in the night of time (w. antonio muñoz molina, tr. edith grossman)

Plaza Santa Ana, a place where a young American rents a room, living beside washerwomen and labourers The smell of homemade food wafts its way up to her third floor apartment. Caldos, or sopas, tomato based, heavy on the pimenton, earthy flavours which make the most of the leftovers from the day before the day before. Down the road, on Alcala, just off Sol, a politician sits in a bar and consumes vast quantities of prawns and beer. The city hums with a life which reflects the way the capital has become a pole star, integrating every corner of the country, Andaluz, Asturian, Catalan, Galician and so on and so forth. It’s a far cry from the Santa Ana and Calle Alcala of today. Today, Santa Ana is full of dainty restaurants with prices geared towards the tourists. Sol is a catch-all, gaudy to the point of ugliness. As such, Molina’s novel, which is about many things, feels like a lament for a lost Spain, a Madrid which has been appropriated by the tourist dollar. The first time I ever visited Madrid, it still had a provincial feel; a town for insiders, full of secrets. Now, its secrets have been cast to the wind and it bustles with the energy of a modern, global capital. 

The novel captures Madrid on the eve of the Civil War. It’s framed around the affair conducted by its protagonist, Ignacio Abel, with Judith, a youngish American who is falling in love with him and Madrid. The novel has a double focus. On the one hand it’s a brilliant portrayal of a city which is teetering on the brink of disaster. Day by day, as the affair unfolds, the city steps closer and closer to the abyss, never realising where it will end until it’s too late. Molina details this process immaculately. The reader feels as though they are entering the vortex alongside the characters, many of whom will meet, we know, a tragic end. Hindsight is the novelist’s great weapon, and Molina wields it like a fencing sword. At one point he writes: “How strange to imagine with such clarity what I haven’t lived, what happened more than seventy years ago.” That strangeness is communicated to the reader, looking on in horror as the net closes. For an English reader in these times, the novel is more than disconcerting, it’s positively scary. 

The secondary focus of the novel is the affair. This too is detailed meticulously. Every step of Judith and Ignacio’s voyage is mapped. The novel itself is framed around Ignacio’s voyage from Penn Station to Rhineland, the university town on the Hudson where he has been commissioned to design a library, (his ticket out of Spain). At the end of this journey, he will meet Judith once again. The novelist never seeks to place his protagonist in a sympathetic light: he’s not merely fleeing Spain, he’s also running away from his family. There’s a coldness to Ignacio which perhaps goes with his chosen profession, a coldness which Judith succeeds in melting. At times it’s hard not to question Ignacio and by implication the author himself. if there’s any part of this novel which felt less than satisfactory to this reader it was the last twenty five pages, which might be said to allow Ignacio to have his cake and eat it.

Nevertheless, this last section cannot take the shine off a novel which succeeds brilliantly in conjuring up the lost world of pre-Civil War Spain, capturing in the process the way in which families and communities were rent asunder. At one point in the novel there’s a barbed reference to Hemingway and the other foreign writers who passed through Spain during the Civil War. In non-Spanish speaking countries, our understanding of that conflict is very much shaped by an outsider’s perspective. Here, in a fine translation by Edith Grossman, Molina recalibrates that, offering a compelling, evocative portrayal of a land teetering on the brink. 

doubles vies (w&d olivier assayas)

Assayas is prolific. He’s one of those directors who makes almost a film a year. There aren’t many who manage to do this nowadays. (Allen, Eastwood, Winterbottom.) You need a well-oiled machine to be able to go through the whole process of development, financing, pre-production, production, post with such consistency. Studios are set up to do this, but individual directors generally aren’t. The problem with the machine is that there’s a danger that the product starts to feel like just like that. A product. And there’s a sense with Doubles Vies, for all its fleeting moments of brilliance, that this is just that. 

The film opens with a wordy, brilliant sequence where publisher Alain informs the novelist Leonard Spiegel that he’s not planning on publishing his new novel, but he does so in a roundabout, amiable fashion, inviting him to lunch before stabbing him in the back. The decision is taken in he context of where Alain’s publishing house is going, with much discussion about the destiny of the novel in the digital age, both as an idea and a tangible product. Alain is having a fling with his head of digital operations, the go-getting bisexual Laure. The film appears to be laying down all kind of markers, as an investigation into the shape of thought in the future; the value of the word; the death of the attention span. In which context the highly wordy script makes sense: the film is challenging an audience to pay attention, to roll with intellectual ideas, a revindication of cinema as a space of thought/ philosophy rather than pure entertainment. There’s a lovely running joke about Haneke’s White Ribbon as well as a mediation on the ethics of auto-fiction, which might have struck a nerve with the Uruguayan audience. 

And yet, beneath all this, Doubles Vies ends up a very traditional French sex-comedy. Everyone is sleeping with someone else. The deceit stacks up and is mined for comedy. The ideas don’t really go anywhere, or if they do, it’s over this viewer’s head. The final pay-off is unadulterated sentimentalism. This is a bouillabaisse of Frenchness, pungent, reliable, a heartwarming dish. It reaffirms the tropes that the french are intellectual lovers, who drink in elegant bars whilst talking with aplomb about les idées du jour. Whether there’s any real substance behind all this is another matter altogether. 

la flor, parte 1 (w&d mariano llinás)

Paradox: should one write a review of La Flor, having only seen one third of the whole film? Under normal circumstances, the answer would be no. But La Flor is 808 minutes long. The first part alone is nearly three hours long. The film is made up of six stories, featuring the same four actresses, stories which are not connected. In the only part of the film which might be described as brief, the prologue, the filmmaker gives a rundown of each story, supplying an elegant diagram describing the shape of the film, a diagram which has the forma of a flower (or ‘flor’ in Spanish). The film, we are told, consists of four unfinished stories, another story which has a beginning, a middle and and an end, and a final story. Last night, in the company of Snr O, I watched the first two parts. 

