the city & the city (china miéville)

Miéville’s novel warrants a quick attempt at a synopsis. Borlú, a detective in the fictional town of Besźel, investigates a crime when a young woman is found dead in the back of a van. However, his investigation, like everything in the world of Besźel, is complicated by the fact that the crime took place in Ul Qoma, which is a city which occupies the same territory as Besźel, but exists in a parallel dimension, so to speak. The twin cities operate literally side-by-side, but it’s illegal for a citizen of either to interact with the other city. If they are caught doing so, they are seized by a shadowy but omnipotent police force known as ‘Breach’. The act of showing an awareness of the other city is known as breaching.

This is a metaphysical concept which smacks of Borges, Calvino, modernism taken to the nth degree. It is also, with its down-at-heel detective patrolling a bizarre modernist world, reminiscent of Blade Runner. More pertinently, perhaps, it also seems to talk directly to the situation in the West Bank, a territory that has been divided up into zones of control which neither side, in theory, should cross. The novel was published in 2009, long before a more general awareness of the extreme nature of that situation became more widely known, so whether the allusion is deliberate or not is hard to tell.

It’s a curiously dry read, which strains at the leash for some kind of emotional connection with the reader. The metaphysical complications of Borlú’s investigation are contained within the simple conventions of the detective novel, which gives the book something of the feel of two cities at once: that of a high-brow metaphysical investigation into the meaning of time and space, contrasted with the cosier surroundings of an investigative narrative which any modern reader is at home with. 

narciso (w&d marcelo martinessi, w. guido rodríguez alcalá)

Always good to get a chance to watch a film from Paraguay, and Narciso makes a decent fist of telling a quietly complex story which ties in the arrival of rocknroll in the country, the arrival of Stroessner’s dictatorship, the repression felt by homosexuals, the opening of a clean water dam and all that that represents, Dracula and radio theatre. If that sounds like a lot of themes, then this is indicative of the film, a slightly baggy assemblage of ideas and characters who revolve around Narciso, the charismatic would-be Paraguayan Buddy Holly. It doesn’t come as much of a surprise to see that the film is inspired by a novel, a medium that perhaps has more scope to pad out the narrative with liquorice allsorts.

It’s also perhaps notable how Narciso sticks to what would appear to be a Latam aesthetic for films with public funding support. This ensures that everyone working on the film is paid, clearly a good thing. However, it also means that budgets are so tight that it becomes hard to film exteriors with a whole crew. The films construct their narrative around interior scenes, with an inherent lighting aesthetic. There are very few exteriors in Narciso, and most of them occur at night. One daylight exterior scene takes place when Narciso is approached by a female fan and then he and his radio team drive away in a van. Another set-piece daylight exterior takes place at the opening of the dam, but feels underused. This budgeted aesthetic restricts the poetic potential of the movie. In Narciso we get very little sense of Asuncion - it could be set in late fifties Tacuarembo or Rosario. Given that the film is striving to talk about the events of that specific city, the aesthetic seems counter-productive, even if presumably a result of budgetary constraints. 

the house of hunger (dambudzo marechera)

Hisham Matar referentes Marechera’s book in My Friends, which is how I came to it. The author died young, after what would appear to have been a turbulent life. The House of Hunger has the feel of a semi-autobiographical novel, relating a ferocious youth in Harare whilst still under the imperial rule of Ian Smith, when the country now known as Zimbabwe was called Rhodesia. It’s a rumbustious book, full of protest, violence, sex and melodrama. A heightened narrative with echoes of Lautréamont and Bataille. Living in a police state, the narrator navigates a path between his shanty town family and a more literary interracial scene he becomes part of as he heads out of adolescence. Timelines crackle and pop, storylines blend into one another. Characters come and go. It’s a visceral read which distils the energy of this fucked-up colonised world. The book is split into two parts. The first half is a mazy romp through youth and Harare, the second switches to Oxford and England, where Marechera spent eight years after going to the university on a scholarship. This second half is split into small chapters, which flit backwards and forwards from the UK to Zimbabwe, and lend one of the chapter headings the title: Fear and Loathing in Harare. The echoes couldn’t be clearer. It’s a great, percussive read which communicates the energy of the world it depicts, a chaotic, brutal energy, steeped in sex, alcohol, racial tension and suspicion. 

the baron in the trees (calvino, tr. ann goldstein)

So much of my Calvino reading was tied up with studying literature at school. I discovered If On A Winter’s Night and its structure blew me away. I remember referencing it in a Lachlan Mackinnnon class. He approved in his Eeyoreish way. At that point in time, the eighties, I guess Calvino was still a relative newcomer, equivalent perhaps to a turn of the century author today, which doesn’t seem that long ago. Now he’s a full blown member of the modernist canon, which perhaps explains why I haven’t come back to his writing: he feels like part of the syllabus. So Baron came as a surprise, not so much for its expected playfulness, but for it being a pioneering work of environmental fiction, which could be read alongside Powers, or Amitav Ghosh. Set in Italy at the turn of the 18th century, it features that old chestnut Napoleon as well as the revolutionary movement of the time. Indeed, this is what the blurb highlights. But far more surprising in the tale of Cosimo, the baron who decides to live in the trees, is the fulsome defence of forests, trees, and environmentalism. Calvino feels far ahead of his time in his vision of a post-enlightenment world which seeks a way of co-existing with the natural world. The following quote could come straight out of the writing of Macfarlane, for instance.

And to say that Cosimo in that time had written and distributed a Plan of a Constitution for a Republican City with Declaration of the Rights of Men, Women, Children, Domestic and Wild Animals, Including Birds, Fish, and Insects, and of Plants Both Forest Trees and Vegetables and Grasses. It was a beautiful work, which could serve as a guide for all who govern; instead no one took it under consideration, and it remained a dead letter.

