Thaindian News

New Delhi, Jan 24 (IANS) American writer Lionel Shriver, the author of “We Need to Talk About Kevin”, is still moved by the novel she wrote in 2003 about a disturbed mother and son, but says its screen adaptation misinterprets the book.

“The film is very unambiguous about the kid. It takes into account that Kevin is evil. The movie comes across as a horror movie and it is in this area that I am disappointed. The film misinterprets the book,” Shriver said in a conversation with writer-editor Nilanjana Roy at the Jaipur Literature Festival Tuesday.

The 55-year-old author of 11 books shot to fame after her eighth book “We Need To Talk About Kevin”, an epistle monologue written after a long spell of professional obscurity as a journalist. It won the Orange Prize for fiction. It was made into a movie by BBC Films and screened at the Toronto Film Festival in 2011.

It deals with a fictional school shootout, a grisly family murder and the troubled relationship between the killer Kevin and his “cold” mother Eva.

The movie by Lynne Ramsay, which stars Tilda Swinton, Ezra Miller and John C. Reilly, was critically acclaimed for its incisive look at the modern day mother’s psychology and the American society where kids are often drawn to guns, violence and depression in fractured filial mosaics.

Kevin is not loved by his mother, who resents the fact that she is a mother.

“I liked Kevin… I came to like him even more and more as I wrote the book. I appreciated his wit and intelligence. He turned into a cold person because of his mother’s neglect… Now whose fault is the atrocity which is committed at the end of the book,” Shriver said.

“I think school shootings are absolutely evil. But I am reluctant to move the word to the killer. Each of those school shootings has a story behind it… as a journalist I had a sense of it but in a novel you get the back story,” she said.

Shriver’s books combine story telling with contemporary realities and complex human relationships that bustle with an underlying restlessness and inquisitiveness reflecting the writer’s tomboyish ways and a rather radical view of the world-breaking out of stereotypes.

“Eva, the narrator in Kevin, does not love her son. She looks on her own self without sentimentality. Being a mother is quite stark. She was not happy being pregnant… it is not exactly a walk in the park. Eva feels demoted from a householder to a house. She finds herself colonised,” Shriver said.

When the baby is put to Eva’s breasts for the first time, she says “What’s this”.

“When the baby screams, she can’t stand it. When the kid gets a bit older, she has to teach him the alphabet… it is boring because she had learnt her alphabet long ago,” Shriver says, opening up Eva’s psyche.

Shriver on her part is assailed by a similar “boredom” towards children in real life.

“I can’t play with five-year-olds either. It is tedious - being a parent is hard work,” Shriver says.

But the world is obsessed with motherhood, the writer says. “We rely on the bedrock of our parents and we can’t imagine that we can do anything that wouldn’t make them love us any more,” she said.

Shriver believes in freedom of choice for women and celebrates the fact that she is “born in a generation which has choice - whether to breastfeed or not”.

Her 11th book “The New Republic”, a novel about human charisma and terror, was published in 2011.