mulholland drive (w&d lynch)

Amidst all the playfulness and Lynchian tropes, there’s a classic hard-boiled LA detective story at play. LA is a city defined in no small degree by the idea of the detective, from Chandler to Elroy to Altman to Houston to Polanski to (even) Pynchon. The list could go on. The subtext of is that, in a city of power and image, there are secrets, things hidden behind the arras. In Mulholland Drive, Lynch gleefully joins the party. His heroine sets out to uncover a mystery and in the process she finds herself drawn into peril. As ever with Lynch it’s not quite that simple: the heroine has an alter-ego who might or might not be her in another dimension. Is she the author of the killing she is trying to solve? The questions add a piquancy to the story, steering it away from the formulaic. But the narrative drive of the mystery propels the movie through the directorial detours and flights of fancy. Lynch also reveals another LA, the Latino city that lies beneath the WASP creation. A different kind of tragic past which takes the viewer to places where Anglo Hollywood normally fears to tread.

the piano teacher (w&d haneke, w. elfriede jelinek)

The Piano Teacher was scheduled by Mariana Enriquez as a part of a ciclo she curated, very little of which I am able to watch, due to rehearsals for Birdland. Nevertheless, I caught Huppert and her funny games. The film was more savage than I remembered. It might be one of the most extreme films ever made. Sexual violence, self-mutilation, and the closest Haneke perhaps gets to really letting the handbrake off. For all his cold art, The Piano Teacher feels furiously visceral. In all the wrong ways. By which one means - in all the ways that truly disturb. Unlike, say, Titane, which for all its extremism is nevertheless kind of alluring. Haneke is the high priest of deconstructing western materialism. His uncompromising vision, allied with where Huppert is willing to go as an actress, backed up by Jelinek’s source text, makes for something that seems designed to get its audience to walk out. Or stagger out, bloodied and beaten like the film’s titular protagonist. 

l’emploi du temps (w&d laurent cantet, w. robin campillo)

Cantet, who died earlier this year was, for a while, one of the most feted directors on the planet. Looking at his IMDB page, it looks as though things might have started to go awry when he directed Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, in 2012, adapted from a Joyce Carol Oates novel. Up to then his cerebral, measured movies were big festival hitters. L'emploi du temps, a title I suspect is a pun, although my French isn’t quite good enough to confirm this, is a slow burn drama which looks at corporate life and the capitalist world. Vincent, a dreamy misfit, lies to everyone about his career. Unemployed, he constructs a narrative about another job working for a development agency in Geneva, where he theoretically helps small African start-ups. In reality he’s fleecing his former acquaintances by falsely promising to invest their savings in emerging Eastern European markets, as well as getting caught up in a smuggling business. Vincent thereby positions himself at the most dubious edges of the capitalist Ponzi scheme, which helps him maintain his wife and family in their comfortable bourgeois lifestyle. All of his is slightly thematic, and the narrative perhaps sags under the weight of the film’s ambitions, but L'emploi du temps nevertheless represents an attempt to puncture the creeping materialist comfort of affluent Europe, a companion piece to Hanecke’s more radical Seventh Continent. 

andy warhol a biography (wayne koestenbaum)

Wayne Koestenbaum’s biography of Warhol is an incisive account which blends fact and theory. As well as recounting the Warhol story from childhood though to untimely death, the author also explores the logic and inspiration behind the creative work of an artist almost as famous for being famous as he was for his art. The art was received in his lifetime as something between genius and kitsch, with no-one all that certain which was which. I wonder if Warhol’s fame is quite what it was when I was growing up. Warhol, both the name and the work, was an omnipresent point of reference in the late twentieth century, in part because of his association with some of the most cultish pop stars in the universe, in part because his art had an iconoclastic freshness. It feels as though the likes of Koons, Hirst, Emin and Holzer have to a certain extent displaced his position within the zeitgeist, just as they are waiting to be replaced now.

