perdita durango (w&d álex de la Iglesia, w. jorge guerricaechevarría, david trueba, barry gifford)

Emerging from de la Iglesia’s bombastic movie, I was told that it went down a storm in Mexico when it came out, back in the twentieth century. It would be worth analysing why that would be, given that the Mexican lead, Romeo, played by an over-the-top Javier Bardem (is it cosplaying when a Spaniard plays a Mexican bandido as a psychotic?) fits a stereotype of the kind of deranged, amoral killer which US governments warn are exactly the type of people they need to keep out. Much of the action takes place on or near the border itself, which Flavio Martínez Labiano’s flamboyant camera work depicts with swooping helicopter shots, pre-drone. As Romeo and Rosie Perez’ Perdita criss-cross across this border, wreaking havoc, they tread a fine line between charismatic anti-heroes and sadistic monsters. I guess if one identifies as an anti-hero, something which the us-and-them of the border encourages, then it’s not that hard a leap to identify with Perdita and Romeo. It’s an interesting contrast with other border fictions. In McCarthy, the gringos are the good guys, crossing into a biblical world whose protean mores they grapple with. In Villeneuve’s lurid Sicario, the Mexicans are just as amoral and sadistic as Romeo and Perdita, but with none of the charm. So in a sense, de la Iglesia’s operatic tale can be seen as a vindication of those who are usually vilified, and their arbitrary vengeful abuse of two young kids is a turning of the tables. On the other hand, a film which glorifies a rapist, (or rapists, because Rosie also gets in on the act), is perhaps harder to like in this day and age, even if this might be termed a film which clearly comes from another era and the kids seem to get off on it.

In many ways Perdita Durango feels like one of those macho films with a female lead that got given budgets back in the day. Perdita is second cousin to Betty Blue or Thelma and Louise or La Femme Nikita, even Run Lola Run, eponymous avatars of a kind of kick-ass femininity which still feels a long way from feminism. 

the ice storm (d. ang lee, w. rick moody, james schamus)

Ang Lee’s nineties hit is such a curious film. On one level it is a hideous examination of suburban USA, a world where the bad haircuts and fashions match the dubious morals in the time of Nixon. On the other it’s a tender-hearted coming of age tale, peopled by a whole school of future stars, including Maguire, Ricci and Wood. Lee skewers the vacuous suburban world with real dexterity, helped by some great acting from Kline, Joan Allen and Weaver. At one moment, Weaver, on her hilarious waterbed, one of many succinct touches, is seen reading a Philip Roth novel. We have been transported into a ghoulish world of wannabe predatory men who are in real life a bitter disappointment to their women, either as husbands or lovers. Only the children, lead by the gloriously off-beat Maguire., hold out some kind of hope for a better future, once the ice has melted. (Of course we now know that the ice is melting far too fast and the better future is as illusory as ever). It’s intriguing to see how effectively the outsider, Lee, disembowels the North American culture, in a fashion neither Hanecke or Wong Kar Wai, for example, managed. Sadly I didn’t get a chance to see any of his other films in the Cinemateca cycle. A last note - the strangeness of hearing Bowie’s voice at the end in the song that covers the closing credits. For all that Bowie might have ended up spending the last years of his life in New York, he sounds resolutely un-American, faintly out of place, like the man who fell to earth, albeit, the Englishman who fell to earth. 

twenty four seven (w&d shane meadows, w. paul fraser)

Has anyone ever laughed as much as I did in an Uruguayan cinema upon hearing the words ‘Edwina Currie’? I doubt it. This reference to the erstwhile politician and lover of the former prime minister actually taps into the wider themes of Meadows’ engaging early work. The central character, Darcy, played by Bob Hoskins with an irascible glee, keeps a diary, which one of the lads who make up his boxing team later discovers. In it, he writes, and narrates, that he was one of those left behind in the Thatcherite boom of the eighties. Which is why he finds himself down on his luck, identifying with the gang of kids who hang around and get into trouble. His mission to set up the boxing club and give the kids a focus in life is a communitarian reaction to the warped individualism of Thatcherite Britain.

The film rides on the back of Hoskins’ charm, the director’s verve and the humour of the kids. Meadows’ future as a spinner of stories for TV can be noted here, as there are more than enough sub-stories and narrative strands to fill out another three movies at least. The closing credits come over the scenes of Darcy’s funeral, a few years after the film’s events, picking out the lads and their new families. The film is carried by Hoskins, whose commitment to the boxing club presumably reflected his commitment to the film itself, an actor with a notable track record mucking in with a rookie director and an even more rookie cast.

