the funeral (d. abel ferrara w. nicholas st john)

Ferrara's The Funeral feels like a riposte to Coppola's Godfather. Socialist mafia battles with capital. Socialist mafia goes anti-catholic in speakeasies and whorehouses. But mafia is mafia and no matter your politics or your licentiousness, family is going to family and the villains are going to do the dirty. In truth, at a hundred minutes, it feels as though Ferrara needed at least twice the running time to tease out all the angles his story opens up. Three brothers all have their stories to be told, the narrative has to skip backwards and forwards in time, and the female characters, played by Sciorra, Rosselini and Mol are given greater protagonism than any, apart from Keaton, in Coppola's version. This is all great, and  Gallo shows what a star he might have been, but ultimately the film is always chasing the narrative's tail. Nevertheless, it's an absorbing piece of filmmaking, a worthy and undervalued addendum to the Italo-American lexicon of mafia movie making.

tésis (w&d alejandro amenábar, w. mateo gil)

Tésis is a film which has acquired the notoriety it clearly sought. A great, if underdeveloped premise, has Angela, a female film student writing a thesis about violence in cinema, leading her to search for illicit, unwatchable material. So far so engaging. Thereafter, perhaps too soon, she discovers that the source of the worst of this material lurks within the university where she studies. The film then becomes an investigative cat-and-mouse game: will the killer get to her before she can discover and reveal him? There is quite a lot of random pursuits and false leads, although some of the plot twists are entirely predictable. Curiously for a film that would appear to be suggesting a critique of Hollywood storytelling, with the villain of the piece saying in one of the film’s most interesting scenes that the Spanish film industry needs to ape the North Americans and give the public what they want, the film then seems to take on his advice. Instead of taking us to the heart of the problem (and perhaps discovering why Angela is so interested in this subject), it embarks on the kind of roundabout story beats which would not be out of place in the concluding episodes of a supposedly gripping Netflix series. There are moments where the darkness the film purports to reveal shine through, as in the closing hospital sequences where patients gaze like drug addicts at the titillating violence on their TV screens, but these moments are interspersed with the generic jokey tone of the Scream franchise.

schizopolis (w&d soderbergh)

Doing a spot of research whilst trying to make my mind up whether to head to Cinemateca to catch another in the Soderbergh season, I read several people saying Schizopolis is the worst film ever made. Which meant that I really didn't have much choice: I had to go and see it. Schizopolis is not the worst film ever made, I am disappointed to have to say. It's not the best, but it's also far from the worst. It is quietly and pleasantly bonkers, as one might expect from a film where the director plays three characters, all variations on the same person, who is probably himself. What is admirable about Soderbergh is the way he games the system, making big studio films alongside his own smaller scale projects. There’s something quasi Godardian about all this., not least in the sense that he clearly doesn’t give a fuck what anyone thinks of a film like Schizopolis, which was never going to be a box office hit and which many people will deem a self-indulgent mess. Which it sort of is, but sort of isn’t, as Soderbergh plays with humour and confusion to construct a narrative of multiple identities which almost works. On another level, it’s a slice of unadorned American life, shot without any trimmings, revealing the petty neuroses of the most powerful citizens on earth. 

crash (w&d. cronenberg, w. j.g. ballard)

Crash is a movie which is constructed upon a brilliant premise. About forty minutes in, Elias Koteas’ mysterious and charismatic psychopath introduces a staging of James Dean’s fatal crash, using identical cars, which actually collide. The world of the movie and technology fused in a single moment. The love of speed, which has driven the twentieth century, impaled on the steering wheel of the fixed punctum of the cinema frame. This moment seems to connect Hollywood with Marinetti’s Futurism, with Ducournau’s Titane, the automobile as the death drive of progress. The fact that the characters all want to have sex in cars, all the time, the cars being their potential murderers, only exacerbates the Freudian connotations where sex and death are all part of the same turbulent psychological crisis towards which modernity, and us, its guests, is constantly accelerating.