Koestenbaum’s biography is so telling because it takes the reader back to the work itself, both pinpointing why it was so radical and also offering an artistic vindication of the pieces. He notes how Warhol’s sensibility reflected the gay NY world he inhabited as a young man when homosexuality was still a crime, a locus where “rigorous conceptual artists, (were) pioneers in understanding how perverse sexuality interrupts the distinction between public and private space.” Warhol’s private/public working space, The Factory, emerged from this consciousness, a place where the outrageous could flower in private, where societal norms and aesthetic criteria could be reinvented. Koestenbaum is also great on the way that Warhol’s fascination with fame was paradoxical: “His goal was to make everyone famous—the creed of “Commonism”; a Foucaultian recognition of the previously repressed role of narcissism in the human psyche which now blooms in the world of Instagram. These days anyone can put a filter on their portraits, following in the footsteps of Warhol, the first person to really grasp the iconic power of distortion, reframing and idealisation in the age of mechanical (later digital) reproduction.

One can’t help thinking there ought to be a play about Warhol and Foucault hanging out together in a NY sauna, because Koestenbaum’s text highlights the way in which the artist was a visionary whose sexuality was fundamental to his ability to reimagine the world, as was perhaps the case with Foucault. There’s also a lovely moment where the book notes a connection between Warhol and George Grosz, who voted to include the young artist’s work in an exhibition. The links between Warhol’s portraits and Grosz’s caricatures seem retrospectively obvious, both using human features to comment on the socially determined vanity of the human species. 

la azotea (fernanda trias)

Trias’ slight, early novel is another in the catalogue of women going crazy in the attic. See Repulsion by Polanski and Jane Eyre, among others. Quite why Clara, the narrator, has lost it to such a degree that she goes from having a job and living apart from her abusive father to moving in with him, doting on him and being abused by him, is never entirely clear. The writing is sparse with a growing sense of inevitable dread as the fate of the childlike narrator and her little world hurtles slowly towards impending doom.

red dust (ma jian)

In times of Covid it is doubly enthralling to read travellers’ tales. We have all become the old peasants that he meets in remote corners of an awakening China, never moving more than ten miles from where we live. Red Dust is an account of the author’s travels through that country in the eighties. It opens in Beijing, where he works as a state photographer, separated from his wife and his daughter. Long-haired, reading Whitman, he belongs to a bohemian set which is under attack by the forces of law and order. His love life is a disaster, his professional life is a dangerous farce, he fears arrest, and given all this he sets off on his travels.

One of the earliest famous journeys, that of Marco Polo, was to China. It’s exoticism and sense of apartness remained intact over centuries. Ma Jian’s account of his travels around the country, his fascination with the lost tribes of China, and those who live on the edges of greater China, feel like the report of someone venturing to corners of the globe which even now remain obscure. He travels through desert, jungle and mountains, visiting the Mongolian, Burmese and Tibetan frontiers, as well as travelling down the Yellow River and then the coast. The book, split into nine chapters, is woozy. Time slips and slides. Towards the end he says that he’s been on the road for three years, but place supersedes time as he floats through geography. This is true in another sense: China of the eighties is on the brink of change. The economic transformation has already begun on the coast, near Hong Kong. Meanwhile, deep inland, poverty is still extreme. Ma Jian’s account gives a vivid portrayal of these contrasts. One wonders how much has changed in deepest Tibet, for example, where the book concludes with the spectacle of a Buddhist funeral of a 17 year old girl. 

It’s of note that the book was published in 2001, nearly two decades after the journey. These are recollections in tranquility, the writer returning to his younger self. The book is a remarkable blend of acute observation and adventure. Run-ins with the police, near drownings, encounters with an exotic poetess, dovetail with observations of poverty and ways of life that are struggling for survival. The vast quantity of ruins the writer visits (and one of the pleasures of reading this book in a digital form is the ability to look up images of places he visits), are testament to the way in which China has always been a crucible for the birth and death of entire cultures. It also contextualises the issue of cruelty and rights, from the way entire workforces of thousands were buried alive by an Emperor’s command to keep a secret, to the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and finally even the cruelties of Buddhism itself, where a Lama can blandly explain that the reasons for a punishment like cutting off an arm might be attributed to sins committed in a former life. Ma Jian’s book succeeds in giving an overview of the multiple histories, religions and ways of thinking that make up the idea of the country called China. It is also, in these straightened times, a wonderful escape. We need the travellers of this world to remind us that there are other ways of thinking, other ways of seeing, other ways, even, of dying. 

