You read a novel that you really liked, to the point of reading it again. You are looking for the original edition because it was a translation and you still want to go back to it. You give it away several times and effusively recommend it a few more times. You discuss the ending with other readers and see that it allows for more than one interpretation. And you are happy Until you find out that they have made a film version of it and that it has also been nominated for the Oscars, then you start to suffer. This is the film An Cailín Ciúin (The quiet girl), based on the novel Foster by Claire Keegan, translated as Tres llums (Minúscula/Eterna Cadencia).
A short novel in length but of great depth, which narrates in the first person the stay of a girl with relatives in rural Ireland because it is rather cold at home. I had a mixture of curiosity and mistrust to know how this little girl's thoughts would play out on the screen when she arrives at the new farm, where everything is cleaner, more abundant and affectionate: "Here there is space, and time to think. Maybe there's even money to spare." And he realizes that it will only be a temporary reception: "I'm at a point where I can neither be what I always am nor become what I could be".
Apart from going on this journey of knowledge and new sensations with the girl, the reader creates an image of her. It is not quite a portrait that can be reproduced, but something more ethereal. It seems to me that the reader's imagination manages to be more real than the face that someone has chosen for us to see on the screen, even if it seems like a paradox. Reading, we get a portrait of a girl without make-up or spotlights that illuminate her good side.
Despite the initial reluctance I must say that the version is fully faithful to the text and that for many of the thoughts that read are so transparent (“I feel that I am missing many words, but this is a new place and new words are needed”) they have known find good resources to convey its spirit. I was only sorry that they wasted a detail of the atmosphere of the vigil of a deceased person. "Some of the men sit around the coffin, and the part that is closed is used as a table to put the glasses on." The dark beer glasses on the box are not seen in the film, an image from the book that stuck with me.
