BBC picks up Rachman book for TV series
Brad Pitt is no longer involved, but Vancouver-raised novelist Tom Rachman still has a screen deal for his smash debut effort, The Imperfectionists.
Pitt’s production company, Plan B, optioned the rights to the critically heralded story about a group of journalists when it became an international bestseller and made the Scotiabank Giller Prize long list in 2010.
Now, as Rachman promotes his equally ravedabout second book, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, he says Pitt’s company wrote a screenplay for the first novel but “decided it didn’t work as a film.”
“The script that they did, they cut it down to three characters essentially out of all of them, so it just didn’t really have enough of the original in it and so it didn’t go forward,” the 39-year-old said.
“But it’s now being worked up as a television series and it’s being done by BBC Worldwide.
The earliest embryonic idea for it is that it would be one episode per chapter, so it would adhere much more strictly to the way that the book unfolded.”
As for the newly released The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, Rachman said the film industry hasn’t come knocking yet.
But the gushing reviews could very well change that.
The New York Times calls the novel “ingenious,” The Times of London declares it “mesmerizing” and Vanity Fair says it’s ingeniously orchestrated.”
The richly layered story moves back and forth in time as it follows Tooly Zylberberg in three stages of her life: as a curious child in Bangkok in 1988, a scheming young woman in New York in 1999 and a 30-something owner of a struggling used bookstore in Wales in 2011.
Tooly’s peripatetic past is a mystery, even to her, but the haze begins to lift after an ex-boyfriend contacts her via Facebook to let her know the man he assumes is her father is ailing.
“I’m interested in people who feel somewhat internationally mixed up, people who are from various different cultures and aren’t really sure exactly where they fit,” Rachman says.
The writing process raised the question: “If you’re not the product in some degree of your context, then what are you the product of? Where do you come from? What makes you?
“If you’d been born in a different country, would you be the same? “Is there a kind of essential you that would exist wherever you were, even if it was a different time?”