Good news for those who enjoyed HBO’s adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize winner, Olive Kitteridge. The director, Lisa Cholodenko, is gearing up for another TV adaptation, this one for NBC, of a complex, award-winning novel, The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, (Penguin, 2010).

It was just announced that Uma Thurman will star, replacing Mary Louise Parker, who recently had to drop out to recover from pneumonia.

The controversial Australian novel, about the shock waves set off after a man, having had it with an obnoxious four-year-old boy at a barbecue, ends up slapping him. It was a hit in both Australia and the U.K., where it became a reading group staple.

When it was released here as an original trade paperback, it received a strong endorsement in the Washington Post.  Noting that the book switches back and forth among various characters and their reactions to the events, the reviewer says,

It’s a potentially confusing structure, but Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas is a master of seamless joints … He gets so close to his characters that the reader almost pleads with him to treat them more kindly.

While it gives American readers a sense of life in Australia, it also resonates here,

In The Slap we live for a few short weeks in suburban Australia, learning the language, becoming intimate with the characters and experiencing their customs. But finally the novel transcends both suburban Melbourne and the Australian continent, leaving us exhausted but gasping with admiration.

It was made into a popular Australian TV series in 2011 (as a result, some reports cite the new adaptation as a remake of that series, without noting the original source material).

Below is a trailer for the Australian version:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2014 at 10:22 am and is filed under Books & TV, Fiction, Literary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.