los chicos y la calle (d carlos echeverría)

In 2001 Argentina and Uruguay suffered a brutal economic collapse. Kids that grew up in that era are sometimes called here, los chicos del pasto, the kids who ate grass. Made during this recession, Echeverría’s documentary looks at the street kids of Buenos Aires. It is orientated around a refuge, called CAINA, where the kids go for food, clothing and shelter, run by willing young men and women with clear social consciences. The doc has a Wiseman feel, albeit interrupted at times with interviews. The kids roam the streets near Retiro. The film captures the humanity behind their hard facade. No-one finds themselves living on the street without a story that explains how they got there. Kids that most would walk past or shy away from become people in their own right. The camera roams the streets with them, listens in on their stories, a testament to the trust the director and his crew managed to engender. Below the surface there lurk tales of sexual abuse and violence. It’s impossible not to contemplate what has happened to these lost children twenty five years on, now that those who have survived will be adults entering middle age. 

far from heaven (w&d todd haynes)

Todd Haynes achieves something complex in his Sirk homage. He bestows pathos on characters who at first seem laughable, even absurd. The film was released in 2002 and perhaps the lens through which an audience might watch the film has changed over the course of the last 25 years. Moore’s Cathy struggles to cope with her husband Frank’s gay infidelity,  The tone is melodramatic. Moore’s impeccably coiffed hair seems as much of a character as either of her children. Quaid’s Frank breaks down and weeps and then pinballs around like an archetypal repressed North American bourgeois. Everything is so on point that it feels like a pastiche, as indeed it is. It’s impossible not to laugh at these characters and their cliched fifties behaviour. Surely this is a world that we have left behind? Dennis Haysbert’s Raymond is the down-to-earth antidote to all this. A man whose solid decency transcends the boundaries of race and class. No wonder Cathy falls for him. All the same, this world and its characters feel like a caricature. Then something remarkable happens, in large part through the performances of Moore and Haysbert. The characters seem to slip the pastiche net. Their emotional distress touches us. The film becomes a film about love. its power and its limitations. These emotions are, of course, timeless.

Twenty five years later, even those elements of the film that seem wilfully contrived suddenly feel far more plausible. Conservatism is back. Prejudice is back. The closet is back. It seems like we’re slipping back into the absurd, divided world of the fifties. 

the man without a past (w&d kaurismaki)

Kaurismaki’s cinema really doesn’t feel as though it ought to work in the 21st century. It feels like the lost child of the silent era. The photography is beautifully crude. The colour palette is unashamedly contrived. The dialogue lacks any obvious subtext. The stories are simple, without any of the derivations or complications so beloved of modern scriptwriting. It feels like the anti-Nolan, if you like, whose bombastic cinema is the apotheosis of what the movies, even ‘serious’ movies have become. And yet, Kaurismaki’s cinema is always an unadorned delight. Simplicity, as his fellow Nordic savant, Fosse, also understands, has a power that all the machinations of the world struggle to compete with. The Man without a Past is yet another example of this, a fable which feels timeless, which nevertheless succeeds in communicating so much about the nature of identity, and its construction, a sly peaen to the IG generation, all of them deadset on creating themselves from scratch. It can be done, but it helps if someone smashes you over the head with a baseball bat first.  

a tale of love and darkness (amos oz, tr nicholas de lange)

Oz’s lengthy book is part autobiography, part deep dive into his roots. The first half deals extensively with the Ukrainian origins of his mother’s family. He traces the routes of both sides of his family towards their arrival in the state that would soon become Israel. His mother’s subsequent decline in her new land is illustrative of the uneasy ties of Oz’s parents’ generation to their new land. They were bookish, urbane people who had deep ties to the lands they left behind, far from the arid soil of Palestine.

