the savage detectives (bolaño, tr wimmer)

 Re-Reading the Savage Detectives.   

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

As perhaps now. Lost in the nights that have lost

Their discipline. Errant children, out on the lash. 

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

Me then, on the eleventh floor, Wembley Stadium 

Grinning at my rear window, Paddington bear 

Goofing down the canal. You came to console,

Unbidden, the mystery guest, with your tired 

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

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

Riding pillion again, humming a tune so catchy

I can’t help but sing along, the Encrucijada

Blues. You’ll see me through these insomniac

Ciudad Vieja nights, just as you did then, the

Resolute beat of your words casting spells,

Luring the night to its false, gleaming, dawn. 

juha (w&d aki kaurismäki)

Kaurismäki’s film is a pitch perfect homage to cinema’s silent era. Essentially a three hander, it reminds the viewer of the virtues of simplicity and clarity in story-telling, virtues which permit the filmmaker to therefor indulge his or her chosen whims. The highly limited use of dialogue means an additional emphasis on shot composition and score. It also reminds us that cinema is an inherently technical art, involving the juxtaposition of artificial moments. The sum of these juxtaposed moments is greater than the whole. Kaurismäki seems to delight in flirting with the ridiculous and still succeeding in cooking up pathos from his morality fable, adapted from a classic work of nineteenth century Finnish literature written by Juhani Aho. 

eternity and a day (w&d angelopoulos, w tonino guerra, petros markaris)

Some classic films grab you, others don’t. Eternity and a Day, with a title which sounds like a Mills & Boon novel (this could be down to the translation), felt like it tightroped between bathetic genius and doughty self-importance. The set-up of an ageing writer taking a young Albanian immigrant under his wing feels as though it is in danger of feeling maudling, and as the film stretches towards tomorrow, that is indeed the case. At other moments, such as when the writer played by Bruno Ganz with his usual doleful charm, rescues the boy from a trafficking gang, the film has an urgent, shocking power. There are many who will be seduced by Angelopoulos’ fragrant pacing and wistful time games, but the film as a whole felt to this viewer as though it was trying to use the story of the immigrant boy to lend it an emotional heft which the journey of the writer lacked. Once upon a time I saw all four hours of the Travelling Players at the NFT and was blown away: in Eternity and a Day it felt to me as though the director was aspiring for a metaphysical power which his film never quite achieved.

seul contre tous (w&d gaspar noé)

What a turgid, provocative film Noé’s opening gambit proves to be. Because it feels like a gambit: an opening move in a career that will seek to provoke and shock. It was, as we now know, though he would not have known it back then, a brilliantly effective ploy which catapulted Noé into the international superstar director firmament, where he has remained ever since. It is a classic case of someone putting something together that the regulation powers-that-be would have said could never work. And to be fair, it doesn’t work all that well as a film. SCT is leaden, weighed down by a misrerabilist voiceover and a crushing despondency. The lead actor, is uncharismatic, and morally odious. There is nothing about this film which suggests it will be hailed in the future as a classic.

Except - for two things. One is the shock value and Noé is bold enough to go all out here, to hold nothing back. In truth, the shocking scenes are few and far between and sandwiched between the long voiceovers as the mordant butcher walks the streets, muttering to himself. But when they come they are truly unpleasant, worthy of Lautréamont at his most savage. Noé puts a card up sometime before the last one, advising that we have 30 seconds to leave the theatre, and counts those seconds down. It’s a showman’s Godardian (Brechtian?) device which works beautifully. These stylistic flourishes complement the dour tone of the film as a whole. But the other thing SCT succeeds in doing is capturing a Parisian world which feels like it is on the point of imploding. This is not a pretty city. It is full of ugly walls and dark corners. The people are ugly. The mood is ugly. Noé wallows in this ugliness, celebrating it, in the way he will celebrate cities with colour and flair in his later films. And this celebration of ugliness is truly iconoclastic. Paris, the great beauty, is transformed into a dull post-industrial sludge.

In so doing, Noé describes an era before turbo-charged capitalism transformed so many occidental and oriental cities into showpieces for an aspirational consumerism with a surgical, Artaudian grotesqueness. The ambivalent ending is a harbinger of everything that will come in the film’s wake. You could write a whole thesis about the final shot, which leaves both the characters and the audience staring into a world/ void which could be construed as hopeful, whilst also being morally compromised beyond repair. 

the tattoed soldier [hector tobar]

Walk into the heart of downtown Los Angeles, away from Beverly Hills or West Hollywood or Santa Monica and you find yourself immersed in a Hispanic city. Which is what Los Angeles was to begin with. There's an argument to be made for it being the Northernmost output of Latin America. In a Youtube interview to Dutch TV, Tobar makes the point that the city is the meeting point for Hispanic, Anglo and Oriental culture, perched on the Pacific, looking West. Los Angeles' geographical situation helps in every way to make it the dream factory that it has become. But it's almost as though the city's dreaming has succeeded in eradicating its daily realities. No one want to know about the Hispanic city which still occupies its centre, just like no one wants to know that Los Angeles still has a centre. It doesn't fit with the idea of a liminal, dreaming city.

Tobar is a native Los Angelino, descended from Guatemalan immigrants. His novel puts the city back on the map. It's set in the world of Latino immigrants and a multi-racial underclass. The story follows a mission of revenge by Antonio, a political exile, who discovers his wife's army-sponsored killer playing chess in Macarthur Park. The book is set against the backdrop of the Rodney King riots, which Tobar covered as a journalist. The riots provide the cover for Antonio to exact the revenge history demands. The novel is as much about Guatemala as it is about the US, but like any great city, LA contains the narratives of all those countries whose citizens its walls have provided some kind of shelter to.

