the world/ shijie (w&d jia zhang-ke)

The World is named for a theme park in Beijing which features selected wonders of the world, including Big Ben, a mini Manhattan complete with Twin Towers, (long after they have fallen), a mini Eiffel Tower as well as a Taj Mahal, a St Mark’s Square and other sundry wonders. The film follows the lives of several performers who participate in the shows staged in the theme park, where they dress up in national dress of different regions. Tao, the central character, appears as an Indian dancer and a Japanese geisha, among others. However, Tao longs to travel, and although the world is on their doorstep, few of the people who work there have ever been out of China. So Jia Zhang-Ke’s conceit takes shape: the image of a burgeoning China where the world appears to be opening up is nothing more than a simulacra. The reality is that this is a kind of prison. So far so Baudrillard. It’s also interesting to note that the film occurs just as mobile phones are starting to infiltrate the social web, another mechanism that appears to expand the world, but actually contracts it, with jealous individuals constantly asking why their partner hasn’t answered their call, using the phones as a tool to micro-manage day to day relationships.

Within this context, the film looks at the realities of the lives of these ordinary citizens, many of whom are internal immigrants, coming from rural parts of the country to participate in the economic boom. This is perhaps more typical Jia Zhang-Ke material, the struggle of its citizens to adapt to the rapidly changing face of China. What he succeeds in doing so skilfully is conjuring out of this material an overview of an entire society. By the time we reach Tao’s tragic end in a flat on an old industrial estate, a far cry from the fake glory of The World, it feels as though we have traversed the length and breadth of Chinese society, from high class karaoke joints for the elite to the desperate hotels where internal immigrants turn up when they first land in town. There are many things which make Jia Zhang-Ke one of the greatest living directors, but one of them is the sheer scale of his cinematic imagination. 

senselessness (horacio castellanos moya, tr. katherine silver)

This is one of the least comfortable reads you are likely to come across. A writer accepts the job of rewriting a report on human rights abuses in an unnamed Central American country. He works in an office in the cathedral complex, in the centre of the city. He complains that he’s not being paid enough. He complains there aren’t any good looking women around. He finds two good looking Spanish women and sleeps with one of them. Then he gets scared because the woman he sleeps with has a (Uruguayan) military boyfriend, who is arriving any day. He is haunted by phrases from the report he is working on. He goes mad. It’s all over in a flash. Is the author mocking the process of compiling human rights reports? Is he trying to equate the feckless writer with the feckless and dangerous men who have committed these crimes? The novel’s satirical intentions walk a Swiftian line and the discomfort this engenders is, one imagines, the object of the exercise.

la niña santa (w&d lucrecia martel, w. juan pablo domenech)

Last year Lucrecia Martel came to Montevideo and screened a short she had made during the pandemic. It was a twenty minute short about her life in the north of Argentina. Afterwards, her partner, a singer, did a set. There were questions and answers, many of them about Woody Allen, whose season in Cinemateca was ongoing. It was a slightly dispiriting affair, none of which felt like it had all that much to do with her four feature films, all of which I have seen at one point or another. So I returned to Niña Santa, a film I haven’t watched since it came out, nearly twenty years ago, uncertain of what to expect. Would it live up to the memories, or would it prove as underwhelming as the night in the Zitarossa?

Thankfully, it was the former. Martel has only made four films and they are all small masterpieces. La Niña Santa is a waspish, delicate, pitch perfect film. Martel has talked a lot about the importance of sound. The film opens with girls singing. A recurring motif is the playing of a theremin, the setting for the initial contact physical contact between Amalia and the doctor. Martel explores the balance of power between Amalia and the doctor, pursuing a contentious line which suggests, perhaps, that the weaker party is in part complicit in events. It’s a film which has some affinity with Harrower’s Blackbird, not to mention Lolita, dramatic works which are prepared to go beyond the obvious tropes of blame in their investigation of teenage sexuality and the way adults manipulate or find themselves beholden to this.

There isn’t time or inclination on the part of the reviewer to go into the ethical dimensions of the film, buy him a drink and it can be discussed to the small hours. On an aesthetic level., however there is time to note Martel’s flawless composition and almost too perfect shot selection. Every shot is beautifully set up. The location is a hotel, with the film only occasionally venturing out into the street. Yet Martel makes this hotel into a small town. Secondary characters are allowed to steal the scene, (the maid with the spray and the bad timing offers the kind of comic touch which belies the film’s seemingly serious nature), and the action of the hotel is always humming in the background. The director succeeds in giving the impression that the whole wide world is contained within the hotel’s walls. Lastly, it’s worth noting the sublime pacing of the film, as it seems to pick up pace and accelerate, acquiring more and more dramatic tension as it heads towards its baleful climax.