The Palestinians themselves, as Oz makes clear in the two sequences where Palestinian people feature in this 700 page book, were a reminder of the immigrants’ foreignness. The Palestinians exist on the edge of this account, shadowy creatures who the new arrivals assume crave the annihilation of the newcomers. Which, from the perspective of the immigrants, has a certain logic, given the war footing at the founding of the state. Then, in two episodes, the young Oz succeeds in stepping out of his silo and having actual human interaction with Palestinians. In the first instance, Oz, aged 6, is dragged into an Arab-owned Jerusalem clothes shop by his nagging aunt. In the cavernous women’s clothes shop the child wanders off and finds himself terrified and lost, until he is rescued by the kindly Palestinian owner of the shop. In the second episode, an adolescent Oz is invited, the year before the state of Israel is officially brought to exist, to an event at the house of a wealthy Palestinian in an Arab quarter of Jerusalem. There, he is attracted to a young Palestinian girl, and seeking to show off, he causes a terrible accident to her young brother.

For a contemporary reader, these incidents have more impact than almost anything else in the book. It’s impossible not to see them as parables, which Oz might have intended. The outsider clumsily trying to assert his presence, sowing disaster. What is perhaps curious is that the implication of these stories are never followed through. The Palestinians remain a categorical ‘other’ and return to the edge of the narrative. There is consciousness, but there is no attempt at reconciliation. Instead the dominant conflict in the writer’s worldview is between the immigrant Jews of his parents generation and the Kibbutzers who have another vision of Jewery, one that is active, vigorous, uncowed. Oz moves away from Jerusalem and becomes one of this new school, working on a rural kibbutz, to his father’s dismay.

However, as the book sometimes makes clear, the story is still more complex than this. Because there has been another sector of the new Israel which has always existed, co-existing with the Palestinians, Christians and other sectors of society that made up this multicultural land. They too have been displaced from this narrative by the arrival of the immigrants. And the old Jerusalem that Oz catches glimpses of before the state of Israel is declared will soon be dismantled, with the arrival of the first Nakba. The Arab quarters will be annexed, geography rewritten, and the seeds of an ongoing, unresolvable crisis which will haunt Israel forever will be sown.

Oz’ account of the way the UN declaration of the state of Israel was received in Jerusalem and the war that followed is one of the most effective pieces of writing in the book. But every word about the hardship endured in those days now feels as though it has been mirrored and multiplied a million times by the violence inflicted on Gaza, part of that unacknowledged other which the new state has displaced.

“After that they talked for a while, the others, not my man, my man did not talk but just stroked my cheek and patted me twice on the shoulder and left. Who knows what he was called? Or if he’s still alive? Is he living in his home? Or in dirt and poverty, in some refugee camp?”

Nb - i recognise that this is only one of Oz’s books and it might be injurious to comment on the author’s attitudes through a reading of this work alone. However, it is an autobiography, and as such feels representative of the new Israel’s first generation, something the writer’s accounts of his interaction with Ben Gurion only helps to reinforce. It’s also worth noting what Khoury has to say in My Name is Adam: “I can’t understand how a novelist could write about Jerusalem without revealing the scale of the tragedy that befell the original inhabitants of the city’s western districts, which the Israelis occupied, expelling their occupants from their homes. I both blame him and wonder at him for not seeing the light in the stones of Jerusalem, of whose gradations of colour the Palestinian novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra wrote at such length. Oz saw only a dark city clothed in the fog of his European memories, but anyone who visits Jerusalem knows that it is a city of light and that its roseate stones radiate and glow even in the darkness.”

morvern callar (w&d lynn ramsay, w. liana dognini)