Having reached this point, 45 minutes into the film, it then feels as though Cronenberg wasn’t entirely sure where to go next. The tension that is laced into the film like a corset in the opening, a place where anything might happens, starts to slip as the characters settle into a playful Schnitzler-esque ronde, seeking to either screw or kill one another in the next car accident they can provoke. The film seems to decelerate rather than accelerate, and the brilliance of the opening forty five minutes becomes a tail light moving out of range, speeding away into a parallel film in another dimension, a dimension Cronenberg’s film would die to crash through to, if only it hadn’t lost the map.

asaltar los cielos (josé luis lópez linares y javier rioyo)

Storm the Heavens might be an English translation for the title of this documentary. It is constructed around the killing of Trotsky in Mexico in 1941, tracing the life of his assassin, Ramon Mercader. In the process it moves from Spain to Moscow to Paris to Mexico and finally Cuba, following in the footsteps of Mercader’s peripatetic and curious life. Following the assassination he spent twenty years in prison in Mexico, before being released and sent to Moscow, where he didn’t settle, moving finally to Cuba, where his grandparents had come from. The film recounts a vivid, restless story, collecting anecdotes from Mercader’s family, but also Trotsky’s US bodyguards, Parisian friends of Mercader’s lover, Silvia, and a host of astonishing figures who made up the Spanish exodus in Moscow, sent by their parents to escape the Spanish Civil War. These personalities belong to one of those hidden corners of the helter skelter twentieth century history. Old men at the time of the interviews for the film, they had spent most of their lives since childhood in Moscow. Nevertheless, they spoke Spanish without a trace of an accent, and manifested a completely Iberian temperament, as though they might have spent all their lives as friends in a tiny village in Extremadura. One of them recounts that in 1956 he went back to Spain, but couldn’t face it, and was soon back in Moscow. These interviews are some of a host of conversations with these long lost warriors of the great ideological conflicts of the twentieth century. The film is now nearly thirty years old, and most of the interviewees must be dead by now. Quite apart from the fascinating insights into the lives of Trotsky and his assassin, trained by his mother, who was waiting in a car for him to emerge from the house after the deed, Asaltar los Cielos opens a captivating window on this lost era, a time when utopian ideologies determined the world’s fate. 

hard eight (w&d paul thomas anderson)

I can still recall the posters for Hard Eight going up in the tube and a certain buzz about the film which put it on my radar although I never got round to watching it. No-one knew at the time that this was the first offering of one of the modern masters of the art. There’s something quite affecting about watching Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s cameo appearance, which is so distinctive and at the same time so unlike Hoffman, because of the youthfulness, the cockiness of his performance, which looking back retrospectively almost makes it look as though he was cast against type. The film is full of future stars, not the least of them Gwyneth Paltrow who gives a performance which suggests the potential of a greater actress than the media personality she has subsequently become, capable of portraying an erratic emotional instability. Not to mention Samuel L Jackson, even if he had already broken through with Pulp Fiction. Hard Eight revealed Anderson to be a director who knew how to get the best out of his actors, also including Philip Baker Hall and John C Reilly, how to make the most of their tics and mannerisms. The film is essentially a character study, with the narrative rather less consequential than it initially purports to be. A sub-Mamet movie which in the end out-Mameted Mamet, by somehow ignoring the intricacies of the gambling world, using it as a backdrop rather than a focal point. The film hinges on a just about credible sequence of events which feel, nevertheless, contrived. As though the writer-director is giving a nod in the direction of narrative, but is more interested in tone and ‘clima’, the mood of a man walking through a Vegas gambling parlour of more importance than anything he actually does there. There’s already something stately about Anderson’s filmmaking, hinting at the more operatic path he would soon follow. 

the promise (jean-pierre dardenne & luc dardenne)

It might be that I owe an apology to Jérémie Renier. Not that he’d be interested. When I give my class on directing actors at the film school (and what do I know?) I use one of his performances as an example of an actor being poorly directed. I always stress that Renier is a fine actor, and it’s not his fault that in this particular film he’s off the pace, its down to the direction, but nonetheless, there’s a small generation of aspiring filmmakers in Montevideo who will forever associate him with this example of how not to do it. As I say, this is always stressing that this is an actor capable of great things, and indeed in a joint class given with Javier Olivera, we also showed him excelling in a Dardenne brothers movie to emphasise the contrast between an actor well directed and an actor poorly directed.