Let’s hope Martel hasn’t gone to ground altogether in Northern Argentina, and that her fifth feature film is in the pipeline and coming soon. 

turtles can fly (w&d bahman ghobadi)

A Kurdish refugee camp on the border of Iraq and Turkey. The refugee camp is littered with destroyed tanks and plagued by mines. The children in the camp earn their pennies by deactivating the mines and selling them on. In the arms bazaar in the local town they exchange mines for weapons. It is 2003, the eve of the US invasion of Iraq. The Kurds in the refugee camp have been brutally repressed by Saddam’s regime. They long for the war to start, even though there’s no security that this will make their conditions any better. However, it could hardly make them worse. The refugee camp is a sea of mud and chaos, with the ever-present risk of being killed or maimed by a stray mine, or being shot at by the Turkish border guard. This is the frontier between war zone and a gateway to Europe, or even the USA.

In this world, the bespectacled Satellite is prince. He buys the antenna that permits the elders to decode the news. He announces the arrival of rain and war. The kids follow him as though he’s a kind of pied piper. but he falls in love with Agrin, a young woman with a child, an armless brother and a death wish. We are a long way from Hollywood. The war will start, the Americans will come, Saddam will be deposed, but there can be no happy endings here.

Bahman Ghobadi’s film is achingly prescient, 20 years on. It’s a drama with the authenticity of the rawest of documentaries. Bahman Ghobadi is an Iranian Kurd whose sensibility to the issues of the Kurdish refugees is at times unbearably plausible. Cinema is a tool that allows us to walk through the mud with these characters, to feel as though we could reach out and touch them, even though we know we could never save them. It seems astonishing to me that Ghobadi is not better known. Perhaps his sensibility is considered too raw, too harrowing. But I don’t know of any work of art that has taken me closer to the realities of life in the shadow of 21st century geo-politics, and the way that the machinations of men and women in power impact on the lives of innocents. This is a masterpiece of filmmaking - an art which can make the intimacy of another’s life in a land we will probably never visit touch us in a way news reporting never can. 

man tiger [w. eka kurniawan, tr. labodalih sembiring]

Man Tiger, a novel which caused quite a stir in the English speaking world when it was first translated, is an elegantly written tale of provincial Indonesian life. It has more than a little in common with Mia Couto’s Confessions of the Lioness, with the idea of anthropomorphism to the fore. Margio, a likeable young man with a troubled history finds himself killing the father of the woman he loves when he is possessed by a tiger. The killing itself is described early on in the book in savage detail. It’s an arresting moment, but it becomes clear as the novel unfolds that this objective is not sensationalism, but to grip the reader in the vice of the story which then goes on to explore gender mores and morals. The violence that surges in Margio is an extension of a casual violence that pervades, from the boar hunts to the domestic violence suffered by Margio’s mother at the hands of his lazily sadistic father. Kurniawan teases out the complexities of the society he depicts, showing how Margio’s savage, irrational act possesses a clear and tangible context, as well as making it clear that the real victim here is Margio, rather than the man he kills. 

triple agent (w&d rohmer)

Rohmer’s chamber piece has a curious topicality, in a modern day era of Russian spies and double crosses. A white Russian in exile in pre-war Paris and his Greek wife get caught up in the machinations which eventually lead to the HItler-Stalin pact. It would appear that the film is based on fact, with an addendum that the sympathetic heroine died from TB in prison in 1940, after being tried for her alleged part in her husband’s plot to abduct an exiled Russian general on Stalin’s behalf. (A charge which Rohmer’s film suggests was ridiculous.) There’s a stately feel to the film., which appears to lack the subtlety of Rohmer’s earlier work. The delicate character study of the heroine is swallowed up by the march of history and the film’s epic scope as it covers the years leading up to the second world war. The film’s attempt to show the way in which ordinary people become victims of historical contrivance, though supremely relevant, is never as effective as the story suggests it should be. Having said which, there’s something peculiarly haunting about the way in which the film incorporates black and white archive footage, charting events which retrospectively appear inevitable. Are we in the midst of a similar era today? Are there ordinary or not-so-ordinary couples whose lives are on the point of being torn apart? 

graceland [chris abani]

Mike Davis, in Planet of Slums, references Abani’s book several times. Planet of Slums is a non-fiction tome, but the reference helps to illustrate how fiction can take the reader into the experience of life lead within a particular environment far more effectively than facts and figures. Abani’s book rises up out of Lagos’ Maroko slum like another one of its rickety, fantastical structures. Its words and images are balanced above the lapping tides, resisting the onset of the floods, the bulldozers and the developers.

