war and war (lászló krasznahorkai, tr. george szirtes)

László Krasznahorkai looks in his younger photos a bit like Thom Yorke. There’s something of the recondite, complex musicianship of Radiohead in the prose of Krasznahorkai, which drives around in circles looking for an exit that never opens up. So the driver starts talking about how he’s been driving in circles for hours, spinning plates, and how the way things are going petrol consumption is going to be the end of the world, but he can’t help it, he still needs to find a way out and if he stops the car that’s never going to happen, so he has to keep going and if he does ever find a way out he knows it’s going to lead to the great revelation of why the world is neither round nor shaped in a manner that anyone could ever possibly imagine. A secret some people have known at various times in history which keeps getting misplaced or forgotten, because the world is an amnesiac structure, but if he can ever find a way out of this circular motion, these circular structures, then he might just let us in on the secret, if the narcos don’t narcolepse us first, because they too want the secret or the money or the car or your soul. And the narcos usually get what they want, because that is the way of history.

In short, a hypnotic read. 

magnolia (w&d pt anderson)

Cine Universitario has a healthy, youthful turnout on a Friday night. I guess I’m the oldest member of the audience. They seem to drink it all in, PTA’s grandiose, operatic epic, which swoons through the course of a single night. There’s more than one reference to opera in the film - Stanley even sings opera at one point. The whole film is underscored to an extreme degree, as though the director is suggesting he is not so much writing a film as composing one. I read a Wikipedia quote of Anderson’s saying that looking back on the film he would have cut twenty minutes, which isn’t such a ridiculous suggestion but also seems irrelevant. The movie could be an hour shorter or twelve hours longer. Certainly some storylines could have been teased out more - Donny’s and Phil’s to name but two. But this isn’t so much the film of an LA night as the symphony: the characters are instruments who have their solos, but are part of a wider whole, one that can mess with the logic of time; (whilst Claudia cleans her apartment waiting to open up for the cop, half a dozen storylines are running ahead, but it doesn’t matter, within the geometry of action, all that matters is that she will open the door); with the logic of chance, as the bookending narrator declares, laying cards on the table; all of this without in any way jeopardising the coherence of the music of the film. Anderson even does this with the score, willing to lay music over music, music over dialogue, noise on noise, the parts constantly subsumed to the whole. It is indeed operatic, exhausting, but also moving, portentously moving, perhaps, Yankee style, but moving nonetheless. And as the credits rolled and the final Mann song played, the youthful audience, as though in an opera house, burst into spontaneous applause. 

the straight story (d. lynch, w. john roach, mary sweeney)

The Straight Story, which the director interestingly doesn’t claim a writing credit for, is a homespun tale of americana, the apple pie version of Lynch. It’s the flip side of his dark America, something that the imagery of the sprinkler early on, that keynote of Blue Velvet, reminds us of. It seems fair enough that Lynch, the great dissector of the dark underbelly of his country, should also honour it in this fashion, and Alvin Strait’s journey towards reunion with his estranged brother is genuinely moving, as evinced by the round of applause at the film’s conclusion from a packed Cinemateca audience. However, there were times when it felt as though what we were witnessing was the US brand of Soviet social realism. The tractor itself feels like a signifier that could come from either side of the Cold War divide, and it encapsulates those things the two superpowers had in common. Vast lands that look inwards more comfortably than outwards. Countries whose values are defined by their rural heartlands, whose great cities are outliers rather than cornerstones of empire. The endless plains of central russia map on to the endless great plains. Alvin’s journey pays homage to the more homely values of the USA - this is a world without villains, drug taking, or Indians to kill. The sentimentality of Lynch’s vision here pays tribute to the soft power of these supposed US values, and if it wasn’t for all the times he has defrocked those values, this film might have felt like propaganda. 

the limey (d soderbergh, w. lem dobbs)

