Books like Betty Blue

I went to university in 1989, so of course, like pretty everyone my age, I had a Betty Blue poster on my wall (along with The Big Blue and Blue Velvet and The Queen is Dead). And like most of my year, I fell in love with the film at one of the late night showings at Oxford's Phoenix Cinema.It wasn't until 20 years later that I finally read the book. It is so so different - the film has an epic sweep, all massive skies, moody saxophone and impossibly gorgeous colours as befits the Cinema du Look. But the book is a relentless stranglehold of intensity as the nameless narrator, who sort of plays with the idea of being a writer but doesn't really care about much other than drinking beer and hanging out falls under the spell of Betty, who is determined that he will make something of the talent she believs he possesses. Betty is his opposite, never happy except when she's on the move, constantly wanting more - not more in material terms, but more of life itself. She is one of the great existential heroes in literature, hungry for life itself, and ultimately driven mad when life refuses to keep up with her hunger for it. The ending has a strange diversion about a bank robbery that adds an element of farce missing from the film. I can't quite work out whether this gives added poignancy or detracts from an intensity that becomes almost unreadable, as we follow Betty's final descent into madness and (it's not a spoiler, we know from the word go that this is heading in only one direction) death. Betty personifies the way the world takes beauty and freedom and slowly cages and crushes it. A haunting, mesmerising, exquisite exploration of the glorious fragility of life.