If you liked Richard Linklater's Before Trilogy...

Recommending 3 dialogue-driven novels that evoke the intimacy of the films Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, & Before Midnight

Celine is a graduate student at the Sorbonne and Jesse’s an American with a Eurail pass. They meet on a train from Budapest to Paris. When a couple in the throes of an argument storms into another car, Jesse and Celine glance each other’s way. He raises his eyebrows. She smiles. They begin a conversation in that awkward, pretentious, magical first-date way—what parts of ourselves do we want to reveal? What anecdotes make statements about who we are, who we want to be, how we hope to be perceived?

Jesse convinces Celine to get off with him in Vienna. His flight back to the States is the next morning; she can get tomorrow’s train. He doesn’t have money for a hotel and planned only to walk around the city as afternoon became night, night became morning.

“Think of it like this. Jump ahead, ten, twenty years, and you’re married. Only, your marriage doesn’t have that same energy that it used to have. You start to blame your husband. You start to think about all those guys you met in your life, and what might’ve happened if you’d picked up with one of them. Well, I’m one of those guys—that’s me! So think of this as time travel, from then to now. To find out what you’re missing out on. See, what this really could be is a gigantic favor to both you and your future husband to find out that you’re not missing out on anything. I’m just as big a loser as he is. Totally unmotivated, totally boring, and you made the right choice, and you’re really happy!”

Celine does get off, and the two talk all evening and night. It gets dark then light again, and then the movie ends. Celine boards her train. Jessie, his bus to the airport.

Before Sunrise was released in 1995 and takes place in Vienna. Nine years later, in 2004, the next movie in the trilogy came out: Before Sunset. Jesse and Celine are nine years older, in their thirties, when they walk together through Paris. Nine years later, the trilogy’s final installment, Before Midnight, landed in theaters. The 2013 release is set in Greece. Viewers watch Jesse and Celine’s lives unfold, apart or together, as actors Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy grow older, too.¹ The films never last more than a day—conversation stretching overnight or across an afternoon or into an evening. Each takes place in summer, and I can’t help but look forward to returning to them when the nights get shorter and the weather gets warm.

Books play a role in the trilogy. Jesse and Celine’s first brief exchange on the train is about what they’re reading, and [spoiler in this footnote!]². So it only feels natural to reflect on and recommend three books (well, five) that are perfect for fans of the films.

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The Outline Trilogy by Rachel Cusk (FSG, 2014, 2016, 2018)

Rachel Cusk’s three Outline novels, like Linklater’s films, consist primarily of conversations and interactions between relative strangers. In the first novel, Outline, Cusk’s unnamed narrator travels to Athens to teach a week-long writing course.³ The man in the seat next to her on the plane strikes up a conversation, which becomes the first of many: The narrator is a listener and observer, cataloging experiences of the people around her—a friend, fellow teachers, her students—who speak to her almost in extended monologues. There’s no hook to keep readers fixed to the page necessarily, just the slow reveal of curious human truths from a variety of encounters.

The Trilogy’s second novel, Transit, is set in London, where the narrator moves with her two sons after a divorce with her husband; conversations take place with her neighbors, the workers on her flat, a date, her hairdresser, and again, her students. Readers find Cusk’s narrator traveling to Germany then Portugal to promote her book in the trilogy’s final installment, Kudos, where she talks with characters across the literary world. In my favorite blurb on Kudos’ back cover, Emily Donaldson from the Toronto Star writes, “Alienating yet intimate, dreamlike yet grounded, slim yet substantial, delicate but fierce, Cusk’s writing feels, exhilaratingly, unlike any other fiction being written these days.”⁴

And Never Said a Word by Heinrich Böll (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1953)

While Cusk’s Outline Trilogy is an obvious choice when it comes to Before Trilogy comparisons, Heinrich Böll’s novel is maybe more niche though no less suited. A post-WWII German writer, Böll won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972.

I read And Never Said a Word two summers ago in a 1978 translation by Canadian-English translator Leila Vennewitz that I found at a used bookstore in Berlin, and I immediately conducted an internet deep dive in an attempt to discover whether the novel had ever come up in an interview of Linklater’s. It seemed impossible that the director hadn’t been inspired the story, which shared so many similarities—themes, settings, exchanges, scenes—despite occurring in such a dissimilar time period. But nothing came up.⁵

Käte and Fred Bogner have been married for fifteen years and have three children together. Faced with severe poverty in the wreckage of postwar Germany, they're deciding whether to stay together or separate. The novel takes place over the course of a day and a half in a central German city. Fred sends money to but lives separately from Käte and the children in their too-small apartment. In the novel’s first pages, he’s taking a train into town so the couple can spend a date night together—the kids are being taken care of by the landlady.