The narrative is brisk, engaging and discursive. It's written with a smattering of Spanish and Spanglish. It walks the streets with its desperate characters, but the only time it gets near to Beverly Hills is when Antonio's Mexican friend shacks up with a housekeeper. People don't drive their own cars, they take buses. There's a reality lived by millions of Angelinos which the dream factory only touches on when it needs criminals or undesirables to populate its narratives. Tobar's novel brings this reality to life. It's a book which should be read by anyone who's ever visited LA, ever seen a film set in LA. It's all very well living in dreams, but sometimes, you have to return to the dirty business of reality. 

the lost camels of tartary (w. john hare)

In common with most, I suspect, I was unaware that in the depths of the Gobi desert there range the last remaining wild camels in the world, threatened by gold prospectors, hunters, and the fact the region is China's preferred nuclear testing site. Neither did I know much about the Gobi itself, one of the world's true wildernesses, a place from where explorers as often as not never come back, their bodies and souls absorbed in the vastness of shifting sands and hysterical temperature changes.

Fortunately John Hare did return, though as the book describes he cut it fine upon occasion. The book documents his four visits into the region, in search of the wild Bactarian camel. Hare doesn't seem like the type of figure likely to be intimidated by the threat of the Gobi. Neither is he the model of the rugged adventurer. Pushing old age, in his tweed jacket, he's a quintessential British eccentric, engaged on the kind of foolhardy, quixotic missions for which his survival skills, his gregariousness and his diplomatic tact make him well suited.

I haven't read many of the most popular travel writers, the Theroux's, Bryson's and so on. So I don't have much to compare Hare with as a travel writer. However, the way in which he gets under the skin of this desolate part of the world, drinking with the locals, peppering his text with anecdotes from the Wild East, and bringing the most foreign of worlds to life suggests to me that he deserves a wider readership than he probably has. In addition, he's someone who actually puts something back into the places he visits, helping to establish a reserve for the camels, eating several dog legs and drinking all kinds of concoctions to help make it happen.

At a time when reading has felt like a secondary exercise, Hare's book, opening doors to the lost cities of the Silk Road, and the realities of late twentieth century Mongolia and China, has kept my reading juices flowing. Perhaps most tellingly of all, his book has made me jealous, taking the reader as it does to the kind of lost worlds which all too often seem, in our globalised modernity, to be under just as great a threat as the Bactarian camel.

preston falls [david gates]

Preston Falls tells the straightforward tale of Doug Willis, a middle-class, suburban New Yorker whose dreams are in tatters. The book traces the course of his mid-life crisis as he takes time out from his job, ostensibly to work on renovating his upstate country cottage in Preston Falls, but in practice disintegrating in a blizzard of displaced machismo, Dickens and drugs. We meet Willis on the cusp, and watch him go over it. The book is split into four sections. The first describes Willis and his wife Jean and kids, Mel and Roger, arriving at Preston Falls for a long weekend, which goes rapidly sour. The second charts the phases of Willis' disintegration as he's left alone, finding himself sucked into his evil's lawyers games, reading Dickens, trying to re-ignite a spark of his guitar playing youth. The third section turns the narrative around, presenting the consequences of Willis' actions from Jean's point of view as she struggles to deal with the children, and the last is a kind of coda.

Gates' prose has a rat-a-tat-tat effectiveness. He writes primarily in the present tense, using the past for the book's numerous flashbacks. This helps to add urgency to the drama, as though opening up the possibilities of every action: these are not cast in the stone, every decision could have been another, and the reader seems to feel Willis bringing his fate down upon himself with a relentless but always avoidable stupidity, or fatalism. This doesn't make him in any way sympathetic. Rather the author employs his surgical prose to pick at every failing of his book's hero, in much the same way as the hero uses every one of his failings to contribute to his demise. It's a theatre of cruelty, wherein Willis is the object of the gods' derision, but where his feeble neglect of his paternal duties denudes him of any kind of tragic dignity.

You might say this book was firmly in Updike territory. It's twenty years since I read Updike and the taste his work leaves in my mouth is one of wanting to have it both ways. Portray the child in the man, whilst in some way converting the retreat to childhood into a kind of Romantic voyage. Gates, it seems to me, is debunking any notion of a Romantic journey. It's kind of what we think is going to happen when Willis is left alone in the wilds of Preston Falls, and appears to be what he's looking for, but reality is harsher than he's ready for. Once again, there's the grand North American tension between the lure of nature's wilds and civilisation's charms, but there's no doubt where Gates positions his characters on this spectrum in the end: once you've sold your soul to the home-comfort devil there's not much hope of getting it back again.

Further down the line from Updike, the book brings to mind two films. One is Herzog's Grizzly Man, where Treadwell thinks he can walk with the bears but he can't; and the other is Kaufman's recent Synechdoche, another work that spins a thread between New York and its upstate neighbours, watching a man go to pieces as he tries to make sense of the vast distance between these closely linked geographic spaces. The US and its arts will always be immersed in the desperate tension between the material comfort it has afforded its citizens (or at least those born on the right side of the tracks) and the spiritual cost that seems to be the price they have to pay for that material comfort. It's an important theme, and Preston Falls isn't scared to get down and dirty with it.