The Limey includes footage of its star, Terrence Stamp, from another film, Ken Loach’s Poor Cow, to show Stamp as a young man (and handsome devil). Soderbergh cleverly weaves this footage into his film, part of a masterful edit, lending The Limey an instant nostalgia factor. This nostalgia factor is amplified watching the film 25 years after its release. The Limey seems to hark back to a different, bolder era, when filmmakers were permitted a certain licence to indulge and hence enrich what might otherwise have been fairly regulation genre fare. In The Limey, alongside Out of Sight, Soderbergh constructed a pair of whip-smart films which perhaps would struggle to be financed today. Reminiscent of French thrillers like Cercle Rouge or Le Samurai, The Limey makes a virtue of its difficulties: the choppy edit, a la Godard, the playfulness of the dialogue, Stamp’s weirdly monochromatic acting, only broken every now and again by a sly smile behind the eyes. It’s a minor direction masterclass. If this is where film is headed, we thought back in those last of the pre-millennial days, we’re in good hands. 

a dirty war (anna politkovskaya)

The journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, was murdered in 2006. Reading this book of her articles written for Novaya Gazeta about the second Chechen war, and knowing what we know about Putin’s Russia, the fact of her murder, no matter how shocking, no longer seems surprising. In much the same way as being a journalist in Mexico is a perilous profession, being a journalist prepared to go after the truth in Putin’s Russia is a job with a low life expectancy. Politkovskaya details the events of the war with a sanguine tone, describing its barbarous cruelties with her weather-beaten prose. The world had little interest in the suffering of the Chechens, and Politkovskaya seems all too aware of this. The absurdities of the Russian military campaign, one which appeared to benefit no-one and nothing save for consolidating Putin’s grasp on power, are repeatedly flagged up. One of the many grotesque chapters deals with the military office in charge of documenting the fatalities of Russian soldiers, charged with finding a way of delivering information no-one wants to hear. One can imagine his relief at finding someone willing to listen to him.

Of course, these past months we have all been compelled to finally take our heads out of the sand and pay some attention to the horrors that Politkovskaya detailed and warned about over twenty years ago. She was the Cassandra that no-one wanted to hear. Why did no-one care about Chechnya and Grozny’s fate? Perhaps because it was a Muslim country, perhaps because it was that little bit further away than Ukraine, perhaps because it was deeply inconvenient for vested interests who depended so much on the largesse of Russian wealth. Read Politkovskaya’s book and weep, not just for Ukraine, but for all the other people who have been victims of an aggression which seems to be almost nihilistic. Politkovskaya herself being another of these victims, an irony which she would no doubt have reported with the deadpan humanity which marks out as one of the bravest journalists of the twenty first century.  

madame deffand and the idiots (marias, tr. margaret jill costa)

Marias’s brief account of the lives of five writers (Madame de Deffand, Nabakov, Djuna Barnes, and  Emily Bronte) is a brilliant piece of economic writing, which benefits from the sympathy Marias has for the travails of the process of composition, be that letter-writing or novel writing. It’s a book that can be read in its entirety on a flight, in between multiple films, no sleep and terrible food, and still seem inordinately enjoyable and there’s really no greater compliment that can be paid to any book than that. It will only take you an hour, but it might be the best hour you’ll ever spend doing anything at all ever. 

topsy turvy (w&d mike leigh)