Someone once sent me a copy of this film and it has been sitting on my hard drive or my cloud, or a disk drive, or some kind of infinite space construction for many years. I am glad I never watched it on my laptop and the first time I encountered it was in the cinema. Even if there was a classic Cinemateca moment when the sound vanished for five minutes. Because, like all Ramsay’s work, Morvern Callar is an immersive, profoundly cinematic experience. Ramsey feels to me like a chef who takes what seems like far too few ingredients and cooks up something completely original and unexpected. As so often, the plot is thin, a tremulous coming of age story, stitched around an unlikely twist. But it is fleshed out with beautiful and brilliant set pieces. A party or a rave or a Spanish village fiesta. The film also makes the most of two lovely performances by Samantha Morton and the lesser heralded Kathleen McDermott, as Morvern & Lanna, two friends who have adventures together. There was a moment when a kid with a Peckham T-shirt made me laugh out loud - has any film better captured that absurd combination of humour and idiocy that has defined British youth culture since the eighties, where self-knowledge goes hand in hand with self-oblivion and the greatest virtue in life is to get properly mashed? Spain became a kind of spiritual home for this way of thinking, that other world where the sun always shines and the party never stops. Somehow the film captures all this with charm and empathy. Ramsay deep dives into a British Scotland a British Spain and a Spanish Spain, and it’s always a trip. 

japón (w&d reygadas)

There’s a strange magic to Reygadas’ film making. What is this magic? Firstly there’s a pursuit of the elemental. Cinema is about light and Reygadas reveres light. It’s also about relationships, human or other and he is one of the most fearless investigators of what that means. One of the things it means is being prepared to embrace images that others might find ridiculous. Masturbation, copulating horses, unsexy sex. On the page this seems like it could be bad taste, but Reygadas is prepared to run that risk if it takes us further into the complex avenues of his mind. This kind of material has long been explored in literature, from Ovid to Chaucer to Donne to Bataille, and many more, but the image is a hard taskmaster and the line between what’s considered tasteful and what crosses the line is a visceral one. Japón is a film about an artist’s search for some kind of redemption. Contemplating suicide for reasons that are never clear, an artist comes to the reclusive home of Ascen, an elderly woman. There, he becomes embroiled in the village politics, as her nephew, recently released from prison is trying to take over her home. The artist finds a cause which gives him some reason to live. It’s a doomed cause, but even so his relationship with unlikely bedfellow, Ascen, offers each of them some kind of strange succour. The film is unwieldy, awkward, but remorselessly brilliant all the same. Reygadas is not afraid to stare into the abyss and ask himself, his characters and the audience, if there’s anything worth fighting for. Perhaps, his films suggest, there might be. 

balnearios (d mariano llinás)

Llinas’ first film is a blink-and-you-miss-it 80 mins long. Watching this, if he reminded me of anyone as a filmmaker it’s perhaps, no matter how tangential this might feel, Adam Curtis. An idiosyncratic vision which gives free rein to an intellectual playfulness. (Curtis might not like this word but all the same it seems appropriate). Llinas headed off towards the waters of fiction, whereas Curtis is all heavy-hitting politics, but watching their films feels like a similar experience. We are in the hands of a conjurer who will come up with unlikely associations and unpredictable combinations. They also both leave the viewer with the feeling that they are basking within the timeless waters of cinema. Even this reduced length film felt like it had an elastic timeframe. You never quite knew where you were headed or when the film might come to a natural conclusion. 

Balnearios, a word which is probably best translated as ‘resorts’ opens with some lovely archive footage of the Argentine and Uruguayan coast. The film is constructed out of various parts. There’s a section on the balnearios’ annual cycle, the transformation from the dead times of winter to the frenzy of summer. The film ends with an extended, warm-hearted section about an eccentric sculptor. At times the film feels like a slightly cobbled-together piece, a bricolage if you like, hints of a student movie, albeit one touched with brilliance. Towards the end of the first half of the film, however, there’s a section which is pure Llinas, anticipating Historias Extraordinarias. The story of a once-glorious, now decayed hotel is related via photos and recreated footage, detailing  how the hotel has passed through various hands in dodgy business dealings, at one point being owned by a fraudulent playboy with a French chanteuse wife. One of her songs plays balefully over images of the crumbling hotel. The sequence has a lazy Borgesian charm; an epic narrative recounted in ten minutes with a few broad brushstrokes, no more than a subset of the movie itself. A clear pointer for the direction in which this idiosyncratic filmmaker was headed.

occident (w&d mungiu)