Llinás specialises in shaggy dog stories. Another three part epic, Historias Extraordinarias, used voiceover to construct three narratives over several hours which never really went anywhere. Something similar occurs here, even though there’s no private-eye style narration. The first tale is a self-consciously B-Movie Mummy story, of possession in the Andes. It’s rudimentary and effective. The second chapter is more complex. This tells the story of a singing duo, who were a couple, albeit a couple whose story has been fictionalised in order to create a false marketing myth. The conflict between the two singers leads to a highly charged, brilliant rendition of their hit song, a duet in which the couple use the song like a weapon with which to wage their ongoing conflict. There’s shades of a sixties french romantic drama at work, something quasi-Godardian, very nouvelle vague, with faces in profile dominating the screen and much use of depth of field. 

Interweaved in this second story is another B-Movie strand, as one of the singer’s assistants is involved with a shadowy gang which is seeking to extract a serum for eternal youth from the venom of a “centurion scorpion”. The two narratives sit awkwardly within the same tale. The B-movie strand undercuts the potency of the music narrative. The chapter drags on, loses focus, becomes self-indulgent. Llinás’ temporal ambition, converting cinema into a kind of epic, oneiric poetry is revelatory. It sings of a lost art, part Abel Gance, part Homer.  However, it feels as though the filmmaker is wary of permitting any kind of emotional engagement; he wants this to be a definitively ludic, Borgesian viewing experience, nothing more and nothing less.

Which left me, as a viewer, frustrated; wanting to see the other episodes to see if the film could rise above its addiction to intellectual tomfoolery. It seems more than likely that La Flor will acquire a cult status. Like Tarantino, Llinás is an auteur of self-indulgent brilliance. Whether the whole adds up to more than the sum of the parts is something that can only be assessed after watching the film in its entirety. Perhaps it’s unfair to write this review without having seen the film as a whole; but then again it’s entirely within the spirit of La Flor’s ludic narrative philosophy to react in a manner which is not entirely coherent.

the inheritance (peter stephan jungk, tr. michael hoffmann)

The Inheritance is a novel about a man who is seeking to realise his inheritance. There’s not much in the way of subtext. Daniel has an uncle who lives in Venezuela. Daniel is his only kin. He has left a will, but the will is less definitive than it should be and Daniel accuses the Venezuelan executors of the will of stealing two million dollars which is rightfully his. The struggle to reclaim the monies takes years. Daniel gyrates from London to Caracas to Panama to Miami. It also leads to the breakdown of his marriage. However, there is another factor in the breakdown of the marriage: Daniel has an affair with a neighbour which his wife finds out about. The fact that he has no income; he is a listless poet; that his family live from hand to mouth and that he’s having an affair are never really acknowledged by the narrator as the real reason for his problems: rather he blames it all on his failure to realise an inheritance, which he doesn’t really seem to deserve on any kind of higher moral grounds. If this was a novel about misplaced obsession and fatal flaws, it might have been powerful; however the author seems, for reasons that aren’t always easy to discern, devoted to his protagonist, for whom it’s impossible to feel any kind of sympathy as his case goes from bad to worse. 

los enamoramientos (the infatuations) [javier marias, tr. margaret jull costa]

Marias is an author much in vogue. I had tried to read one of his previously, and hadn’t got on with it. I opted for The Infatuations as I read it was a novel about Madrid. Where I find myself at present. In truth, Madrid is but a marginal presence in the novel. True, the book is predicated around the act of going for breakfast, a regular Madrileño habit. Thereafter it feels as though it could occur in any capital city. Which in no way diminishes the book’s quality. The narrator, Maria, becomes mildly obsessed with a perfect couple she spies on over her breakfast coffee, whose happiness raises her spirits before she goes to work. When the husband is brutally murdered, she finds herself an unwitting confidant of the murderer. As this brief outline might reveal, there’s a fair amount of contrivance in the plot, something the erudite author plays on, as he riffs on Shakespeare and Balzac, among other references for unlikely death scenarios. The pleasure of the text is to be found in the way Marias teases out the thoughts and permutations of the unlikely scenario he has constructed. With an almost forensic or neurotic diligence, depending on your point of view, Maria explores every conceivable avenue that the book possesses. Marias clearly loves to write and he never seems to use one word where half a dozen would do. The effect is sometimes exasperating, but it also delivers nuggets of brilliance, as the writer sifts through the narrator’s stream of his consciousness.

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(It crossed my mind as I was returning to the city from the Casa del Campo, that one way in which this might be said to be a Madrileño novel is that the city’s perspective is sentinel. Madrid is perched on top of a steep hill, looking down towards the river and the plain. Marias’ perspective, and that of Maria, feels similar. The story is looked down on from on high, with every detail in the landscape inspected and surveilled. A forensic consciousness.)