Watching Leigh’s lengthy film allows plenty of time for reflection. It’s curate’s egg of a film, perhaps appropriately, given its Victorian setting. A first thought is that this is a film that abandons the central tenet of its narrative half way through. The fist half of the film is constructed around the emerging conflict between Sullivan and Gilbert. Sullivan aspires to greater things that operetta. He wants to be a serous musician. Whereas Gilbert is happy repeating the age old formula which is growing weary, but if it isn’t broke, why change it. They fall out, agree to disagree. Then Gilbert has a new idea, to set a work in Japan, and without ever engaging with Sullivan’s reasons for accepting this new project, the two are back, working as harmoniously as ever, with the second half of the film dedicated to the process of putting the Mikado on. It’s a curious shift, which makes for a rambling, whimsical film. The second observation is that Leigh’s actor’s cinema is rife with danger. The actors certainly seem to be enjoying themselves, but whether this is entirely to the benefit of the characters they are portraying is open to question. There are moments when gold is struck, such as Manville’s closing speech, but other moments when the tone, as ever in a Leigh movie, feels forced. Leigh is only really rescued by a towering central performance, (Thewlis in Naked, Spall in Turner). This goes against his collective approach, which is evident here when every character seems required to have their moment of glory, which generally encourages them to seek to upstage everyone else. As a result excellent actors frequently come across as bizarrely overacting. It’s a constant mystery the way in which Leigh is feted for his work with actors when the autonomy he grants them frequently leads them to deliver their most questionable performances. Lastly, there is the issue of self-consciousness. The Mikado is an operetta set in Japan. It’s exoticism, according to the film, helped reinvent the careers of Gilbert and Sullivan. But there is never any sense of the film interrogating the cultural implications of this appropriation of the Orient as a marketing device. How do the protagonists’ aesthetic choices lock into the context of peak Empire? This isn’t so much to suggest that the film has to come down on any side, but the film’s almost complete lack of interest in the context of The Mikado, its subject matter, feels indicative of a mindset which hadn’t changed in over a hundred years. 

the wind will carry us (w&d abbas kiarostami)

The film’s title makes it sound as though this might be an Iranian version of a Douglas Sirk movie. In practice this film couldn’t be further from melodrama, or even drama. Essentially, it’s a study of an engineer who visits a remote rural village with a team of work companions who are never seen and spends most of his time trying to find reception for his mobile phone. His phone has no problem ringing, but he cannot hear what’s being said. So he runs across the village, gets into his car, drives up a hill, gets out of the car, and speaks to someone in Tehran. Either his boss or his family. This happens approximately 75 times. The use of repetition is clearly deliberate, but the intention behind this use of repetition remained cryptic. The engineer’s desperate need to communicate? The chasm that exists between rural and urban Iranian society? All of the above? The engineer also befriends a boy, who is constantly (repeatedly) sitting exams. At the end of the film someone falls into a hole they have been digging but gets out alive. Which in some ways felt like a metaphor for watching the movie. I realise that Kiarostami is considered a genius, and I think I’ve seen other films of his which I engaged with more readily, but I have to confess to a feeling of bemusement brought on by The Wind Will Carry Us, a film whose hermitic qualities escaped me upon this occasion. Having said that, there is always the subjectivity of the moment to consider when watching cinema; perhaps on another day the film might indeed have blown me away. 

the inheritance (peter stephan jungk, tr. michael hoffmann)

The Inheritance is a novel about a man who is seeking to realise his inheritance. There’s not much in the way of subtext. Daniel has an uncle who lives in Venezuela. Daniel is his only kin. He has left a will, but the will is less definitive than it should be and Daniel accuses the Venezuelan executors of the will of stealing two million dollars which is rightfully his. The struggle to reclaim the monies takes years. Daniel gyrates from London to Caracas to Panama to Miami. It also leads to the breakdown of his marriage. However, there is another factor in the breakdown of the marriage: Daniel has an affair with a neighbour which his wife finds out about. The fact that he has no income; he is a listless poet; that his family live from hand to mouth and that he’s having an affair are never really acknowledged by the narrator as the real reason for his problems: rather he blames it all on his failure to realise an inheritance, which he doesn’t really seem to deserve on any kind of higher moral grounds. If this was a novel about misplaced obsession and fatal flaws, it might have been powerful; however the author seems, for reasons that aren’t always easy to discern, devoted to his protagonist, for whom it’s impossible to feel any kind of sympathy as his case goes from bad to worse. 

groovy bob [harriet vyner]

