Faber, one of the world’s most prestigious publishing houses that boasts of having published the longest list of Nobel literature laureates, was one of the first to make cinema scripts into respectable literature. Their latest is the film version of a prize-winning biography of mathematician John Nash. A Beautiful Mind is the film script by Sylvia Nasar of Nash’s by-now forgotten biography. At 21, the eccentric mathematician at Princeton University invented the most influential theory of rational behaviour of our time: game theory. Ten years later, at the peak of his brilliant career, Nash turned schizophrenic and went in and out of mental hospitals, a silent, ghostlike figure haunting the Princeton campus. But at 60, he fought back to sanity and fame by winning the Nobel prize. But that was nothing to the glory of the Oscars, with Russell Crowe as Nash.
Bibliofile
The best writing talent is now going into films, as V.S. Naipaul pointed out...
Another book that received a fresh lease of life after the Oscars is John Bayley’s Iris, a memoir to his philosopher-novelist wife Iris Murdoch. Bayley’s poignant account of his long and loving marriage to Iris, from its inauspicious beginnings in the Oxford of the early ’50s to its slow and painful closure with Iris dying of Alzheimer’s, was a modest bestseller in the UK. But now with filmstar Judi Dench on the cover, the new edition by Abacus is all set for a splendid rerun.
Arecent example of how films can make book sales soar is Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man. Once the book was turned into a film—Earth, 1947—her publishers, Penguin India, were laughing all the way to the printers, reprinting every three months. Similarly with English, August. By the time Penguin acquired the rights, the book was well past its first flush of sales but luckily for them, the film version renewed interest in what some insist is "the only funny book written in Indian English". Of course, Anurag Mathur’s Inscrutable Americans hardly needed a film version to clamber back into the bestseller list. For some inscrutable reason, it never got off the bestseller list at all in over a decade.