the big goodbye (sam wasson)

Wasson’s book narrates the story of Chinatown, the film. How it came to be conceived, developed, made, distributed. It focuses on four key figures: Bob Towne, screenwriter, Robert Evans, producer, Polanski, director and Nicholson. In a sense the book is a tragedy, a paean to a world that might have been but never was, due to the obvious flaws of these four key players, but also because of the changing face of Hollywood and, by implication, the drift within the USA towards a more stupid vision of what it aspired to be as a nation/ culture. More commerce, less art. The balance between these two poles of a film’s production has always been a delicate one, film being an industry as well as an artform. Wasson describes how Chinatown’s success as a model of a certain kind of Hollywood filmmaking was the result of Evans’ indulgence and patronage, a production model which, even as the film was being released, was already in the process of being disassembled. For those interested in this complex equation, Wasson’s book is a masterly guide. The book doesn’t shy away from the Polanski issue, laying bare his crimes. However, it does look to contextualise this within the framework of the director’s life, noting the tragedies which befell him from birth, his mother killed in a concentration camp and the later murder of Sharon Tate and his unborn child. All the characters, save perhaps Nicholson, emerge ultimately as monsters of one kind or another, the product and victims of a kind of high Roman empire Hollywood epoch, where excess and wealth were celebrated, but whose fruits were a succession of films engaging with the artform in a manner that has never been equalled. Nicholson is described as a Falstaffian character within this network, at once vain, generous and brilliant. 

blind fanatics (pankaj mishra)

Pankaj Mishra’s collection of essays is a takedown of both liberalism and its bastard offspring neo-liberalism. The essays span a number of years and some are extended book reviews. Nevertheless, the book as a whole offers a comprehensive alternative slant on the history of the past 300 years. In particular the way in which the Anglo-American model, incorporating a ‘democracy’ which can be exported using force, has been of devastating harm to all those societies it has exploited rather than served. The curious element of Mishra’s commentary is that he appears to do as more of an insider than an outsider. He has read all the figures who have participated in the intellectual construction of the late twentieth and early twenty first version of Anglo-American/ European hegemony. Writers in the US as wide-ranged as Mark Grief or Ta-Nehisi Coates, or the ubiquitous Jordan Peterson. On the Anglo front, he skewers the Amis, Hitchens axis, showing how it has a direct lineage to Imperialist racism, particularly in tis attitude towards Islam. Mishra recognises that political actions are fertilised by intellectual standpoints and that there is a cross-fertilisation which benefits the writers and thinkers whose prose backs up established attitudes. The higher up the food chain you go, the more weight a magazine like The Economist, The Spectator or The Atlantic has. People who write for these publications are writing to speak to and with the elite, those who will decide whether it’s permissible to bomb or to turn a blind eye to genocide. So many critiques of ‘the system’ appear to come from people who have no idea of how the system really works, or how insulated it is. Mishra’s coherent grasp permits his critique to be more comprehensive and telling. Whether we are entering the death throes of the Anglo-US-European age and embarking on a new Asian age is another matter, but the iniquities of liberalism are well and truly skewered in these essays. 

the annual banquet of the gravediggers’ guild (enard, tr. frank wynne)

A change of tone for Enard, a writer who wears his influences on his sleeve. The Annual Banquet shifts away from the Mediterranean and the Orient into the deep French heartland, the Norman countryside near the Atlantic, the land of Rabelais and Villon. An anthropologist goes to study the locals and finds himself gradually seduced by their down-to-earth ways. The anthropologist, David Macon, starts and ends as narrator, but in between becomes a marginal figure as Enard uses both the landscape and the Buddhist notion of resurrection to probe the history of the region, from the time of the English invasions to the revolutionary era to the Second World War, with a brief cameo from Bonaparte himself. If this is a typically erudite approach to the art of writing a novel, then the generally gentle affectionate tone is not nearly so customary. The novel is like going for a four seasons walk through this countryside, where some days are sun-dappled, others icy, others morose, but beyond the restless presence of death itself, or ‘the great wheel’ as the novel puts it, there is always the prospect of a heart-warming vegetable soup to be had at the end of the day. The Buddhist framework is an elegant device, and the gravediggers at the heart of the book are suitably Rabelaisian. If anything the novel leaves the reader, accustomed to Enard’s more hard-edged work, with the sensation that the writer might be slipping into a mellifluous late middle age, which he is entitled to, but I can’t help suspecting this is a detour on the Enard road, rather than an endpoint. 