Mungiu’s first feature is a brilliant, flawed piece of filmmaking. Perhaps it’s easy to say in retrospect that there’s something callow about the film, given how it becomes clear in the director’s later career his capacity for conveying both emotion and tension. Nevertheless there’s a formal dexterity to Occident which wins the viewer over. The leap from Occident to 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days is fascinating. 4 Months possesses an intensity and tension which Occident barely hints at. Occident feels in many ways as though it belongs to a line of Eastern European filmmaking which celebrated the quirks of their respective societies, (think also of Kustirica’s early films and others such as Nemescu, Porumboiu or Menzel, even early Kieslowski.) The tone of much of this filmmaking is tongue-in-cheek, affectionate and ironic; also, clearly limited by what the censor permitted. 4 Months represented a step into a darker, more threatening world, with a level of psychological violence which grabbed the viewer by the throat. Having said which, Occident is a highly engaging piece of filmmaking in its own right. There’s a formal investigation of narrative, with three interwoven stories, reminiscent of its near contemporary Amores Perros. The fractured narrative is punctuated by freeze frames and the occasional crane shot, stylistic flourishes which the director dispensed with in his later films. The opening sequence runs the risk of becoming schmaltzy (notably through the use of music) but as the film builds layer upon layer, it lures the viewer in. In the end, Occident offers a diverse portrait of early C21st Bucharest, a city where Macdonalds and a ‘World Trade Centre’ commercial zone cohabit with rundown Ceausescu era apartment blocks. One where ordinary Romanians dream of escape to the West, whilst maintaining an affectionate, pre-atomised society which, his next film will go on to suggest, will soon be blown apart.

the movies of my life [alberto fuguet]

The 50 films of your life. Which 50 movies would you use in order to tell the story of your life? They’d have to fulfil differing roles. On the one hand, there are movies whose narratives had a particular resonance. On the other there are films which you happened to see at key moments, or with key people. Or there are movies which just seemed emblematic of a time and place in your life. In other words, the list isn’t curated on aesthetic grounds alone. There’s something slightly random about it. It could well be that one of your worst cinema experiences was one of the most significant. Sitting through a film with someone who didn’t want to be with you, or on a day when you’d rather have been doing something else, but that something else wasn’t there to be done. Cinema going is a curious pastime; you shut yourself up inside and place yourself in a completely passive mode for a couple of hours or so, staring at a screen, and yet this passivity has a strangely active dimension. When we go to the movies, we feel as though we’re doing something; although in reality we’re doing very little.

This is the quirky premise that Fuguet adopts to narrate if not the life of his protagonist, Beltran Soler, then the early years. As such it’s a Prousitan mission which reaps Proustian rewards. Beltran’s movies start when he’s 2, (Born Free) and end when he’s 16 (An Unmarried Woman). This is a coming of age story, told against the backdrop of Pinochet’s Chile. The first 8 years of Beltran’s life are spent in California, where his family have moved to; thereafter they return to Chile. A slight twist to the tale is that Soler’s family, whilst fundamentally apolitical, is more pro-Pinochet than anti; this is not the classic resistance narrative we have come to expect from dictatorship Latin America. Instead, it’s a gentle tale of growing up, with all the difficulties which go with it, no matter the political conditions. Discovering the opposite sex; trying to find out who your friends are; what you want from life; and, above all, coping with the family which destiny or genetics has donated.

Young Beltran’s childhood is refracted through the mostly Hollywood films of the 70’s and early 80’s he watches at the cinema. Titles like The Towering Inferno or The Deep figure, reflecting the tentacular reach of Hollywood as it infiltrates every child’s life. Beltran’s taste is MOR; there’s nothing arty about it, but at the same time, it also reveals how art, of any kind, can exert a grip. Above all in those films about family which Beltran watches which help him to understand that his dysfunctional family is not the only one out there. The narrator’s observation on watching Spielberg’s Close Encounters is that it “had me believing in UFO’s but not in families. 