The film’s depiction of a depressed Midlands town, where multi-racial youths feel as though there is nothing to do except look for trouble, feels acute and authentic. It is also a telling prefiguration of a country which, no matter how wealthy it has appeared, has been in many ways running on empty for forty years.

hana-bi (w&d takeshi kitano)

From the very opening shot I had the strange sensation of having seen this film before, without being able to identify in my mind where or when. The film has an aesthetic which is unlike anything Western cinema ever aspires to. The mix of sentimentality and violence is jarring. Nishi is a hard-boiled cop who is also doing everything he can to share his last days with his dying wife in peace. The trouble is the yakuza are on his trail, believing he owes them money and they keep requiring him to mercilessly beat the shit out of someone else. At the same time, Nishi’s former partner, Horibe, has been left in a wheelchair following a shooting and is trying to find a reason to live through painting. (Imdb informs that these paintings were actually made by Kitano himself, following a near fatal motocycle accident in 1994.) The resultant film is a pot pourri of genre and tragedy, of colour and deadpan pacing. Even the edit is disorientating, with Nishi having flash forwards that intersperse the action, breaking it up, messing with the viewer’s mind. There are moments when this device feels like something Nolan might have stolen, cinema as a spinning vortex of time, without any of Nolan’s pretension. All of which marks Hana-Bi as a film that is curiously gentle, but insatiably violent all at the same time, a jagged combination that makes for disorientating viewing, even more so when one suspects that one has seen this all before, but cannot be completely confident that this is the case.

happy together (wong kar-wai)

In between Fallen Angels and Happy Together, according to Imdb, the prolific director only made one film, a ten minute short where: “A Japanese-Chinese couple hangs out and shoots each other.” If this short feels like standard Kar Wai material, the subsequent film must have come as a shock. Firstly in that the director abandoned South East Asia for Argentina, of all places, and secondly because in his next film no-one dies and there’s very little violence. Instead it’s a doomed gay love story. It was a smart move, as Happy Together won him best director at Cannes. Again the film blooms with cinematographic fecundity. The grade flips from washed out black and white, perfect for a tango-vision of Buenos Aires, to washed out colour, which is equally perfect. The play of light and shade which was so integral to the lighting of In The Mood for Love, is investigated with a severity which means that sometimes Tony Leung’s face is almost entirely cast in shadow. The director seems to revel in the Rioplatense winter, that dank, monochrome fever dream which I am presently inhabiting, which gives the lie to any notion of a tropical continent. However, beyond the aesthetic joys, this film is also a fierce investigation of both love and home. By filming abroad, in a society so remote from his own, Wong Kar Wai finds himself investigating the meaning of exile, the lure of the return. The last sequences, in Taipei and Hong Kong, act as a bookend and give Leung’s journey an uplift after all the grief his lost lover has bestowed on him.

The examination of a fierce, doomed, romantic love is peerless. The attraction between the two protagonists Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yiu-Fai is indisputable, and rendered with wit and grace. They dance like a couple, they fuck like a couple and they bicker like a couple. It’s perhaps in the final part of this equation that the director’s portrayal of romantic love comes into its own, because he is prepared to even dwell on the tedium of love, as Autumn turns to Summer and the sun comes out of the Bonaerense gloom, but the two men remain trapped in their room and their torpor, unable to escape the knot of their hopeless dependency on each other.

Another notable aspect of the film, seen from this side of the world, is the way in which it evokes Buenos Aires so effectively. The musical score is spot on, but so is the identification of a place which can seem, from the point of a fixed camera pointed at the Obelisco, like a teeming metropolitan world, but is also a place of lonely streets with warm corners, where people dance as much to keep the cold at bay as out of desperate passion. Seen through an exile’s eyes, the peeling beauty of a faded Boca pension possesses a tragic charm, even if the reality of living there has less than zero glamour. The way the Argentine characters react to Po-Wing and Yiu-Fai, just two more characters in the barrio, where the exotic has no great premium, also seems spot on. It’s a land which seems rooted in a Borgesian timelessness, impervious to change, a place to play out elemental human dramas in peace, isolated from the rest of the world and its teeming chaos. 

on connais la chanson (d resnais, w. agnès jaoui & jean-pierre bacri)

