Eat Pray Love - the film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's hugely popular memoir, which chronicles the author's journey of enlightenment around the world after a divorce - was something of a no-brainer: with more than five million people buying a copy of the book, enticing just a fraction of them into the cinema was a sure-fire route to box-office success. Which is why book adaptations are increasingly popular in Hollywood: with money tight, studios prefer the safety net of a ready-made audience. It has ever been thus. Back in 1939, Gone With the Wind was an eagerly awaited adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's southern epic. But even the most cursory of glances at the forthcoming films to hit our screens in the next year suggests the balance has tipped firmly away from the original screenplay.
Not least because literary adaptations are often Oscar bait, too, as Push: A Novel (renamed Precious), Walter Kirn's Up in t he Air and Lynn Barber's An Education all proved last year. So the film version of Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel Never Let Me Go will surely fit firmly into that category when the 2011 nominations are made. At the Toronto Film Festival this month it was widely praised for the way Mark Romanek's direction subtly deals with its premise - that scientists discovered how to prolong human life in the 1950s - without losing sight of the love story and moral quandary at its heart.
Never Let Me Go, which will be screened here as part of the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, has enjoyed a relatively smooth transition to the screen - Alex Garland adapted Ishiguro's novel before it had even been published. Sometimes, though, the sheer density of the source material causes huge problems. Barney's Version was written by the Canadian author Mordecai Richler in 1997, but has been in development ever since - going through five writers and the death of Richler himself. The producer Robert Lantos even admitted at the Toronto Film Festival that during the completed film's 13-year gestation, two of the previous writers had been Oscar-winners. Even they couldn't get to the heart of the story.
"The book is extremely difficult to adapt," Lantos said. "It's sprawling in nature, [has] a huge cast of characters, with flashbacks and flash-forwards, and it's narrated by this character who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It's so good, so rich and juicy, that the instinct is to preserve it all, but you can't do that in two hours onscreen." By comparison, the producers of the bucolic drama Tamara Drewe had it easy. Even so, the Oscar-winning director Stephen Frears had a lot of history to contend with. Based on a much-loved weekly comic strip in an English newspaper by Posy Simmons, itself loosely inspired by Thomas Hardy's novel Far From the Madding Crowd, Frears's attitude was to use all these sources as the background for his film rather than adapt the actual story too closely.
Does it work? Mostly. Certainly, directors and screenwriters make life easier for themselves if they loosely base their films on existing texts rather than attempting full-scale adaptations, which inevitably attract criticism from rabid fans of the books. The two films at the top of the US box-office right now do suggest that merely using books as a starting point is often more successful. The Town, Ben Affleck's bank robber caper, is based on a Chuck Hogan book, Prince of Thieves. And Easy A, a high-school comedy about abstinence enjoying surprisingly good reviews, is loosely tied to Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic novel The Scarlet Letter.
The "inspired-by" route is also one that Rowan Joffe has taken for his version of Brighton Rock, out later this year. Unsurprisingly, really, as Graham Greene's original murder-thriller remains a classic of 20th-century English writing, and the 1947 film is considered to be one of the best British films of all time. Joffe, though, has moved matters 30 years forward, into the era of The Beatles. This is less a remake and more a new look at a much-loved story.
It's not just the English-speaking film industry that finds increasing inspiration in books. Two of the most eagerly awaited foreign language films of this year are the horror-romance The Solitude of Prime Numbers by the best-selling Italian writer Paolo Giordano, and Norwegian Wood by the peerless Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. And even the theatre is catching the bug. The best adaptation of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy wasn't the film at all, but a magnificently intense 2003 theatrical version performed in two parts. Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong, the First World War epic, has just opened in London, directed by Sir Trevor Nunn. The poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy will also see her poetry adapted for a magical Christmas show, Beasts and Beauties.
So the journey from page to stage or screen might be oft-travelled, and the rewards great for those who pull it off in style. But for every credible adaptation such as The Road (Cormac McCarthy) or A Single Man (Christopher Isherwood), there's the story of Yann Martel's Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi. All sorts of big-name directors have been linked with the task of chronicling in film the story of a shipwrecked teenaged boy marooned on a life raft - Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Alfonso Cuaron and M Night Shyamalan to name just three. Last year Ang Lee picked up the baton, but even he told the Digital Spy website: "How exactly I'm going to do it, I don't know. A little boy adrift at sea with a tiger. It's a hard one to crack!"
Since then... nothing but a sketchy, projected 2012 release date. Sometimes, it seems, books are best left on the bookshelves.
Election pledges on migration
CDU: "Now is the time to control the German borders and enforce strict border rejections"
SPD: "Border closures and blanket rejections at internal borders contradict the spirit of a common area of freedom"
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Stats at a glance:
Cost: 1.05 billion pounds (Dh 4.8 billion)
Number in service: 6
Complement 191 (space for up to 285)
Top speed: over 32 knots
Range: Over 7,000 nautical miles
Length 152.4 m
Displacement: 8,700 tonnes
Beam: 21.2 m
Draught: 7.4 m
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
PROFILE OF SWVL
Started: April 2017
Founders: Mostafa Kandil, Ahmed Sabbah and Mahmoud Nouh
Based: Cairo, Egypt
Sector: transport
Size: 450 employees
Investment: approximately $80 million
Investors include: Dubai’s Beco Capital, US’s Endeavor Catalyst, China’s MSA, Egypt’s Sawari Ventures, Sweden’s Vostok New Ventures, Property Finder CEO Michael Lahyani
'Shakuntala Devi'
Starring: Vidya Balan, Sanya Malhotra
Director: Anu Menon
Rating: Three out of five stars
Specs
Engine: 51.5kW electric motor
Range: 400km
Power: 134bhp
Torque: 175Nm
Price: From Dh98,800
Available: Now
Specs
Engine: Electric motor generating 54.2kWh (Cooper SE and Aceman SE), 64.6kW (Countryman All4 SE)
Power: 218hp (Cooper and Aceman), 313hp (Countryman)
Torque: 330Nm (Cooper and Aceman), 494Nm (Countryman)
On sale: Now
Price: From Dh158,000 (Cooper), Dh168,000 (Aceman), Dh190,000 (Countryman)
The smuggler
Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.
Khouli conviction
Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
For sale
A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.
- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950
