london and the south east (david szalay)

Seeing the author awarded the Booker, and investigating his back catalogue, this seemed like a good entry point. A novel set in London in the world of telephone sales, and, as the title suggests, the South East. It’s a world I once had some knowledge of. My first “job” in London was in an institution very similar to the one where the protagonist, Paul Rainey, works, selling advertising space in spurious magazines. Unlike Paul’s world, which is white and predominantly masculine, based in Holborn, my workplace was in Cricklewood, and my most notable companions were from Ghana and Nigeria, as well as Meli Rome, an Italian former model who had a bedsit in Knightsbridge and had fallen on hard times. It was a world shadowed by the cynicism of the world Szalay depicts, but also a gateway to the more cosmopolitan universe of London, which also included IRA pubs and old colonels.

I only lasted a month, and was rubbish at it. Rainey has lasted 15 years, even if he too appears to be rubbish at sales. Something he recognises and wants to escape from. The novel follows his descent into a tepid midlife crisis. Paul, like his colleagues, his partner Heather, and anyone else he meets, is not a sympathetic figure. It feels as though we’re skirting the edges of the land knowns as Amis-country, a jaundiced trek through the sufferings of the lower middle class, men who spend their lives in pubs, women who are decidedly secondary figures. The book rolls along efficiently, and Paul’s misadventures boil up towards a comic denouement. Nevertheless, this feels like the kind of novel that the British literary establishment adores, a somewhat patronising peregrination leading to a foreseeable resolution. 

visitation (jenny erpenbeck, tr susan bernofsky)

Erpenbeck’s novel reads almost as a collection of short stories. The unifying theme and principal protagonist is the house where the novel occurs, although in fact the singularity of the house is inaccurate, as the house is connected to a neighbouring house as well as a boat house, all of them situated by the side of a lake at a short distance to the east of Berlin. The novel has one fixed character, the gardener, a constant presence as the inhabitants of these spaces come and go. The gardener is allotted his own brief chapters, which intercut those of the changing cast. The novel’s conceit allows Erpenbeck to pirouette through modern German history. At one point the householders of the neighbouring house are Jewish, and they are forced to sell to the owner of the main house at a knock down price, which should help them to emigrate, but doesn’t. Another chapter is dedicated to a relative of the Jewish family who succeeded in getting out to South Africa, and whose memories of the German land are flavoured by his new surroundings and his sadness. Perhaps it is unsurprising that the most arresting chapters are those which occur before or after the war, including the fleeting stay of a Russian cavalry officer. The novel, though flowing towards the twenty first century, when the house will be demolished, is not afraid to step back in time on occasion. It’s a short, dense piece of writing, which harbours sadness, happiness and thwarted dreams, and offers a recondite vision of Germany’s complex twentieth century. 

arcadia (nicolson)

Nicholson is a restless writer, constantly seeking windmills to tilt his theories against. Arcadia takes the premise that the ancient English estates which were formed at the end of the Middle Ages and consolidated in Tudor times offered a vision of indentured Englishness which was collective, bucolic and aspirational, in spite of the fact these estates were autocratic and had little respect for individual freedoms. HIs wider theory is that within a social framework, the citizen has to accept compromises about the degree of liberty as opposed to the degree of security, whereas contemporary UK is a society that has chosen to value liberty above any great sense of security.

Nicholson’s focus is the Wiltshire estates of the Pembroke family, where Phillip Sidney wrote his great poem, Arcadia, (dedicated to his sister the Countess of Pembroke), and which inspired a sleepy, idyllic vision in the work of Aubrey, Browne and others. This was a nostalgic vision, one  with one foot in an idealised past and another in an inevitably compromised present. The book traces the way that the very power of these estates lead to the conflict with the king that produced the Civil War, but suggests that underneath this conflict was a more ideological struggle between a communal vision of Britain and an individualistic vision. HIs slightly heretical conclusion is that people had a better standard of living with less freedom than with more. When one thinks of the harsh rural world depicted by Hardy, where the labouring rural class had few rights and less security, a world which was in Nicholson’s view a direct result of the defeat of the more paternalistic, autocratic Tudor society, the logic of his argument is clear. There is even an ecological element to Nicholson’s argument, as the Tudor estates permitted smallholdings, whereas the subsequent break up of the copyholder system lead to the construction of vast farms owned by the few, driven by the need for profit as much as a requirement for sustainability. Nicholson’s writing tends to flourish when it is more comprehensively tied to the articulation of his theory and the latter half of the book tends to get lost in the detail of history. All the same this is a book that speaks of Britain past and Britain present with a degree of imaginative and intellectual verve which puts those phoney fogeys of the current government to shame.

