Character Study: Readopolis

Our new and improved Character Study column takes the CanLit books you love and re-imagines them as Hollywood movies: who would play your favourite bookish characters and why.Readopolis strikes a chord with writing and publishing folks – main character Ghislain is an editorial board reader for a publisher – and then pushes that chord to the brink. What if reading was a transformative and teleportational act, bringing the reader away from their everyday doldrums and to the sparsely-inhabited Readopolis? Told over a plethora of writing media – narrative, sure, but emails, screenplays, letters, too – the novel’s protagonist staggers between reality and Readopolis, finding it increasingly difficult to tell which is which. We couldn’t think of a better plot for a movie.Bertrand, ever wonderful, sent us his “dream of the dream of the dream cast !!!“He also gave us the direction: “I propose an abstract kind of poster, a la Calder or Tinguely style. Like a Hitchcock poster or a fifties arthouse geometrical stylish poster.“Oana, equally wonderful, sent us some photos from a recent trip to Chicago for the poster. We used the one of a building, looking up.

Is it clear we had a blast with this one? Because we did. For some background colour, check out this reading of Readopolis in both the original French and translation, at the BookThug Spring 2017 launch. * * *Thanks so much to Bertrand and Oana for their enthusiastic participation, and to Hazel at BookThug for connecting us. Don’t miss our Universal Bureau of Copyrights, nor Readopolis, available now. For more Character Study, click here.