All of which meant, when I realised about ten minutes in that the child who is the protagonist of The Promise was none other than a very youthful Renier, with his foppish blond locks and impish charm, it made me smile. Because he displays an innate brilliance in this early film of the Dardenne brothers. The brothers at their best have a mastery of the simplest elements of drama: a sympathetic hero(ine) put in a place of moral compromise, who has to realise a quest to redeem themselves. The premise of The Promise is at once straightforward and mesmerising. Can Igor free himself from the tyrannical hold of his desperate father, Roger (also brilliantly played with a mixture of canniness, greed and stupidity by Olivier Gourmet). All of this set in a world of immigration which the film shows was just as pressing an issue twenty years ago as it is today. 

The film manages to combine great flair in its camerawork and edit, with something so down-to-earth that it really feels at times as though you’re there, in this Belgian backwater. The restless energy of the camera, allied to the energy of the performances (including that of Assita Ouedraogo as Assita) gives the film an urgency which entraps the viewer. People are always moving in this film, in a combi van across an urban landscape, in a go-kart, or striding the night streets. The restless forces of a globalised capitalism on the march, captured in the bewilderment and moral complexity of a young man’s growing understanding of the world he lives in.

civil war land in bad decline [george saunders]

Saunders' short stories have a rebarbative, offbeat feel. The prose is abrasive, occasionally challenging. The author creates unusual, surreal american worlds where surprisingly normal sounding people struggle with demented situations. In Bounty, the longest story, a man born with a deformity which means he belongs to the flawed sector of a world divided by a new form of apartheid sets out on a journey across the country to rescue his lost sister. The journey looks both backwards and forwards: at once an allegory for an escaped slave but also a terrible vision of a post apocalyptic USA. It's The Road meets Gravity's Rainbow meets Native Son, told in a sparse 80 pages. The US has become a kind of theme park in Saunders' imagination, something to be cannibalised for entertainment purposes. It’s a dystopian vision, and the clanking prose seems like part of this; even the language people use to communicate has become mechanised, atonal.

hotel iris [yoko ogawa]

Ogawa's short novel is set in a Japanese coastal resort town. Which coast it is set on I don't know, but the notion that all those fictional characters who participate in the novel, and the fictional town itself, might no longer exist, adds piquancy to a slight but finely written story of depravity and delinquency. One of the comments in the blurb, by Hilary Mantel, says - "I admire any writer who dares to work on this uneasy territory". This territory being the sexuality of a seventeen year old girl who enjoys, that being the operative word, a fraught and to-most-people's eyes abusive sexual relationship with a man three times her age.

There's much here that seems to resonate with foreign notions of the Japanese psyche. The use of sex as both a complex outlet for power games and a means to excavate the subject's confused interior landscape. Mari, the protagonist, desires the humiliation that her lover, the Russian translator subjects her to. Here is the pertinence of Mantel's comment. It is the kind of book which it might be said could only be published by a female writer, in this day and age. If a man were to suggest that Mari wanted this 'abusive' relationship, exploring it from her point of view, it is hard to think he would be taken seriously and would in all likelihood be read as exploitative. However, in Ogawa's hands, the story is strangely convincing. Mari is never a victim: she remains a level-headed appraiser of her situation, no matter how dangerous. We are in similar territory to the recent film of Norwegian Wood: just because you're going through something difficult and complex doesn't make for an inevitably tragic narrative. The resilience of youth enables people seeking experience to embrace strangeness; a strangeness which society, (in Hotel Iris denoted by the townspeople and Mari's family), cannot contemplate as anything but alien and reprehensible.

