The Crossed-Out Notebook
A Novel
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From the Academy Award-winning cowriter 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Giacobone, who co-wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for Birdman, contributes a mind-bending addition to the Latin American tradition of metafiction in his clever debut. Pablo Betances, a talented but unknown screenwriter, believes he's had a lucky break when his friend's girlfriend passes his screenplay to famous film director Santiago Salvatierra. Instead, Salvatierra kidnaps Pablo and imprisons him in his basement, forcing him to write a screenplay that Salvatierra intends to take credit for. Pablo is brought sustenance by the housekeeper (whose cooking gives him hemorrhoids), listens to The Beatles on repeat, and has endless arguments with Salvatierra about plot ideas and edits to the screenplays he is being forced to write. After five years in his basement prison, during which time he's written two successful screenplays, he is tasked with writing his final screenplay: the one that will change the history of film and cement Salvatierra's reputation as the greatest director/writer in the world. While a movie is eventually made, it subverts both Pablo and Salvatierra's ideas of what filmmaking can be. Pablo's journal entries detailing his ridiculous situation and creative anxiety are humorous, insightful, and pointedly sardonic as he draws from and imitates with delightful absurdity the writing of Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges. Giacobone's superb novel entertainingly dredges the neural recesses of how art is created, what it means to be authentic, and if potential can ever truly be harnessed.
