Shadows and inspirations

© Michael Chevy Castranova 2016

-->I’m now at the part in “Everybody Behaves Badly,” Lesley M.M. Blume’s book about the writing of “The Sunday Also Rises,” in which she details how much Hemingway altered his fictional characters from their real counterparts. In some cases, not very much at all, and not very politely.

I’m clearly going to have to read the novel again. (That would make it the seventh or eighth time — I’ve lost count over the years.)

But I’ve long been fascinated about using real people as models for fictional characters. Writers and cartoonists often adapt the looks and sometimes aspects of the personalities of movie and sports celebrities — alive or dead — and of friends and enemies.

And sometimes they borrow both the looks and the personalities. Are these people ever flattered by the attention?

Hemingway revealed very little to his friends about how he’d taken their looks and lives and remarks and reshaped them into his version of events. Probably because they wouldn’t have liked the unkind way he portrayed them.

They had to read the book for themselves.

Have I done that in “Slipped”? Well, in the eight-plus years I’ve definitely modeled some characters real people.

For one, Dargelos is meant to look like — in a very cartoony way, of course — Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni. He died in 1996, and I’m sure he was in no way demonic. But I figured if the devil — or something like the devil — desired to tempt and trick a young woman, he’d want to look like Mastroianni — charming, smooth and handsome in “8 ½” and “La Dolce Vita,” among other movies.

You can pick up the trail of the Scarlet Sparrow — right now joined by her sister, Mendacity, and, as always, Pip — in chapter 383. Take a look.

© Michael Chevy Castranova 2016

Behaving badly in Paris

 

Pip image © Michael Chevy Castranova 2016

It occurs to me, as I’m reading Lesley M.M. Blume’s new book, “Everybody Behaves Badly,” about how Ernest Hemingway came to write “The Sun Also Rises” — which I’ve read at least a half-dozen times — that in the mid-1920s Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, JohnDos Passos and others would have been in Paris. That is, around pretty much the same time when the Scarlet Sparrow lives there.

So my thought is, as Tyler, Pip and friends, as about to return to Paris, maybe they’ll drop in at la Closerie des Lilas or le Dingo and spend some time with these famous expats.

She will, after all, need all the allies she can get. Remember, as this storyline moves forward from chapter 381 onward, this will be her second time through Paris in 1926. The first time saw the already-in-place occupation of western Europe by les Rongeurs. But now, after Tyler altered history — in hopes of stopping the giant rats — she’s actually made things worse. This time, the rats are in even more control, and have even larger rats with them — all due to Tyler injecting two of them with the genetic serum and giving them the idea to perfect the formula.

So, yeah, she is going to need help. Take a look right here.