The book's effectiveness is not founded on its more salacious material, but on the way it gets under its protagonist's skin. The whole world is coming alive for Mari, and the translator is but one part of that world. At times the book's town feels reminiscent of Prout's Normandy seaside holiday resort; the seaside, with its unique rhythms, is a great place to grow up, to realise the possibilities of the adult world. Ogawa's prose offers precise descriptions and is unafraid of surreal detail (a plague of fishes, a lunch of multi-coloured soups). Hotel Iris is a book that succeeds in exploring the most provocative of worlds without really being provocative at all. By reducing the salacious to the mundane, she seems to suggest that we shouldn't over-emphasise deviance or sexuality; normality abounds in even the most rarified of situations.

rainy season [w jose agualusa]

Rainy Season is composed of 9 sections, each of which consists of several miniature chapters of their own. The book seems at first somewhat lop-sided. The early sections are given over to an account of the life of a female Angolan poet, Lidia do Carmo Ferreira. (The author's use of the figure of a lost female poet having uncanny resonance with the work of Bolano.) Then the narrative moves forward in time, towards the seventies and the event of the Angolan revolution, when the Portuguese were overthrown. A host of characters are introduced, including Lidia's daughter, Pauleta, her flatmates and fellow political activists and local characters. The narrative feels somewhat random, and becomes hard to follow. The narrator's first person voice gradually becomes more important, and his story begins to be told.

For a while it seems as though the author's material is in danger of spiralling out of control. Rainy Season is a concise book, and the shifts from character to character, from Luanda to Lisbon to Berlin to Olinda and back to Angola seem too much for the narrative to bear. And then the story focuses in on the aftermath of the revolution. When Lidia, the narrator, and all the other sundry characters, become political prisoners, their lives at the mercy of whichever faction is dominant within the new Angola, riven by civil war.

In this coalescence, this pulling together of its divergent strands, the book changes gear, and like a puzzle where the pieces finally find their home, a terrible clarity emerges. The short, precise chapters offer all the information that the narrator has at his disposal. Information takes on a different quality within the confines of a prison, a prison lost in a lost conflict. Timelines are immaterial, and blurred. It might be a year between chapters, it might be ten. Information is a current that flows, rather than a clear chronology. Things are lost along the way. Some remain constant - such as the narrator's awareness of Lidia's fate; such as the presence, although not the pre-eminence, of death. The fate of tangential, marginal characters reveals as much as the fate of the figures at the heart of the story, a story whose tendrils stretch across the devastated land.

I think that I commented earlier about Agualusa that I wondered how his work might tackle the events of Angola's recent history. That at times his style seems too gossamer, too fragile. Here, those qualities are revealed to be a by-product of a world where there is no real expectation of survival, and the notion of history has become the loosest of dreams. The fragility of day-to-day existence permitting little space for reflection on what has caused the chaos, or where the chaos might lead. A time when everything seems marginal, precious, slight. Agualusa's book is like a spider's web, which somehow encompasses fifty years of history, a history which at any moment might have been blown away. In its opaque way, it reveals as much about the tragedy of political imprisonment, and the vicissitudes of late twentieth century living for so many societies, as many a weightier tome. In a world where words and stories are dangerous, his book suggests that even used sparingly, they retain great power, and his narrative reveals that a tragic order can be constructed out of what appears to be chaos.

I read it in stages, never quite knowing where it was taking me, finishing it on the train to Ipswich yesterday, astonished at its capacity to move me, something I'd never have guessed as I tried to make sense of the early sections, never knowing the power of the connections that would come to be revealed.

nazi literature in the americas [bolaño]

Nazi Literature is something of a conceit. The book consists of approximately thirty short biographies of fictional American writers with some kind of right wing affiliation. Also included is a list of publishing houses, secondary figures, and a complete bibliography. Some of the characters are monsters, but just as many are losers, or curious anomalies within their worlds. Some of the mockery is brutal and extremely funny; some of it is almost tender, in its portrayal of these slightly pathetic figures, and their lacklustre literary efforts. Indeed, the more unsuccessful the writer, the more Bolaño seems to sympathise with them. I once discovered an interview with him online where he was talking about how much he respected the writers that never get anywhere, who fade into obscurity, and it seems as though, in some bizarre way, the writers in this book are the alter-egos or step-siblings of the poets who populate the first part of The Savage Detectives. As though even if they are Nazi murderers, Bolaño finds it hard to speak ill of a fellow writer.