how to blow up a pipeline (andreas malm)

Perhaps the reason Malm’s text feels a tad underwhelming is because it is getting so much coverage right now. It doesn’t hurt having a film made, ostensibly of the same book, and I look forward to seeing it, because it’s hard to see how this slight and largely theoretical text would make a movie. The book’s killer title is an obvious selling point, but the book then tells us very little about how to actually go about blowing up anything. Rather, it’s a meditative discourse on the validity of violent (“terrorist”) actions in defence of a cause, in particular the cause of resisting ecocide. Referring to classic campaigns, assessing to what degree they were actually non-violent (Gandhi; MLK; the Suffragettes etc) and concluding that effective resistance cannot occur without an extremist wing being prepared to go beyond the dictates of the law, an action which contains an implicit violence against the status quo. Quite how that should manifest itself in concrete terms is something the book seems to shy away from, even as it refers to more recent acts of environmental resistance.

apples (w&d christos nikou, stavros raptis)

Is there such a thing as the greek new wave? Apples feels as though it fits neatly into the Lanthimos model. A low-fi high concept narrative which in this case revolves around random members of society finding themselves struck down with total amnesia. It’s an epidemic, but not as we know it. Nikou deadpans through the recovery process of his protagonist, whose strongest link to his past life is his love for apples. Aris is assigned mundane tasks by his medical team. Go out to a club and get drunk. Strike up a conversation with a stranger. Or, most movingly, befriend someone who is on the verge of death and accompany them to that end. The tone and the texture of the film is austere. Even when Aris goes out and dances, he does so in a minimal, semi-comic fashion. He has a brief relationship with a similarly afflicted young woman, which seems like it might turn into a love affair (and in the Hollywood remake undoubtably will) but wanes just at the moment it might have waxed.

There are hints in the narrative of Saramago’s Blindness, even Camus’ La Peste, and the idea of an epidemic has firmly seized hold in a Covid world. (Although one suspects Apples was conceived before the pandemic struck.) However, perhaps it makes more sense to posit the film within the overarching drama of Greece’s rumbling economic crisis. These are notes from the underground, Aris’ amnesia is the product of a society which has been compelled by forces beyond its control to sever social ties, reducing its citizens to lost souls, drifting through life searching for clues about the life they used to lead, or might have been leading. The result is something strangely muted and undramatic, a tale whispered in the corners by characters who look like someone you might know but can’t quite place.

Nb - Browsing imdb I discover Nikou was 2nd AD on Dogtooth)

never gonna snow again (w&d malgorzata szumowska, michal englert)

Never gonna Snow Again is a film full of ingredients. A psychic masseur from Ukraine. A gated community on the edge of Warsaw. Peopled by the dissociated upper middle class. A teacher dying of cancer. A woman in love with her bulldogs. A frustrated mum. A racist ex UN peacekeeper. Kids home-cooking MDMA tablets. A little bit of everything that makes the modern world go around. The film is beautifully shot, with every frame composed and lit with real flair. The only hitch is that the narrative itself doesn’t really make the most of all these ingredients. The film strolls around the gated community, following Zenia, the masseur, as he soothes souls and muscles, and charms the locals to no particular end. There is a suggestion at the film’s conclusion that this is all about immigration, with Poland now part of the promised EU land which Zenia uses his gifts to infiltrate. But unlike Ramussen’s Flee, which treads similar territory, the film backs away from any kind of emotional involvement. Zenia remains a blank canvas of a figure, who literally vanishes one day, never to return. The overall effect is of a film brimful of ideas which never quite amount to as much as they might have done. Watching it on the day Godard’s death was announced, it was hard not to think about how the aesthetisisation of cinema sometimes works against any more polemical or discursive ambitions it might aspire to, something Godard was well aware of and fought against. 