address unknown (w&d kim ki duk)

At one point in the film, Eunok the one-eyed beauty, takes an LSD pill which her GI suitor has hidden in her bag. She starts to trip, staggering forwards, the world turned wavy. Duk doesn’t develop the trip, the effects are over before they’ve begun and in a later scene, when the GI forces her to take another pill, the action cuts before we get to see what effect it has on her. You can see why, having introduced the trope of the trip, Duk then backs off from it. Because the reality is that the whole film is a trip, one that becomes increasingly and dangerously delirious. 

Address Unknown is set on the edge of a US military base (Camp Eagle) in South Korea. Planes roar overhead and soldiers in full camo gear practice their excercises in the fields whilst the locals go about their business. The presence of the Americans distorts reality and facilitates a latent violence which becomes more and more overt as the film progresses. One of the key characters is Chang-guk, a mixed race, Korean-Black American. His mother still writes letters to the GI who has long since disappeared from their lives, whilst Chang-guk suffers from racial discrimination. They are just two characters whose interaction with the US forces has lead to tragedy. Eunok and her admirer, Jihum, will be two more, as the rogue GI turns on Eunok. Stamping on the ground, Jihum realises it’s hollow. He stamps again, and falls through into a makeshift hidden graveyard, a hidden relic of the Korean war his father fought in. The skeletons are very near the surface, wanting to get out.

The violence is embodied by Jae-hyeon Jo, the dog catcher, who brutally kills dogs before selling them to a local restaurant by the kilo. This violence finally overflows, consuming everyone in an increasingly gothic denouement. At times the film, with its vivid editing and extended cast reminded me of early Kustirica, his near contemporary. A portrait of a society which is out there, subject to the forces of a foreign military, on the edge of madness. Like Kustirica’s early films, there’s also something affectionate about this portrayal of everyday people trying to get along in a world that doesn’t seem to want to give them a chance.  

the briefcase/ strange weather in tokyo [hiromi kawakami]

So, I’m going to pitch you the latest. It’s about a woman who is in her late thirties. She likes a drink. She’s not an alcoholic, but she likes a drink. She’s lonely. We don’t know much about why. She hangs out in bars. Drinks beer on her own. One day she runs into her old teacher. He’s in his sixties. They have a drink together. His wife ran off and left him. He’s lonely too. They have this friendship. And she starts seeing another guy. But then she realises she’s falling for the professor. They have this “in-sync” relationship. I know you’re thinking it’s kind of creepy. He’s almost old enough to be her granddad. I know you’re thinking all that. But it’s not like that. It’s quirky. It’s irreverent. It’s engaging. They’re engaging characters. You’re just being politically correct. And anyway. Wait for it. They’re Japanese. That makes a difference. You’re already subtly altering your cultural framework, I can see that. You’re thinking, if I decide that this narrative, this story, this mise-en-scene, is a bit creepy, then am I being, even ever so mildly, am I being racist? Is my political correctness not so politically correct? And I’m going to give you something else. This book, Strange Weather in Tokyo – yeah, they changed the title, it’s written by a woman. Not just any woman. One of the major writers in contemporary Japanese culture. So now you’re doing a swift 180. I can see that. I can understand. The original title? The Briefcase. Yeah, that is creepy. I mean, that’s a creepy title. It’s all he leaves her. There’s nothing in it. He’s not a creep. No. No way. They like beer and saki and food and it’s healthy. You need to switch that mindset. That Hoboken, Harrods Food Hall, Hanif Kureshi mindset. Stranger things have happened. Yeah the cover photo is a bit of a soft-sell. Pretty girl floating in space. No. Really. It’s a very subtle piece of writing. About interiority. I don’t know. I made it up. I don’t know if it’s a real word. It probably is in Japanese. No I don’t speak the language. Change your mindset. Get with the program. 