The book’s narrative tells the story of Elvis, a sixteen year old wannabe dancer, whose idealistic vision leaves him ill-prepared for life in the slum. Elvis reads Rilke and tries to make a living doing Elvis interpretations on the beach for tourists, impressions they fail to appreciate. He is one of the millions trying to get by. He’s also a curious, adventurous soul, convinced there has to be a way to achieve a brighter life than the one he’s living (cf my next entry). HIs game approach leads to him getting into dangerous scrapes, which ultimately only go to show that the slum, and the politics behind the sum, are stronger than he is, and his only real hope is to get out.

Abani’s novel is a dense tale, full of characters and stories. Perhaps its nearest contemporary is the work of Rohinton Mistry. The book is peppered with Elvis’ dead mother’s recipes, something which felt, to this reader, like a slightly twee touch which didn’t really benefit the novel, no matter how important food might be to our understanding of culture. Beneath these artful notes lurk more robust, powerful flavours. The Zolas and Dickens’ of the twenty first century will emerge from the “developing” world. Elvis, defined by his optimism in the face of a world which has little time or space for optimism, feels like a second cousin, several times removed, of Pip. 

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Aside:

Many, many years ago, I had a job looking after a Nigerian theatre group who came to London under the auspices of the Royal Court to do a show. They were about a dozen actors and I became quite close to some of them. On the last day, I was due to drive them in a minibus to Heathrow. One of the troupe had already absconded. I stayed the night in a room in their digs in Notting Hill. We had to leave early in the morning to catch the plane. They were still up when I went to bed. In the morning, three of them had vanished, including Peter, the one I was closest to. I drove the remaining members of the reduced troupe to the airport. The mood in the minibus was sombre. I asked one of them, Femi, what people would say when they got back to Nigeria about the absconders. He told me that they would say: Why have you not joined the others in staying in London? Why have you come back? 

mumbai to mecca [ilija trojanow]

Ilija Trojanow offers a rare insight into the hajj. The hajj is the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Only Muslims are allowed into Mecca, so an experience that is protean to the lives of millions of the world’s population remains scarcely documented in “western” literature. Trojanow offers a pared down account. There are no literary frills. It’s almost as though the writer is aware of an obligation to recount as plainly as possible an experience which he knows much of his readerhood will never be able to share. The emphasis is on a disciplined, sober detailing of the process. There are moments of near-hysteria: an account of being nearly crushed underfoot by the mass of pilgrims suddenly lends the text a more threatening edge. However, for understandable reasons, the book resists any instinct towards hyperbole. Instead it recounts the stages of the hajj, offering vivid accounts of some of his fellow pilgrims who have arrived from all corners of the world. Trojanow helps to demystify Islam. His voice is a valuable, measured bridge between cultures which sometimes seem like they are worlds apart.

jacob the mutant [mario bellatin]

Jacob the Mutant is a genuinely strange exercise in writing. Bellatin presents the extracts of a lost novel written by Joseph Roth. These fragments are stitched together to tell a weird, cabalistic tale. Jacob lived in a border town on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He has a zoo. He helps people to cross the border. His wife is having an affair. She flees to the States with her lover. Jacob ends up following her. He has a transformation and becomes a late-middle-aged woman, who tries to shut down the town’s multiple dance schools. This is a basic summary of the apparent plot of the missing, fragmented novel. Which the author then rewrites in his own words. The author might be Jacob’s great great grandson. Then again he might not be. The translator adds his version. There is more exegesis. There are explanatory drawings which explain very little. There is also a latent hassidic mysticism to the book, which makes precise if baffling references to aspects of the Torah. In short, this brief book contains a degree of mystification which is impressive. What it all means I have no idea, but if you enjoy being bamboozled, this is a great read. I am looking forward to getting my hands on another of his books: The Uruguayan Book of the Dead. 

on the road to babadag [andrzej stasiuk]

Recently I learnt that Bolano wrote listening to heavy metal on his headphones. Franzen needs white noise. There always seems to be some debate about what are the best conditions for writing. How to disconnect yourself from the world in order to open up the interior space and let it loose on the page.

Reading Stasiuk’s remarkable prose I wondered how he goes about producing it. On The Road, as the title suggests, is a road movie of a book. A travel journal, to put it another way. But the prose itself feels like driving down a road. Through Eastern Europe. A road that sometimes meanders, sometimes crawls up hills, sometimes freewheels down them. Sometimes seems to turn into a blazing motorway. And sometimes, too, it feels as though the writer loses control of his vehicle, as the language takes over, barrelling forwards relentlessly, chasing the stars.

