‘This stylish debut novel by an Oscar-winning Argentine screenwriter (he co-wrote Birdman) is a suspenseful, darkly funny exploration of the creative process and the porous boundary between reality and fiction. Highly recommended’ The Mail on Sunday, ‘The Best New Fiction’
From the Academy Award-winning co-writer of Birdman, a wonderfully eccentric, suspenseful debut in the tradition of Misery and Kiss of the Spiderwoman about a screenwriter kidnapped by a world-famous director who orders him to compose a masterpiece.
Pablo, a failed Argentine novelist-turned-screenwriter, has been kidnapped by the greatest Latin American film director of all time and is kept in a basement where he works, day after day, on what he is told must at all costs be a great, world-changing screenplay. Every night, after finishing work on the script, Pablo writes in his notebook and every morning he crosses out what he wrote the night before. The Crossed-Out Notebook is Pablo’s diary of this time: being brought food by a maid; being threatened with a gun; vociferously arguing with the director about what he’s written the previous day.
The clash between the two men and their different approaches leads to a movie being made, a gun going off, an unlikely escape, and a final confrontation. In the end, The Crossed-Out Notebook is a darkly funny novel full of intrigue and surprise about the essence of the creative process; a short, crazy ode to any artist whose brilliance shines through strangeness and adversity.
From the Academy Award-winning co-writer of Birdman, a wonderfully eccentric, suspenseful debut in the tradition of Misery and Kiss of the Spiderwoman about a screenwriter kidnapped by a world-famous director who orders him to compose a masterpiece.
Pablo, a failed Argentine novelist-turned-screenwriter, has been kidnapped by the greatest Latin American film director of all time and is kept in a basement where he works, day after day, on what he is told must at all costs be a great, world-changing screenplay. Every night, after finishing work on the script, Pablo writes in his notebook and every morning he crosses out what he wrote the night before. The Crossed-Out Notebook is Pablo’s diary of this time: being brought food by a maid; being threatened with a gun; vociferously arguing with the director about what he’s written the previous day.
The clash between the two men and their different approaches leads to a movie being made, a gun going off, an unlikely escape, and a final confrontation. In the end, The Crossed-Out Notebook is a darkly funny novel full of intrigue and surprise about the essence of the creative process; a short, crazy ode to any artist whose brilliance shines through strangeness and adversity.
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Reviews
Nicolas Giacobone has done the impossible. The Crossed-Out Notebook is a meta-fictional page-turner that grapples as much with Beckett as with Pretty Woman, as much with The Beatles as with Fellini. Also hidden in these pages are gems about what it takes to sit down in your pajamas everyday and attempt to put worlds to words.
This stylish debut novel by an Oscar-winning Argentine screenwriter (he co-wrote Birdman) is a suspenseful, darkly funny exploration of the creative process and the porous boundary between reality and fiction. Highly recommended
A deceptively straightforward slack-wire act of a novel that probes the hairline crack between selling art and selling out.