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.

the last cowboys at the end of the world [nick reding]

The travel book is a strange beast. Of late I’ve enjoyed Stasiuk’s poeticised wanderings around the Eastern European hinterland. However, all too often, travel writing allows for someone connected enough to the publishing industry to fly in, sample a culture, offer their opinion, however well educated, and move on. Travel writing as an extension of the Sunday supplement. This tends to lead to an account which says more about the writer’s own culture than it does about the cultures he or she have chosen to visit.

Reding’s book is nothing like this. It would be harsh to even describe it as travel writing, although it recounts his journeys to Chilean Patagonia in the nineties. It reads more like a novel. Both on account of the engrossing narrative and also for the way in which this narrative succeeds in encapsulating the arresting, harsh changes which “progress” brings in its wake. Which is another way of saying that it touches on the grand themes of history post the industrial revolution, an ongoing revolution whose reach grows ever more pervasive as the world shrinks.

The book recounts Reding’s stays with a Chilean Gaucho, Duck (or Pato) and his wife, Edith, and their three children. Pato and his family live an isolated life which is not much different to the one lead for hundreds of years by gauchos in the Southern cone of South America. It’s a harsh life which Reding does his best not to sentimentalise. For all the beauty of the relationship with nature and the dignity of an existence which does not depend on possessions, it is also a life beset by boredom, superstition and alcohol. Duck possesses the kind of cowboy charisma which Hollywood stars aspire to. He can ride a herd through mountain passes, butcher a ewe in the flash of an eye and cope with anything mother nature wants to throw at him.

Only things are not quite what they seem. Were this the standard fare of travel writing we would be given a homily to gaucho life and its nobility and the writer would move on. Reding stays. He witnesses Pato’s alcoholic binges and the slow decline of his relationship with Edith. But even more heartbreakingly, he documents the way in which both tire of their rural idyll, with dreams of moving to the nearest town, Coihaique, a town which has been transformed by the arrival of Pinochet’s road. The hardship of living on the land proves too much and they leave. Knowing, in their heart of hearts, that the town is liable to destroy them. Just as the arrival of paved roads and later the internet, (the book hints, even if it was written before the digital revolution really took off), will end up destroying the itinerant gaucho existence. The gauchos, Reding seems to suggest, have become anachronistic. Modernity will change farming methods and destroy the very isolation that has helped to preserve their way of life. A way of life that Reding seeks to document, aware that it is ebbing away.

Hence the decision of Pato and his family to move to the town mirrors the societal changes that are occurring in Southern Chile. Although Reding has noted the downsides of their rural life, there is still something desperate about seeing humans stripped of their savage independence by the onset of progress. It may be a choice that Duck and Edith make themselves, but it is also clear they cannot fight history. The last line of the book, one that is self-consciously understated, comes like a hammer blow, a terrible vengeance on the part of modernity, that devil, for anyone who seeks to stand in the way of the road it is driving through nature.

Reding does the job of a historian and a novelist. He captures the dying of a light which few cared about in the first place. It is a beautiful, terrible story, one which succeeds in telling us as much about the shape the world has chosen to take as it does about the gauchos, their myths and their fading, compromised glory. The only question the book cannot answer is to what degree his own arrival, like the bearded white men of yore,  contributed to the changes in the perspectives of Duck and Edith. There is a hint of guilt, which is only to writer’s credit. He too is part of the destructive wave of change coming to Patagonia. As the tale unwinds you can smell the melancholy that cloaks the writer’s words.

soldiers of salamis [cercas]

Soldiers of Salamis, the predecessor to Speed of Light, and Cercas' breakthrough novel, is something of a three card trick. It's split into three neat sections, and the whole only really adds up once you reach the reveal of the third part. At this point, Cercas seems to settle into the groove of novel as hyper-realism, (or 'true tale', as his translator calls it), where the telling of the story and the story mesh to such a degree that the line between fact and fiction appears to have been eroded.

As Speed of Light demonstrated, this is a highly effective technique, which perhaps harks back to the dawn of the novel, where stories told to the storyteller as 'true tales' became fiction in the hands of the novelist. To this reader's mind it wasn't as effective as the later book, with Cercas' narrative seemingly over-immersed in the neo-scholarly world of his research into the Spanish Civil War. It's only in the final third, with the intriguing arrival of Roberto Bolano as a character, that the book suddenly moves up a gear, and all of Cercas's preoccupations seem to knit into place.

