the last seduction (d. john dahl, w. steve barancik)

Dahl’s film feels like it belongs to another era. The narrative dénouement is hinged on a deliberately provoked rape. Whilst Bridget, the femme fatale, is the agent of this rape and is using Mike’s action to her own advantage, one can’t see a film treating the dramatic action of rape in this manner now. Likewise, whilst we live in the era of the sassy female lead, it feels unlikely that a female protagonist’s strengths would be pinned on her sexuality and powers of seduction, as the title suggests. Which is not to say that seduction has ceased to exist, or that women, and men, are still likely to use their sexual attractiveness as a means to get ahead in the world. Just that this is no longer material around which a narrative might be structured. As Bridget, the femme fatale, Linda Fiorentino gives a barnstorming performance, loving the limelight and unafraid to hog it, delivering Barancik’s one-liners with a deep-fanged venom. Small town boy Mike (Peter Berg) doesn’t know what he’s got himself into. Bridget’s ingenuity is tied to the cynicism that goes with knowing how easily men can be manipulated by a stockinged leg. She knows how the world works, even when the world doesn’t want to be seen to work that way. She also knows that whether or not she triumphs in the end it can only be a pyrrhic victory: age will defeat her finally no matter what, and she needs to make the most of the time she has before that oldest enemy of all catches up with her.  

the memory police (yōko ogawa, tr. stephen snyder)

Several people have brought Ogawa’s novel to my attention. I had anticipated something moderately cute. An unreliable but engaging female narrator, coping with an extraordinary situation, assisted by neutral but sympathetic secondary characters. Set in a world which is removed from ours, but still recognisable and just about plausible. The Memory Police delivers all of this, but then shifts to become one of the more nihilistic texts you might come across. The Memory Police are a totalitarian body who disappear people and objects at will. People flee into hiding to escape them. This much is already reminiscent of Latin American or Arab dictatorships. (On the day of writing there are images of Syrians who have been incarcerated for years finally being released following the fall of Assad.)  The unnamed female narrator, a novelist, takes in her editor, as objects as disparate as flowers and photos are disappeared. The editor clings to his memories. At any point we anticipate that the Memory Police will be confronted, that the world will turn, that the struggle will have been worth it. But what the novel delivers is almost the opposite, in spite of a tsunami and a new ice age. The novel is as mannered as I had imagined it might be, only Ogawa then adds a layer of bleakness that is completely unexpected. 

71 fragments of a chronology of chance (w&d haneke)

The third of Haneke’s early films seen on consecutive nights, this was in structural terms the most ambitious, perhaps, but in narrative terms the most straightforward. A note at the front of the film informs us of a multiple murder in a bank followed by the suicide of the assassin, so we know what’s coming. The point isn’t dramatic tension, it’s to construct a societal collage, as we follow the lives of various characters whose fates will cross in the bank, just before christmas. It’s a jigsaw puzzle, and like any jigsaw puzzle, the nearer you get to completion, the more apparent the design becomes. There lurks beneath the austere takes and the cold logic a strong narrative drive in Haneke’s films, and this is no exception. The frequent inclusion of news reports (Michael Jackson and the Yugoslav wars) root the film in its interrogation of what history might mean, and how much our perspectives are shaped by this consumption of a constructed idea of the present, an idea the film’s end appears to mock, with its repetition of the Jackson news story. Yet 71 Fragments is always more detached than the earlier films from his glaciation trilogy. There is a fascination with the physical process of putting a film together (also known as editing) which hints at the way we edit our own lives, perhaps, seeking to control the narrative but never knowing when the nutter is going to walk in and blow our brains out. 

pereira maintains (w. antonio tabucchi, tr. patrick creagh)

This is an affectionate portrait of a fat man who finds himself compelled against his wiser instincts to do the right thing. Set in Lisbon during the time of the Spanish Civil War, when Portugal was about to enter into its own dictatorship, the story narrates how Pereira, the protagonist, finds himself caught up with two sympathisers of the Republican cause and proceeds to help them even though they are feckless and he realises this will probably lead to his own demise. As well as being a tale of unassuming heroism, it is also a lovely portrait of 1930s Lisbon. It’s a slight book, but it has a sting in the tail and Tabucchi manages his narrative with a disarming charm. If, as is so often noted, for evil to triumph all it requires is that good men do nothing, here we see a man who has little pretension to being in any way political showing us that it is possible to act, and that there’s often a case for following your instincts even if they appear not to be in your interests.

