Lust, Caution by Eileen Chang (1979)

I read this one because I really liked the film and am always curious about how a text translates to screen (and I actually read it the other week but got sidetracked by St. Louis and forgot about blogging). I sooooo want to teach my film adaptations class again and include this one. This is only a novella, fewer than 70 pages. I think the film and novella play very well together but I do think the film needs to be seen before the novella read--which is the opposite of what I would normally say, I think. The film is very very true to the novella but expands it and adds details that are not included in the book, making it a much more complicated story. It's really unusual for film adaptations to not only do a super fantastic job of translating a text but also make the plot more complicated in a way honestly feels as if the original author had written it herself. The novella itself is very simple with the only real trouble I had being the Chinese names (but the film actually helps here because I had a face to go with most of the names already, making them more easily distinguished). Anyway, this is the sort of book that makes you want to chase after the author's other books to see what might be out there . . .