The writing is always crisp and liable to snap, crackle or pop with little jokes or surprises. It's neither a novel nor a collection of short stories, but rather the articulation of a strange, parallel world to the one the writer knew. The final story, dealing with Carlos Hoffman who will reappear in Distant Star, is the one that knits the personal and the fictional together, as Bolaño himself claims to have witnessed the mystical sky-poetry of the freakish and terrifying Hoffman, part of the death squads which might, once upon a time, have claimed his life.

It's a little odd reading Bolaño now, a year and a half on from making his discovery. After 2666's publication, he has started to become known to a wider public; in my circle he's one of those writers who people know of but might never get round to reading. There are more of his books waiting to be translated, but Nazi Literature is the last of his currently translated works left for me to get teeth into. It's hard to put a finger on what he's actually done, but like all the writers one chooses to consider (or who insist upon one discovering them to be) great, Bolaño's works seem to have constructed some kind of universe of their own, a universe which might also be a benchmark for the one we inhabit, or might just be a benchmark for the possibilities of writing, or fiction, which might also be a benchmark for the possibilities of the universe, be it the one we inhabit or one of the ones we don't. Part of being a writer is to remake the world anew for the readers who read you, and convince those readers that your vision has something that gives it an import or a value which they cannot ignore. Perhaps there's a secret fascism involved in the very process of writing; the imposition of one person's will on a vast swathe of others. Certainly many of the writers listed in the Nazi Literature have an unhealthy charisma, and many become cult figures, revered by their readers (although others do perish in complete obscurity). Bolaño's politics never seem to be much of an issue, what with him having pitched in against Pinochet, and sided so ostentatiously with the Left (the key decision for anyone of his generation was which side were you on, and having met a few Chileans of his age, you can see that this decision may well have been one they were then stuck with forever); however Bolaño's fascination with the right (thinking in particular of the last part of 2666) may well have a subtle connection with his understanding of how writing itself works, how the will, or charisma, of a single soul can be transmuted to hold sway over so many. Including, in his case, myself, my own universe marginally reshaped, in some way, by my reading of the strange world of Mr B.

under the frangipani [w. mia couto]

Couto's Sleepwalking Land has stayed with me, even though the tradition of oral storytelling his work derives from feels a long way removed from the literary tradition I belong to. The work of this writer from Mozambique has felt peculiarly significant over the course of the past weeks, for reasons explored below.

The narrative of Under The Frangipani is superficially straightforward. A policeman, Izidine Naita, is sent to a remote fort to investigate the murder of the mightily named Vastome Excellency, the fort overseer, a kind of head honcho. Besides one nurse, who flies to the fort with Izidine on a helicopter, the only people who live there are an odd collection of elderly waifs and strays. These witnesses are questioned by the policeman, one-by-one, and each one successively claims responsibility for Vastome's murder. This potentially quaint, Agatha Christie-esque story is underpinned by darker realities. It emerges that Vastome had been smuggling weapons and hoarding them at the fort. Izidine has essentially been sent not to discover Vastome's fate, but to recover the weapons. When it's clear he's failed, his own life is put in danger.

The story is complicated by the fact that the policeman has been possessed by the story's narrator, Ermelindo, a man who's been dead for 200 years, buried under the frangipani tree. Ermelindo took part in the construction of the fort and the jetty which still stands. This was built to receive slave ships at the beginning of a seemingly uninterrupted dark history for the country which now wants to dig up his bones and proclaim him as a national hero.

Couto weaves the threads of his story together, dovetailing Ermelindo's narration of Izidine's enquiry with the verbatim confessions of the various inhabitants of the fort. The fort is a small island, cut off from the rest of the country, only approachable by helicopter. As in Sleepwalking Land, war has ravaged what might have been taken for normal society, so that it's become fragmented, with isolated enclaves surviving on their own, although even these cannot resist the wider chaos of the country. It is clearly not by chance that there are no families here, no children, not even grown adults, just the elderly, struggling to survive.