“It was an organic ideal, a belief not in mutual exploitation but in the balance of different parts of society. To some extent, ever since, these have been the values of the counter-culture, an underlying thread of idealism which has run throughout the history of the modern world.”

the wasted vigil (w. nadeem aslam)

Afghanistan. A few months ago, the word was on everyone’s lips. The country had fallen for a second time to the Taliban and the consequences, we were assured, were going to be terrible. Then the news cycle moved on and the consequences became almost invisible. So far as can be discerned from news feeds, the consequences have, indeed, proved to be terrible, but no-one is looking.

Nadeem Aslam, a British Pakistani writer, is probably an exception to that last phrase. In a search for literature about Afghanistan I was directed to his book, not knowing where the writer was from. But as a primer for how to understand the last thirty or indeed three thousand years of Afghan history, The Wasted Vigil is a vital starting point. It’s also a coruscating read, skilfully woven, full of portending dread. Which is entirely justified and, so far as we can discern, is even more justified today, 14 years after the book was published.

The book tells the story of four characters. Marcus, a British man who has converted to Islam, whose wife was killed by the Taliban. David, a former CIA agent who fell in love with Marcus’ daughter, Zameen, who was herself killed by an Afghan. Lara, a Russian woman who is searching for her brother, a Soviet soldier by whom Zameen had a child, who might still be alive. Lastly, Casa, a Taliban soldier, who finds himself holed up with these three foreigners in a remote but beautiful part of the country. Each character reflects a different element of Afghanistan’s recent history and their fate is constantly in jeopardy. A sense of dread lurks over the book and its characters: it feels as though none can possibly emerge unscathed.

Aslam peppers his tale with anecdotes and a vast knowledge of Muslim history and religion. Beside offering an insight into the Koran, it gives insights into Afghani history, gem stones, Buddhism, sacred art of the region and much much more. It is, in a way, a treasure trove of knowledge and information, albeit a Pandora’s box kind of treasure trove, one that once opens seems to send the world into a tailspin from which it will never emerge.

As is indeed the case. Even if the characters featured in the novel were to have survived, it seems impossible that recent events would not have now caught up with them and that their survival then was only postponing the inevitable. How the Americans and the British and the Russians and the Pakistanis and probably many others have managed to fuck up Afghanistan. Doubtless they have had help from Afghanis too, but The Wasted Vigil succeeds in harrowing style in showing how geo-politics impacts on individuals of all colours and creeds. 

everything is cinema (richard brody)

Richard Brody’s biography of Godard is monumental. It’s an epic journey through the life of a filmmaker via his films. One feels as though Godard ought to be grateful to the gods for granting him such a dedicated, comprehensive biographer, although one also feels that he, Godard, probably doesn’t give a shit. The tension between Godard’s professional and working life is constantly in play, and Brody delineates this tension forensically. From his relationships with his leading actresses to his squabbles with contemporaries (most notably Truffaut) to the fraught working conditions on set. For Godard, film-making would appear to become, increasingly, a calvary, an inexhaustible source of both suffering and joy. Brody traces the evolution of this process film by film, both reawakening the reader’s fascination with the films themselves but also the filmmaker’s enthusiasm for the process.

One of Brody’s theories is that Godard’s later films, far less well known than those which established him back in the day, are in many ways more profound and deserving of praise than those earlier gobstoppers. (He’s particularly harsh on Bande Á Part). Of course, these films, as the book acknowledges never reached the audiences of Breathless, La Chinoise, Weekend, Contempt, etcetera. Most readers won’t have seen the later films, and I belong to that most readers category. It feels, as we enter this zone when Godard struggled more and more to get films made, and struggled more and more in the making of them, as though the second half of the book occupies a darker, sadder process, albeit one which Brody assures us, in our ignorance (or at least mine) is one whose artistic richness has been neglected.

From a filmmaker’s point of view, the book is inspirational. It highlights how Godard’s quest for innovation meant he was always at the forefront of new cinematic possibilities, sometimes as a result of his own investment (in the development of hand-held cameras, for example), and sometimes as a result of good old fashioned ingenuity. Making cinema is a technological process but the gurus of technology so frequently blind with science that it can start to feel like an exclusive process, one that belongs to those with access to vast funds and equipment. Godard made films like this, but he also concocted films out of the bits and pieces lying around in his Swiss back yard. There are dozens of ways of creating cinema, and Godard’s enthusiasm for trying all of them shines through, and inspires. Similarly, if anything comes across in Brody’s book, it is that Godard was a filmmaker in the sense that he couldn’t not make film. He was/ is constantly in the process of creation. Some of the ideas come to fruition, some don’t, many are recycled to emerge years even decades later. Scraps of footage for one project appear in another. We have now reached the iPhone epoch of filmmaking and as ever, Godard was there decades earlier, working out how to transform the stuff of daily life into the stuff of art or cinema. 

the years (annie ernaux, tr. alison l strayer)

