Adaptations: A Guest Post from Brian Selznick, Author of Kaleidoscope
Audiobook $18.99
Kaleidoscope
Kaleidoscope
By
Brian Selznick
,
Robert Een
Narrated by
Gwendoline Christie
In Stock Online
Audiobook $18.99
With a story focused on the transcendence of a relationship through time, space, memory, and dreams, the stories in Kaleidoscope are an exploration of grief and love in a fresh way. Here, Brian Selznick tells us about the experience of adapting Kaleidoscope for audiobook and the ways they adapted the stories and physical format to work in a brand new medium!
With a story focused on the transcendence of a relationship through time, space, memory, and dreams, the stories in Kaleidoscope are an exploration of grief and love in a fresh way. Here, Brian Selznick tells us about the experience of adapting Kaleidoscope for audiobook and the ways they adapted the stories and physical format to work in a brand new medium!
Kaleidoscope was written during the first lockdown of the pandemic while I was stuck in New York and my husband was stuck in California. I found myself trying to capture in stories the feelings of loss and confusion and fear and hope that I was feeling. I didn’t actually know at the time these stories were going to be published, and I did not write them in the order they appear in the book. They’re more abstract and open-ended than anything I’ve created before, and originally, they were not going to be illustrated. The pictures were supposed to be created completely in the reader’s mind. But my editor, David Levithan, had a wonderful idea about using images that look like they’re being seen through a kaleidoscope at the start of each chapter, and now I feel those spreads serve several purposes, including giving the reader’s mind a rest between stories. When it came time to adapt the book for audio, there were two main challenges. One involved the natural loss of the pictures, which is always an issue with adapting illustrated work, and the second issue had to do with the fact that the narrator in the book has no name and no gender.
That said, I always love the process of adapting work, whether it’s turning a book into a movie, a musical or an audiobook. The challenge is always to make the adaptation feel like it’s the only form in which the story can be told. I’ve been lucky because most of my audio adaptations have been created in collaboration with Paul Gagne, the brilliant Director of Production of Weston Woods Studios and Scholastic Audio. For Kaleidoscope he had a beautiful idea regarding the use of music, which could echo the ideas of fragmentation that run throughout the book, replacing the kaleidoscopic images I use at the start of each chapter. We hired my friend Robert Een to write the music and then Paul worked with the Sound Engineer Steve Syarto to break down and build up the musical motifs over the course of the audio book, giving a cosmic sense of transformation and growth.
Because the narrator has no name and no gender, finding a reader was a bit trickier. In the end, we reached out to Gwendolyn Christie, best known as Brianne of Tarth on Games of Thrones, because we felt she could transcend gender and capture a mysterious sense of humanity in the stories. Her performance still gives me goosebumps every time I hear it.