before night falls (reinaldo arenas)

Cuba is a recurring fever dream in the western imagination. At once an unimpeachable ideal and a communist anathema. Arenas’ sad autobiography comes down firmly on the anti-Castro side, for reasons which the narrative makes clear, even if there is a wistfulness about the early childhood chapters which help to reinforce the idea of an island idyll. The book is more or less from the cradle to the grave. After his rural upbringing, Arenas briefly joins Castro’s cause, but soon finds himself considered an enemy, both for his homosexuality and his criticisms of the state, some of which appear in novels he manages to get published outside the country and the censor’s reach. The repression he receives as a gay writer, which leads to the harshest of imprisonments, also means that Arenas bears witness to the human rights abuses of the Castro regime. Throughout it all, Arenas never loses his lust for life or men and his hope to escape the island. He finally makes it out,  reaching New York. Whilst enjoying a greater sense of personal liberty in the US, he is also shunned for his political views and soon realises that the grass may be greener on the other side, but there are still worms. The tragic Padilla is a recurring figure in Arenas’ story, and the way in which a whole generation of poets and writers was crushed is a key part of the book, although Arenas is sassy enough to realise that in the other world, writers are crushed by other forces, those of capital. There are always forces out to crush writers, there’s no getting away from them. 

benny’s video (w&d haneke)

Pub quiz question. In which Haneke film does the British queen make a cameo appearance? The answer… is Benny’s Video. A clip from Spitting Image lampoons the royal family, but this is just one of the panorama of seemingly random images which populate Benny’s screens and to which he will contribute his own devastating additions. Benny’s Video is from 1992, a time just before the internet was about to transform our lives into a restless sea of images, and in this Benny feels like a preternaturally modern character, one step ahead of his peers, right down to his savage amorality. However, this amorality perhaps has a more complex root than sheer information overload. Talking to the young girl he will soon murder, Benny tells her that the violence in the films they watch is all fakery, composed of paint and plastic. He, and perhaps even she, wants to rediscover a reality beyond the movies, to discover what real blood looks like. (Something which Haneke can paradoxically only show with fake blood, no matter how shocking it might seem.)

Benny’s quest for the real, which doesn’t seem to change him at all, also ties in with his parents post-Nazi amorality, driven by petty bourgeois greed and fear (to be revisited in White Ribbon). Like so many post-war austro-german auteurs, Haneke is also a captive of his nation’s past, and aware of the fact. What this means is that there are multiple factors which contribute to the listless amorality in which Haneke’s film is apparently immersed. The absence of value is only of them, even if within a world of images, this is the one that comes to the foreground. The extended and seemingly irrelevant Egypt section, which goes on for perhaps ten minutes, feels like another manifestation of this: if all images are of equal import, from the killing of a pig to a Spitting Image clip to a  camera view of the street outside, why shouldn’t a film just be composed of arbitrary images, which have no relevance to plot or character? Except that there has been a key development in this sequence, which is that the mother has picked up the camera herself, she has become one for whom the production of images is a way of fending off their meaninglessness, as has been the case with Benny. Two of the videos he has made, one of the killing of the girl, the other of his parents’ acknowledgement of their complicity in his crime, will determine everything that occurs, and in so doing, Benny becomes actor/ director in his own drama, rather than mere passive recipient. It’s not a comfortable space, it’s fucked up, but it affirms the fact that, for better or for worse, he is alive.

The echo into the 21st century of this philosophy is chilling: a world where people only come to life through the manipulation of their image, a manipulation that goes beyond good or evil, transforming the subject into a kind of aestheticised zombie, seemingly in control of their image/fate, but actually atomised, all at sea, lost in a maze of empty referents. 

jesus' son (denis johnson)

This collection of short stories is pretty much the perfect length for a collection: eleven taut stories, all of them screaming silently about the state of the fucking nation. The nation being the USA, the date any time you’ve been lost in the great wilderness of backwaters USA. Even if only in a figurative sense. There’s something so remarkably homely about these tales of drifters and petty criminals, losers the lot of them, just trying to find a way to get by in the maw of a cruel world. Johnson bestows the gift of poetry on these poor souls, as though he wants to redeem them and himself through the power of the broken word. The penultimate story is nothing more than a conversation with a man about being shot by both his wives, as the narrator shaves his moustache and says he’s going to immortalise him in print. Which, in a way, he has done. You can understand why this collection in particular, with its nod to the Velvets, has acquired a cult status. Maybe it’s just those of us who grew up in the Anglo-Saxon world, but all of these characters have an innate affinity with the flotsam and jetsam of the great capitalist mother hen. From William Carlos Williams to Bukowski, from Huckleberry Finn to Slothrop, there’s a dance to be had through the badlands of the North American psyche and in this collection Johnson joins the dance with  the cruel verve of a Lou Reed monologue and the wit of Cale guitar riff. It’s not going to kill you to read this, and it might just make you exhale with relief that you have landed on the right side of the various tracks, in this life, at least. 