Ernaux’s text is the kind that one would love to be paid to write. Fragments of a life, bottled up in some kind of a chronological order, and served up on the plate. It’s a rambling, sub-Proustian voyage which captures the rapid scale of change post-war, the loss of innocence that came with the digital age, the sexual revolution and the highs of May ’68, the anti-climax that followed May ’68, and haunting of post-68. Ernaux’s personal experience is mapped onto the changing position of women within her society, one which allows her to break with the model inherited from her parents, and essentially relive her twenties in her forties. Everything is in there, from philosophers to politicians, from Concorde to 911. Small details like a solar eclipse unexpectedly resonate, “Blind faces raised to the sky seemed to await the coming of god or the pale rider of the Apocalypse. The sun reappeared and people clapped. There wouldn’t be another solar eclipse until 2081 and we would be long gone.” She’s also unafraid to address the rise of identity politics: “One no longer heard the words “goodness” or “good people”. Pride in what one did was substituted for pride in what one was - female, gay, provincial, Arab, Jew, etc.” There’s a laconic quality to much of her writing which allows Ernaux to flirt at the edges of her themes, never quite disclosing her personal take on them, letting them ride on the froth of her prose, leaving the reader never quite knowing where the wave will fall. 

all dogs are blue [rodrigo de souza leāo]

The notes at the close of the novel, written by Blue Dog’s original publisher, reveal a great deal. The author Souza Leāo suffered from schizophrenia, and was frequently in hospital. All dogs Are Blue belongs to the pantheon of literature which lurks on the edge of society, a voice from the other side, as Foucault might have said. The book details the life and times of an inmate of a psychiatric ward, who is accompanied by his blue dog as well as a whole host of other friends, some of them imaginary, some of them fellow patients. Two of these are called Rimbaud and Baudelaire. The narrator lives in Rio, coming from a seemingly middle-class family. His poeticised prose refers to the hybrid nature of his nation’s history: European, African and Indigenous. A mixture which feels, in his voice, unstable, on the point of explosion. At the same time, it’s a carnival of language, (perhaps reminiscent of Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World), a delirious roller-coaster of words. There’s no plot to speak of, just a mosaic of unhappy magic. Like poetry, this is a novel which no doubt rewards repeated reading. The translation, by Deborah Levy, is effective. We go into the narrator’s mind and dance with him for a while. He might be from Rio, but he could be from Shanghai, Essex or Moscow. There’s a universality to ‘madness’, a culture which unites above and beyond geography.  

zone [mathias enard]

Barthes was a fan of the James Bond series. He used them for his structural analysis of narratives. Although Zone contains many signifiers in common with Fleming’s novels, one finds it hard to imagine that Enard shares Barthes’ enthusiasm.  It offers a story constructed around the figure of a French foreign agent, a la Bond. Like Bond, Francis Mirković travels a lot; seduces beautiful women; like Bond his moral compass appears to be ambiguous, his past shady. That’s as far as it goes. Thereafter, conceptually and structurally, the Bond vision of the world and the Mirković go their separate ways, an ocean far wider than the English Channel between them. 

Zone’s narrative is reduced to bare bones. The novel opens with Mirković catching a train at Milan station, travelling under an assumed name. He is heading to Rome, where he is going to exchange a briefcase full of classified information for cash, which the Vatican will pay him. He will meet with his Russian lover and start a new life. As far as narrative goes, that’s it. No mysterious strangers on the train, no run-ins with bad guys, no heroics.The rest is flashbacks and a vomitous torrent of information, all told in a single-sentence 500 page monologue.

The information is an apparently haphazard stream of consciousness. Mirković’s and the author’s theme is the Mediterranean and the lands which border it. The narrator does a matchless job of reordering history, putting it back in its place. Spain and France border Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Italy borders Libya. Greece and the lands of the former Yugoslavia border Egypt, Turkey, Israel, Gaza and Syria. What all these lands have in common, beside the sea, is a shared history of violence. This is the focus of Mirković’s monologue. Atrocities in Algeria, in Salonika, in Beirut, in Barcelona and dozens of other places are all woven into one tale of blood, which also manages to incorporate the Nazi atrocities. Enard’s prose is unsparing, relentless. Perhaps like Bolano in the part about the killings in 2666, he wields language like a weapon, challenging the reader to go the distance, in spite of the horror. This is the novel as endurance sport; history without the niceties, a free-falling catalogue of despair. 

At the end of which there is no salvation. Rather, at the end of which there is only the continuation which could not be written when the book was published, which shall be Syria and Gaza once again and refugees drowning in the great lake. One has the feeling that Enard never wanted to finish his voyage through the Zone. He would have wanted it to be Borgesian text, renewing itself constantly to document the latest instalment of his zone’s barbarity. 