The film’s titles are composed of fetching little cartoons of the characters we are about to meet. Then there is one of Dennis Potter, who had recently died, and the note that the film is a tribute to him. The film’s use of music is a clear homage to Potter, but In so many ways other ways On Connais La Chanson feels nothing like a Potter project. Resnais’ trick in the film is that the cast of his romantic comedy will suddenly start lip synching to popular French songs, not one of which I recognised. This intervention feels at times extremely effective and at other times laboured. Sometimes it’s expositional and at other times it offers a striking insight into a character’s mind. All in all the film feels like an intellectual exercise with little of the pathos Potter managed to wring from his use of popular music. Having said which, The Singing Detective and Brimstone and Treacle and Pennies from Heaven felt, in my memory at least, like punchier, more challenging pieces. On Connais La Chanson is beguilingly French, a soft-edged Parisian comedy of thwarted passion and small betrayals. All the characters are white, middle class, and potentially, one imagines if one was French, irritating. This is the same world that La Haine and early Gaspar Noe emerged from. It’s a world where mobile phones are just starting to be a thing, where property development (a theme also picked up in Paris, 13 Arrondissement) is starting to change the Parisian landscape. Resnais touches on these themes, but they are couched within a doggedly bourgeois narrative, which gives the film a slightly clumsy apolitical air. For all its formal playfulness, we are a long way from Marienbad and Hiroshima. 

boogie nights (w&d paul thomas anderson)

Another film I saw once upon a time, a long time ago, and have not seen since. It struck me that if there’s a cultural point of reference for Boogie Nights it’s probably Angels in America. (One of the films within a film is called Brock Landers: Angels Live In My Town.) The kaleidoscopic presentation of US history and decline which Anderson presents is no doubt softer in its impact than Kushner’s play, in spite of all the sex. Nevertheless, the film represents an incredibly bold statement by the youthful director, one which took the porn industry and used it as a metaphor for the evolution of US capitalism in a similar way to which Coppola used the Mafia to the same end. Boogie Nights is rangy, overly-ambitious and brilliant. It’s the chronicle of hubris, as Wahlberg’s character rises and falls. What might have been tacky, isn’t. If the film’s ambition sometimes outruns itself, with the last half hour in the eighties lacking the narrative coherence of the rest of the film, this is still a reminder that with strong enough characters, you can get away with overreaching. Creating cinema on the scale of a novel is something few manage to achieve, for all kinds of reasons, many of them to do with the relative costs of producing a minute of cinema compared to a page of a novel, but when a director comes along who can pull off the trick the result is something delirious.

the garden of secrets [juan goytisolo, tr. peter bush]

As the title suggests, and the script makes clear, this short novel is a Borgesian endeavour, which uses multiple narrators to construct a picture of the life of Eusebio, a poet who fled Spain in the wake of the Civil War, ending up in Marrakesh. The conceit is that a group of readers/ writers assemble in a garden and each one relates a brief chapter in the poet’s life. Some of these chapters are purely tangential. It’s up to the reader to assemble and construct a viable biography from the fragments on offer. 

The novel reminds us of the barbarity of the Spanish Civil War, as well as reflecting both the closeness and distance of North Africa from Europe, a connection which centuries of distance have kept at illusory bay. Culturally and geographically there’s no reason that the Iberian peninsula, or Southern Italy, should feel themselves to be closer to Sweden or the UK or Hungary, than North Africa, even if, politically, that has been the case for several centuries. This is the kind of false historical narrative that Enard’s Zone also alluded to.

Goytisolo’s playfulness, (up to and including speculating about the author’s own name at the conclusion of the book), almost demands a personal response from the reader. Given the multiple voices and strands employed, it’s easy to drift in and out of the tenuous narrative, but all the same, the book ended up beguiling. It’s indicative of a kind of informal, slightly anarchic, playful approach to literature, whose echoes are found in the work of Vila-Matas and, por supuesto, Bolaño. (Not to mention Cortazar and his ilk). The way in which the Hispanic world creates a self-aware inter-textuality adds a constant fascination to the process of discovering this culture. Goytisolo reaffirms this with a list of little-known writers under the rubric “Appropriations and Borrowings by Co-readers”, a list which includes the name of my friend’s grandfather, the poet, Rafael Duyos. 

the appointment [herta müller]

