【Editor's Note】
In 2016, in order to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, hogarth publishing house, a well-known literary publishing house under the Penguin Random Group, joined hands with world-renowned novelists to start a plan to rewrite Shakespeare's classic plays, the first batch of 7 works included in the "Hogarth Shakespeare Series", rewritten by British female writer Janet Winterson from Shakespeare's later work "Winter's Tale", and "Sherlock is My Name" rewritten by British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson from "The Merchant of Venice". American writer Ann Taylor rewrote "Kate's Choice" from "Taming", and the famous Canadian writer Margaret Atwood rewrote "The Witch's Descendants" from "The Tempest".
Recently, the series of novels rewritten from "Macbeth" "Black City" launched a Chinese version, the novel by the Norwegian suspense novelist, known as the "Nordic crime king", You Nesbo, this article is Nesbo's creative note on "Black City", the surging news is published by the novel Chinese publisher "unread" permission.
Black City: A Modern Edition of Macbeth, by You Neisbo, translated by Shen Xi, Beijing United Publishing Company, September 2018
When I was nine years old, "Where Eagles Dare," starring Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood, was released in the small town of Molde, where I grew up. The movie was set for level 15, so my brother Knut and I had to stay at home and watch my brother Pelle go to the blockbuster. When he got home, he called us into his room, closed the door, dimmed the lights, and repeated the movie to us from beginning to end. The film is about an Allied general captured by the Nazis, who is a key player in the success of the Normandy landings and must be rescued. The film shows the castle in the mountains, the thrilling rescue plan, and Major Smith's struggle to eliminate the traitors. Pell also described Eastwood's appearance as a smoker and his fight with the enemy on the top of the cable car, as well as all the other one hundred and fifty-six minutes. As I left the room, I knew that the movie that had just been shown in my head was more engaging than any Tarzan of the Apes movie I had seen before.
The film's success is of course due to Alistair McLean. He wrote the original novel and the screenplay. The performances of director Brian Hutton and the actors are also one of the reasons for the film's success. And my brother, who has always been a master storyteller. But what I didn't expect at the time was that I actually had a credit here. As a writer and a reader, I have learned a truth from this - a writer's story can only be truly lived when it meets the reader, the audience and the audience. The words you read and hear can only take you to limited situations, and it gives you the necessary space for association, but you have to rely on yourself to direct the rest of the film. The story is created in the process of the reader's unconscious dramatization of the text, and the text is a new story in the eyes of each reader, and it is also slightly different. That's why all stories,whether gifted or not—are never better than the re-created versions of the reader's experiences, imaginations, creativity, and desires, let alone the patience to interpret them. We might as well accept the label "misunderstood writer", because it is only used seriously when the reader thinks that he has finally understood a certain writer, and it makes a strong point to me: the new reader has directed a play that is very different and better than the previous version with the same raw material. In fact, even a writer who is essentially moderate may read better now than he did in his own time, because changing times, renewed knowledge, or cultural curiosity can cause a work to be rediscovered from the previous garbage heap. So to put it bluntly, readers are better than writers. Paul McCartney once mentioned a lyric when he was inspired: "She went through the bathroom window, which was guarded by a silver spoon." He thought the phrase was both cool and mysterious. That doesn't mean, though, that as a reader, I can't use this sentence and the context to create a better story than McCartney had in mind (or he didn't come up with any story at all). The reader is his own author, and that's not to say that writers aren't good or bad. The best directors also need good screenwriters.
Jo Nesbø
Many writers, including me, like to fantasize that the books we write can give us immortal life. But the stories printed on the shelves are lifeless, no matter how wonderful they are. The only ones that survive are the different versions of the same story that remain in the reader's memory, or the one that was produced when they removed the book from the shelf and began to read.
It is not difficult to understand, then, that lifeless, forgotten stories have indirectly gained a longer—albeit a secret—life, like laying an egg, from generation to generation, reproducing new stories. After that, these vibrant stories converge into a genealogy. At this point, we talked about Shakespeare from Eastwood and my brother.
When I was invited to rewrite Shakespeare's plays, I put forward one condition: let me write Macbeth. Like most Norwegians, I had a much greater affection for Ibsen than Shakespeare, but I had seen Macbeth as a child and seen films by Roman Polanski, which prompted me to read the Norwegian translation of the play. Later I saw Brian de Palma's Scarface, the inspiration was so obvious that even I could see it, and I realized that Macbeth had various remakes behind it, including wandering musicians. Just as a musician can both purely cover a popular classic and adapt it slightly, the writer benefits both from his predecessors and from the contemporary. Literary scholars like to argue that there is a dialogue between books, but the reason their horizons are so narrow may be that there are only books in their world. If we look around, we can see that all types of stories interact with each other: books, films, theatrical works, lyrics, stand-up comedy, visual arts, news reports, history, political rhetoric, and nonfiction.