three colours white (w&d kieslowski, w. krzysztof piesiewicz)

I went to watch 3 Colours White as something of a corrective to Blue, which blew me away. It feels as though the same, perhaps, was the case for the director, the second film in his trilogy acting as a counterpoint to the first. The tone is abruptly different, both more light-hearted, and more cynical. It’s an unhappy love story, telling the story of Polish hairdresser Karol’s quest for revenge, after being abandoned by Dominique, his French wife. The narrative is far simpler than Blue, with a clearer trajectory for the protagonist, who has to find a way to lure Dominique to Poland in order to achieve his objective. There is clearly a strong commentary about the ethics of a new capitalist Poland at play, as Karol both embraces capitalism, in a sequence which is almost comically slapdash, going from down-and-out hairdresser to wealthy entrepreneur in the space of fifteen screen minutes, but also embraces the cold-bloodedness of capitalism, setting Dominique up for her fall with a clear-headedness which is unexpectedly ruthless.

tomorrow in the battle think on me [marias, tr. margaret jull costa]

Back in the day, working for some Stakhovian corner of the BBC, we were constantly being told about the importance of creating “sympathetic” characters. No-one would want to engage with a central character they couldn’t warm to. The mealy-mouth tediousness of this dictum seems to me more or less fully responsible for the shit-storm which has since overwhelmed Britain. No-one ever wants to engage with anything or anyone they don’t like, as though the complexities of story and discourse are of secondary importance. All that matters is that we feel good about ourselves: that the mirror held up to our society shows us that we are nice, likeable, and therefore worthy of our own attention. I realise that there have been dramatic and literary exceptions, nevertheless, the pervading need to ‘complacer’ the audience has had a deadening effect on our culture. It’s as though Britain hasn’t had a civil war or been invaded in so long that people have forgotten that good people can do bad things, and bad people good. The complexities of moral representation have been eroded. We  have turned into the land of Harry Potter. All of which springs to mind because Marias, whose affection for Britain would appear to be considerable, has such a radically different attitude towards character. At times it’s as though he’s seeking to challenge the audience to engage in spite of his characters, rather than because of them. The narrator of Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me is a brilliant but flakey man, whose first thoughts on meeting the sister of a woman who died in his arms only weeks ago, is to seduce her. The husband of the woman who died in the narrator’s arms turns out to be an even less likeable specimen of humanity, recounting at the book’s denouement a terrible tale of mortal betrayal, a tale which occurs in a London which crucially still had open-decked double deckers. Like The Infatuations, Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me is another curious tale of unfortunate death and the mixed reactions people have towards death. As though the writer is determined to puncture any kind of sentimentalism regarding that most inevitable of processes. Philosophical asides are smuggled into the great rolling tide of Marias’ prose. The story takes a Cortazarian twist when the narrator sleeps with a prostitute, in a bid to find out whether she’s his ex-wife or not. Everything teeters on the brink of the unbelievable, the unpalatable and yet, somewhere in these morbid, amoral observations, there lurks a deranged wisdom. The oft-dismissed whispers of those who don’t paint pretty, palatable pictures, those who insist on reminding us that the world isn’t a box of chocolates; it is full of random cruelty and stupidity. Those who die young aren’t necessarily good; those who mourn them aren’t necessarily noble. Humans are fickle creatures, easily lead. 

bhava [w. u r ananthamurthy, tr. judith kroll]

Every now and again you pick up a book and as you read it you’re aware that a fair amount is going over your head. This was Bhava for me. It’s a deceptively complex read, telling the story of a man who thinks he’s killed his wife in a jealous fit, only to discover (or think he’s discovered) many years later that he hadn’t, and therefore he has been living with a misplaced guilt all along. Albeit a guilt that hasn’t stopped him having numerous affairs. I have to confess, whilst preferring not see relationship stories in black and white, I found it hard to engage with the subject’s back story. Furthermore, I found it hard to follow the twists and turns of the narrative. The afterword, written by the translator, Judith Kroll, threw some light on what I’d been reading, but it’s always disconcerting to find that a novel requires elucidation. As such, I feel that this is more a record of the novel having been read than any kind of critical reaction; rarely have I come across a book quite as baffling Bhava and I couldn’t for the life of me tell you if that’s to do with my failings as a reader, problems with the translation, or something that’s fundamental to the novel itself. 

the lute and the scars [daniel kis]

So then. A Serbian writer whose father died in Auschwitz, who lived in exile in Paris, who namechecks Calvino, Cortazar and Koestler among a host of other little known Central European writers, who is an admirer of Borges and who, to this reader’s mind, is the missing link between the Argentine and Bolano.