ps - for long term readers, the following is of note: Johnson is quoted as saying that Jesus’ Son is "a rip-off of Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry"

a heart so white (marias)

The novels of Marias have this irritating habit of you leaving feeling bereft and inadequate. Bereft because, like all great novels, they gradually absorb you into the warp and woof of their worlds, slowly overwhelming you until you are so lost in them that there is no reason for them to end and when they do, you are left alone in the dark. Inadequate, because in entering these worlds, you are given access to another way of thought, which is in so many ways identical to your own way of thought, only these thoughts acquire, within the texture and framework of a novel, a sense of completeness which life can never afford. In documenting the ways of the mind with such relentless and brilliant precision, the author achieves the paradox of illustrating a way of thinking we can never emulate, and in so doing we pale beside the words he leaves on the page.

A Heart so White is a story of generational conflict, hidden crimes, and the secret workings of the heart, and how these secret workings interact with the secret workings (desires/fears) of the mind. If indeed the heart and the mind might be separate entities, if they are not, essentially, one and the same. (I would love to ask Marias about this but unfortunately he passed on last month.) The story is woven around three relationships: that of Juan to his new wife, Luisa, that of Juan to his father, Ranz, and that of Luisa to her father-in-law, Ranz. For the details, as ever, one must interrogate the novel (although there is little doubt that there remain some details which will not be revealed within the novel). Ranz, in the vein of Lady Macbeth, murders sleep, Juan, who works as a translator, murders Thatcher’s words, helping to kill her off, and Luisa murders no-one. The novel is put together through a bricolage of scenes and moments, in Madrid, Havana, New York and Geneva, which create a narrative, jumping around in time, that gradually reveals itself, the end rarely in sight, until it arrives, in a hurry, leaving you, the poor reader, desolate, bereft, alone again, or.

It is the very mundanity of the worlds Marias depicts that lend his novels their terrifying power. Because most who inhabit the Europe he depicts have been blessed with mundanity, a lack of dramatic action, a sense of inconsequence, and yet, at the same time, we still feel our lives to be inundated in action and dramatic action and the presence of seismic events, because this is what it means to be human. It means to experience the universe as though it has been constructed in order to give us heartache and terror, and a few good things too. The fact that we haven’t fought in wars or visited the moon doesn’t make this any less so. It was the genius of Marias to recognise and value this mundanity, to spin from its inaction stories and insights that pay homage to the trials of tribulations of living in peacetime, long may it last. 

la marrana (w&d josé luis cuerda)

It’s not every film you come out of thinking about how the art design stole the show. La Marrana (The Sow) is a picaresque journey through Spain in 1492. The film opens with a voiceover setting the historical context: Colombus, the banishment of Jews and Muslims from Spain, etcetera. It then picks one ordinary man, Bartolome, whose story it will follow. Bartolome is hungry, and he has his eyes on the pig which another vagabond on the road, Rey, says he’s taking to Portugal. The film proceeds to follow them over the course of a few days as they wander round the countryside, hoping to enlist as sailors on Colombus´ voyage. Not a lot of any great significance happens. In essence this is a buddy movie, which to my mind promised rather more than it delivered. There’s something of Lazarillo de Tormes about this rustic yarn, and one can see how it would have appealed to a local audience. Having said this, the beauty of the art design deserves highlighting. When we enter a 15th century tavern, it really feels as though we’re there. Down to the tone of the soft Spanish light. The production design on imdb is listed as being by Rafael Palmero, set direction by Gonzalo Thovar, costume by Javier Artiñano. Even if nothing of great note is occurring in the film, you can always luxuriate in the images, and at cinema’s capacity to bring a past era to vibrant life. 

equinox (w&d alan rudolph)

Rudolph was one of those maverick North Americans, like John Sayles, whose films attracted stars but never broke out. Fine directors who, had their careers occurred at another point in time, or perhaps in another country, might have been feted more than they ever were. I remember watching a film of his back in the eighties with Keith Carradine as a laconic outsider who had once published a volume of poetry amongst other unheralded achievements and thinking that could be me in a couple of decades. At its best there’s a romanticism to his work which offers a more mannered vision of the world than cinema’s typical social realist bent. 