All of which makes Zone a curious, elucidatory and punishing read. A quick google revealed that the writer has a burgeoning reputation in his native land. There is something both alt-French and anti- French (anti-structuralist) in the immense seriousness of the book’s subject matter and the minimalist approach to the book’s construction. It’s the antithesis of the Anglo-Saxon Bond, which is all narrative and very little content. 

all the lights [clemens meyer]

All The Lights is a collection of short stories. There are plenty of them (15). There are no overt connections between the stories, but plenty of covert ones. These covert links have the effect of sparking associations in the reader’s mind: did this character crop up in another tale? Haven’t I read this somewhere else in the book? The book’s title, for example, is a phrase that recurs with regularity across many, if not all of the stories, and every time you come across this phrase it helps to construct a network of communality between apparently diverse episodes. (This might be even more apparent in the original, it’s hard to tell, although it should be noted that the translation by Katie Derbyshire is excellent.)

The stories are all set in the Eastern side of a reunified Germany, the former DDR. As such, they are the haunted tales of history’s losers, in one way or another. Even the foreigners who appear, including a Dutch boxer, are losers. They are the ones who history will not celebrate, whose stories are never going to be more than bittersweet. Which is not to say there is no light in the book, or that it’s remorselessly grim; just that there’s an aura of lost possibilities, of the unfulfilled dream. The shadow of the West. 

Under this umbrella, the author constructs elegant portraits of the little people trying to make their way. The immigrants, the warehouse workers, the salesmen. There’s a touch of Carver in all this, but there’s also a flavour of Cortazar in the way Meyer elides time. Like Cortazar he is not afraid of skipping backwards and forwards within the timeline of the story. The effect is disorientating, in the same way in which life can be disorientating. The present and the past and the future collide head-on in a single paragraph. This demands an assurance and skill from the writing; Meyer is not afraid to lead the reader to the border of incomprehension before reeling them back again to the through line of the narrative. Again, this frequently reflects the state of his subjects, people who don’t feel in control of their destiny, who never know if they’re about to fall off a cliff or get knocked out, but battle on regardless.

[As an aside, in Berlin last weekend, we visited the “DDR Museum”, a place which in the end I found unbearably sad. All the hope (all the lights) of a utopian dream reduced to rubble, steamrollered by the capitalist machine and corruption. In the museum people smirk at the Trabant or the mono-politics. It’s all but forgotten that beneath the surface there was once the dream of a more egalitarian and less materialistic society.]

my two worlds [sergio chejfec]

Chejfec's novel is a simple steam of consciousness tale.  It is narrated by someone who might well be the author himself. A man approaching 50 who is a writer, visiting a literary festival in a southern Brazilian town. He goes for a walk in a park in that town, a town he does not know, and the novel is the story of that walk. In reality, very little happens on this walk: it is in effect a coat-hanger, a literary device which allows him to present his observations and aperçus on this thing called life.  

There is nothing ground breaking about this.  The author's fluid prose follows in the footsteps of Bernhard, Robbe-Grillet or, more recently, Sebald or Teju Cole. The narrative consists of a sequence of underwhelming events, with no surprises. What this style of writing does achieve is that it takes the reader inside the writer's brain. Chejfec's brain, which I occupied whilst flying South from New York to Montevideo over the course of what seemed like a thousand years, was not an unpleasant to be, but at the same time, in spite of Vila-Matas' eulogistic preface, I cannot say that it was a particularly revelatory space either. 

chef [jaspreet singh]

Kashmir seems a long way away from Montevideo, but Singh's novel brought it back to life. The novel (as often seems to be the case in Indian literature) is a first person account of the trials and tribulations of a sympathetic but hapless chef in the Indian army. The twist in Singh's take on Kashmir is that he presents the conflict from the point of view of a soldier-chef, Kip Singh, a Sikh from Delhi. Who is seduced by the charms of the Himalayan province, losing his faith in the army and the Indian state in the process.

As well as offering this insight into the conflict, Chef is also a novel which explores the loss of innocence.   In fact, Kip's failure to lose his innocence and sleep with a woman becomes a tragic loss of innocence in itself. The innocence of believing that all will turn out OK, that the world is designed to bring happiness. In his frustration and his struggles to come to terms with his fate, Kip's life echoes the struggles of the place he falls in love with. The tone of the book remains dry and wistful throughout. Kip's eye remains as dispassionate as his tastebuds, which have been coached by his mentor, the older, tragic chef, to absorb and enjoy contrasting influences. There's a great deal of wonderful writing about food and its possibilities. The older chef, for example, loves Brie, and bemoans the paucity of Indian cheeses. The willingness to reach out and delight in another culture and its cuisine not only broadens the palate, it also broadens the imagination. With all the trouble that can cause, as Kip discovers when he starts to fall for a suspected female Pakistani terrorist.

Chef is an assured novel. The writer skips willingly between timelines. In Kip he has created a character who feels like he could have walked out of the pages of a novel from the 19th century: a genuinely decent, likeable hero, whose courage is revealed in the little things he does, not in grand gestures. It's sometimes said that your lead character should be riven with conflict and will not be dramatically interesting if he or she is too sympathetic. Chef shows this not to be the case, revealing a figure whose gradual understanding of the conflict he has become unwittingly caught up in makes for an unlikely but  noble hero. 

the informers [juan gabriel vasquez]

The Informers contains stories within stories. When the narrator writes a book about his father's German Jewish friend, Sara Guterman, who arrived in Colombia fleeing from the Nazis, his father reacts viciously, publishing a damning critique. After a heart by-pass operation, the father changes his tune, before the reconciliation is ended when his father's killed in a car accident. However, it transpires that his father had just come from visiting his old friend, Enrique, whose father he denounced forty years ago as a Nazi, and whose family was destroyed as a consequence.

