French author Dominique Lapierre is writing a sequel to his celebrated best-seller, The City of Joy.
French author’s Freedom at Midnight will be a fictionalised representation of the Sunderbans
KOLKATA: French author Dominique Lapierre is writing a sequel to his celebrated best-seller, The City of Joy.
Rights of the book, Freedom at Midnight, on the events in India from 1947-48 have been sold to US-based production house Working Title.
Co-authored by Larry Collins, the book is to be made into a 10-part TV series for HBO, Lapierre says, adding that he would like someone who “loves India” to direct it, not ruling out Roland Joffe, who directed the screen adaptation of The City of Joy.
The setting of the sequel is far removed from the slums of Pilkhana in Howrah, in the brackish waters of the Sunderbans. Here too, the residents are no strangers to the poverty that was the lot of the rickshaw-puller, Hazari Pal, and his family in The City of Joy. “I want to put the Sunderbans on the world map,” Lapierre says excitedly.
“The sequel is a fictionalised representation of the Sunderbans,” he says, adding that he has already penned one-third of the novel that will be out in two years.
Lapierre’s excitement belies the fact that he is back from the very backwaters barely 15 minutes ago, to be present at the world premiere of the English edition of his latest book, Once Upon A Time In The Soviet Union.
Question him about the timing of Once Upon... (50 years after his visit to the unified nation) and he says, “Had I written this earlier, it would have been a piece of journalistic writing…. Today, it is history… about a world disappeared.”
It is a story of Lapierre (25) and Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini (27), two star reporters of the prestigious Paris Match magazine, who obtained from Nikita Krushchev an extraordinary authorisation in 1956 to cross the iron curtain to travel across Soviet Russia, in their own vehicle.
Never before had any foreigner been allowed to enter Soviet Russia in his/her own vehicle and the idea seemed most extraordinary to be left alone on Soviet roads to these two young adventurers.
Till date, Lapierre is mystified as to why Krushchev granted them that rare permission. “Perhaps, it was his new frame of mind after de-Stalinisation,” he tells DNA.
Lapierre recalls the first thing they experienced on the other side of the border. An old lady walked up to their car and said in impeccable French, “Could you deflate one of your tyres for me?
“I want to breathe the air of Paris!”
“For her, it was the air of liberty,” observes Lapierre.
They wanted to get a first-hand insight into the minds of the enigmatic Russian people, which they did through a Minsk railway worker, a Moscow sales girl, an Ukranian peasant, the Tiflis surgeon and the Gorki factory worker.
They traversed 13,000 km, finding only one gas station that sold high-octane petrol and the 500 Eiffel Tower souvenirs they carried with them for distribution, highly in demand in the black markets of Moscow!
And there was Slava, the Russian reporter who travelled with them, a man happy in his illusions, who died soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, recalls Lapierre.
m_madhumita@dnaindia.net
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
)
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
)
)
)
)
)
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}