the physics of sorrow [georgi gospodinov, tr. angela rodel]

It struck me, whilst reading Gospodinov’s novel, how much of the Eastern European literature I’ve read has a blog-like quality. Where the line between fact and fiction appears to be elided. Tokarczuk’s Flights, Andrzej Stasiuk, now Gospodinov. I realise it’s hardly a comprehensive list, but all the same it felt like there was a kind of pattern emerging, even if that pattern is one shaped by the whims of translators and publishers. There’s a restlessness to the format of shorter sequences, coupled with an apparent bid to create a new taxonomy of the world, one that allows for factors which previous taxonomies had not.

Gospodinov makes no bones regarding the relationship of his thoughts to the past. There’s a generational investigation into the narrator’s second world war ancestry, thereby helping to show how the war and the Soviet invasion shaped Bulgaria. But this investigation is located within a wider investigation into the human condition, where he takes the misunderstood Minatour as a central metaphor, a monster that isn’t actually a monster, just a deviant version of a lost boy. The narrator himself, a writer hidden away in a cellar, identifies with this lost boy who is also a minatour, weaving a written thread to find his way out of the labyrinth.

In truth The Physics of Sorrow is a fragmentary read, a book you can dip in and out of, following the discursive nature of the writer’s thoughts. There are Barthesian hints of other books contained within the text. An investigation into the relationship between physics and metaphysics; a history of the Soviet bloc; an autobiography. These threads are stitched together to create a baggy, quasi-novel which perhaps is at its strongest in the way it reveals the formation and spectrum of the post-communist psyche. 

an american story [christopher priest]

Sometimes books define their importance not so much through their excellence as literature, but through the courage of the writing, or even, perhaps, the necessity of the writing. Books that say things that need to be said, and in the saying, affirm the potency of literature, as a force. The pen mightier than the sword. 

Priest’s novel is one of those. It’s not a complex book, despite the multiple timelines, some of it set in the future and much set in the past. It is narrated by a scientific journalist, Ben Matson, who has become obsessed by 911, for understandable reasons. His then girlfriend, Liv, was on the plane that was flown into the Pentagon. Or, as the novel speculates, was reported to have flown into the Pentagon. Matson, over the course of twenty years, investigates what really happened that day. However, the author is smart enough not to make his narrator an obsessive. He’s someone who doesn’t want to believe what the evidence points to. Who would have been happier accepting the official story. Except for the fact that, as the book shows, the official story doesn’t make sense.

This is where Priest’s text becomes subversive. In fact, the very mundanity of the prose (in general) and the book’s hero, help to heighten this subversiveness. Put simply, it doesn’t feel as though it has been written with someone with an axe to grind. There’s a constant tension between the matter-of-factness of the authorial voice, distilled through that of his protagonist, and the explosive nature of the information that is being disseminated. 

At which point, an aside. I find it hard to believe that anyone with a curious mind wouldn’t run up against some of the obvious incongruities of the events of the day which have shaped this century and our lives to such an extent. Even a cursory reading of the given facts suggests more questions than answers. Furthermore, you don’t need to be a Shakespeare scholar to know that history is written by the winners. The given story of 911, the one which launched two wars (at least), and whose residual effects quite possibly include the new wave of nationalism, is tenuous. 

Priest constructs the character of a naturalised US-Russian mathematician. who is employed by the US govt, (and interviewed twice by the narrator), to meditate upon the profounder effects of 911 and its received story on political culture, the way in which the truth is less important than the story, something the author overtly links to Brexit and Trump. The fictionalisation of the facts, which Priest never hides, (this is, after all, a novel), permits the author to re-present those facts that have been dismissed, discounted, or concealed. Of course, the reader can question whether these facts have veracity, but by presenting them within a fictional context, the author implicitly accepts that there can be no authoritative version of “the truth” of that day. Which also implies that the official story should never be accepted as authoritative.

I have never come across Priest, and only know of his work via Nolan’s adaptation of The Prestige, a story about magic. An American Story displays a master of sleight of hand analysing the work of another perpetrator of sleight of hand, albeit a perpetrator so ephemeral that we will never know their identity (or identities). In a way, the terror that might once have been generated by the defrocking of the sleight of hand which Priest conducts has dissipated. Time salves wounds. The truth becomes an interpretive science. Things happened that will never be known. The world moves on. All that is left is the wake of the lies, which continues to wash up against the shore of the present. 

el motoarrebatador (w&d agustín toscano)

Toscano’s film, with a title that perhaps is a nod to Bicycle Thieves, is set on the outskirts of Tucuman, in Northern Argentina. This is a city where the police are on strike, and where gangs of bored men loot electrical shops in broad daylight.  A petty thief who robs old ladies on his motorbike is caught up in this listless world of borderline poverty, where people seek out any way possible to get hold of the desirable gimmicks of modern life. When one of his victims ends up in hospital, he starts to get pangs of conscience, and an odd-couple movie ensues, as the thief and his victim develop a mutual dependency on one another.

Whilst the world feels slightly Latin American generic, the narrative has just sufficient twists and turns to keep the viewer guessing and cover up a few holes. The good guys aren’t all they seem and neither are the bad guys. But what distinguishes Toscano’s film is its cinematic aplomb. The acting is impeccable, with Sergio Prina making for a credible, sympathetic petty criminal, whose complex desire to create a different kind of life for himself and his young son is portrayed with a deadpan assurance. The cinematography of Arauco Hernández contains an edgy dynamism, which excels in the looting scene, captured in one long take with a great pay-off. The soundtrack is punchy and effective. Everything possible is done to give the film an edge, one that helps it to steer clear of the Latin clichés, and makes for a solid, engaging piece of film-making. 

vivre sa vie (w&d godard, w marcel sacotte)

Godard, for a third time in as many months. Godard, which is like watching a brand new way of making cinema every time. No matter that the film is nearly 60 years old. It feels like it could have been made yesterday and still knock spots off the most avant-garde cineasta out there today. Maybe the avant garde has eaten itself. There’s no room left in the multiplex. And those with avant-garde predilections have no option but to shut the system down, adapt, meet the market criteria. Does anyone today use sound with the creative dexterity that Godard did? With the brash, assertive dislocation? Does the notion of playfulness even exist anymore? Watching Godard is like watching a lost innocence, the joy of film still vibrant, still singing. Coutard’s darting, swirling camera work has undoubtably been imitated a million times, but the overall tone of reckless esprit de jeu has been consigned to the cutting room floor. And to think that Godard became a byword for pretension? When his creative impulse stems from a childlike delight in the medium’s creative and iconographic possibilities. Perhaps children are secretly the most pretentious of them all.