In effect this is a tale of family intrigue and secrets, with the narrator's journey towards the truth assisting him in his mission to escape the shadow of his overpowering father. The book comes lauded with critical acclaim. It is a well constructed text, but suffers from the author's tendency to overwrite and embellish. Succinctly told it could have come in at 200 pages, but instead comes in at 350, and its whimsical asides diminish the potent father-son narrative. Furthermore, the books ends with a historical footnote, explaining the nature of the Colombian blacklists, upon which the book's mystery and drama is predicated. The need for the footnote seems to some extent to point out the book's failure to sufficiently convey their significance within the text itself. Additionally, whilst much play is made of the mystery surrounding the father's action, it still seems puzzling that his son, for all his fascination with the case, never seeks to investigate the causes of his father's seemingly random act of betrayal.

The Informers feels very much like a first novel, full of intriguing ideas, but lacking a certain clarity. It offers a frustratingly restricted insight into wartime Colombia's history, and the way in which it connects to its more recent, violent history. A book full of loose threads, it never quite seems to get to the bottom of the various mysteries it sets out to investigate.

24 city (d. zhang ke jia, w. zhang ke jia & yongming zhai)

My appetite for reviewing appears to be waning somewhat, so my apologies if this is at all cursory. Perhaps its the result of the political manoeuvrings which have been occuring in the UK of late. Strange to think that as a nation we once held sway over China, forcibly addicting its citizens to opium, in one of the more benevolent phases of British imperialism. Now it's China which is finally looking outwards, imposing its mark upon the world. I have no figures but its said they own most of Africa, I know they own large parts of Australia, and are no doubt active in Latin America. Over the course of what seems like no time at all they've become the world's greatest commercial power, or have initiated the process of becoming it. The transformation seems astonishing, but then one of the conundrums of ageing is that it's only as you yourself devour the years alloted to you that you begin to realise how fast history operates, and how impermanent are things that in your youth seemed to have been the same for ever.

All of which is apropos of Zhang Ke Jia's film, which is a study of an old weapons factory in the growing city of Chengdu. Zhang films the process of its destruction as it makes way for a swanky housing/ commercial development. In the course of the film he stages interviews with workers (apparently played by actors) who recount some anecdote from their past, thereby bringing the social fabric of the factory to life from its inception in the fifties up to its recent closure. These stories are counter-pointed by images of the factory as the last workers work there, engaged in the rugged labour of heavy industry. Rings of molten metal are beaten into shape, before the workers leave and the space becomes a kind of mausoleum to the China which has now slipped away.

Zhang's film is lengthy and far from an easy watch. Its pace is slow and there's little attempt to dramatise the stories, which are told by speaking heads in fixed locations (a bus, a hairdresser's etc.) Yet the film has a subtle and gradually accumulating potency, with the final subject, a pretty young buyer who owns a new VW Beetle talking about how she finally grew up when she realised she had to take responsibility for her parents. Which suggests the film's message is that the present cannot be called mature, or developed, until it learns to respect the past. The dangers and ironies of vast material growth at the expense of spiritual (for want of a better word) development are reaffirmed by the closing vision of modern Chengdu, a sprawling, characterless seeming city of glass skyscrapers and flyovers. This is a documentary of sorts, but it is also a critique of onrushing history and the way in which China is changing.

revanche (w&d götz spielmann)

Revanche would appear to be the latest in the Austrian wave to break over the shores of Britain. In many ways this seems like the most conventional of the four different director's films I've seen over the course of the last year or so. It tells the story of a man whose girlfriend is shot by a policeman, and how he obtains a kind of revenge. The film moves from the milieu of a Viennese brothel to the rural backwaters, as Alex, the anti-hero, holes up on his grandfather's farm. There are sufficient holes and co-incidences in the plot to empty several buckets, but the film's effectiveness has more to do with the sense of mood or tone it creates than its narrative. It's here that the influence of his peers seems to touch Spielmann. The tendency to let the camera linger on a scene longer than might seem strictly necessary; the violence of the sex scenes; the sometimes abrupt edits. All of these things contribute to give the piece a slightly brooding weight which the narrative alone perhaps doesn't warrant. In contrast to the film's slightly regulation premise and storylines, the things that stand out are moments like an old man playing his accordion or another younger man mowing his lawn.

the white tiger [aravind adiga]

Adiga's book has been an international publishing phenomenon, as well as winning the Booker prize. In practice it's a glass half full/ glass half empty book.