The book itself is an account of the writer’s wanderings through the netherlands of Eastern Europe. Places which, for the average Western European, might as well be in Asia. Moldova, Albania, Romania, Transylvania, Slovenia. However, his investigation is more abstruse than this. Stasiuk shuns the cities as far as possible, preferring to delve into the backwoods, searching out the roots that hark back to a rural Europe, unchanged by modernity. He doesn’t like motorways and he likes getting lost. He shows little interest in the tourist sights, preferring to drink beer or the local tipple in a bar than visit Roman remains. The writer seems to be on a constant search to find the essence of this other Europe which has managed to preserve itself in the face of the barrage of the modern world’s relentless quest for uniformity. Places are not the same as one another. They are different and people evolve with this difference as a result.

Stasiuk diligently investigates these differences. He searches out the thinginess of things, seeking the way in which man, beast and object are so tightly defined by one another that it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference. This is the world of the object from the  pre-consumer age, when the individual retained a different relationship to matter. His descriptions of these societies, preserved by their place on the European margin, have the resonance of a William Carlos Williams poem and the intellectual acuity of Foucault’s Les Mots et Les Choses.

The book is split into several sections detailing his journeys in various countries, until the last essay, a long, haphazard, semi-stream of consciousness where he allows himself to hop from place to place, name to name, creating through the act of writing alone a kind of communality between these corners of Eastern Europe. It’s bravura writing, perhaps inspired as the title suggests by Keroac, but something all of its own at the same time. In the chaos of words which flash like sparks, passages of the most extreme beauty and insight emerge. This is writing as incantation, spell, lyric. Geography is let loose on the page and places converge and separate as though these names on the map are part of an ancient dance that Stasiuk alone has managed to unveil.

amor idiota (w&d ventura pons)

Pons’ film opens in madcap, playful style. The camera crash-zooms, pans, runs around with its trousers at half mast. Amor Idiota tells the story of a self-confessed idiot, Pere-Luc who threatens to impale his penis with a fork at his birthday party. His mordant voiceover contrasts with the kamikaze edit style. Mr Pons appears to be throwing the kitchen sink at us and seeing if it will stick.

It does, more or less. Despite the reference to Dostoyevsky’s Idiot at some point, this is more rom-com than deep psychological study. Pere-Luc finds the woman of his dreams and pursues her in a suitably idiotic fashion, stalking her at her house, refusing to take no for an answer, perusing her with a manic intensity. There’s one brilliant scene where the lovers kiss for the first time in a restaurant in front of a group of gawping cyclists. However, whilst the film seems to work best when it captures this comic energy, it also succeeds in inveigling the audience into an understanding of the lunacy of love, the way it is capable of tearing down the boundaries of standard social practice. There’s something akin to the craziness of Shakespeare’s lovers, lost in the forest of Arden or a midsummer night’s dream in the way Pere-Luc whizzes around his hometown on his desperate quest. Or like Rohmer drunk on Cava.

NB: I assumed this film, showing in rep at Cinemateca 18 was recent. In the process of watching it I gradually became aware of the absence of the accoutrements of modern urban life/ love. No mobile phones. No email. No Skype. Only later did I twig that the film was from 2004. Was life really simpler a decade ago? Or is it that just a trick of the light which Pons pulls off. 

harbor [lorraine adams]

The physical harbor referred to in the title is near Boston. It's where the Algerians, many of whom come from the same small seaside town, Arzew, arrive after they jump off the tankers they have stowed away on into the icy Atlantic and swim the last leg of their journey to the relative safety of the USA. The Algerians are fleeing from the brutal and under-reported conflict that has ravaged their country. The book follows the journey of Aziz, a former soldier, from the tanker up to his arrest on charges of terrorism.

The last word signals the secondary, ghost narrative of the book. Who are the bogeyman figures who populate our media and our consciousness? What does the shape of the "evil which threatens our civilisation" as Blair, Bush and Amis might say, take? In Harbor, Adams sets out to demystify what will come to be known as a terrorist cell.

The book is apparently based on testimonies that Adams curated during her time working as an investigative journalist. Her style is clipped, with fast edits between short chapters. The influence of Elroy appears to be significant, as she hops, skips and jumps through the years of the Algerians' illegal stay, constantly moving the narrative along. The effect is sometimes opaque: the reader can feel as lost as the novel's characters as they head into a new continent without much of a clue. Logical, "transparent" readings of their lives, the book seems to be suggesting, are impossible to construct. They inhabit an almost invisible hinterland of petty crime, credit card theft, black labour, nightclubs, religion, alcohol and ultimately, at the edge of the spectrum, fundamentalism.  Bit-by-bit, the narrative accrues, and our understanding of Aziz grows, shaped in large part by the terrifying events he experienced in Algeria and from which he will always be fleeing.

