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Yvettep
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 2432
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, November 03, 2007 - 04:57 pm: | 
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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/books/review/Carter-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all &oref=slogin
...Sequels to great novels are iffy propositions, especially when the great novels are also famous movies. The first authorized sequel to “Gone With the Wind,” Alexandra Ripley’s “Scarlett,” was published in 1991 to enormous commercial success and largely negative reviews. The unauthorized sequel, the parody “The Wind Done Gone,” by Alice Randall, became a best seller after the Mitchell estate sued to stop its publication and lost. The slaves were ubiquitous in Mitchell’s original, the supporting structure of the civilization she was defending and, in her view, largely happy with their lot. Randall had the clever idea of telling the story from the slaves’ point of view. Ripley, perhaps worried about giving offense, largely removed them from the story by moving a good chunk of the action to Ireland. When she had to mention them — for example, in scenes in Charleston and Atlanta — she referred to them, ahistorically, as “black,” which at the time would have been considered an insult.
McCaig avoids these pitfalls. His story stays in the South, beginning a few years before the war and ending a few years after it. The slaves are not happy. When the Union troops march through, nearly all the slaves run off — and none return later to beg their former masters to take them back, as they do in Mitchell’s telling. McCaig is perfectly willing to say “colored” and “••••••,” even when writing in the third person, and so lends his tale a verisimilitude that Ripley’s, in this respect, lacked.
Ripley saw “Gone With the Wind” as fundamentally a love story and assumed that our interest in Rhett and Scarlett would be sufficient to carry the tale. McCaig’s prose captures something of the charm and smoothness of the original. He understands that the power of Mitchell’s narrative arose because she set the romance against momentous events. He sensibly places the postwar struggle over white supremacy at the heart of his story.
But mostly his goal is to rehabilitate Rhett. The Klan question, the woman he dishonored, the rumors of a bastard in New Orleans, the money supposedly pilfered from the Confederate treasury — all of this McCaig explains away while keeping the story moving at a nice clip, faster even than the original... |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 10595
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, November 03, 2007 - 06:49 pm: |
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A very perceptive review. "Gone With The Wind" has always been my guilty pleasure. I read this 1000-page novel twice. Once when I was 18, and again when I was double that age. I've seen the movie more times than I can count. And I agree that it is a glorified soap opera that romanticizes the Old South and portrays "darkies" as either happy and simple-minded, or loyal and long-suffering. But Scarlett O'Hara, the heroine of this saga, is the consummate b i t c h and the original feminist.
Stephen Carter's critique is a good one, all right, and I am dismayed to hear that in an attempt to sanitize the infamous Rhett Butler, McCaig robbed him of the mystery and charm that made Butler such an appealing rascal. Another review I read of this book further noted that the author defused Rhett's animal magnetism.
Nevertheless, I look forward to reading this novel, but with some misgivings. What piques me is how both Stephen Carter and Margaret Mitchell's family never addressed the idea that since Margaret Mitchell died several years after she wrote this book, never exhibiting a desire to write a sequel, and that both of the people who did write sequels to GWTW were not acquainted with her, how in the hell did they know the back-story of Rhett, or how Rhett and Scarlett ended up?? If the author had wanted to take this tale to the next level she would have done so herself instead of leaving a story for strangers to take liberties with. Margaret Mitchell may very well have wanted her characters frozen in time like the carvings on Keat's "Ode to a Gredican Urn", a poem in which he declares that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,- that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
So, to me, "Scarlett" and "Rhett Butler's People" are actually new novels. Not sequels. And I guess this would also apply to "The Wind Done Gone."
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