Recent events across the world have raised the spectre of even the most affluent societies facing increased economic and political pressures. There has been much gnashing of teeth and grinding of forelocks at the dystopian possibilities that could be engendered by a kamikaze use of renewable fuels coupled with an insatiable demand for growth. Of course, as one comment on an economics blog I was reading last week noted, in Africa the weak have rarely been anything other than susceptible to the destructive powers of unregulated capital. The commentator observed that the affluent West was now learning what it feels like to see one's destiny in the hands of young, ignorant pursuers of greed, and ended his careful comments with the hyperbolic, 'Welcome to hell.'

Apart from those in my grandparents' generation who lived through the conclusion of World War 2 on mainland Europe, very few of us have any idea what this dystopian future would be like. A report on Newsnight from one of the few journalists to have visited Mogadishu in recent months gives the slightest hint: buildings that are nothing more than ghosts, a place where even a well- armed UN force will not travel so far from base that they can't get back before nightfall. Mozambique, like other parts of Africa which have barely benefited from the great economic prosperity which the world is so scared of losing, has suffered in similar ways to Somalia. Given this, Couto's books really do feel like dispatches from some kind of front line. Only in those societies where chaos has at some point become the norm rather than the exception will it be possible to discover what it might be like when a projected societal breakdown has become the norm.

In which sense, Couto's mixed messages, whilst dystopian (again it is worth noting the parallels between McCarthy's exalted The Road and Couto's unknown Sleepwalking Land), seem far from disheartening. There remains a clear, engrained notion of a social fabric, which can be rooted both in an idea of fellowship and nature, most obviously, in this instance, enshrined within the frangipani tree the book is named after. The relationship between the soil and the humans who live on it (also known as history) has a power which is all too easy to forget, but which Couto's elderly and irascible would-be murderers understand.

One thing I find about Couto's books is that they demand I adapt my notions of reading. His books seem like a journey down a lazy, meandering river: they cannot be rushed, because each aspect of the narrative is a story in itself, with its own beginning, middle and end. Although the books are short, progress through them is dense. They don't have the compelling nature of Western narratives, continually driving towards the consumption of the next page and the next. It feels more like a journey through a village of standing stones: no matter what happens, the book and its stories will still be there tomorrow. Perhaps this is because the stories belong as much to the soil as they do to the mind.

five years of my life [w. murat kurnaz] & the flight [w. horacio verbitsky]

Whilst writing about literature I have steered away from non-fiction. Non-fiction has a different agenda to fiction, requiring divergent skills. With non-fiction, the way in which the piece is written is less important than what is being written about; whereas with fiction, this is the other way round. This is not to say that there are works of non-fiction which will be far more carefully composed than works of fiction; just that the reasons for reading the two may not be the same, meaning that, in the interests of clarity, I have resisted reviewing the non-fiction I've read this year.

However, I've just finished two books which demand to be made an exception of. The Flight, also known as Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior, is a book of acknowledged significance. It's author, Horacio Verbitsky, conducted a series of interviews with a navy officer, Adolfo Scilingo, wherein Scilingo came clean about his part in what the navy had been doing during the dirty war. He spoke to the journalist about the way in which the military regime would drug prisoners and then fly them above the South Atlantic, before throwing them, drugged but alive, into the ocean. Over the course of several years there were weekly flights, which members of the Argentine navy were obliged to participate in. Scilingo said he had been on two of them.

Scilingo's confession was not, in fact, the first time news of these crimes had been officially acknowledged. They had been mentioned in a judicial review conducted in the wake of the end of the dictatorship, and if anyone had wanted to know, the information was out there. However, it was the first time a member of the navy had confessed and broken the code of silence concerning events that had happened almost twenty years previously. The book caused a storm when originally published in Argentina, as for the first time, the nation really began to take stock of the crimes that had been committed in its name by the armed forces during the dictatorship.

Verbitsky's story deals with issues from the recent past. As noted elsewhere, there's a fine line to be trod between moving on from what happened and taking account of what happened. However, the story's potency is heightened by the human role within it of Scilingo himself, who Verbitsky does not give an easy ride. Scilingo's motivations for talking turn from annoyance with his superiors and a hypocritical code of silence, to a genuine realisation of the horror of what he has participated in, to a desperate quest for personal survival. His story is the tragedy, which has a redemptive edge to it, of a man caught up in the wider scheme of political history, unable to sever himself at any point from the circumstances he finds himself trapped in, yet who nevertheless at least has the courage to confront his demons, which is more than could be said for anyone else who emerged from the dehumanised culture he belonged to.