Bolano again. He recurs with nagging regularity. Bolano’s short stories, the ones that helped garner him attention, blend the cotidian, the personal, the everyday, with the global. They are also obliquely autobiographical. Lo and behold, here is the avowed Serbian Borghesian who, somewhat before Bolano’s time, is writing in exactly the same vein. With the same off-the-cuff, anecdotal brilliance. Converting the world and his life into a compendium of stories, with all the rag-tag connections of history interwoven.

There are only seven stories in this collection. But that’s enough. Two at least are minor masterpieces. The title-piece effortlessly manages to encompass fifty years of Soviet tragedy in a few, seemingly throwaway pages. Jurij Golec is a more Borghesian meditation on death, framed within a Bolano-esque context. The Stateless One tells the life of Von Horvarth in 26 brief chapters. The other brief tales conjure the life of post-War Europe, the frontiers collapsing and retrenching, Russia, Serbia and France all over-lapping. Kis’ genius lies in his capacity to make something transcendental out of a seeming nothing, to turn water into wine.

The joy of reading is to stumble across a voice which comes out of nowhere and somehow speaks across time and geography. There’s no time for theory in the world anymore, at least not the kind of theory that makes any sense, but if there were I’d try and pin down the secret donation of late 20^th C literature: as the scale of the global seemed to become evermore immense, all-encompassing, overwhelming, the writers realised that it was only by using the micro of their own experiences as a prism that the world of the macro (the death camps, the wars, the torture chambers) could begin to be discussed. That these subjects might be removed from the discursive terrain of political rhetoric and re-positioned within a context where their real effects could begin to be grasped. Real being defined as something that can be phenomenologically experienced, as opposed to being intellectually contemplated. This, more than Borges, is what binds Kis with Bolano, and their fellows. In essence, they are writers who seek to reclaim history through the existence of the everyday, which is after all, all that history is. Reclaiming it from the preachers and the politicians and the theoreticians who have annexed language in a bid to sever the common Brechtian from his or her own experiences.

There’s no time for theory. Which might be just as well. On an overcast Montevidean morning. There is time for that failsafe of modernity, a google search (Kis Bolano) which reveals that I am not the only one to have made the association. Three others, in fact, including Vila-Matas, who lists Kis alongside his friend Bolano, Koetzee, Pynchon, Antunes and Perec in order to refute Vargas Llosa’s argument that literature has become too “leve, ligera, fácil”. Which puts Daniel Kis in some fine company and also suggests that there is indeed a possibility that the Chilean Borghesian was aware of the work of the Serbian Borghesian.

see how they fall (w&d audiard, w. le henry)

Audiard seems like something of a johnny-come-lately, with the success of The Beat that my Heart Skipped putting him on the map, a success cemented by his yet-to-be-released-in-the-UK, A Prophet. Of course there's rarely such a thing in cinema, no-one hands you a million squid and says, get on with it, unless you're already in the know. True to form, Audiard has been around the block a few times. However, his earlier films, whilst possessing a remarkable cinematic lucidity, (and ludicity, if such a word exists), were never overly feted, and it's difficult to connect the johnny-come-lately with the struggling auteur. So much so that when I was told in a Jaipur hotel room that Audiard was also the director of A Self-Made Hero, I couldn't quite believe it, just as Mr W couldn't quite believe after seeing See How They Fall that this was by the same director as The Beat That... There may be something heartening in this; the knowledge that early invisibility can lead to universal acclaim later in life, the fairy tale that talent will out.