There's an acerbic, journalistic flintiness to Adams' prose. Like Elroy, she doesn't want her style or even our natural tendency to sympathise for a hero, to get in the way of the account she's giving. This makes for a compelling, ultimately tragic novel. What is revealed is that it is not so much the perceived threat that is a danger to our society, but our ignorance with regard to what this perceived threat really consists of.

the hungry tide [amitav ghosh]

This is one of those books that arrived at a time of need. When you don't really know what you're doing yourself and you can't understand why things are happening as they are and you can't think about reading anything but then you do and the voice of the author anchors you. This is the world. Not the things that happen. But the things that are written. Which exist like a permanent rainbow overhead, a pot of gold which is constantly within reach.

In the end, oddly, Ghosh's book left me feeling disappointed. But in the beginning, it was a revelation. To say this reveals that reading this writer is to embark on a journey. Fittingly, the book's two principle characters, Piya, the US cetologist and Kanai, an Indian translator, meet on a train as they are about to begin a journey to the Sundarbans, a series of mangrove swamp islands in the Bay of Benghal, not all that far from Calcutta. Piya is hoping to study river dolphins; Kanai is returning to visit his aunt, whose late husband's notebook has been discovered and bequeathed to Kanai, for reasons he doesn't entirely understand.

Immediately the reader is thrown into rich novelistic territory. What will Kanai discover in the journal? Will Piya find the dolphins and what will happen if she does? How are these two seemingly disconnected persons due to become connected? Ghosh's book is so well formed, it's foundations laid with the cunning and art of a mason, that it's an immediate delight to feel oneself, as a reader, caught up in his tide, rolling down the river with his effortless narrative. In addition to all this, the book feels as though it's hard-wired into the land he's talking about: the people's myths; the presence of nature, above all in the shape of the mercurial, murderous tigers; the influence of the British; and finally, the force of the weather, which shapes the land as well as the stories of those who inhabit this land. Including all the characters we will meet. At one point, the narrative even finds a way to inform the reader of how the birth of the continent, so far away and yet so present, the island that was India colliding with Asia, forming the Himalayas and its rivers, helped to shape this land, and its people.

At times this is bravura writing, the novelist providing the perspective for his characters' stories (and our own) which day-to-day life has no time for. Ghosh achieves this without imposing his voice upon this audience: the information he conveys resides within the dreams, folklore and learning of the people he writes about. You come out of the book feeling as though you too have visited the Sundarbans and walked in the shadow of the tiger. The moment Fokir, the local fisherman, explains to Piya, distraught at the killing of a tiger, why the tiger has allowed itself to be killed, is a remarkable one, the inherited knowledge of the land trumping everything our liberal Western sensibilities have taught us (with our inherited knowledge) to feel.

Perhaps strangely, it felt to me as though the book's denouement was its least convincing aspect. As though the mechanics of the story are in danger of taking hold. There are moments in this book when you can see the gears moving. Perhaps because he had done such a job of luring me into his trap, it's closing felt like an anti-climax. Nevertheless, the job had been done. I had been taken out of my world, a world without sense, and escorted through another one. The act of separation helping to lend perspective to my own. Reading being the opposite of escapism; instead a space for contemplation, the novelist's acute presentation of the parameters of his described world allowing one to spy the parameters of one's own.

the darling [russell banks]

Banks' novel is a peculiar beast. The subject matter is rich and provocative. It opens with Hannah Musgrave, also known as Dawn Carrington, a former member of the now almost forgotten US radical terrorist group the Weather Underground, returning to Liberia to search for her three missing sons. Their father, Woodrow Sundiata, was murdered as he became caught up in the power games that took place as President Doe fell to the forces of Charles Taylor. After fleeing without her sons, who abruptly took up the call to become child soldiers, Hannah has lived on a farm of her own, rearing free range chickens. Now she's back, looking for her lost children.

It's an exciting premise with which to open the book. As Hannah smuggles her way back into Liberia, the quest is on. However, it's never followed up. The book then unfolds in a series of flashbacks, describing Hannah's life in the lead-up to her flight to Liberia, her time there, and the years she spent in the US before returning. In the end, the opening of the book is rounded up in a desultory fashion some four hundred pages later, with Hannah's sons becoming just another of the things she's left behind in her protracted, curiously soul-less life.