I had read somewhere that Bolano appeared in the book, so his arrival was not a surprise. All the same, it is intriguing to see the way in which the writer's influence stretched across the Spanish speaking world within his lifetime. Cercas makes it clear that he does not share Bolano's approach to novel writing - Bolano tells him to make up the missing details, Cercas refuses to do so, and from this dichotomy the book emerges, although of course the reader has no way of telling to what extent the author is inventing or not - but all the same the shadow of Bolano's concerns and even his style encroaches. These include, as Cercas acknowledges, the role of the writer as testimonial to that which has passed, the dead soldiers whose part in our history has been forgotten; as well as the writer's neo-Nietzchean obligation to acknowledge his own role within the narrative, thereby demystifying the authorial presence (even if, in practice, this actually has the inverse effect).

Of course, given Bolano's untimely death, the book ends up doing the same for the writer as it does for the soldiers it seeks to immortalise, demonstrating the way in which literature can cheat death, and preserve a trace of that which it would seem death has claimed as its own. The book took me almost a fortnight to read, as I took it to the Highlands of Scotland and back, battling with the opening sections, wondering when the pay-off would come. Then I completed the last section in an afternoon. Reading it after Speed of Light, it's possible to see how the author is honing and developing his technique. His novels lack the scale and extravagance of Bolano's, but they possess all of his subtlety, and all of his love for the potency and playfulness of those things we call stories.

snow [w orhan pamuk]

In the week or so since I've finished Snow the economic crisis in the UK, and other parts of the world, has slipped another notch, a new leader of the Western world has been installed, with great fanfare, there have been no terrorist outrages, and, apropos nothing at all, I have read another ten thousand scripts.

Beside the last point, all of the above has some pertinence to Pamuk's novel. Although this is a novel set in Kars, a small town in a distant corner of Turkey, Pamuk succeeds in convincing the reader that what he is actually writing about is the great ebb and flow of ideas and ideologies which shape the margins, and therefore by definition, the very structures themselves, of this world, this world being the one within which all of the above information might seem of pertinence.

The novel describes the brief stay in the city of a minor Turkish poet, Ka, who finds himself trapped there by heavy snowfalls, as the army seize power in a theatrical coup. The coup is conducted with the aim of suppressing the radical Muslim influences in the town. It's doomed to be unsuccessful, its lifespan no longer than the time it will take for the snow to start melting. During his stay, Ka meets all the city's key political players. He falls in love with Ipek, who he later learns is a former lover of Blue, the leader of the radical Muslims. Ostensibly in the city to investigate a recent spate of suicides by girls who have refused to take their headscarves off, Ka finds himself possessed by his poetic muse, writing a flood of poetry for the first time in years.

Snow is therefore, about many things: the value of love, the nature of creativity, the curse of politics. It's a multi-layered book, which can be read from a variety of perspectives. There are all kinds of themes one could choose to highlight, and a variety of readings to be had. As such its invidious to select one, but given the week that's passing, it feels prescient to choose to nominate the way in which Snow unfurls the great dividing line that exists between the world of the 'West' and the world of those who feel alienated by this 'West' with its laisser faire morals, economics and social structures. In his travels round Kars, Ka walks the tightrope which is this fault line, understanding the need and value for belief, whilst also cherishing his right to write what he wants, and to love in accordance with the urgings of his heart.

It comes as little surprise to learn that its not a tightrope that can be walked for long. Ka finds it impossible to resist his tragic destiny, falling under the sway of what he perceives to be an inevitable unhappiness. The novel skillfully diffuses tension, constantly leaking information about what the future holds for its characters. Pamuk's book doesn't seem so much interested in the tension inherent in his plot (the survival of a hero adrift in an anarchic cut-off border town) as the tensions that collectively create a context for the hero's plot to unfold. Tensions which provoke his creativity, which force him to come to terms with what really matters in life. Tensions which underpin the aspirations of both 'Western' society, and the parallel society which defines itself in opposition to 'the West', one shaped by its poverty just as much as the West is shaped by its wealth.