In a recent visit to Chile, I had a few conversations about their contemporary literature. Bolano looms large, like an absentee father. The writer who left and became the most famous Chilean writer of modern times. Fuguet’s book has none of Bolano’s prose fireworks and little of his strangeness. Yet it does retain, in both its more detached prologue and its structure something reminiscent of the exiled Chilean. There’s something about the idea of an anthology, or that Borgesian library, that is intrinsic to the book’s structural ambitions. The story and the structure interlock with a seismic neatness. A celebration of youth and cinema at the same time. 

What are the fifty films of your life?

the yacoubian building [alaa-al-aswany]

Alaa-Al-Aswany’s novel has a curious timelessness about it. The Egypt it depicts doesn’t seem all that far removed from Albert Cossery’s Splendid Conspiracy. The matrix of heat, poverty and power generates a torpor which suggests an unchanging world, one where none of its three defining elements will ever change. Power, above all, resides in the grasp of a select, military-protected few, whose grubby self-centredness ensures the nation remains in a state of neo-feudalism. What affects the country is not capitalism, communism or Islamism; it’s venality, dressed up as politics. In the face of this monolithic governing principle, for ordinary citizens to aspire to anything better feels hopeless. Against this backdrop, the lives of the novel’s multiple protagonists play themselves out, almost all headed towards a desultory conclusion. 

However, this isn’t the fifties. it’s the nineties, with the US and its allies, including Egypt, on the point of going to war with Iraq for a first time. As a result, this is a Cairo which is both old-hat and new-hat. The events of the past decade are prefigured. Something is stirring, something which will continue to incubate over the course of the next twenty years or so before it erupts in Tahrir Square. Literature has the power to act like a depth sounder, dropped off the side of the boat, fathoming the deep. In the lives of Taha and Busayna, above all, the currents which are dragging Egyptian society towards revolution and conflict are sounded out. The novel’s artistry lies in the way it knits its portrait of its world together, illustrating, through the present tense of its action, Egypt's past and future. 

yalo [elias khoury]

Months which are not turbulent in the Middle East are welcome. This last couple of months have been particularly lacking in this respect. When people look back in twenty years at the Summer of 2014 in Palestine, Syria and Iraq, will they remember the terrible events which have befallen them, or will it just blend into a generalised history of catastrophe and violence?

Khoury’s epic and terrible book is set in the Lebanon, in the nineties. I recently read that a new synagogue is being built in the Lebanon, a sign of its current stability. A whole generation will have grown up which will have no memory of the events in that country, events which destroyed Beirut and made the Lebanon a basket case for over a decade. Every day from my youth seemed to bring a fresh tale of woe, a tale which at the time seemed as though it would have no ending.

Khoury’s novel is set in the aftermath of that civil war. However, that war, just like the ones currently raging in the region, was part of a wider conflict. The anti-hero, Yalo, traces his roots to Aleppo, Damascus and Turkey. He can’t be sure if he’s Arab, Assyrian or Kurdish. His grandfather is a priest from the last Christian sect which speaks the language of Christ, or so he claims. He berates his grandson for not being able to speak the language himself, telling him: “To whom do you think you will talk at your second coming?” The Grandfather’s religious philosophy offers an overbearing Gnosticism, one that Yalo can never get to grips with. “’I am Mar Afram’ the grandfather answered, and he smiled because his grandson was such an idiot that he didn’t know that all the writers of the world are merely copyists and there is only one, hidden book on the face of the earth, a book not written from human inspiration, and that when people write literature or poetry, parts of this book are revealed to them and they copy them down a rearrange them.”

Yalo is born into this confusion and is a product of it. He is not particularly religious, although he believes in the miracle he thinks his mother and grandfather performed when they drank the seawater of the Mediterranean. He is pliable, unsure of his identity, gullible. He fights briefly in the war and then is easily convinced when a fellow fighter suggests they steal from the company safe and run away. That same fighter then leaves him high and dry in Paris. He is brought back by a Lebanese arms dealer as a guard. He discovers that he lives in what would now be called a notorious dogging spot, in the country, and begins a brief career as a rapist and thief, a career which comes to a halt when he falls in love with one of his victims, who will later denounce him.