el año de la furia (w&d rafa russo)

Authenticity is a strange thing in cinema. Russo’s film deals with events in Montevideo in 1972 which lead up to the coup which brought on a decade of military dictatorship. However, if this film was made to be watched anywhere, it probably isn’t Montevideo. The North Americans have done this for years, but casting actors whose accents are clearly not from the place where the film is set instantly jars. Most of the secondary actors are recognisable Uruguayan faces, including my compinche Fernando Dianesi, but they are just background noise, like the moodily filmed Ciudad Vieja exteriors. The lead actors are Spanish or Argentine. Hence, the film becomes a curious study in cultural appropriation. The confusion around casting extends to the rest of the film as it seeks to engage with its political context whilst incorporating genre elements of a romantic thriller. The result is uncomfortable and consistently unconvincing. El Año de la Furia feels indicative of a trend which has been driven in recent years by the streaming giants who have significant budget to invest and are desperately seeking stories. Recent political history works as a canvas upon which a story can be drawn. The true historical events and players are exploited for the purposes of mainstream ‘entertainment’. The result is a two dimensional exposition, which cannibalises real events. Cinema is always waging a Borgesian war with actuality, (cf The Map and the Territory), but recent developments have meant that the bad habits of Hollywood have now permeated the global industry.

(Whilst not a particular fan of Tarantino, one of the most interesting elements of his work is the way he transparently manipulates and deviates from assumed ideas of historical truth in his films, as though to say it is not the duty of cinema to seek authenticity. A film like El Año de la Furia, with its closing notes and aspirations to historical accuracy fails to recognise the way in which its use of narrative and character inevitably distorts audience perception of actual events. In its defence, the filmmaker might say, ‘So did Shakespeare…’)

o ano da morte de ricardo reis (the year of the death of ricardo reis) (w&d joão botelho)

Botelho’s ode to Pessoa is beautifully filmed and lugubrious in its storytelling. This is a film of a book about the alibi of a poet. Saramago wrote the novel, and Ricardo Reis was a nom de plume of Fernando Pessoa. Ricardo Reis is a doctor-poet is returning to Lisbon from Brazil, where he has been fifteen years in exile. He returns to a country which is under fascist rule, with the Spanish Civil War raging across the border. For those of us who are not aficionados of either Pessoa or Saramago, much of the political context remains obscure. Reis attends a fascist rally but he is suspected of being a subversive. The police raid his home, only they are part of a movie. The film drifts through the love affairs and melancholia of Reis’s return to a wintery Lisbon. The majestic lighting and cinematography, with its perfect shadow play, means the film is constantly watchable, in spite of the longeurs.

putin’s people (catherine belton)

It’s hard to know what needs to be said about Catherine Belton’s book about the rise of Vladimir Putin and the way the former KGB has seized power in Russia and infiltrated the corridors of power far beyond. It’s one of those books which is essential reading for understanding the state of our modern world. Even if some of it were to be wide of the mark, enough of it surely hits the mark to mean that its central thesis cannot be too far off. Power is power and power always seeks to reinforce itself, but when you are British and you see the way in which the country has been manipulated and brought down, if even if a tenth of what Belton speculates is true, it makes for a profoundly depressing read. Essentially, the book argues, the establishment in Britain has allowed itself to be bought by foreign interests. As she frequently states, Putin understood that the establishment in ‘the West’ had been hollowed out of all moral value. So he could mercilessly steal, oppress and wage war, without any risk, so long as he kept their coffers full. In London, this establishment is represented by lawyers, accountants, property developers, politicians and who knows what else. Russian money has been a Trojan horse and Britain is not the only country to have been susceptible to it, but it might be we were the weakest.

