OK so here's what we now know about Choob's adaptation idea:
- Author died after 1948 (as not currently public domain) but probably before 1990 (as Ollie anticipates making an adaptation when the works are public domain). Probably died after 1958 as otherwise Choob wouldn't be seeing this as an "outlast" situation, so it's not going to be public domain particularly soon.
- This particular work has never been adapted (but other works may have been adapted)
- Managed by a man who's the head of his own literary agency that is also named after him
- Has an associated foundation and one of the members lives in London, but the rest don't
- Ollie judges the author to be needing more attention from his adaptation
It's
got to be Nabokov, right? At one point I was thinking maybe he wanted to do an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's
Love Amongst The Ruins (it has a whole bit where a bearded woman is forced to submit to society and get a rubber jaw installed, so obvious trans parallels, and the main character is an arsonist) but it's this literary foundation that's got me swayed back. Most dead authors don't have foundations.
We don't know for certain Andrew Wylie is the literary agent (although it makes sense for previously described reasons) but there's only 10 or so foundations on his agency's client list and they're either children's books or visual artists - Nabokov is the only adult fiction author.
Furthermore here's the list of people associated with the Vladamir Nabokov Literary Foundation:
Andrew Wylie - President
Lila Azam Zanganeh - Secretary
Morris Kahn - Treasurer
Brian Boyd - Trustee
Gennedy Barabtarlo - Trustee
Olga Voronina - Trustee
The first two live in New York City, Morris Kahn lives just outside Tel Aviv, Brian Boyd is a lecturer at the University of Auckland, Gennedy Barabtarlo died recently but was a lecturer at the University of Missouri... but Olga Voronina is a lecturer at University College London's School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies. She's based in UCL. She lives in London.
The arguments against it being Nabokov are a) surely Choob wouldn't be so arrogant as to think he could adapt Nabokov (he would) and b) Ollie thinks his adaptation could bring Nabokov more attention. Nabokov is a well known author, but your average person probably doesn't know who he is and most people who've heard of Nabokov probably haven't read him or at most have read Lolita. The average PhilosophyTube enjoyer (you know, people who'd never been to the theatre before) is unlikely to read a dense modernist 600 page novel about philosophy and incest written by a dead Russian guy, but they would watch an adaptation of it (because they know claiming to have read Nabokov makes you sound smart).
So I'm calling it. Just like how we second guess ourselves in the Tranch thread thinking they can't really be that stupid (and then they wow us by being that stupid), we've all been hedging that Ollie wouldn't actually go out of his way to try and adapt Ada, Contrapoint's favourite book. But nah, I think this is about as much confirmation I need short of Ollie openly admitting it that he's been trying to adapt Ada.
That’s been a little while now though.