Yalo has plenty in common with Mersault, Camus’ anti-hero from L’Etranger. Any sympathy we feel for him is grudging and hard-earned. Seen from the outside he’s a miserable character. However, we watch Yalo as he buckles under hideous torture and gradually his whole construction of his self, his identity, starts to fall to pieces and then reassemble itself. So much so that by the final part of the book, the narrator, who is Yalo, has come to see his former self as another man, whom he observes and talks to.

The novel narrates Yalo’s story in a circuitous flashback. Its present tense is the interrogation cell, where Yalo recollects his past and tries to assemble it in a form that will appease his interrogator. Yalo’s is a terrible journey which comes at the end of the terrible journey which has been his pitiable life. It’s the life of any young man who has the misfortune to become caught up in the internecine strife of the region. Whose world view is constructed around the myths of his family, the urges of his masculinity and the peer pressure of the militarised world he inhabits.

The book was intially published in 2002. Twelve years on, its bleak vision appears to be more apposite than ever. 

bus 174 (w&d josé padilha; co-directed felipe lacerda)

Subsequent to this film, Padilha moved into drama, making the slightly bombastic Elite Squad. Elite Squad was a success on many levels, and bombast and cinema make for comfortable commercial bedfellows. Nevertheless, Bus 174, a documentary, displays a rather more surgical directorial sensibility, one which skewers some of the more grotesque aspects of Brazilian (and specifically Rio) society with unyielding intent.

The film opens with a panoramic helicopter shot, homing in on the primeval beauty of Rio as it seems to erupt out of the Atlantic ocean, the city named for the month it's river was discovered, a city which more than most succeeds in maintaining an affinity with the land it's made from. Jungle lurks at the city's edges and hides away on hilltops within its boundaries. Almost as though declaring that this is a city which contains environments which cannot be known, forever at odds with the urban ideal of transparency or accessibility. The directorial counterpoint to the gleaming opening shot are the scenes filmed in a prison, which are given the heading - any prison in Rio. This, even more than the favelas, is the manifestation of jungle, contained within the city, a place where men live crammed together, without room to lie down, or suspended above each other in hammocks, with shared possessions hung from ropes. The camera captures faces in negative making them appear dehumanised, vague, their pleas for attention or justice or decency coming through as sound recordings from the underworld. It's a mesmerising passage of footage which brings home the film's contention that there are parts of Brazilian society that suffer from extreme neglect and de-humanisation. When these elements appear within society, it should come as no surprise that conflict comes with them, something Sandro's story eloquently conveys.

These directorial touches help to ensure that Bus 174 pushes the boundaries of the documentary format. As well as the talking heads of those involved in the Bus siege, the directors make the most of what is a documentary goldmine, the hours of TV tape which traced the abortive bus hijacking by Sandro do Nascimento, a renegade figure whose agenda, the film gradually reveals, was more complex than anyone could imagine. Tracing Sandro's journey in conjunction with the progress of the siege itself, the film assembles a portrait of a complex, abused figure, who created his own meta-drama in order to finally, it is suggested, make himself visible within a society that does not want to know about people like him. (As such the film's resonance reaches far beyond Brazil).

Bus 174 is a taut, masterly piece of documentary making. In contrast with Elite Squad, it benefits from having a clear focus on one dramatic situation, which is played out to its tragic, farcical conclusion. It's high-octane fiim-making, which shakes up a format which so often manages to reduce the dramatic into something staid.

montano [enrique vila-matas]

My father used to work for a firm called Monsanto. I am tempted to begin an account of my experiences with regard to Montano thus, and indeed I find myself succumbing to temptation. My father was called Jean Paul Sartre and he was also my uncle. He was their in-house writer and his journal only came into my hands after his death. In which I discovered that he, Sartre, wasn't my father after all, he was just pretending to be my father. Or I was pretending to be his son. The distinction isn't clear. Or rather it doesn't always make sense, as I discovered when we were both in Buenos Aires for a while, without realising it, and I saw him crossing the road and called out to him and then chased after him and when I caught up with him he had become Cortazar, and he denied all knowledge of me, and told me that just because I thought he was part of my narrative it didn't mean that he necessarily was.

