exit west (mohsin hamid)

It is noted with some amusement that the Obamas' production company has acquired the rights to Exit West. On imdb the putative film project, ‘in development’ is headlined by a pair of British tyros, one of whom is a friend of a friend. The presence of the Obamas is, these days, something of a double edged sword. On the one hand a badge of liberal consciousness in a world where the extremists are on the rise, on the other, a badge of compromise, a validation of a system, (US imperialism, with all that implies), which remains a dangerous and far-from-beneficial influence on the shape the world is and has been taking over the course of the last 50 years, or more.

Why would the Obamas be interested in Exit West? The novel opens in a Middle Eastern town, which might be Aleppo or Mosul, but is in fact a fictional space, where extremists are seizing power. The semiotics smell of Isis, (the ritual executions, the sense of lawlessness under the shroud of religious devotion). Nadia and Saeed find themselves falling in love against the backdrop of this turmoil. They know they have to flee, which they do, escaping through a magic door to arrive on a Greek island. From there they will hop to London and finally California. The complex process of flight and exile is reduced to a literary device, which, whilst convenient on an allegorical  level, might be accused of minimising the realities and risks of these migrations. However, this also reflects the way that the novel transforms from being a meditation on surviving the impact of religious extremism to a more spaced-out, opaque vision of the near-future, redolent of hypothetical dystopias such as the Parable of the Sower.

Clearly there’s a market for this kind of story, which in the end offers a positivist vision of a millennial future where religious fundamentalism, xenophobia and climate change have been overcome, laying the basis for a kinder, simpler civil society. However, this also means that the novel might be deemed open to charges of over-simplifying what are, in essence, seismic and perhaps intractable problems. The knottiness of these problems is skated over. You open a door and arrive on the other side. 

the savage detectives (bolaño, tr wimmer)

 Re-Reading the Savage Detectives.   

In another winter you came to me. I was lost then.

As perhaps now. Lost in the nights that have lost

Their discipline. Errant children, out on the lash. 

With me, a single parent, left to fret. You came to

Me then, on the eleventh floor, Wembley Stadium 

Grinning at my rear window, Paddington bear 

Goofing down the canal. You came to console,

Unbidden, the mystery guest, with your tired 

Eyes and tequila prose. And now you’re back.

It’s the middle of a midwinter night and you’re 

Riding pillion again, humming a tune so catchy

I can’t help but sing along, the Encrucijada

Blues. You’ll see me through these insomniac

Ciudad Vieja nights, just as you did then, the

Resolute beat of your words casting spells,

Luring the night to its false, gleaming, dawn. 

pax in lucem (w&d emiliano mazza de luca, w. alejandro díaz lageard)

Pax in Lucem is an affectionate and informed documentary about the life of Torres Garcia, who was the great grandfather of the co-writer and narrator, Alejandro Diaz. As such it occupies what is now somewhat well trodden ground in Uruguayan documentary filmmaking: the investigation of the family heritage. However, the story of Torres Garcia is complex and perhaps not so very Uruguayan, as he left the country at the age of 16 and only returned when 60. In a sense his story is one of perpetual confrontation with ruin and failure, as the commercial ventures he embarked on in New York and Paris ended on the point of bankruptcy. As the film recounts, the return to Montevideo was almost a choice of last resort, even if he was subsequently venerated as a prodigal son on his homecoming. The film is constructed around the process of recreating a work, Pax in Lucem, that was destroyed when the Museo de Arte Moderno in Rio caught fire. Some 60 of the artists’ most important works were lost in the fire, and the director talks emotively about this loss, as he follows the process of trying to recreate the original artwork. As such the film morphs into a meditation on originality, and is all the stronger for this philosophical desvio. 

club zero (w&d jessica hausner; w. géraldine bajard)