Here's the glass half empty:

White Tiger is a somewhat one-dimensional piece of writing. The narrator and anti-hero, Balram, tells a simple story over the course of a week, describing how he went from the 'darkness' of India's rural backwaters, to glory as an entrepreneur. The catalyst in moving from one world to the other was a violent crime, although in truth the narrator's canny intelligence has already marked him out as a contender within the bustling new India. The plot moves along at a brisk if not rollicking pace, punctuated by Balram's asides on the nature of his country. However, this is one of those books where a lot seems to happen and at the same time, next to nothing seems to happen. Balram recounts his life history, and although the critics praise the 'shocking' act of murder which lies beneath his genial tone, the fact is there's nothing that shocking about it. This is the world of fiction after all: it's supposed to contain murders and the like, and the action within White Tiger always feels relatively tame. It offers a wry account of a new India, which people, particularly in Britain, probably want to hear, but it's far from the coruscating vision of Rohinton Mistry, whose darker, more savage novels capture the true horror of India's overwhelming poverty.

Glass half full:

White Tiger's rawness is one of its great strengths. Its narrator's prose has the kind of unpolished verve which successfully captures the chaotic energy of a rapidly changing nation, struggling with the cruel juxtaposition of great wealth and even greater poverty. At the moment, on You Tube, the IPL is doing its level best to turn cricket into the biggest brand sport in the world, a sport based in India, out-selling the Premier League or the NBA. The remarkable thing is it might just succeed. Turn it on and you'll see razzmatazz, foreign stars, baying crowds, beamed around the world. Balram belongs to this New India, where the clash between wealth and poverty will inevitably lead to violence; it's just a question of whether that violence can be contained. White Tiger lays bare the corruption, venality and the way in which both rich and poor are committed, day by day, to the business of maintaining and improving their station. Whilst comparisons have been made to Dickens, there's something in the narrator's free-flowing, conversational style that seems more reminiscent of 18th century British literature: the free-wheeling prose of Fielding, or the acute observational skills of Defoe, married to the scathing satire of Swift. Adiga is a writer riding the wave of vast change within his country, as technology, population explosion, scarcity and the potential for wealth combine to generate hardship, but also possibility, for those who are prepared to grasp the nettle. The writer's voice seems to articulate this brave new world, which has such people in it.

johnny mad dog (d. jean-stéphane sauvaire)

It's been nearly a week since I saw Johnny Mad Dog. He's a blurred memory, strolling through a Liberian hinterland, wreaking havoc and waiting for havoc to catch up with him.

There's nothing sympathetic about him, and in a way that's the film's redeeming feature. Johnny Mad Dog occupies similar territory to Sin Nombre. The woes of the underdeveloped world brought to a screen near you. However, unlike Sin Nombre, Sauvaire's film has no cute storyline to alleviate Johnny and his crew's relentless violence. This is senseless violence, which goes on and on, and if the director was seeking to portray something of the life of a Liberian child soldier, this might be the only way of doing it with any kind of authenticity.

Except that this is art, not a documentary. Which can make a bear out of a cloud or a pearl from a clod. In its relentless search to convey a kind of reality, Johnny Mad Dog perhaps tries too hard, stringently resisting the transformative potential of art/ cinema to let its audience get inside the mind of the child who's been brainwashed into becoming a killer. In which sense the movie ultimately feels trapped between two stools, wanting to engage with subject matter the world would rather not know about, yet fearful of seeming to be exploitative in its bid to bring the child soldiers to a wider audience, working as hard as it can to ensure they're never loveable, that the heart strings of pop superstars shall not be tugged.

It's a hard balance to pull off. I don't see it as wrong that Sauvaire should have had a go, but as fireworks pepper the London skyline in a Guy Fawkes frenzy, I'm not sure if Johnny Mad Dog has left me much the wiser as to what it would be like if feral children patrolled the streets playing with the real firecrackers, the ones that aren't just for show.

birdwatchers (w&d mario bechis; w. luiz bolognesi)

Birdwatchers is a film made with indigenous tribespeople in Brazil. If that sentence conjures up an image of Brazilian Indians standing on the bank of an isolated river, wearing little, firing arrows into the air, then that is exactly what the film delivers in its opening shots. Before pulling back to reveal the same Indians emerging from what is no more than a thin strip of jungle, putting on T-shirts and jeans, and being paid for the spectacle they've provided for visiting tourists, who've come to take in the native fauna.

From the opening, there are semiotic games at work in Bechis' film. We, the viewers, are placed in the position of the tourists, until the camera suddenly swings around behind, to reveal the Indians perspective. In a sense, this might be what the filmmaker is aiming to achieve. Bechis, born in Chile, but having spent much of his life in Europe, does not belong to the Guarani tribe, and the chances of anyone from that community making a film which breaks out to be seen by the world must be slim. So the film would appear to be made by someone knowing the very medium itself might be in conflict with the community it seeks to portray, but nevertheless attempting to present their perspective to the best of their abilities.