Murat Kurnaz's book tells the other side of the story. Kurnaz was arrested in Pakistan, spent several months being tortured by the Americans in Kandahar, and was then transferred to Guantanamo. A Turkish citizen who'd lived all his life in Germany, who had worked as a bouncer at discos before he discovered Islam, Kurnaz describes with a dispassionate candour the torture he underwent whilst in American custody. We have watched our TV screens over the past six years and glimpsed images of something we know is unethical but about which details have remained sparse. Kurnaz strips clear the TV veneer, offering detail after detail about a shockingly inhumane system which was, and presumably still is, far worse than anything we have been lead to believe.

It is hard to know why Kurnaz's book has not been on the bestseller lists, has not received more attention here. It reads like a thriller, in so far as it's almost impossible to put down. Murnaz writes without embitterment, in spite of everything. The book also gives as telling an insight into the positive properties of Islam as anything I've read. In the face of all that he is forced to suffer, his faith keeps him alive, as well as those around him. At one point a guard who has a modicum of humanity comments on the way that he would have gone mad if couped up in the kind of living conditions the prisoners have to suffer, and notes that only their faith has kept the prisoners sane.

On the other side of the chain link fence are the guards. The damnation of the US system comes about as much through the empty headed savagery of the men and women who run the prison as the prison itself. When Kurnaz comments on those few guards who act with some kind of decency, something the prisoners always note, there is relief that not everyone in this place is corrupt. An inhumane system relies for its efficiency on the inhumanity of its operators. Kurnaz finds greater fellowship with the iguanas, spiders and hummingbirds who visit him in his cell than with the humans who patrol on the outside.

Verbitsky's account of Scilingo's self-confessed crimes is shocking. Yet that shockingness is dulled, no matter what, by time, which dulls all things. Kurnaz's account of events in Kandahar and Cuba is also shocking. Yet that describes a prison which is still active, and many of the men mentioned in his account will still be living in conditions whose barbarity has nothing to do with a world we would like to believe is civilised, even as I write.

distant star [w. bolaño]

If your themes are poetry; fascism and Chile it's hard to imagine coming up with a better conceit to wed the three than a sky writing poet from Pinochet's airforce. Carlos Wieder is as evil and complex an anti-hero as they come. His charisma shines through in spite of Bolaño's antipathy to his position. He comes across as an enigmatic genius. It is only when what he writes in the sky is revealed that the banality and lack of originality underpinning his mystique is revealed.

Bolaño's text is brief, corrosive, shines itself like the heavens above a cold Chilean night. Each page contains little gems that sparkle: the alt-German etymology of Wieder's name; or the performance art of Wieder's catastrophic 'exhibition'. As ever in Bolaño's work there's the pleasure taken from the pleasure taken by the author as he concocts his tales. Distant Star uses the format of The Savage Detectives - a detective story where two friends hunt down a lost poet. The blending of discursive fable, sharp characterisation and detective novel is as effective as ever, spun around the image of the fascist poet, lost in his isolation.

Distant Star is a minor masterpiece. It is the fourth novel of Bolaño's I've read this year, and I still await the translation of 2066. The slimmer volumes feel like prose poems. A narrator wends thoughts around his or her theme. The novels exist as much for their digressions as their narrative. The introduction claims this text is amplified from a short story in a previous volume, Nazi Literature in America, and, as with all Bolaño's smaller works, it feels as though this too could be amplified into something more extravagant. If it were not for The Savage Detectives and (I assume) 2066, the feeling might have persisted that Bolaño was almost as much of a dilettante as some of his anti-heroes: a great talent that never quite flowered. As it is, the longer novels did get written, and Distant Star shines as a highly enjoyable crystallisation of Bolaño's talent - a talent as transparent as Wieder's sky-writing, but coupled with depth and durability and a humanity the book's anti-hero so palpably lacks.

This text would be the best introduction to the writer's work I have so far read.