This just one strand of modern Russia’s geo-political strategy. Belton’s book is also very informative about the development of tensions between Russia and Ukraine, outlining the steps since the break-up of the USSR that have lead to the current outrageous but predictable Russian aggression. The early part of the book which details how Putin and his cronies seized power first in St Petersburg and then Moscow, displacing Yeltsin and his chosen oligarchs, is told with meticulous and plausible detail. Whilst the Putin/ KGB playbook perhaps encounters more fertile ground in a society such as Russia, which has never known democracy, there seems little doubt that others in the West have watched and sought to emulate his methods and will continue to do so. 

happy hour (marlowe granados)

Granados’ chirpy novel, another roman a clef, is the most recent addition to the NY tip I have been of late. It’s set in the mid-teens, and describes the adventures of Isa and Gala, two 21 year old friends who are living the high life on a zero budget, scraping by as they hang out with a kind of second-tier NY jetset. The book recounts one Summer in diary form. It is anecdotal and sub-Fitzgeraldian. In the acknowledgements there is a thanks to “Gay Gatsby for the inspiration, elegance, and cocktails”, and the world depicted is very much a Gatsbyesque demi-monde, which doesn’t appear to have changed that much in the course of a century. It’s a world populated by feckless wealth; selfish people with little generosity. The warmest character in the book is the Salvadorean restaurant owner who appears in the penultimate chapter, encouraging Isa to dance with her husband, who feels like a counterweight to all the book’s vain socialites, many of them the worst kind of posh British.

The book is anecdotal and doesn’t really go anywhere, beyond this scratching of the surface of wealth. All the same, it is an enjoyable read, and reminded me of life in my twenties in London. Cities feed off youth, they need it to reassure them that there is a future beyond the money. Isa and Gala’s splendid ligging brought back memories of desperately trying to scrape pennies together for the night out, and stories of characters who would move from private view to private view in order to eat and drink. Walking home with no money in one’s pockets for the nightbus, constantly walking the high wire of poverty, even as you tiptoe around the city’s circles of disgusting wealth. 

responsabilidad empresarial (corporate responsibility). (d. jonathan perel)

Jonathan Perel’s austere documentary is an exercise in cinematic minimalism. A series of single shot takes, clearly filmed from within a car, of Argentine factories or workplaces. Each  shot is accompanied by a voiceover giving details of the way in which the owners of the particular factory, (some of which are now abandoned or in disuse, others still operating), collaborated with the Argentine military dictatorship. The unseen voice lists the crimes associated with the factory, from laying off workers for their militancy to participating in the disappearance of workers, as well as the pay-off that the businesses received for having collaborated.

As mentioned it is an austere watch, cinema pared down to the bone, which almost seems to invite a debate as to whether this is the best way to address this subject matter or not. The great debate surrounding political or activist filmmaking is the question of how much it chooses to preach to the converted and how much it seeks to reach out to a wider audience. Perel’s film, which premiered at Berlin, is very much a niche watching experience. It is a document(ary), in the purest sense of that idea. It documents, with no attempt made to entertain or seduce. As such it’s doubtful it will convince anyone who does not have a vested interest in watching the film about the iniquities of dictatorships. But it will also linger in my mind far longer than many a soft-soap drama about the subject matter might have done. 

de la noche a la mañana (w&d manuel ferrari, w rodrigo muñoz galvez & gabriel medina)