Hausner’s film about food ends up being a bit of a suet pudding. There’s a lot of ideas in there, but they never seem to settle into a coherent narrative. It could be subtitled Five go Mad for Fasting. Charismatic teacher, Ms Novak, played with a fierce lack of emotion by Mia Wasikowska comes to a private school to teach a class about conscious eating. What is conscious eating? It’s a process of moderating your food intake to an absolute minimum, for the good of your body and the planet. A select group of five are later initiated by Ms Novak, into Club Zero - which is when you stop eating altogether. The kids embrace this as an attack against the system and their parents - it’s essentially a teenage rebellion. The kids become wanner, their skin touched by a sulphuric yellow, as they gradually wither away, and head towards an entirely enigmatic fate, in between offering their parents diatribes on how the consumption of food only serves to fortify the capitalist system. It’s all very po-faced, reminiscent of mid-period Godard or Lanthimos, but the ideas seem to hover at the edge of the screen, chomping at the bit to be allowed in. There are the occasional gross-out moments which are stitched into the narrative, obvious calling-cards, but these moments have the feel of clunky necessity in a script which has been boiled to within an inch of its life.  

tender is the night (scott fitzgerald)

Fitzgerald’s text is one that has recurred several times in my reading. Initially it was read at University, where I wrote an essay on the connection with Macbeth, a connection which fascinated me as I started to get to grips with the issues that go with relationships. This is a novel about relationships: specifically the doomed love affair between Nicole and Dick. To what extent is our idea of love merely a crutch to help us see out the darkness of the universe in which we find ourselves abandoned? Nicole’s trauma has a specific incestuous root, but her sense of crisis, which Dick inherits, feels existential. The pointlessness, the pointlessness. We can conjure the most beatific and beautiful surroundings, but in the end we are all caged tigers. There’s a disarming nihilism at work here and the more glorious Dick and Nicole’s mystique, the more hollow it becomes.

I wonder where Fitzgerald slides to in my worldview as I get older. As I bypass youth and enter late middle age. Is Fitzgerald a young person’s writer? When we all go through the mirror does it all start to look tawdry? Which is the paradox that lends his novels their existential glory. Those shallow western dreams and their hollow hearts.

Then reading Bruccoli’s biography, the book is cast in another light. The tragic roman a clef. Because Scott and Zelda lived on both sides of the mirror. They had the Divers’ glamour lifestyle. But they also inhabited its hollowness, as their genius was ignored, hung out to dry, and their empire faded to dust.

It’s hard not to have a soft spot for Tender, for Dick’s relentless drive towards middle American mediocrity, for Nicole’s flight from a madness which is positively glorious. The vainglory of humanity, like a sparkling Mediterranean morning blue, iridescent, seductive, irredeemably flawed. 

 

men in the sun & other stories (gassan kanafani, tr hilary kilpatrick)

Kanafani’s stories deal with the consequences of the Nakba, rather than the event itself. Desperate refugees, having lost everything, doing what they can to make ends meet. The celebrated opening story recounts the tragic journey of three men seeking to cross the desert from Basra to Kuwait, a land of supposed opportunities. (Following the same path that Saddam fatefully took years later.) It is a mission that ends in absolute disaster, of a similar vein to the disasters that occur at borders across Europe and between Mexico and the USA, among others. Desperation is the driver, a desperation far removed from the kind of problems these characters’ ancestors might have faced. Ancestors who lived quiet lives near the orange and olive groves, in villages which no longer bear the names they did then, or don’t even so much as exist. To think that Kanafani’s tales are even more prescient today than when he wrote them is just another factor in the indictment of the Israeli state’s crimes against the Palestinian peoples.

crime and punishment (dostoyevksy, tr. david mcduff)

What brought my reading back to this strange, savage novel? In part it has been inspired by working on Rambert’s Repetition, in which a character at one point talks about how ‘everything was written, the truth was to be found in the fiction’, which chimes with the idea of the writer as amanuensis and prophet. In part it was to explore a thought in my head that the world of St Petersburg described in my memory was akin to the worlds that lie just down the road, or even sometimes across the road, in the Americas I now inhabit.