Groovy Bob is an account of the life of Robert Fraser, the art dealer immortalised by Richard Hamilton’s picture of him and his friend, Mick Jagger, handcuffed together after the police raid on Keith Richards’ country house at Redlands. Fraser is one of the sixties’ forgotten men. He was a force of nature and a hedonist, who was instrumental in bringing Pop Art to the UK. The driving force behind Peter Blake and Jann Haworth’s cover for the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album, he also brought Rauschenberg, Twombly, Warhol, Oldenburg, Haring etcetera to the public eye, not to mention staging exhibitions in his gallery including work by Dubuffet, Bacon, Caulfield, Riley and many more. However, as the title of the book suggests, more than being just an art dealer, Fraser was also a pivotal figure in the development of what has come to be known as the swinging sixties. An old Etonian, born into wealth, he set out to cross the class divide, participating in the pop world, the criminal world and the burgeoning gay scene. He rode the wave of the sixties dream, moving between New York, London, Morocco and India. His restless curiosity matched the artistic and intellectual movements of that decade, as a post-colonial world began to open up and society sought to recalibrate itself. Vyner’s biography relates this journey and the price Fraser ended up paying for it. Prison was followed by financial ruin and exile. Fraser overcame the setbacks with increased levels of drugs, sex and partying, eventually becoming one of the first British citizens to die of Aids. There are two ways at looking at his story: either as a cautionary tale of a Hogarthian character who lived life to excess and paid for it; or as the story of the comet who blazed the path that future generations would follow. Fraser was entwined with the Beatles and the Stones and the vision of the world they sought to realise. Today that counter-culture has become the mainstream; that which was beyond the pale has been absorbed into the beating heart of the world. 

A note on Vyner’s work: the biography is made up of short, verbatim accounts, culled from those who knew Fraser, from the Stones to his mother’s oldest friend. It’s a vivid, generous method of writing biography. Vyner herself sometimes appears as one of the voices, but more than anything this is a curatorship. This allows for the juxtapositions between divergent points of view, with differing contributors sometimes flat-out contradicting one another.  In giving the narrators their voice, the range and tenor of the various worlds Fraser inhabited comes through all the more effectively. It makes for a compelling read and leaves the reader feeling as though they have a real handle on who this curious, multi-faceted man might have been. 

babylon [pelevin]

What is Russia? Is it a country? Is it a state of mind? Is it a race? At a time when “Russia”, the idea of ‘Russia’ is being bandied about like a tennis ball being chased by a dog on a beach, all we truly discern is the degree of ignorance possessed about the word itself. When you’re swimming in a sea of ignorance, that is when literature can come to your assistance. No work of literature can disclose the truth about the country it emerges from, but it can help to offer some insight, at the very least. Given this, there’s no better time to read Pelevin. In the nineties, a new wave of post-Soviet writers emerged (see also Sorokin and Prilepin) who sought to capture within their writing the course their country was taking. The results are delirious, terrifying, wackily entertaining and frequently appear to be nonsensical. In other words, more than a bit like Trump-world.

There is, of course, a strand of US literature that foreshadows this. The Pynchon-Acker-Burroughs strand (there will be others who escape me). In this sense, the two sprawling superpowers have more, culturally in common, perhaps, than we tend to realise. This is a world of drugs and conspiracies and naked power. Throw in the Babylonians and you start to get a handle on Pelelvin’s early novel. It tells the story of Babe Tatarsky, (a Pynchonian name if ever there was one). Tatarsky is a no-mark who finds himself working as an advertising copywriter during the Yeltsin years, when every two-bit criminal is hoping to become the next oligarch. Boris Berezovsky appears in the novel and there are doubtless dozens of other specific references; this is a book rooted in the Moscow which formed Putin and his clique. 

Pelevin follows Tatarsky as he makes his way up the greasy pole. Clients are both dangerous and endangered. All of them have criminal ties, but their life-spans are brief, as one after another is bumped off by the next man down. The copywriter’s adverts are brilliant; the objective is not so much to promote the brand as to explode it into public consciousness. The more depraved the advertising idea, the better. This is anarcho-terrorism-capitalism. (Sound familiar?) In a state of perpetual chaos, the consumer’s attention is all that counts, and nothing but the most outrageous, obscene idea will gain their attention. Truth and falsehood are ideas which are left behind. Survival and power are all that matter.