De la Noche a la Mañana is a movie about getting lost. In this case Ignacio, a Porteño architect, finds himself dazed and confused in Valparaiso, where he goes ostensibly to give a talk on modern architectural trends. His reasons for going feels slightly contrived: two students approach him at the end of a class he gives in Buenos Aires saying they were in touch a while ago and on the basis of this and nothing else he leaves his newly pregnant wife, paying his own to Valparaiso where he discovers the uni has been occupied by the students, no-one knows anything about his proposed talk and the two female students who invited him are nowhere to be found. He proceeds to have a lost weekend in Valparaiso, where he is robbed, offered a life-changing job and seduced by a younger teacher from the uni who offers him a place to crash. Tonally there’s a lot to like about the film’s dry humour and the way in which the hangdog character of Ignacio is developed. However, the narrative starts to feel as though it turns into something of a shaggy dog story about half way through. Nothing very bad is going to happen to Ignacio and nothing very exciting either. The film’s dry depiction of university life has something in common with Santiago Mitre’s El Estudiante and its depiction of an Argentine lost in the wilds of South America (although Valparaiso is not that remote a place to get lost) felt reminiscent of Santiago Loza’s La Paz. The role of the architect in Latin America is also a fascinating one, with the tremulous relationship between urban and natural environments which the film explores in Ignacio’s opening seminar. But having laid a foundation, setting the story up for an earthquake to strike, the film then seems reluctant to confront the possibility that any real harm could ever come to its forlorn protagonist. 

white noise (d. daniel lombroso)

White Noise follows three figures from the US alt-right, Richard Spencer, Mike Cernovich and Lauren Southern, following them over the course of the years 2016 to 2018, more or less. The film is an investigation into the phenomenon of the far right, which at its most extreme takes the from of Nazi salutes, and saying the unspeakable, but can also have a more insidious influence in shifting the terrain of debate, pushing previously extreme views towards the mainstream. The British have suffered from this as much as any nation, although the guiding light of Daniel Lombroso’s film, unsurprisingly, is Trump, to whose bandwagon Spencer and Cernovich were inexorably tied. As Trump’s campaign starts to falter, their post-election euphoria starts to wane and the glow of success begins to wear off.

However, the film is most acute in those moments it reveals the way in which all three are, to a lesser or greater degree, grifters, flying their kites more from a sense of expediency and opportunism than conviction. Cernovich’s amiable wife is Iranian, and their baby is mixed race. He ends up selling pills for skin care like some modern day quack doctor. Cernovich comes across as a slightly bumbling fool who made his name by being controversial but has no real political beliefs beyond saying things that will help him sell his products. Southern, starts the film as an ingenue 22 year old, and is shown gradually beginning to become aware of the murky moral waters she’s getting herself into, even though she’s reluctant to face up to them. The clinching moment comes towards the end when, pregnant, she is asked about the colour of her partner and we learn that this white ethno-warrior is another who will have a mixed race child. Spencer is an eternal man child, who ends up living with his mother, and shrugs off any responsibility for anything he has ever said or done.

As such, the film is a useful and effective vehicle for debunking these would-be sacred cows of a movement which has caused untold damage. At times it feels as though the director might have gone a bit harder on his subjects, especially Southern, but part of the complexity of constructing the intimacy necessary to debunk these figures, to hoist them on their own petards, is that you have to be close enough to get past the carefully curated facade and discover the reality. 

porque todas las quiero cantar (d. florencia núñez)

If you’re a fan of Florencia Núñez there’s plenty to enjoy here. The singer returns to her roots in Rocha, and meets the songwriters who created the emblematic songs of the preposterously beautiful ocean departamento. She goes for lengthy strolls with them and then sings cover versions of their tunes, with full band, in a studio. There are half a dozen songs to match half a dozen interviews. It feels slightly formulaic, and the best moments for my money, are when the film manages to break through the formula, when the composers/ performers get to sing their own songs, once in an open air theatre, and most engagingly in a late night bar. That scene captures the essence of live music, a shared rite, whose participation breaks through barriers and unites. Whilst the rest of the film has a clear documentary value, capturing the thoughts and memories of these figures, giants in their community although barely known beyond, (even within the tiny music world of Uruguay), for my money it felt as though there might have been more magic to be conjured if the film had been prepared to be bolder in its vision of what the music truly means to Rocha. 

death in her hands (ottessa moshfegh)