Furthermore, it might be that it's hard for a Western, cinematic audience to relate to the values which the Guarani display. For example, when the chief's son kills himself, following on from the suicides of two other tribespeople earlier in the film, there's little remorse shown for his part in the son's decision, and little sign of mourning. There are set cinematic responses to a son's suicide, (regret, sadness, soul-searching) which this film doesn't meet. It seems to me to the director's credit that he not only resists any attempts to sentimentalise the tragedy, but seems to actively endorse the tribe's seemingly unfeeling response. It is claimed in the film's notes that the Guarani assisted in the film's development, and it's perhaps when the film seems least likely to do what we would expect that it's getting closest to capturing the things it has set out to do.

It would be easy to criticise Bechis' film, which perhaps suffers to a certain extent from trying to straddle two worlds. Storylines don't go anywhere in particular, notably the trainee Shaman and the ranch owner's daughter's romance. The conclusion feels prosaic, no matter how true to reality it might be. However, this is a film of moments, of images, none of which is more striking than the closing scene, when the gap between cultures seems inflamed, and the trainee Shaman's howls sound like something from another world, another vision of human destiny, a road that might be on the verge of being lost, overgrown in what remains of a place we know as a jungle.

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nb: I know little of Bechis but I saw an earlier film of his, Garage Olimpo, and of the films that I've seen dealing with the Dictatorships of Latin America, his, in my memory, seemed like one of the most subtle, aware of the complex knots that contribute to any conflict.

the hurt locker (d. kathryn bigelow, w. mark boal)

The movies keep coming. Mr Curry had narrowed down the choice to this against Almodovar. Iraq grunts won on a Friday night. Mr Curry regretted his decision. His was a weighty presence beside me, as he slid further and further into his seat. Every explosion seemed to force him deeper towards the ground off Tottenham Court Road which lay somewhere below us, and which, had a similar explosion to those that pepper Bigelow's Baghdad gone off, might have been revealed to the sky for the first time in centuries.

Mr Curry said, presciently, afterwards, that it's impossible for a movie to both try and entertain and try to have something serious to say. It's a busted flush of a Faustian pact (not his actual words) and in the end the financial imperative to entertain will always win through. This was one of the problems he had with The Hurt Locker, which seems to be receiving universal praise from the critics.

For my part, I wasn't too sure what to make of things. There were so many explosions, and so many moments of ultimate tension, that in the end there was nothing particularly explosive or tense about anything. Later, over cowpiss and kim chi, it struck me that the movie appeared to be aspiring to some of the complexity, grandeur and account-taking of The Deer Hunter. Aspiring, but ultimately falling short. Once again, there was too much movie making by numbers. Nothing summed this up more than the closing sequence, where the maverick Sgt James (played with some aplomb by Jeremy Renner) finds himself back Stateside with his uxoriously attractive wife and baby child of indeterminate sex. There are about three scenes in this sequence. One was a nicely guaged sequence in a supermarket, where James is confronted by a vast range of cereal choice in a soulless hanger, and the reality of what he's been laying his life on the line for is revealed in a simple, pleasantly sardonic fashion. The next is a brief scene where he says, as you expect him to, that defusing bombs is part of his psyche and he can't live without it, to which his wife, knowing this all along, responds by telling him to peel some vegetables. The third is a tired, potentially-though-not-quite vomit-inducing scene, where James tells his disinterested, sexless baby that his jack in the box is just some tin and a cloth, suggesting that there's more to life than products... or something along those lines. Intimating that there are other things, like making a mess of other country's social infrastructures and then trying to fix them; of feeling like a man because you do dangerous things; or cheese rolling... What the other things actually are, is never all that clear, they're just implied, and that's where you realise the filmmakers, for all their doubtless good intentions, doesn't have a clue about what points their film's trying so hard to make. They're just making a movie. A bit like the US just invaded a country. Because it could?

Which might be a bit harsh, though Mr Curry might agree. (He might not.) The Hurt Locker is a smart movie in so far as it's taken on a really strong premise, the men who dismantle the bombs, who try to make things right. Which is both kind of John Wayne and the closest you're going to come to a seemingly socially conscious approach in a US movie about the grunts in I-raq. However, the lack of any real Iraqi perspective seemed to weigh all the more heavily because of the closet social agenda. The explosions and macho stuff is done well, the human tragedy/ cost rather less so. Iraqis in the film are people who stare out of windows, and any one of them might be a threat, unless they're called Beckham. So in the end the John Wayne element easily trumps the socio-political element. Which brings us back to Mr Curry's point, which he put rather more succinctly.

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nb - One reason for watching the film is to catch one of the most impressive hameos in the history of recent cinema. A hameo hopefully being self-explanatory, and if it isn't, watch the film and it soon will be.

mesrine part 1 killer instinct (d. richet; w. mesrine & dafri)

The biopic. Currently the French seem to be churning them out. I've missed Coco Before Chanel, but the promise of Cassel, one of the great screen actors of today, lured me in to see Mesrine. That and the self-avowedly boy-sy subject matter. Gangster flicks seem more attractive in French.