Equinox is a tale of twins separated at birth, yin to each other’s yan, destined to meet one day, which they do. The film is set in a futuristic city beset by social upheaval and petty crime, offering hints of Blade Runner without the design bravura. It feels as though its striving for a kind of transcendence it never quite achieves and in truth, it’s not Rudolph’s greatest film, rather one that suggests where he might have gone had he had the budgets to indulge his imagination further. Which perhaps might not have been for the best, as it’s his low-key, intimate films which allow him to dwell on his oddball characters that felt most distinctive. (Interesting to note that Rudolph was another one of those directors who built up his own stable of actors.)

On another note, this was seen on the Monday and by Wednesday, Cinemateca had once again shut its doors, for a third time, due to the pandemic. This time, in Montevideo, it feels as though the threat is far closer than it ever has been before. The great war of Cinema vs Plague continues. (Not to mention theatre, dance, art and so on.) On the streets of Ciudad Vieja, hundreds of film crews jockey for position, sent from all over South America, but the net is closing in. Maybe the vaccines will save us. Maybe the equinox has passed. The question then remains: which equinox?

omon ra [w. pelevin]

Omon Ra tells the story of a young man, Omon, who finds himself realising his dream of being recruited into the Soviet space program. However, he discovers, during training, that the mission he's been sent on is a suicidal one-way journey to the dark side of the Moon, a fate he is obliged to embrace for the greater good of the Republic. Omon is the callow narrator, who talks us through his trials and tribulations with a flat, underwhelmed tone, one shared by his fellow kamikaze astranouts, with the exception of a brief discussion about the best songs of Pink Floyd.

This is Pelevin's first novel. Whilst the scale and ambition is evident, the piece lacks the assurance of The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, and Pelevin's prose style is, at times, as tentative as his narrator's disposition. Even at a mere 150 pages, it feels as though Omon is crawling towards his demise, rather than hurtling through space.

Nevertheless, the ideas on display are rich, not least the remarkable sequence which describes a hunting trip undertaken by Kissinger when in Russia on a diplomatic mission. Pelevin's imagination seems to be bursting to break through the confines of the Soviet-era setting, something it perhaps achieves in the book's closing sequences, when the narrative accelerates into the unexpected, with a detour via Zabriskie Point.

It would be interesting to know what Pelevin considers to be his influences. The narrative of the book, dealing with an innocent being sent to his probable death in a rocket, resembles that of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Like Pynchon, Pelevin draws on an esoteric frame of reference, his erudition distilled through the perspective of a simple hero trying to do the right thing in difficult times. Whether Pelevin has come across Pynchon or not, he shares the other's sense of ambition, the notion that a novel needs to challenge the boundaries of realism in order to be able to discover a perspective from which any kind of originality can be articulated. Likewise, both have dwelt on the fact that nothing shows up the hubris of our era more than our pitiful ventures into space. Adventures which show how unadaptable man is as a species; and whose grandiose ambition only serves to reveal how parochial the systems which fuel these ambitions are, within a universe we can barely dip our toes in.

sleepwalking land [w. mia couto]

Sleepwalking Land opens like the book MacCarthy might have stolen The Road from. A young man, Muidinga, walks down a highway, deserted, in the company of an elder man, who might be his father, and might not be. They arrive at a bus, which has been burnt out. Inside are dead bodies, which keep them company. Who knows what is on the road. It's safer with the dead. One of the dead men had a case. They prise open the case. Inside they find a journal of another young man, Kundzu, telling of his wanderings through the dreamland that Mozambique has become. The young man reads the journals to his elderly companion. They never travel away from the bus, but they travel across the country, as the reader does, in the company of Kundzu's notebooks.

Couto's novel, first published in 1992, seems to nod its head at magical realism, or maybe this is just African realism. In this particular catastrophic world, realism as it has been defined in 'the west' has no value. The world contains too much that is unspeakable to tell what has been done. The writer has to mediate reality through fable and digression. Kundzu's journey involves a stay on a wrecked liner with a Sirenesque woman, a search for her son, his own brother turning into a chicken, and other haphazard, near Chaplinesque escapades. Reading Kundzu's narrative offers Muidinga a way of filling in the gaps of the things he cannot remember, or has chosen not to.

The text is steeped in a tradition of oral history as well as post-modern playfulness. Cuoto seems to be exploring how to write about a world where nothing is reliable: rivers can turn to mud in an instant; ghosts can rise up at the drop of a hat. It may be that there are allegories within the text which passed me by. The reading of it was not always straightforward, but gradually the text's tendrils took hold. In a world which seems as much shaped by dystopias as utopias, Couto's Sleepwalking Land is a playful companion, hinting at what perhaps lies beyond the catastrophe MacCarthy describes, once the tragedy has become routine, and the western fantasies of order have been just about forgotten altogether.