated film "Hotel Transylvania" scared up $9.5 million from Friday through Sunday, narrowly edging "Cloud Atlas", studio estimates showed.

After two weeks in the No. 2 spot, "Argo" moved into the lead and lifted its domestic sales to $60.8 million through three weekends.

The movie, produced by Warner Bros. and GK Films for $44 million, tells the story of a mission to rescue U.S. government employees from Iran in 1979. The film has earned Oscar buzz after stellar reviews from critics and an "A+" grade from audiences polled by CinemaScore.

Dan Fellman, president of theatrical distribution for Warner Bros., a unit of Time Warner Inc, attributed the film's jump to "great word-of-mouth", which he called "the best form of advertising".

"Cloud Atlas", also from Warner Bros., fell short of industry forecasts for a $13 million debut at North American (U.S. and Canadian) theaters. Fellman said the film did better in larger cities, but struggled in the South and Midwest.

The film, starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, cost $100 million to make. Many in Hollywood thought the story, based on a philosophical novel by David Mitchell, was too complex to bring to the big screen.

The nearly three-hour film with six interweaving stories divided critics, with the harshest reviewers saying it would try audiences' patience with multiple storylines and century-hopping plots. The film's stars also shift characters. Hanks, for example, is a shady doctor in the 1840s, a nuclear scientist in the 1970s and a simple valley-dweller in the distant future.

But "Cloud Atlas" also drew praise as an ambitious and well-acted epic. Sixty-one percent of reviews on the Rotten Tomatoes website recommended the film.

"Hotel Transylvania" set a record for a September film opening in North America when it opened on September 28, and has performed solidly since then.

In the family comedy, Frankenstein, the Invisible Man and other monsters gather for a party at a high-end resort operated by Dracula. Their celebration is disrupted when a boy discovers the hotel and falls in love with Dracula's daughter but must deal with her overprotective father.

The president of worldwide distribution for Sony Corp's Sony Pictures studio, Rory Bruer, wasn't entirely surprised that the weeks-old movie beat "Cloud Atlas", despite the latter movie's buzz.

"Anything at this point doesn't surprise me," Bruer said. "It's like an annuity that keeps on giving and giving."

Paul Dergarabedian, box office analyst at Hollywood.com, said the Halloween weekend gave the film a boost, and is "still the number one choice for families" among the spooky seasonal films currently playing.

This weekend was fairly quiet at the box office in North America, which Dergarabedian attributed to Hurricane Sandy, a storm menacing the East Coast of the United States.

However, the new James Bond movie "Skyfall" whipped up a storm of its own overseas, taking $77.7 million in 25 countries. The latest installment of the British spy saga took the top spot in all 25 countries, broke the all-time Saturday attendance record in the United Kingdom, and was the biggest film opening there of 2012. It will open in the United States on November 9.

Rounding out the weekend's top five, low-budget horror sequel "Paranormal Activity 4" grossed $8.7 million at domestic theaters. "Silent Hill: Revelation 3D" and "Taken 2" tied for fifth place, each pulling in $8 million.

Two other new films failed to crack the top five.

New Halloween-themed comedy "Fun Size" brought in $4.1 million at domestic theaters, landing in tenth place. The $14 million production tells the story of a boy who goes missing among trick-or-treaters, sparking his teen sister's frantic search to find him before her mother comes home.

Sports drama "Chasing Mavericks" disappointed, failing to break the top ten. The movie stars Gerard Butler in the story of a surfer who tries to conquer one of the biggest waves on Earth.

"Silent Hill: Revelation 3D" was released by Open Road Films, a joint venture between theater owners Regal Entertainment Group and AMC Entertainment Inc. Paramount Pictures, a unit of Viacom Inc, released "Fun Size" and "Paranormal Activity 4".

"Chasing Mavericks" was distributed by News Corp's 20th Century Fox studio. Sony Corp's movie division released "Hotel Transylvania".

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Review: 'The Impossible' overwhelms with melodrama

Based on the true story of a family swept away by the deadly 2004 tsunami that pummeled Southeast Asia, "The Impossible" is about as subtle as a wall of water.

The depiction of the natural disaster itself, which killed 230,000 people, is visceral and horrifying. Director Juan Antonio Bayona has crafted an event that's impeccable from a production standpoint with its dizzying, seemingly endless sprawl of destruction, a relentless, wet menace full of things that snap and stab and strangle. And Naomi Watts gives a vivid, deeply committed performance as the wife and mother of three young boys who finds the strength to persevere despite desolation and debilitating injuries.

But man, is this thing heavy-handed. Although "The Impossible" sucks you in at the start, it proceeds to pound you over the head after that.

Watts and Ewan McGregor co-star as Maria and Henry, a happily married British couple spending Christmas at a luxury resort in Thailand with their adorable sons, played by Tom Holland, Samuel Joslin and Oaklee Pendergast. (The real-life family whose story inspired the film was Spanish, like the director himself; changing their ethnicity and casting famous people to play them seems like a rather transparent attempt to appeal to a larger audience.)

During a quiet morning by the pool, the first massive wave comes ashore, scattering the family and thousands of strangers across the devastated landscape. "The Impossible" tracks their efforts to survive, reconnect, find medical care and get the hell out of town. Maria and eldest son Lucas have managed to stick together, as have Henry and the youngest boys, Thomas and Simon. But neither group knows that the others are alive. The sense of loneliness and fear that sets in during those first quiet moments after the mayhem has settled are eerie.

Both halves of the family trudge on, though. The near-misses at an overcrowded hospital are just too agonizing to be true, and the uplifting score swells repeatedly in overpowering fashion, urging us to feel, as if we wouldn't know how on our own. Surely, the inherent drama of this story could have stood on its own two feet.

Bayona lingers almost fetishistically on Watts' wounds — the massive gash to the back of her right leg, the slashes beneath her left breast, the cuts over both eyes — then he martyrs her as she lingers near death. Meanwhile, the countless thousands of native people suffer in a blur — literally, they're fleeting images glimpsed from the back of a rumbling pickup truck on a dirt road. Either that or they're elderly, toothless saints spouting gibberish, but they never feel like real people who've just endured the devastation of the only home they've ever known.

"The Impossible," a Summit Entertainment release, is rated PG-13 for intense, realistic disaster sequences, including disturbing injury images, and brief nudity. Running time: 107 minutes. Two stars out of four.

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