In keeping with this theme, I'd forgotten that I'd seen See How They Fall, back in some kind of day, presumably when it first came out. As a result the NFT offered me that most curious of cinematic experiences, which could be called 'seeing a ghost', when everything you're seeing really has been seen before, but the original viewing is so dim and distant that its memory only exists as odd traces or intuitions, which lurk on the screen, interfering with the present. Hence, the calibrated pairing of Kassovitz and Trintignant; the lugubrious charm of Jean Yanne; and the delirious noir-ish genius of the screenplay didn't have the freshness they might have done. See How They Fall is in some ways a muddy film, full of loose ends, some of which get pulled, drawing the viewer in, an ambitious film which seems chaotic but is in fact as taut as a narrative drum. It's a film made to be seen more than once, and such is its lack of obviousness, that I found myself both trying to work out what was likely to happen next, and simultaneously trying to work out what I remembered as happening next. Only for the film to come up with something I neither expected nor remembered.

Audiard has retained a kind of intensity to his film-making. There's something feverish screaming beneath the surface, hints of violence, suggestions of love, everything draped in a white cloth waiting to be removed, like a body in a murder scene. In his first film it's there in the Trintignant's stick which helps him walk but is also a repeated weapon; in the creeping madness of Yanne, revealed through his impassioned assaults on an electronic keyboard; in the shape of the voiceovers, one by Yanne, the other by an unnamed woman - who is she? All of these are tricks which snare the audience, which keep you hooked even when you haven't got a clue what's going on or where it's heading. They're the mark of a film-maker who knew what they were doing, (even to the point of making it appear as though they didn't), part of which involves forging a distinctive style which can be picked and unpicked over the years in the films which are to follow.

going native (w stephen wright)

It's New Year's Eve. Thoughts turn to friends, family, the diaspora both national, international and temporal. None of which has much to do with Going Native. Save perhaps for the fact it's deeply rooted in the States and was read in India by an Englishman. In this instance.

As a book it befuddled me. This may have been because I was befuddled by the sub-continent. But I'd like to think it's because I assumed it was a novel, reached the second chapter, found no connection with the first, and it then took me about two more to realise that it was in fact a collection of short stories. The fact that you can move from one chapter into another and not realise that is not a novel has something to do with an abrupt switch in styles, as Wright moves from a fairly regulation sub-Updike register into something altogether more hallucinogenic. His versatility would appear to be both a strength and a weakness, as Going Native darts between various tonal frequencies, never allowing the reader to settle, constantly searching for patterns. Perhaps it might be said that he appears on occasion to be trying a little too hard. From Updike to Burroughs via Pynchon and who knows what else proves skill, but doesn't make for an unbefuddling read. Or maybe it was just the sub-continent.

Happy New Year, both to readers and non-readers, those who are real, those who might be ghosts, and those who are ghosts.

the investigation [w. juan jose saer]

The Investigation marries two narratives which appear to be completely separate. The second describes a day when three friends take a boat out of Buenos Aires to visit the widow of a writer they used to know, and look at a manuscript that probably wasn't written by the writer, a six hundred page re-imagining of the Trojan war, set entirely on the Trojan side. The second narrative recounts how the distinguished Parisian police inspector Morvan is on the trail of a vicious serial killer who targets the old ladies of a wealthy Parisian arrondissement.

The spectre of Cortazar looms over Saer's book. It's quite a trick to jump between apparently unconnected narratives from paragraph to paragraph, and though it's a while since I read him, I have a feeling that Saer's fellow Argentine was one of the few that could pull it off. Nevertheless, the book stands up of its own right, and is curiously engaging, despite the writer's somewhat baroque prose style (which may be suffering in translation). The hook, unsurprisingly is the cunningly plotted and unashamedly gory crime narrative. When I put the book down at my place of work, one of my fellow readers looked at it and said - Umm, you've got me there - before noting that it was billed as a crime thriller, and becoming more conciliatory. Saer's Morvan is a wonderful character. It feels as though he merits a rather longer novel (and perhaps a kinder fate). However, in the end, just as we come to accept the seemingly random leaps between narratives, we also come to understand the way in which Morvan reconciles himself to his cruel fate, even embracing it to a certain extent.