It’s a lovely, ludic book, typical in its way of Calvino’s love of manipulating the idea of the novel to twist it in directions the reader doesn’t expect, in the process exploring the dynamic between reader and writer that his era was so fascinated by. (Barthes, Foucault etc.) Perhaps, within the terms of that investigation, there is also a latent investigation into the dynamic between the human and the natural world, the latter being a book that is written by no-one. 

hope (w&d na hong-jin)

Hope reminds me of why sometimes it’s best not to go into something blind. The idea of a Korean film featuring Fassbender, as well as the teaser trailer which showed the opening sequence,  tickled my curiosity. The opening ten minutes are great. Suspenseful, strong characters swiftly established, a suitably exotic borderland world. And then the action starts. And I realised that I was not part of the target audience for this movie. In fact, watching it reminded me of why people like to eat popcorn with movies. What happens, the narrative, the pathos, the journey, all that shit, doesn’t really matter to a great many moviegoers. They just want to see something that goes with the popcorn. Laugh at how ridiculous the whole thing is. And that’s another form of cinematic consumption, as valid as the day the Lumière brothers drove a train into the station.

 

digger (w&d iñárritu, w. alexander dinelaris, nicolás giacobone, jez butterworth)

Digger sums up the contradictions of Hollywood trying to make films about ‘important’ issues. This is a film about climate change. Which spends its whole time, no matter how carbon neutral the budget might have been, making you wonder, rightly or wrongly, how much damage the making of it might have done to the environment. It’s Cruise’s correlative to Top Gun and all the other petrolhead dreams he might have inspired. It’s Iñárritu’s late baroque period. Lots of excessive flourishes and gold leaf. The medium and the message feel as though they are struggling to coalesce. 

the director (daniel kehlmann. tr. ross benjamin)

The Director tells the story of G W Pabst, the German director who returned to Nazi Germany having earlier fled to California, a place where he didn’t fit in and his only film is a flop. Pabst directed Brooks and Garbo, amongst other names. He had a prolific career in Germany and France. He was one of a bunch of great German/ Austrian directors, including Lang, Wilder, Zimmerman and others, a collection which helped to shape Hollywood. He also worked with Riefenstahl. His accommodation with the Nazis was not held against him and he directed after the war. Kehlmann is given a rich palette to paint with and he uses it in part to interrogate the Holocaust in an oblique manner.

Curiously, the novel reminded me structurally of another recent Booker nominated novel by a European writer, Szalay’s Flesh. Both novels use disconnected chapters to relate the life of a man occupying an ambivalent role within their moral universes. Neither writer outright condemns or outright defends his protagonist. The construction of a life through discordant passages (a bricolage) is a neat way to knit together an historical overview, which doesn’t require too much scene setting and permits the narrative to flow. 

the watergate caper (d. shane o’sullivan)

As a pocket guide to Watergate, O’Sullivan’s film is effective and entertaining. He incorporates references from popular culture and the arts into his broad-brush account of the scandal that brought down a president in the era when scandals still meant something. The obvious cinematic references are there: All The President’s Men, The Ice Storm. But there are also excerpts from Medium Cool and other films that are more or less off the radar. On a personal note I would have loved a bit more Hunter S Thompson, and also felt the spectre of James Elroy haunting events, with his Cuban break-in maestros and uneasy Agency tyros. But the film does what it says on the tin, as well as offering a commentary on how much contemporary culture seems to fight shy of the corruption that sits under its nose, in comparison with the bolder age of Tricky Dicky. 

barrio triste (dir. stillz)

Barrio Triste might be a companion piece to Un Poeta. The film goes into the cantegriles of Medellin to show life on the other side of the tracks. It opens with the conceit of some kids stealing a camera, which is then used to document life in the cantegril. A bravura sequence shows the kids descending from the cantegril in a beaten-up old car to rob a jewellery store in the centre of town. A serial killer speaks on the radio as the car moves downhill and up through the class barriers. It’s the only time the film leaves the cantegril, where the remaining action plays out with an abstract, woozy indifference to narrative. A car burns, an alien makes an appearance and life in the cantegril goes on all around. It’s part fly-on-the-wall documentary, part street-kid fable, and it doesn’t seem all that surprising to learn that Harmony Korine is named as one of the producers.

balcony in the forest (julien gracq)

Gracq’s novel details the phoney war of 1939-1940, seen from the perspective of a French lieutenant, Grange, sent to the Ardennes on the Belgian border. He lives in a bunker on the deep forest. There is a village nearby. He engages in an affair with a local girl. The war is happening elsewhere, in Finland, in Eastern Europe. If anything, Grange, about whose history we learn little, seems to enter into a Walden-ian reverie. The forest cradles him. He savours his walks and his isolation, holed up as he is with a few other soldiers under his command. There is a slow burning fuse to this life and the novel, which is the imminent arrival of the German forces, but for now he lives in the present, the past at arm’s length and the future held in abeyance. It’s a curious novel, with the tension between what is to come (the war) and what is happening (not a lot) making for a strange, hypnotic energy. It’s also interesting how Gracq has his protagonist compare memories of the start of the First World War with the start of the Second. That was a festive, foolish time. This is a cautious, uncertain time, a breathing space, before the world changes forever all over again.

It’s perhaps worth also considering how this novel, published over a decade after the war ended, might have been received in France, a country whose relationship with the Second World War is more complex that our British take. The ambivalent, oneiric time that Gracq documents is also the ambivalent time before the nation would be split in two, in more ways than one.