As in Before Sunrise, there’s a carnival scene. Käte and Fred sleep together in a park. And they wander through cemeteries. They even play at a pinball machine in a bar. The novel, like Linklater’s film, is built out of intimate conversations between these two kind of lost, hopeful individuals. Linklater’s and Böll’s are human stories with a timeless question at their core: Will, or won’t, love persevere?

Ash Wednesday by Ethan Hawke (Knopf, 2002)

I unironically love Ethan Hawke’s sophomore novel, a sincere, manic road trip infused with Americana, even though—or perhaps because—it starts like this:

“I was driving a ‘69 Chevy Nova 370 four-barrel with mag wheels and a dual exhaust. It’s a kick-ass car. I took the muffler out so it sounds like a Harley. People love it. I was staring at myself through the window into the driver’s side mirror; I do that all the time.”

Its narrator Jimmy, cocky and insecure, is AWOL from the military. His pregnant girlfriend Christy is en route from New York to Texas, determined to get home to her family and make amends before having her baby—with or without Jimmy. It’s so clear how much fun Hawke had writing the novel. It’s a beatnik, over-the-top story almost too full of personality at times, but it’s imaginative, complicated, and startlingly sincere, too, as characters enter into winding dialogues about identity and religion and ambition. (And it’s almost impossible not to imagine Ethan Hawke and ex-wife Uma Thurman starring as Jimmy and Christy.)

Hawke, like co-star Julie Delpy, shares writing credits with Linklater on the second and third installments of the Before Trilogy—for which they received two Academy Award nominations. It’s easy to roll your eyes at an actor-cum-novelist, so I can’t help but admire Hawke’s sheer enthusiasm in all his creative pursuits and his willingness to “play the fool.” Alongside Ash Wednesday, I’m recommending a short video: Hawke’s nine-minute TED Talk: “Give yourself permission to be creative.”

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After almost a year away, I’m back in the States! I’ve landed in Minnesota until my return to New York come August. I’m working on a few different pieces/projects this month, one of which is my next newsletter; I’ll be recommending three of my favorite memoirs-in-essays.

If you’re looking for more…

• During my time at Abrams Books, I had the immense pleasure of working with Jen Fawkes and editing her dazzling, genre-bending debut novel, Daughters of Chaos, which comes out next Tuesday, July 9th. Check it out, preorder, put in a library request, listen to the audiobook, etc.—it’s an inventive, whirlwind journey through Civil War history and Greek mythology. Kelly Link, Charles Yu, and Publishers Weekly agree it’s worth your time!⁶

• I watched director Trân Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things on last weekend’s flight. The French film, based off a 1924 novel, follows a wealthy French gastronomer and chef, Dodin, and his cook Eugenie, with whom he’s in love (she loves him too, but won’t marry him). I’d say three-quarters of the film consists of choreographed scenes of cooking, plating, serving, and tasting food, with minimal dialogue. I’ve wanted to watch the film since reading Melissa Anderson’s review for 4Columns in February, but I was still surprised by just how much I loved it.

1. Writer and director Richard Linklater also filmed Boyhood (2014) over twelve years, following its main character from 6 to 18 years old. Linklater is currently working on a film adaptation of American musical Merrily We Roll Along, starring Paul Mescal. Filming will span two decades, and anticipated release is slated for 2039. (His filmography also includes the new Glenn Powell comedy Hit Man, the School of Rock movie-musical adaptation with Jack Black, and the classic Matthew McConaughey stoner flick Dazed and Confused, among others. Range!).

2. SPOILER: Jesse becomes an author, his two bestselling novels being loosely veiled fiction about his and Celine’s first and second encounters.

3. I mention Rachel Cusk in a previous newsletter about the potential pitfall of many works of autofiction: is it getting boring to read about writers writing about writers being writers? Nonetheless, I remain a huge fan of Cusk (and Knausgaard, and Heti, and the other writers mentioned).

4. Jumping into another footnote to mention that Cusk’s latest, Parade, came out in mid-June. While I haven’t read Parade just yet, I found Andrea Long Chu’s recent Vulture article about Cusk’s gender politics to be a worthwhile critique that adds nuance to my opinions and understanding of her work.

5. What I did find out is that Linklater was inspired to write Before Sunrise after a night he shared with a woman in Philadelphia, who, unbeknownst to him, tragically passed away just as filming was beginning.

6. “Jen Fawkes’s writing—and her characters—are ferociously, radiantly compelling.” —Kelly Link, Pulitzer Prize Finalist / “A dazzling synthesis of history, myth, and sheer invention. Fawkes is a bold, wild, funny writer, unafraid of taking risks.” —Charles Yu, National Book Award–winning author / “Fawkes wows with this wildly original tale.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)