There is in the book what appears to be a doffing of the hat towards the notion of chaos theory, as a butterfly bats its wings in Buenos Aires and this (might have) ramifications on the narrative in Paris. The book, written just before the global unleashing of the internet, seems to be dipping its toes into the theory that the actions of someone else, on the other side of the world, who we've never heard of, could end up, in a shrinking globe, affecting us in ways which we might never understand. The mystery of the interconnectedness of things, which is in some ways the story of the 21st century.

our lady of the assassins [fernando vallejo]

The narrator is a gay grammarian, living in Medellin. He hooks up with a young contract killer, called Alexis, whose contracts have dried up following the killing of the head honcho, Pablo Escobar himself. Killing is such an integral part of Alexis' life that he happily executes anyone who gets on his, or his lover's, nerves. Taxi drivers who talk back, whistling strangers, cops in the wrong place at the wrong time. And there's so much killing going on in Medellin that no-one seems to notice. The only thing that can put an end to Alexis and the narrator's killing spree is the arrival of Alexis' bullet, which is never likely to be too far away.

Vallejo's insouciant narrator is morally compromised, aware of the fact and not in the least bothered by it. His jaunty tone suggests that in a country where corruption is the norm, a few murders here and there count for nothing. Life is cheap in Medellin, and given that, Alexis' amorality is perfectly acceptable. To my mind there was something a little too pat about all this; perhaps I was missing some of Vallejo's irony. It's interesting to note that Vallejo was apparently writing in exile. Because his slight book doesn't feel like a letter from the front line; there's no anguish, just a kind of sculptural pleasure taken in the chaotic mess that Medellin has made of itself. There's something coldly impersonal about the grammarian's narrative, which may be part of the point, but didn't seem to help explain why his young lovers had evolved into such adorable killing machines; or what their families or even they themselves felt about the ruthless world they inhabited.

It's also perhaps worth noting that 1994 is a long time ago in Colombian history. No doubt the drugs and the gangsters are still out there, influencing the city's shape. However, as a footnote, it seems worth mentioning the taxi driver who drove C and I to Almagro earlier this month. He was Colombian, and had been living in Madrid for a few years. He was from Cali, a city which is Medellin's equal in narco-notoriety. We asked him what it was like, and I suggested it must be a dangerous place to live. But, as we drove through the dry flat plain of La Mancha, he told us that it was always Spring in his city, with a never ending parade of flowers. He and his wife had saved up enough to build a house for themselves there. As to whether it was dangerous or not, he suggested it was no more dangerous than any other city. The vision I'd had of a city patrolled by teenage soldiers of the drugs lords, touting machine guns in the back of their four by four jeeps, a vision not so very different to Vallejo's portrayal of Medellin, crumbled. Our driver even told us which barrio to go to if we want to see some theatre. Apparently it's called San Antonio.

the book of secrets [w. M G Vassanji]

The Book of Secrets, set in Tanzania, spans the best part of the twentieth century. The book of secrets itself appears to be a diary, written by a British colonial officer, Corbin, during his time as the colonial overseer in the backwoods town of Kikono, in the lead up to the first world war. The diary appears to be fairly innocuous, apart from the suggestion of a possible affair with a local woman, Miriamiu, whose husband accuses her of not being a virgin on her wedding night. Miriamiu's son is a pale skinned boy who ends up becoming wealthy and traveling to England. The book suggests that the colonial official and his possible son met and might possibly have possibly broached the subject of paternity, or might not have done.

Vassanji's narrator is Pius Fernandes, a schoolteacher in Dar Es Salaam, who is given the diary, which has survived through the century, and who takes on responsiblity for investigating its origins. This narrator recounts the various stories of the people who may or may not have been connected to the diary. These are a varied bunch, from Corbin to the son, Ali, to the woman Ali later runs off to England with, to the English poet who makes Dar Es Salaam his home. The narrative meanders across the years, and has a knack of engaging the reader in a particular character only to let that character's storyline drift out of the narrative as it moves on to the next. As a result, it feels as though the reader is continually restarting the project of the book and the quest for the true significance of the Book of Secrets. This particular reader never really got to the bottom of the diary's significance - it felt like something of a Maguffin around which Vassanji could embroider his knowledge of Tanzania, past and present, and the diverse communities that inhabited the country. 

The diary and Pius's mission to discover its secrets insinuates both the idea of a dramatic resolution to the book as well as some kind of key to the recent history of Tanzania. As it becomes clear that the book will not deliver on its insinuation, the reader has two courses of action. One is to become a little frustrated with a literal pretentiousness (understanding that word to mean an undelivered pretension to communicate something which is, in the end, never communicated); and secondly to enjoy the ramblingly assembled portrait of a faintly idyllic part of the world.