In the meantime Tatarsky is visited by the ghost of Che Guevara who offers a neo-buddhist propaganda doctrine (As someone points out to Tatarsky, the Spanish word for advertising is ‘propaganda’). He also takes copious amounts of magic mushrooms and hangs out with Chechen terrorists. Gradually, by a process of default, rather than any cunning plan, he finds himself being promoted up a nebulous Masonic chain, until he finally assumes the position of propagandist-in-chief. 

At one point, Tatarsky’s role is “senior creative in the kompromat department”. The chaos that it would appear Putin’s mandate has succeeded in unleashing globally was something that was being perfected back in the nineties in Russia. Babylon describes a state which is so unhinged it can only be managed through the intercession of a cult. If Pelevin’s novel is any guide as to how that played itself out, expect more ‘American carnage’ sooner rather than later. 

the planets [sergio chejfec]

To say that The Planets is a dense text would be to do it a disservice. It almost seems to possess a texture all its own, more akin to reading braille than the printed word. There is a temptation to use the word ‘viscous’, but braille is more appropriate. Lurking beneath the stickiness are subterranean meanings which won’t give themselves up lightly.

Kafka is a point of reference. The text includes visits to a Buenos Aires synagogue as Chejfec acknowledges a semetic tradition. It might be unPC to categorise literature according to race, but the influence of the Torah and the interpretative science it demands would appear to have influenced Jewish writers (and filmmakers, cf Aranofsky’s Pi) through the ages. The reading/writing of a book is a quest to discern hidden meaning, a quest shared by reader and author alike.

Chejfecs narrative, in so far as it can be pinned down, deals with the unnamed narrator’s friendship with “M” (another Kafkaesque touch). M vanishes one day from the Buenos Aires streets. The narrator assumes he has been murdered and also tortured. In spite of the narrator’s assertion that M had no political involvement, he appears to be another victim of Argentina’s dirty war against its own people. However, the novel seems less concerned with the political aspects of M’s fate than the metaphysical implications. In the narrator’s hands, the book becomes an evaluation of loss, and therefore history. (For what is history in the end, except the accumulation of endless loss?)

The book consists of seven chapters, with each chapter a diversion containing its own diversions. Random stories are included, told by half-formed characters who we never really get to know, such as M’s father. The net effect is a gradual overwhelming, or seduction, of the reader. The absence of a coherent narrative is compensated for by the reader’s vertiginous journey into the mystery of Chejfec’s prose, a mystery which appears to be constantly revealing itself without ever letting the reader know what exactly is going on.

The remarkable thing about Chejfec’s book is that, despite choosing to veer so radically from the classical Western narrative model, it proves to be such a delirious reading experience. The Planets succeeds in being both an engrossing text, as well as one that challenges received notions of how the novel can, or should, communicate with its reader.

the romantics [pankaj mishra]

This book has an unlikely history. I'm talking about this particular book, not Mishra's book, although this is obviously a sentence which could provoke a Platonic debate. It was purchased via Amazon in London and brought to Monvtevideo in August 2010. (i don't know its history before it reached me, it may be that that too was unlikely.) In Montevideo it was, initially, not read. Rather it became a star of the stage. In the version of Pinter's Betrayal I was working on, the character Emma reads a book whilst she's in Venice through the course of the scene wherein her husband, Jerry, confronts her with the revelation that he knows about her infidelity with his best friend. The book selected was this edition of Mishra's The Romantics. Not because of its content or its title. Rather, because as a solid, red-clothed hardback, it had a suitable anonymous weight. It had sufficient presence to signal Emma's attempt to remain engaged with its pages in spite of where she suspects the conversation is headed and at the same time was suitably anonymous not to draw the spectator's attention away from the actors or the action. In this day and age, of course. she would have been more likely to have been reading a Kindle. When the run of the show came to an end the book was reclaimed and went to live on the Costa de Oro for a while, before finally returning to the Barrio Sur in Montevideo in 2012. Where I am now living, and where the book has been, at long last, read.

