A review by susannah_n
Diary of a Film by Niven Govinden

3.0

I hoped this would be better. Niven Govinden set the scene of the novel really well, but the pretentiousness of the main character (the otherwise nameless "Maestro") and the way the focus of the story moved back-and-forth didn't work for me. The secondary characters were appealing, but that wasn't enough. And the story really lost me with its references to the film that the Maestro is promoting: an adaptation of William Maxwell's The Folded Leaf. I read The Folded Leaf before I read Diary of a Film because I knew it referenced Maxwell's story, but I don't actually know why Govinden bothered to call it an adaptation since it basically just used the names of that book's title, author, and main characters, and changed the rest. And yes, I realize that adaptations often just use the names of a book's title, author, and characters, but in a book about a director in which his latest movie's plot is not even secondary to the novel's plot, it hardly seemed necessary.