A woman gets on a tram to fulfil an appointment with her interrogator, Albu. Albu is a henchman of the Ceausescu regime. He’s brutish, possessed of a savage subtlety, and at the same time both marginal and central to the woman’s life. The narrative is threaded around this tram journey, which will take as long as the novel lasts. In between times, the narrator ducks in and out of her story, explaining how she came to be where she is, taking a tram to visit her interrogator. The fact that this journey seems almost voluntary makes it all the more chilling, because of course, it is not. There’s no escaping Albu. The fact that he permits you to go home after the interrogation ends doesn’t mean to say that it will ever end, that you are ever off the hook. The interrogations will continue for as long as the regime continues. This late 20th century Eastern European world is still resolutely Kafkaesque, after all these years. During the (tram) journey of the novel, the narrator describes her life to the reader. Her alcoholic boyfriend, Paul, her stark upbringing, the neighbours who spy on her and Paul, for one of whom she buys a notebook to assist him in his task. This is a down-at-heel, desolate Morrissey tune of a novel, only one where instead of ennui, the subject is gripped by a necessary and unavoidable paranoia. The noose is slowly closing in and there’s no escaping it. The trick, the narrator tells us, is not go to mad. Her acerbic observations and semi-transgressive friendship with the enigmatic and doomed Lilli help us to understand that she is, so far, succeeding in this aim, of not going mad, but it’s always there, the madness of despair, lurking round the corner, waiting to be thrown out of the window with the bedclothes and the pillows. Müller’s text is not an easy read, but then again, the life her heroine leads is not an easy life. 

the return [bolaño]

Another volume from the posthumous pen of. What to make of this collection, ripped from two volumes published in Spanish, Putas Asesinas and Llamadas Telefonicas?

I have no idea when these stories were written within the timeframe of the Bolano oeuvre. My hazard-a-guess would be they come from towards the end, rather than the beginning. The author starts to show a fascination with more colourful “characters”. Porn stars, footballers, a Parisian playboy, fashion designers. It might be that these stories, which seem dependent to a certain extent on the exoticism of their characters’ professions, do not work as effectively as those which adopt either a more neutral protagonist, or, the classical Bolanian trope, either a writer or the writer’s alter-ego. Belano or Bolaño appears in several of the stories. When he does it reminds us of what a skill it is to construct a self-referential protagonist without this seeming whimsical or self-indulgent. All too often, this device will lead (pace Amis) to something clunky and unconvincing. But when Bolaño makes an appearance in one of his own stories the voice, the turn of phrase, feels completely authentic. Of course, it is a voice from beyond the grave, but it almost feels as though the text was indeed written from that vantage point, the high peaks of death. One of the stories, The Return, is told by a dead man, but oddly the dead man’s voice here is less compelling than the dead voice of the author. Even though this is also the author’s voice and even though in the moment of writing the author was not, we imagine, actually dead.

Writing is by definition a self-indulgent process. The wife of a writer friend of mine once turned on him, telling him it was all masturbation. It’s a regular attack and, when the writer isn’t getting paid for their troubles, one that is not ungrounded. The writer plunges into the morass of their own mind, hoping to emerge with gems which, for some unknown reason, might be of interest to others. This is as much an urge as a skill, more an addiction than a virtue. What’s so beguiling about Bolaño is that the reader knows this is not a man who wrote for money  or even for fame. He wrote because he obeyed the compulsion to write, something that is detached from the industry of writing, an industry which includes the whole paraphernalia of criticism. That compulsion, shaped and honed through both practice and the act of reading, lead to the unlikely event of his books sitting in your hand, or your digital device. There might be thousands of Bolaños out there, unread, undiscovered, drowned under the weight of their unrecognised words. It is worth bearing in mind that, although his success is not entirely posthumous, it is largely so. Right up until the beginning of the end, this is someone who wrote into the void, unafraid, refusing to be silenced by the absence of an echo that might have marked the point which defined the writing’s raison d’etre.

The last story here is an account of a dream, a dream wherein he meets the poet Enrique Lihn. The story states that the dream took place in ’99. Lihn died in ’98. Lihn is therefore a ghost, although ghosts are allowed to roam free in our dreams, whilst real life ordains they remain on the other side of the crepuscular surface of ‘reality’. The story doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s just an account of a dream. It mentions the fate of another five authors who Lihn once nominated as the future voices of Chilean literature, once upon a time, all of whom have either died or seen their stars fade. What is the point of this story, this dream? It doesn’t possess the classical virtues of a well-rounded story. Yet it marks a completely satisfying conclusion to the collection of short stories. Because this is a ghost writing about a ghost. Who was also a writer. Literature, for all its masturbatory tendencies, is a death defyer. The writer, from the cocoon of his absence, maintains a presence. The universe of literature, just like the literature of dreams, resists the supposed laws of physics. The writers egotistical I triumphs. Bolaño, one feels in his writing, had a grasp of this, much as Homer or whoever else one wants to name did. Those writers who are not so much charging over the precipice of their society, as most do, for fame or fortune, but charging over the precipice of mortality. An altogether more audacious, Quixotian endeavour.

television [jean-philippe toussaint]

Television is another novel which inhabits the curious novella/ journal territory which seems increasingly popular at the edge of the latest modernist universe.