Crime and punishment is a tale from the underworld. An anti-murder mystery, where we know who did it from the very start. Here is the paradox, because we know the criminal is not the image of the desperate criminal, but rather the sensitive student, Raskolnikov, almost likeable, forever intriguing, cursed by his very hand as it enacts the murder he has intellectually decided to commit. In another world, he might have become the muddied intellectual with a career in academia or ‘the media’. But in the impoverished conditions he lives in, his intellect and imagination prove to be the road to hell, or at least Siberia, rather than a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle in Ealing, to pick a name out of the hat. All of which goes to show that the problems of an impoverished society don’t just impinge on the underclass. They also lead to a deformation of the idea of education, or, to put it another way, a Nietszchean re-evaluation of the idea of education: not as a means of furthering the health of society, but as a means of advancing the individual.

Raskolnikov crumbles under the weight of the moral bind he has placed himself in. He would be a superman, but he can’t sustain the illusion. But in his endeavour, as described by the author, we can indeed see the future written, the future which would lead to the Russian revolution, but would also lead to fascism and the love of the figure of the all-powerful leader. The fragile cat’s cradle of society only needs to lose a few threads for the whole thing to unravel. In these Americas, there will be Raskolnikovs aplenty. Driven to desperate acts in the name of their own higher purpose. Nothing much has changed, the great cities and the less-great cities continue to be the site of desperate, unheeded struggles, hidden behind the shop windows of fashion stores and car dealerships. 

raíz (d. franco garcia becerra, w. annemarie gunkel, alicia quispe)

Raíz is an effective piece of filmmaking, which manages to blend the sentimentality of the story of a football-obsessed child who lives as a llama shepherd in the highlands of Peru, with a dash of the Sanjines, as the film tackles the impact of global capitalism on this obscure, and beautiful part of the world. Feliciano is, as his name suggests, a happy-go-lucky child who roams the mountains with his flock, and has particular affection for one llama which he has christened Ronaldo. At the same time, the mining industry is looking to drive the villagers and homesteaders out of the area. Feliciano’s parents are dragged into a conflict the child can only really understand when his flock and Ronaldo go missing, the result of an attack on the villagers by goons hired by the mining company. Set against the backdrop of Peru’s quest to go to the 2018 World Cup in Russia, the film adroitly weaves these twin strands together, and the overall impact is aided by the stunning scenery, immaculately captured by DOP, Johan Carrasco. 

the moustache (emmanuel carrère, tr. lanie goodman)

Carrère’s curious tale of everyday madness. We can all go mad one day, just like that, and end up in a Macau hotel, wondering what we did with our sanity. I wonder if it was in any way inspired by Scorsese’s short, The Big Shave. I once read a book by the author that annoyed me so much that I didn’t write about it here, and almost made me quit this whole process. I can't remember why, or even what the book was called. Maybe I invented it. The Moustache did not have the same effect, albeit one gets the sense that the writer is a cold fish. But that coldness underpins this savage dissection of ordinary bourgeois society, so it’s all good. 

cowboy graves (bolaño, tr natasha wimmer)

Returning to Bolaño after so long feels like coming home. This book is a collection of three separate texts, excavated apparently from his hard drive, composed in the nineties and in the year before his death. As Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas’ afterword puts it eloquently, the themes and characters are culled from the Bolaño universe. Familiar figures pop up. New arrivals appear. The stories range between Mexico, Chile and Europe. There is nothing new here and plenty that is new. To what extent are the stories autobiographical, marked by the presence of Bolaño’s alter ego, Arturo Belano? Two of the tales feature the day of the Pinochet coup, and these have the smell of the real, albeit we know they are not the real, they are fictions, spun from the writer’s skull. The author will always be a touchstone of my literary life. Part of the pleasure of reading is diving into the themes and issues which fascinate the reader. Few writers of my time have scaled the divides of my own life; but the one who unfailingly goes there is Roberto Bolaño.