Or something like that. And repeat. I confess, speaking as neither my father nor as Cortazar nor as either of the Thomas', Pynchon or Bernard, that I found it hard, taxing, at times, to get my head around the book written by Enrique Vila-Matas which is known as Montano. In contrast to the concision of Bartleby, this is a novel that gyrates around itself in ever increasing circles, and they have a way of making the reader dizzy. In trying to write about the truth; or write the truth; or see which truths the truth will allow him to tell, Vila-Matas leads himself and his readership on a merry dance, waltzing along with Walser, and Musil and Kafka and Dickinson, and plenty more besides. In the end, rather than trying to make sense of the ever charming narrator's narrative, you just have to go with it, and trust that as he (I wanted to write 'or she?' but realise that if there's one thing we know for sure about this deceptive/ deceitful narrator it's that he is a he) sorts out his marriage and his literature sickness and his romantic tendencies, we, his readership, will pick up nuggets along the way which will be worth the treasuring.

And of course, Vila-Matas being the bibliophile he is, we do. As to what it all means, without wanting to sound malevolently Anglo-Saxon, search me guv, but there's fruit on the trees to be plucked, nurtured by the writer's fair hand. Two quotations from Montaigne towards the book's conclusion struck me as amongst the finest things you can read, and in a sense Vila-Matas is the writer as guide, shepherding his flock through the pastures of literature, saying don't worry about the terrain underfoot, just look at the views; and don't be scared of strangers. Even if they do turn out to be your father. Because in the Vila-Matas world of literature, everyone's your parent or your child. And he's probably got a point.

ice [w. vladimir sorokin]

Ice is composed of four sections. The first tells the story of three Russians living in contemporary Moscow who are kidnapped, brutally assaulted, and then discover that something remarkable has happened to them, the full details of which are not disclosed. The second part is the story of a young woman in the second world war, who is indicted into the secret cult of the ICE, later returning to Russia to find other suitable converts. The third and fourth parts are negligible, throwaway addendums.

The cult that the individuals find themselves belonging to is one which is shaped by some kind of alien force; which leads people towards their rediscovered hearts. The way of unearthing which people are suitable to join the cult is to smash an ice-hammer against their breastbones, then listen to see whether their hearts 'talk' in response to the assault. (The ice of the ice hammer is made from a meteorite which has landed in Siberia, although it takes a while to realise this.) Once they have joined the cult, the neophytes learn how to speak with their hearts, discovering a purity which the rest of humanity has forgotten it ever possessed. The cult's mission will end, as is the way of cults, in the annihilation of humanity when the cult members are absorbed by the LIGHT, a kind of nirvanic bliss which supersedes materialism.

Sorokin uses a lot of capitals, which have the effect of stressing the child-like glee of the cult devotees, as they speak to one another with their enthusiastic, re-discovered hearts. The writing is laced with a populist trashiness, crudely described sex scenes sitting alongside moments of brash violence. The notes on the flyleaf reference Houllebecq, and Ice possesses a similar blend of high-falutin' ideas married to an almost anti-intellectual prose style.

What it all means, or perhaps that should be, 'signifies', is something I'm not altogether sure of. The second section, describing Khram's (the woman's 'heart-name') mission to establish the community of Ice in the post-war USSR allows Sorokin to do a breezy run-through of late Soviet history, linking it up to the present day. From Beria to Yeltsin, he describes how the Soviet Union functioned, before mutating into Russia. Khram's narrative makes a theoretical, fantastical sense out of a history which is still being carved out, above and beyond the obvious ideological shifts. The members of the sect don't care about politics, all that matters to them is the Ice, and in order to achieve their ends, they will always rise to the top of society.

