Platforms like Netflix are the new Midas kings, capable of turning remote novels or works by thriving new authors such as Elisabet benavent. And there is so much script already in literature, why spend on creatives and scriptwriters, if only someone who is in charge of transferring what is written to the screen and little else.
So as the good of Walter Tevis regains new vigor. And that his work coming to the screens is nothing new. Only that once they were another type of screen and celluloid as a synecdoche of the cinematographic made sense. It was the happy 80s and Paul Newman together with a youngster named Tom Cruise made the homonymous film of his work "The Color of Money" worldwide popularized.
Now the wheel of fortune has returned to Tevis. And it is also not bad that chance or the relentless search for new plots (perhaps even cheap) for Netflix green up a suggestive narrative, acidic at times, dystopian eighties type at times and always relishing the exceptional and strangeness as a setting to locate ourselves. all facing the closest alienation…
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Walter Tevis
Lady's gambit
Chess, like bullfighting, offers those semantic flashes that represent an approach to its concepts from its own slang. Spaces also created in the language around a hobby that acquires that fuller point of culture when new terms are needed to apply.
Yes, "queen's gambit" is a play, like castling. And the glossary of terms would need a dictionary. There are many novels and movies around the emblem of the intellectual that is chess. But it is that even reality itself offers glimpses of fascination in characters like Bobby Fischer. And, as the mythical Sissa knew, a board, with its limitations, can be the closest thing to the eternal ...
Since its first publication in 1983, this novel became a cult book for chess players in particular and lovers of the great American novel in general. A secret that suddenly exploded at the end of 2020 with the premiere of the series based on this story, conquering the entire world in record time. Beth Harmon, the protagonist, is already an icon in the minds of millions of fans of Lady's gambit: orphan, lonely, multi-drug addict, competitive, fragile, great. A chess Mozart whose intelligence brings her both successes and problems.
This novel, addictive, fast-paced, and with a tension that does not decline in each game, in each trip, in each moment of abandonment of the protagonist, who always oscillates between success and the abyss, will remain in the hearts of the readers. And it will also serve as an introduction to the world of chess, which, like Beth Harmon, seems calm and approachable, but contains a volcano of passions and dangers underneath.
The man who fell to Earth
Fleeing the nuclear devastation of the wars that almost annihilated life on Anthea, planet of the solar system, the alien with humanoid features Thomas Jerome Newton lands on Earth after years of training and learning Earthly customs with the mission of building a ship space with which to move the few Antheans who survived the hecatomb and thus be able to ensure the survival of their lineage.
Despite his extremely fragile complexion and an unhealthy sensitivity to Earth's gravity and temperature, Newton possesses an intelligence far superior to that of humans, allowing him to revolutionize the world with some inventions - an ultra-sensitive photographic film, an unusual procedure of refining petroleum — and becoming one of the great fortunes of Earth.
However, contact with humans, uprooting and a natural tendency to melancholy will turn him into an alcoholic and jeopardize his mission. "The Man Who Fell to Earth" is one of the great classics of science fiction and a subversion of the theme of the alien invasion. Starting from a realistic approach, tinged with the unease of postwar existentialism and the threat of the Cold War, the novel breathes life into one of the genre's most fragile and memorable aliens.
David Bowie played the Anthean in the celluloid version of the book, directed by Nicolas Roeg in 1976. In late 2015, shortly before his death, Bowie composed the musical "Lazarus", a sequel to "The Man Who Fell to Earth." , which premiered in New York.
The color of money
Thanks to the fact that Scorsese found it funny, this novel transcended even more than it did "The Man Who Fell to Earth" with Bowie in the cast of its film version. But the truth is that as a plot it does not have for me the hook of the other two good novels that Tevis released. However, there was little to choose from this writer because the rest of his bibliography is scattered in short stories or in untranslated books, unless Netflix now works the magic and turns him into a best-seller in 2021 also in books ...
Twenty years after conquering the underground pool circuit, Eddie Felson the Fast returns to play a series of exhibition games with his longtime rival Minnesota Fats. With a failed marriage and years of running a pool hall behind him, Eddie is ready to challenge the world of competitive billiards, where everything has changed since his time.
There is a new generation of contenders, much more public matches, and a question in the air: can the old hustler regain his legendary ability? The Color of Money was the basis for Martin Scorsese's film of the same title with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise.
Other recommended books by Walter Tevis
Mockingbird
Hundreds of years from now, Earth has become a bleak, dystopian world where robots work and humans languish, lulled to sleep by electronic bliss and narcotic bliss. It is a world without art, without reading and without children, in which people choose to burn themselves alive so as not to bear reality. Spofforth, dean of New York University, and the most perfect machine ever created, is an android of unlimited duration who has lived for centuries and whose most fervent wish is to die.
The only problem is that his programming prevents him from committing suicide. Until two characters intersect in his life: Paul Bentley, a human who has learned to read after discovering a collection of old silent movies; and Mary Lou, a rebel whose biggest hobby is spending hours at the New York Zoo admiring the automaton snakes. Soon Paul and Mary, like two modern biblical Adam and Eve, will create their own paradise in the midst of desolation.
With echoes of Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World or Blade Runner, Mockingbird is one of the most mythical modern science fiction novels, which reads as an elegy to the wretched of humanity, as a celebration of love and as a journey of self-discovery. .
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