Banks appears to be attempting to create a narrative which examines the fate of idealism in the US, and the way in which its seeming extinction has impacted on its global role. The choice of Liberia as a setting, a country founded by freed US slaves in the 19th century, seems both a commentary on the course of global politics in the centuries that have followed, and perhaps a metaphor for a land whose politics are governed by self-interest. At the heart of this is the curious figure of Hannah, whose naivity is matched by her lack of heart, someone prepared to walk out on almost any situation if needs be, a supposed idealist in practice ruled by the demands of realpolitik.

The book is narrated in Hannah's voice. It's never clear to what extent we're supposed to take at face value her constant philosophising, self-justification and mental nurdling about the fate of her parents, her ex-lovers, and her family. The farm which has become in later life her redoubt, something of a Utopian feminist collective, where the workers go skinny dipping with the owner, gradually fades out of the narrative, so that when it reappears in the closing stages the effect is jarring. As the book goes on there are several clumsy narrative devices, as Hannah helps to spring Charles Taylor, the Liberian opponent to Doe, from a US prison, and her former Weather Underground companion Zach pops up unexpectedly to keep the story ticking over. At times it feels as though the architecture of the novel's ambition dwarfs the actuality of the book's achievement. Seeking to write a grand novel about the late twentieth century, Banks finds himself occasionally floundering, no more so than in the book's closing pages' references to 911, which seem shoe-horned in to lend added weight.

The only beings with whom Hannah seems to construct lasting and meaningful relationships are the chimpanzees she protects in her sanctuary, chimpanzees which the civil war will eventually devour along with everything else. Reflecting on this (p 340) Hannah says that 'I dealt with my chimpanzees as though I were one myself. And what was wrong with this? What was ethically and even practically wrong with having empathy towards the other? For a long time I answered, Nothing. Nothing at all. It's good politics...' until she says, you betray them, when 'taken to its extreme, perhaps even pathological, form, empathy is narcissism.' In some ways this seems to be getting to the nub of the book: Hannah can empathise with other cultures, but she can never sympathise, or identify herself with them. Hence she's constantly discovering that her instincts only lead towards heartlessness. However, this seems to be a problem the book, as well as the narrator, faces. It leads us into the world of Liberia, and its dark African politics, but it can't help but posit itself firmly on the outside, and there's never any insight on the African perspective of the chaos that's been unleashed in the country. The reader views it in the same way as Hannah, a meaningless hell, where children turn from being adorable teenagers into merciless, psychopathic killers at the drop of a hat, in spite of a loving, stable upbringing. Why are Hannah's children transformed into monsters? The book offers no answers, leaving the reader to conclude that it must be because they're African, they belong to some 'Other' which a US citizen, even though she's their mother, will never be able to connect with. In spite of all her philosophising on her own fractured relationship with her parents, Hannah comes up with no rationale for what happens to her own offspring. Her quest is fruitless. She goes back to her farm. She is none the wiser. And neither, after her story, are we.

flying doctors of east africa & la soufriere & the white diamond (herzog)

A Herzog doc triple bill of a Sunday lunchtime. Mr P and myself keeping an eye on the audience, trying to determine their provenance, finally deciding they were all German. Which they clearly were not.

The three films covered three continents, more or less, and came from three separate decades. The links however, include people placing themselves in remarkable situations, often perilous, with objectives that are tinged with a spiritual rather than a material dimension. A man who chooses to stay on the island of Guadeloupe, in spite of a mass evacuation, saying he has no fear of the death that the volcano might bring. The doctor who has no qualms about landing his plane on an airstrip whose dangers he lists as he and Herzog prepare to descend, the first plane to ever land on the strip. The scientist driven to fly his zeppelin over the jungle canopy in spite of, or because of, the fate of the friend who crashed in an earlier incarnation of the vehicle.

There's Werner to document it all, sharing their risk, revelling in the freedom to discover his camera has offered him over the course of forty years. Allowing their stories to unfold, step by step, always alert to the whimsical detail which brings the project down to earth: Mark Antony, whose best friend is his rooster, and who christens the airship a 'white diamond'; or the Masai whose fear of steps threatens to prevent them receiving the medicine the flying doctors want to bestow. Tracing the intersection between our 'modern' world, and an older ancient one, that persists.

Three hours of films and never a dull moment; the unexpected forever at the door, the story always told with a sense of purpose.

conquest of the useless [herzog]

There are books that you read and there are books that you miss. By which I mean that, when the relationship between yourself and the book comes to an end, because you have finished the reading of it, there's a sense of loss. Between the insomnia of last night and the late start of this morning, I devoured the final hundred or so pages of Herzog's account of the making of Fitzcarraldo, and this evening on coming to bed, I am saddened that there's no more pages to be read, no more of the adventure to be shared.