The opening shots give the appearance of a film that looks like it knows what it's doing. Split screen, Cassel in some kind of fat disguise, a bubbly French chick. But at the same time, whilst the sequence appears to be suave and composed, not a lot is actually disclosed here, a tension is summoned and then more or less exhausted as the titles roll. Then the action jump cuts to a lean young Cassel, with a neat tache, in Algeria, and its all hand held cameras and a kind of Gaspar Noe tension. Then Cassel's back in France and the journey to becoming public enemy number one begins in earnest. And continues. And continues. Mesrine seduces a pretty woman with his gallic charm. Then another. And another. And so on. Mesrine uses his gallic charm to get out of a scrape. And again. Mesrine kills someone. And again. And then he does it in Canada.

It feels as though there's two main problems with Mesrine, Killer Instinct (if we discount the corny title). The first is the curse of the biopic: a script which sprawls, trying to grab all the best bits and thereby only succeeding in diluting them. So you end with an insipid trawl through the protagonist's life, with no narrative focus and a steadily declining return of interest. Secondly, it doesn't look like Richet really knows what kind of a movie he wants to make. At moments there's an adventurous Scorceseian camera, roving round the room, implicating menace or emphasising mood. But these are against the grain, and on the whole it's conservatively shot, with static, slightly theatrical set-ups. Add to this the issue of the script's (and perhaps Cassel's) desire to have Mesrine played all ends up - lconic charmer, psychotic nutter, a family man who has no qualms sticking a gun in his wife's mouth. Again, there's a suspicion that those concerned have been watching Scorcese, including Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino, but Cassel's portrayal has none of the 'he's-going-to-lose-it-any-moment' of Scorcese's protagonists. Cassel is always too cool, too in control.

Mesrine has been critically lauded, spoken of in the same breath as Riffifi and Cercle Rouge and other iconic crime movies of French cinema. It doesn't deserve to be. Mesrine, Killer Instinct never succeeds in throwing off the shackles of the biopic, as though it's hobbling along with ankles chained and wrists hoping one day to be released from the cuffs.

unaccustomed earth [jhumpa lahiri]

Lahiri's book is a collection of short stories. Having said which, it's a collection of short stories split into two sections, the second of which, Hema and Kaushik, is more of a novella, being three connected stories, dealing with two characters who have an affair in the third and final story.

The first part, untitled, consists of five stories which deal with the experiences of immigrant Bengalis in North America. One story takes place in Seattle, but the rest occur on the East Coast, describing the experience of three generations of Indian (or rather Bengali) families who have chosen to settle in the United States, whilst maintaining links with India, as well as London, something of a staging post for Bengali families on their way to the States. These stories are all 'well written', hinting at Chekhov or other writers I may once have read. They're unremittingly gloomy, as though suggesting that to be a Bengali immigrant is some kind of curse; that carrying the weight of a heavily family based tradition whilst trying to forge a North American identity is a pressured and perhaps doomed enterprise. The first character I found myself in any way relating to, the brother in Only Goodness, turns into an unreliable drunk who wrecks his sister's marriage to a deeply unsympathetic Brit.

These stories set the groundwork for the second part, which ends, to no great surprise, tragically. It was a relief to find that these last three stories were not only connected, but dealt with characters who seemed to have overcome their rigid, stultifying heritage, finding work as a photographer and a classics scholar, respectively. Hema and Kaushik come alive off the page, and there's no doubt that Lahiri has a talent for capturing voices and teasing out a narrative.

However, the great however of my day-to-day work, for all its measured, cut-glass effectiveness, it consistently felt to me as though in the end the writing was struggling to capture emotional truths which it pretends to be capturing effortlessly. Kaushik's hysterical reaction to his step-sisters, like his eventual fate, felt altogether too neat, too literary, to be true, and this was the case in most of the stories. Lahiri appears to be a writer reluctant to stray far from a world she knows inside out. Whilst the writing shows great precision in the depiction of a culture, and in the premise of the emotional conflicts it concocts, it felt to my mind as though there was something brittle, even a little shrill, in its final representation of those conflicts and their consequences, as though the coldness of the prose mitigated against a credible engagement with the truth of pain; or loss; or even love.

Is this even remotely fair? Because it's not to say that Lahiri is not a talented writer. Her skill is self-evident, seemingly effortless. My own subjectivity is caused by many factors, not least the permanent shadow of Bolano hovering over the short story form, or my current struggle to connect with most Anglo-Saxon prose. All the same, it seems to me that Unaccustomed Earth sets out its stall to capture the heartbreak of the commonplace; the fatality of the mundane, and we need to be convinced of the heartbreak or the fatality in order for this approach to work.