You, the reader, will accompany me as I take you on a stroll through my curiously disinteresting life. Which is nevertheless full of interesting details. In this instance, I am going to tell you about the monograph on Titian for which I have received a grant which permits me to spend the Summer in Berlin whilst my wife and kids are away but which I cannot motivate myself to write so instead I write about not writing it. Whilst also detailing my solitary adventures as a nudist bather, killing my neighbours' plants and generally not doing what I know I ought to be doing.

You might find it droll. You might find my observations on the role of television in contemporary life incisive. You might not. It doesn’t matter all that much. It’s only a novel after all. I don’t know if I am either droll or incisive. I might be. Sooner or later my wife will return and life will get back to normal and the time of this novel, called television, will have expired. A bit like a television program, in fact. Although I didn’t say that. You did.

I, the writer, not of the novel but of this review of the novel, if indeed it is a review of what can only barely be called a novel, have to confess that in this instance, I did find Toussaint and his meandering prose droll. At times I would even go so far as to say that it was even very funny. However, I would also say that Toussaint could be said to have succeeded in his ambition to create a commentary on the disposable role of television within a disposable society, because when I concluded the book, when I turned it off, it vanished from my mind almost as rapidly as, in the words of Mr Jagger, yesterday’s papers. Though not quite as rapidly. So perhaps it’s not like television after all. Perhaps the additional nano seconds are what make it literature. Entertaining literature, albeit disposable literature. But wasn’t literature once the equivalent of television? Before they had television? Maybe television is only literature in disguise. Or vice versa. And what about Titian? 

dukla [stasiuk]

Dukla has a lot in common with The Road to Babadag. There is an underlying theme which is the writer's repeated visits over the years to the same small town, Dukla, observing how it and himself have changed as the years pass by. But it is also a discursive, rambling treatise, that examines the nature of light, the relationship of light to place, the relationship of perceiving light to being human.

The book ends with a series of cameos about the  village which are almost Carveresque. But these also show why Stasiuk's writing is more effective when unfettered, free to roam. The shorter format appears to curb his instincts. It's the very process of getting lost with him, in his prose, which makes the experience of reading Stasiuk so rich. In comparison to Road to Babadag, Dukla is like a starter, an entree.

the eel (d. shôhei imamura, w. imamura, daisuke tengan, motofumi tomikawa)

Imamura’s film is an exuberant, eccentric fairy tale. Yamashita kills his wife in a fit of jealous passion and then adopts an eel whilst in prison as an ersatz substitute. His passions have rendered him incapable of having real relationships with humans. An eel is safer.

The film then gradually traces the return of his humanity. He finds a sleeping princess, Keiko, (she’s actually taken an overdose) who he rescues. She falls for him and comes to work in his barber’s shop. Gradually Keiko helps him overcome his sense of alienation and when her own problems come back to haunt her, Yamashita finally begins to face up to his true feelings.

As the plot outlines, this is an ultimately sentimental tale, even its starting point is an act of murder. At times it feels as though the director runs the risk of being overly whimsical, with the secondary characters who help to make up Yamashita’s world all having their particular eccentricities (creating a UFO landing ground or displaying a passion for flamenco). Sometimes these feel like gimmicks, in contrast to Yamashita’s more nuanced relationship with his eel. In another way it could be said that they give the film something of the feel of a US indie movie: there’s a hint of Imamura’s idiosyncrasy in the work of Wes Anderson, for example. 

rostov luanda (d. abderrahhmane sissako)

Rostov Lunda is a documentary road movie, detailing the director's quest to find Baribanga, an old Angolan friend who he once knew in Russia. Sissako wends his way through Angola, with only an old photograph to help him. He stops to ask people if they've seen his friend wherever he goes, and as he does so, he creates a portrait of the former Portuguese colony, a state shredded by decades of civil conflict in the aftermath of independence.