Conquest of the Useless is far from an orthodox account of the two year filming process. At times it consists of musings on the nature of the jungle the author finds himself immersed within; at others it's a dream diary; at others it details his adventures with Kinski, Jagger, and the rest of the team. The fact that the journal lasts over two years already offers some idea of the difficulties Herzog faced in the realisation of his movie. As such it is also a detailed account of a creative process, including all the madness, exhilaration, boredom and perspiration the creative process can entail. Towards the very end of the process, Herzog writes: 'It is only through writing that I become myself.' Thus offering another clue to the book, which has its existentialist dimension. Through the insanity of the project, the writing of the journal allows the author to maintain his sense of self, when the forces of nature, art and an enclosed society, not to mention his megalomanic leading man, conspire to destroy him. At the very end of the book there is a note describing how one of his team really did lose his senses, or go mad, and it seems as though this madness was always closing in on Herzog, and everyone else who embarked on the kind of cinematic project that only a lunatic could contemplate.

There's something about the book which is reminiscent of works such as Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laureds Brigge or even Lautreamont's Maldoror. The project and the book detail the travails of someone navigating the rivers of their mind. Herzog's commentaries on nature and the jungle, by now reasonably well known, come from the coal face. He reads the runes of a termite's nest and seeks out the sense to be found in a caged anaconda's eyes. The connection between nature and humanity, so cauterised by a modern urban society, is alive and kicking. His fate depends on the rainfall, as an animal's might; when he surfs the rapids, he's as vulnerable as any creature would be. Death is everpresent. Some of the indians working on his project are shot with arrows and barely survive; a plane some of his team are on crashes; he himself chronicles several close calls; and throughout it all his mother appears to be dying, back in Germany. The safe world is left behind, and filters back through snippets of news, such as an assassination attempt on the Pope, or Reagan.

The only thing which throws our reading of the book is the knowledge, which he did not possess as he wrote, that in the end he prevailed, and the film was completed. This key piece of information perhaps warps our ability to connect with the journey the writer is going on; a journey which at the time of writing often seems more likely to end in failure than success. However, in a way, there's a sense that if he can just keep writing, if he can just keep on being Herzog, all will be alright in the end. Even in its most pessimistic vision of the world he has chosen to inhabit, there's an energy to the writing, and the man; the ceaseless workings of his imagination offer a kind of hope, both to himself, and to the reader. So long as the writer's mind can convey itself, and connect with the reader's, the journey continuing, hope (whatever that word means) remains. The Conquest of the Useless possesses a morose, humanistic beauty. Every day there are things to observe, and choices to make. Even if everything is underpinned by some kind of nihilistic pointlessness, to be human means to continue to observe, and to continue to make choices, no matter how pointless (or useless) these actions might appear in the present moment. Over the course of its two year span, three hundred pages, and one extraordinary film, Herzog's text reaffirms the value of those things which make us both animal and human.

the sacred book of the werewolf [w. victor pelevin]

The heroine of this book is called A Hu-Li, a Chinese name for a Russian teenage prostitute who left China for Moscow at some point in the last thousand years. Translated into Russian, her name means, 'What the fuck'. A Hu-Li tells her this herself, as she is the book's narrator, and the text charts her journey, via a love affair with a werewolf, towards enlightenment, when she uses a BMX bike in a remote Moscow park to help propel her into the Nirvanic Rainbow Stream.

Pelevin's text is esoteric. Apart from being a treatise on the attainment of post-material enlightenment, (in the Zen Buddhist sense of that phrase), it also references, among other nodes in the contemporary zeitgeist, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, The Matrix, and Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood for Love. The narrator claims to have slept with Dostoyevsky and been an associate of Tolstoy. Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kant and Bishop Berkeley are all name-checked, and the book also offers a comprehensive interpretation of recent Russian history.

All of which might make The Sacred Book of the Werewolf sound like a worthy, academic read, which couldn’t be further from the truth. (Although the Zen Buddhism gets intense at certain points.) A Hu-Li, clearly some kind of a cover for the book’s maverick author, is witty, irreverent and ultimately kind-hearted. She kept me great company as I travelled through old Russia, never afraid of putting the world in front of my eyes into a context that made sense to someone who’d never been there before.