Milan Kundera once said that the meaning of the existence of the novel is to complete the task that only the novel can complete. That's a good point, but I'm afraid I won't agree with it. For example, I don't see a fundamental difference between Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men and the Coen Brothers' remake of the same name. Regardless of this, the novel and the film are very good. This may be because our generation is a generation that consumes a lot of stories, and we are too accustomed to this, and we are filled with stories all the time, so we do not refuse any form of innovation. So, when a movie is made like a book, or a book is written like a movie, we can all digest and accept it. Maybe we will ask, why is this? If the new form does not provide new content, is it not redundant? This seems to be the obvious truth.
However, neither the film version nor the novel of "Old Nobody" feels superfluous. Just like when a good book is read a second time, you rarely feel redundant. Similarly, listening to Joe Kirk's cover of "With a Little Help from My Friends" and Ryan Adams' version of "Wonderwall" doesn't feel superfluous. Perhaps the reason for this is that the stories are updated in repetition, where they not only meet the reader, but also collide with a new voice that tells the story.
So you find yourself with a rewrite of Macbeth, and you've agreed to create a version of the novel based on this world-class classic. All you need is a new approach to creation, a personalized interpretation, and confidence that the reader will do the rest on their own. How hard can this be? I don't know, but "How hard can this be" has always been my motto, and I have had the problem of having a low eye since I was a child, which has led to me sometimes achieving small things and sometimes failing. Given that forgetting failure is much faster than forgetting success, my motto and this naïve idea remain unchanged to this day. Well, that's it. I decided to adopt the framework of the novel and see where it led me. I don't want to get caught up in the classic interpretation of Shakespeare's character, but rather want to follow my instincts – what drives them? What might be their deep or relatively shallow motivations? I want to set aside all shakespeare lines and popular lines and change the time, place, and context from eleventh-century Scotland to a corrupt black city of the 1970s, mired in crime, industrial pollution, Cold War mentality and addiction, and a power struggle over the position of police chief. The plot of the Three Witches boiling poison represents the supernatural elements of Shakespeare's play (experts vary widely in their interpretation of the witch's metaphor and their relationship with the goddess Hecate), but they are very realistic in my novel: they are the drug-making pharmacists who serve the city's big drug lord and the black hand behind the scenes.
In my novels, Mrs. Macbeth has worked as a prostitute and bustard, and her goal in life is to become a woman who is admired or at least respected by all. So she opened a casino, which was frequented by politicians and celebrities in the city, giving her the opportunity to meet the powerful. Her lover, Macbeth, was much younger than she was and was the swat team leader in the fight against drug cartels. They have a fierce love, but unfortunately a mismatched couple. Macbeth is a police hero who supports the new commissioner, Duncan, in fighting corruption, while Madame is more practical and cares only about political influence. But later, Macbeth and his wife realized that they could replace Duncan as police chief, as long as they were willing to poison Duncan.
Loyalty and integrity. Social loyalty to the people you love, but therefore difficult to be loyal to you. Personal ambition and a thirst for power make it difficult for you to uphold integrity, morality, and the public interest. And how emotions dominate, make decisions for us, and make excuses for those decisions afterwards. The thirst for power creates a monarch, but it is also this poison—the witch's "craft brew"—that drives their hearts darker and more humiliated. Probably this category. I can write.
I shouted at my brothers that they could come in. I closed the door, dimmed the lights, and started telling the story. I don't know if this is the plot in Shakespeare's or Alistair McLean's mind, but in this moment, it's my story, and it's up to me. At this moment, I can imagine myself trying to create the image of Macbeth like Shakespeare. When they walk out the door and the lights come on again, I will naturally wake up. I will humbly salute this master and let go of my fantasies. Maybe that's why writers spend so much time writing, in order to make themselves sit in that room, immerse themselves in legends, and imagine that this is where they belong. There is a childhood memory that always lingers. On my way home, I finally reached the age limit and watched the whole "Blood Stained Snow Mountain Castle". I found that while Burton, Eastwood, and this legendary production were brilliant, they weren't as compelling as my brother's dictations. Because I made it even more exciting. Similarly, I hope my readers and friends will make Macbeth the best version in the world—a story that's not entirely redundant.