Six Degrees of Separation is a meme hosted by Kate over at Books Are My Favourite and Best. It works like this: each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six others to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the titles on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.
This month we’re starting with Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses about the corruption of a young girl by two dissipated aristocrats, described memorably by my tutor as the most pornographic book she’d read.
John Malkovich made an excellent Valmont in the 1980s movie adaptation of Laclos’s novel, bringing the same calculating amorality to his portrayal of Ripley in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game decades later.
Andrew Scott played Ripley in Netflix’s stylish series, a very different part to his role in last year’s poignant adaptation of Taichi Yamada’s Strangers (transl. Wayne P. Lammers)
In which Scott played opposite Paul Mescal who shot to fame in the BBC’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People.
Comparisons with Rooney abound in publishers’ blurbs. I made my own in my review of Johanna Hedman’s The Trio (transl. Kira Jossefson)
Leading me to William Boyd’s novel, Trio, whose three main characters are involved in making a film in 1960s Brighton.
Which is the setting for Graham Greene’s gripping Brighton Rock with its 1930s gangland backdrop.
This month’s Six Degrees has taken me from an eighteenth-century French epistolatory novel about depravity and corruption to a classic thriller featuring one of twentieth-century fiction’s most memorable characters, taking in lots of screen adaptations along the way. Part of the fun of this meme is comparing the very different routes other bloggers take from each month’s starting point. If you’re interested, you can follow it on Twitter with the hashtag #6Degrees, check out the links over at Kate’s blog or perhaps even join in.