Pelevin’s agendas range all over the place. He critiques the evolution of the new Russian oligarchy, with its thirst for oil, whilst offering his readers simple readings of Buddhist aphorisms (eg What’s the difference between a dog and a lion watching a stick being thrown – the dog looks at the stick, the lion at the stick’s thrower.) It’s a blend that shouldn’t really work, yet its very unlikeliness allows Pelevin to pull it off, in much the same way that his narrator conjures men into believing they have enacted their wildest fantasies with her, when she’s actually been reading Hawking the whole time. Reading Pelevin is an, at times, dazzling experience. In the face of his and his narrator’s sardonic wit and eclectic intelligence, it might be expected that the book had traded in emotional power for intellectual mind-games. However, there’s a strong (ahuman) emotional narrative at work in A Hu-Li’s story. Attaining Buddhist enlightenment might not sound like a moving endgame for a novel, but by instituting this as the finale of A Hu-Li’s narrative, Pelevin manages to make it so. When you reach the end of the book and see how it connects with the beginning, something almost magical occurs. As if all this wasn’t enough, it also offers the most intriguing account of werewolf sex you’re ever likely to find.

the book of chameleons [w. josé eduardo agualusa]

This is a book written from the point of a view of a lizard. This put me off. I picked the book up wearily. Lizards, Africa... it sounded too saccharine for my tastes. Sacchirine and dry, with a hint of tragedy. Like a slightly stale digestive. Anyway, I picked the book up, and prepared myself for whatever was coming. And within a page I realised I was wrong, and remembered that prejudice is pointless.

The lizard, or gecko, is christened Eulalio. It makes a pointed remark at one stage about another Angolan writer who builds his career selling national horrors to the West. The Book of Chameleons hints at the history that has shaped the perceptions of the book's characters, but it does so elliptically. Felix, who owns the house the lizard inhabits, makes his living as a genealogist who invents family trees for people. The suggestion being that history can be overruled, at least on a temporary basis. However, the main narrative of the book concerns a man who comes to Felix, is re-christened as José Buchmann, embraces his new self to such an extent he begins a quest for his lost 'new' mother, and yet in the end comes face to face with the daughter he believed he had lost in the civil war which ravaged Angola for so many years.

In a way Agualuca's delicate prose, detailing a woman who travels the world collecting different experiences of light, an albino who communes with the gecko, and a gentle, pastoral setting, seems to be acting in wilful opposition to all that history has thrown at the writer's country. Structured in a succession of fleeting chapters, it has the kind of lightness of touch which is in danger of being described as charming; and yet there lurks just below the surface a notion of another history. Just as the gecko doesn't live in an idyll, threatened as it is by the predatory scorpion which would kill it for no apparent reason at all. The lightness and humour of the book have a precision which keeps the reader on their toes, never knowing in which direction the narrative will turn, when the sting will come.

delirium [w. laura restrepo]

I discovered Delirium via a link to Bolaño. Set in Columbia, it tells the story of a husband whose second wife, Agustina, young and scatty, loses her mind. The husband, Aguilar, goes about the process of trying to recover it. The narrative is told from four different perspectives, Aguilar, Agustina as a young girl, Agustina's ex-lover the cocaine money launderer, Midas, and Agustina's German immigrant Grandfather, the composer, Portulinus.

The only Columbian writer I know is Marquez. Restrepo's prose has a similar fluid, relaxed style. In the voice of Midas, a man playing dice with Pablo Escobar, it occasionally felt too easy going, but perhaps, in contrast to our melodramatic visions of crime, this is how it feels to live on the sharp edge of a criminal culture. Delirium offers a window into the crazy, fucked-up narco-world of a country where normality is just a memory, professors sell dog food, and insanity lurks round any corner.

It's in the portrayal of Agustina's madness that the book takes hold. Agustina hovers on the brink between sanity and insanity, and this is part of her charm for Aguilar. Who hasn't loved someone because they're 'a little bit crazy'? So when Agustina crosses the line, and becomes altogether crazy, we root for him as he fights to win her back, a noble warrior in a land riven with moral ambivalence.

There's hints of Jane Eyre in all this, and it's possible that only a woman writer could get away with this depiction of female insanity. It might be that Agustina's perilous journey reflects her country's - a place sliding over the brink, which retains the hope of returning to that thing we know as sanity. Which, the narrative suggests, it needs to, because charming, idiosyncratic and exciting though madness may be, in the end it's not only tiring but it forecloses the possibilities of living. When Agustina retreats from the mess of her mind and offers Aguilar moments of sanity, it feels like the world has been put back in place.

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A note on branching out into the world of literature. For various reasons it feels as though this year I have rediscovered the art of reading novels. After a gap of about twenty years. Which is not to say that I have read no novels in the interim, just that I have rediscovered a relationship with the novel that has been semi-dormant. An appetite, if you like, which might be worth sharing.