Of course, had Sissako found his friend in the opening days of his journey, it would have made for a different film. The longer it takes to find him, the more mileage there is in his travelogue. Perhaps it is not altogether fortuitous that it is on his last evening he finally learns Baribanga isn't in Angola at all, but Berlin. Along the way Sissako meets a surprising and touching collection of individuals, of mixed racial descent. Angola is another rainbow nation, where the disenfranchised can be black, white or of mixed race. All are unified by their ability to have survived, where so many others haven't.

Sissako talks about how Angolan independence was seen as an inspirational moment in African development for his generation when he was younger. The troubles the country was heir to were testament to what has gone wrong on the continent. However, the director's selection of stories seems calculated to cultivate a new optimism; not least when a stately black woman explains how she was finally cajoled to learn to stand and use her feet again after years of sitting, lured by the irresistible pull of dance, a dance she demonstrates for his camera. Likewise, the underlying narrative ends with a satisfying conclusion, when Sissako finds Baribanga in Berlin.

money to burn [ricardo piglia]

Money To Burn is a brief, curious crime novel. Published in 1997, it describes a real 1965 bank robbery that took place in Buenos Aires. In the aftermath, the gang escape to Montevideo, where three of them become involved in the mother of all shout-outs, after finding themselves holed up in a police trap. In his epilogue, Piglia explains that he compiled most of his notes for the book in the sixties, then left them in a drawer for nearly thirty years before rediscovering the material and turning it into Money To Burn.

There are similarities in his approach to Capote's In Cold Blood, a book that some adore, and I have found on the various occasions I've grappled with it to be unreadable. Piglia's style occupies a similar middle ground to Capote's. Part reconstruction, part psychological exploration of a collection of delinquent criminals. The book opens describing Kid Brignone and Gaucho Dorda, two of the three who took part in the shoot-out, as being like twins. The pair met in a psychiatric prison, were occasional lovers, drug addicts and fearlessly psychopathic. Piglia's narrative occasionally darts away from its description of events to offer an imagined insight into their thinking, articulating their dreams and confused desires. However, having dipped into their minds, the book flips back into the wider narrative in an instant, thereby developing a strangely uncohesive narrative that sometimes feels like neither fish nor foul.

Piglia, who prefaces the book with a quotation from Brecht, resists any temptation to editorialise, attempting to stick as far as possible to accurate sources. So the fate of the gang's leader, who managed to avoid getting trapped in the safe house, remains unknown, something the author notes in his epilogue. He also recounts a meeting he himself had, on a train to Bolivia, with a woman who claimed to be the girlfriend of Mereles, the third gangster in the shoot-out. This moment, thrown away at the end, opens up another vista, which is why this story should have resonated so strongly in the author's mind that he felt a desire to revisit it thirty years after the event. In a sense, one suspects, he is also revisiting his own past, a lost world of Studebakers and stool pigeons. In spite of the effectiveness of the drama of the shoot-out, captured in subtle detail over three chapters at the book's conclusion, the author's insistence in absenting himself from the text frustrated me, all the more so when his brief appearance in the epilogue cast so much light on this lost fable from another time.

creole [w. jose eduardo agualusa]

Another novel from the Angolan, this time an epistolary, historical mini-epic, spanning three continents, thirty two years and no more than a hundred and fifty pages.

Most of the letters are written by the Portuguese adventurer, Fradique Mendes, who reports back on his findings to a variety of correspondents. Part of the fun of the book is realising that there are sometimes large temporal gaps between letters which don't at first appear obvious. However, it's hard not to feel at times when reading the always-entertaining Agualusa that there's a great big epic novel screaming to be let out of the book's thin pages. As though the author is dipping his toes in the river rather than diving right in. All the links between the slave trade, Brazil, Europe and Africa are in place and explored, and Fradique's voyage through the murky waters of late 19th century colonialism are fascinating. However, Agualusa resists the lure of narrative, preferring to cast shards of light on the occasional place and time (early Rio, downtown Luanda, the bush) before brushing the shards under the table and skipping forward.

Agualusa has an eye for an image and a nose for a story. I look forward to reading The Rainy Season, about the more recent Angolan struggles. It feels as though the writer wants to tread a delicate line between commenting on his country's history, without wishing that history to become a burden to either his narrative or the reader. So the love of Fradique's life may be seized and thrown into slavery, but this only becomes the cause of the hero's next adventure, and results in a happy ending where Fradique finally gets his girl. Fradique's jaunty tone works wonderfully for relating the curiosities of the expanding world he explores, but is rather less effective in capturing the growing pains of the new countries whose development he participates in with such gusto.