+++

One of the downsides of being well-connected is that it means you are able to get that first novel, which should probably have remained in a drawer, published. Pankaj Mishra is an intelligent and informed non-fiction writer. He has ascended to one of those pan-global lives only enjoyed by sports stars, celebrity chefs or DJs or high powered cultural commentators, flitting between India, New York and London. He has, according to Wiki, been described as the next Edward Said. And good luck to him. But in a week where the conflicts latent with the 'new' India have come to the fore, (and one has little doubt that he has written on the issue), this is a tome from the past. Dealing with vapid Westerners mingling with innocent, Flaubert-addicted natives, breaking their hearts and corrupting their world views. In theory a book that drifts between Varanasi, Dharamsala and Pondicherry should have plenty to offer, but in practice there's something tired and uninspired about this maudlin tale, which lives up to its slightly preposterous (late Bertolucci) title. Had Mr Mishra not managed to make himself so well connected, with the clear backing of a powerful UK publisher, there's little doubt the novel would never have seen the light of day, and no-one would have been any the wiser. As it is, in spite of the fact that he has intimated in interviews that he would like to write another novel, one suspects that the author would be best off sticking to his undoubted strengths.

monsieur pain [roberto bolaño]

Bolaño's literary history means that he's going to spend a long time dying. Having written extensively for twenty years before he was first published, there's a substantial back catalogue to be worked through. The reason he had to wait so long for success was more to do with the fact he was a maverick than anything else, scrabbling around on the margins. All of which means that, in death, he's more prolific than most living writers. This book is one that helped to get him recognised, and is the subject of one of his more famous stories in Last Evenings on Earth. As such it almost as interesting for its role within the Bolaño myth as it is for its literary qualities.

Monsieur Pain is a slight if beguiling book, set in Paris before the second world war, when the eponymous hero, a mesmerist, is drafted in to consult on the case of a man who is dying, apparently, of hiccoughs. However, a rival party doesn't want the man, Snr Vallejo, cured, paying Monsieur Pain a sizeable bribe in order to get him not to take the case. That's about it with regard to the narrative. The pearls are to be found in the writer's love of arcane detail. He meets a pair of twins who design ghoulish scenes in fishtanks, (a kind of cross between Mr Hirst and the Chapman Brothers?); Pain is plagued by random characters who pursue him across Paris. His former best friend has become a fascist luminary in the Spanish Civil War. There is an air of Poeian menace (the book includes a quotation from Poe at the front).

Monsieur Pain is neither a great book nor a terrible one. At times it feels like an exercise in style, at others it includes writing that is bona fide Bolaño. As ever, a little research brings intriguing results. Bolaño was always a fervent advocate of neglected Latin American poets. It turns out that Vallejo is not a fictional but a real figure, who died in Paris in 1938. One whose work is held up to be among the most eccentrically brilliant in the Spanish language. Vallejo's qualities don't really come through in the book: he is a man who cannot speak and is dying of hiccoughs. However, it might not be too spurious to suggest that Bolaño sees something of himself in the figure of the Peruvian, a Latin American poet dying in exile. Which would make Monsieur Pain something of a prophetic text, as though the writer sensed a tragic destiny underpinning his development, something that tallies with his instinct to auto-mythologise, blending fact and fiction, as though his life was a book he was constantly writing, fragments of which would be captured on paper and described as his novels.


Given this, the following lines from a Vallejo poem (Black Stone on top of a White Stone) would appear to have their part to play in the story and Bolaño's reasons for writing this book:


I shall die in Paris, in a rainstorm,
On a day I already remember.
I shall die in Paris-- it does not bother me--
Doubtless on a Thursday, like today, in autumn.