In that sense Sorokin's book has elements of David Icke's Lizards or conspiracies such as the Bildenberg society. Certainly there appears to be a neo-fascist element to the sect, which has been nurtured in Nazi Austria, and only recruits the blond and blue-eyed. It may well be that there's a clear and apparent satire which any Russian would recognise at work in these pages. The thing that makes the book curious, however, is that the nirvanic ideas which the cult ferments possess a near-mystical beauty. The notion that we no longer listen to our hearts, and that though that deafness we have lost touch with the potentially angelic simplicity of being human, is beguiling. As Russia crashes through the glass ceiling into the sordid world of capitalism, what happens to the messianic drive which is latent in much of its literature as well as its political history? It is not hard to envision Dostoyevsky's visionary misfits being attracted to a society of the heart, where the purity of love supersedes the materialistic drive.

In some ways, Ice is a frustrating book, which throws its narrative(s) away all too readily, and appears to want to introduce significant ideas without taking them all that seriously. However, (and this is one of those occasions when the reader's ignorance should be mentioned as a disclaimer), it's probably to a book's credit when you come away from it going - what the hell was that? Was it rubbish? Did it really have flashes of brilliance? Did it mean anything at all? Sorokin's book comes across as a provocation. A provocation as to what, remains far from clear, but better to be provoked and frustrated than mollycoddled.

nine nights [w. bernardo carvalho]

Nine Nights weaves together three separate stories. At the core of the book is the tale of a young US anthropologist, Buell Quain, who committed suicide after a three month mission spent in a village of Kraho Indians, in 1938. The novel cobbles together an account of his life and death, in part structured around seven letters which Quain sent via a local engineer, Manoel Perna, who befriended him briefly. These letters were sent on to friends and family; some were preserved and some lost. Manoel Perna, in turn, writes a series of letters giving an account of his encounters with Quain, which lead to his death, by drowning, a few years later. The third story appears to be the author's himself, who acts as narrator, recounting his increasingly desperate quest to discover the reasons for Quain's suicide.

Quain's life story is scratchy, endlessly out of reach, the subject of supposition and rumour. The author supplies two photos of Quain, implying that whilst this is a work of fiction, it is based on factual events. As the events themselves seem so sketchy, it's impossible for the reader to ascertain where truth begins and fiction starts, just as it is for the author-narrator. However, in contrast to the vagueness of Quain's story, the narrator also tells his own story, including details from his childhood, about his eccentric father, and in a particularly striking passage, of a trip he made himself to visit the Kraho, fifty years after Quain.

This trip is in many ways the highlight of the book, occupying a swathe of text. It's a nightmarish account, written by a trained journalist, of a trip into an alien culture. The divide between the urban, European Brazil of Sao Paulo and the ancient, indigenous cultures of the Indians is yawning. If you've ever visited somewhere foreign, expecting to make a connection with the culture but in practice only discovering with every passing hour of your visit how different societies can be, then this remarkable passage will resonate. Far from participating in an Edenic idyll, the narrator feels threatened, paranoid, and driven to the verge of madness.

The brilliance of this passage is coupled with the compelling sequence where the narrator visits New York in his quest to find a living connection with Quain. These passages smack of the real... and yet, no matter how convincing they feel as a personal account, the text constantly needles the reader with the injunction that nothing should be taken for granted. The more the narrator learns about Quain, the less convinced he seems to become that the truth can be anything more than supposition driven by the personal drive of its seeker. As the narrator discloses more and more of his own story, the reader is inevitably lead to question how much of what is being told can be taken as read.

Nine Nights is a playful, slight, profound novel. Its structure seems erratic at times, short passages dovetailing with longer ones. The premise - the quest for the white man who loses his mind in the jungle - is self-consciously Conradian, and makes for a compelling yarn. It is also a book about modern Brazil, and the disassociations that lie within its borders. But above all it is a journalist's reckoning with the touchstone of their career: the idea that every story has a revealable truth. A reckoning which seems to lead both writer and reader towards the most ambivalent of conclusions.