Death in her Hands is something of a shaggy dog story, almost literally, as the narrator’s dog plays a key role in the narrative. Out walking her dog Charlie, the narrator, Vesta Gul, discovers a note which states: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” The novel opens with the discovery of this note, which prompts the elderly Vesta to go on an increasingly unhinged journey to discover what really happened to Magda. Suffice it to say there is no body and what we, as readers, discover is entirely the product of Vesta’s curious imagination. Which is also, one deduces, the author’s curious imagination. In essence this is a short sharp novel about delirium. It is reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, in the way in which the reading of his novels compels the reader to enter into the consciousness of the narrator. Similarly, this is a journey through Vesta’s consciousness, made all the more curious because she is not so much an unreliable narrator as an unhinged one. We know that Vesta is constructing a mystery out of nothing - there is no body - but at the same time the shadow of her imagination seems to cast its spell and suggest that there is something there to be discovered, even though we know there probably isn’t. Maybe Robbe-Grillet would be another point of reference. The novel as a construction of insanity, the process of reading as one that is complicit with this process. All of which makes it sound more challenging than it is to read: Death in her Hands rattles along at a fair old lick, the greatest obstacle to completing it being the reader’s tendency to scratch his or her head in bemusement on a regular basis. 

who they was (gabriel krauze)

Krauze’s roman a clef is a plaintive celebration of masculinity and the fearsome dreams of youth. It’s an account of a white, second generation Polish man’s integration into a West London criminal scene. Gabriel, the protagonist, spends his days either smoking weed, plotting robberies, or carrying out robberies. Sometimes he gets involved in stabbings, sometimes he witnesses shootings. Some days he’s in prison and on other days he goes to uni and talks about Nietzsche. The book’s take on crime, as one might expect from the Nietzsche reference, is anti-judgemental. Crime is a phenomenon that exists, with society’s moral boundaries being something imposed by an elite seeking to protect its status and wealth against the ferocious power of youth. One of the longest non-criminal sections in the book involves a uni discussion about the victim’s rights to murder and even torture a pedophile, an argument Gabriel puts forward to the nodding approval of some of his fellow students. The law exists as a means to control base tensions and the collateral damage of lawlessness is a price worth paying to exist in a society that feels more alive. 

The moral questions the book poses are perhaps the least interesting element of a fascinating book. I am slowly working my way through Quixote, a book riddled with a cartoonish violence, and Krause’s use of violence or crime seems almost as much a literary device as a declaration of (Im)moral purpose. Violence has always been a cornerstone of the literary experience and Who They Was just adopts this to give the novel fuel. In a similar way, the use of street slang, in which the book is written, feels like a carefully crafted wallpaper which lends the text authenticity and acts as a distancing device. Gabriel inhabits a world with its own codes and languages, one which the reader can access but will always feel estranged from, because on the whole readers won’t talk like this. (Good luck to the translators.) The spine of the book is not the violence or the language, it’s the elliptical journey of the protagonist, who will in the end exile himself from this Threepenny Opera world, using the writing of the novel as a way of exorcising his earlier life. Much of the novel’s dramatic tension lies in this: when will the narrator switch, when will he leave this world behind? Krause holds on until the very end, when we come to realise that the novel is essentially a lament. A lament for the lost world of (his) youth, where you don’t yet have to play by the rules, where your guile and strength should protect you, where you will bounce back from a beating or a stabbing, ready for more. It’s the world of Mercutio and Tybalt, and it retains a dark lawless beauty, fuelled by adrenaline, which Krause’s prose captures with surgical efficiency. 

+++

Aside. I lived for a decade in a block of flats on an estate which gets a passing mention as one of the less troubled West London estates. Gabriel’s family lived on the other side of the railway tracks. At one point he scoots across the footbridge and the narrow passageway which connects my former block to Westbourne Grove. Hyde Park is just a ten minute walk away. London is a city where worlds rub up against one another. My flat was sandwiched between Notting Hill and Maida Vale, two of the wealthiest barrios in the city. I too lived there in part because I wanted to cross over from the middle class divide, find out what it meant to live on an estate. If I had read Who They Was beforehand I might have been scared off, but the truth its that Polesworth House was never a threatening place to live. It always felt safe. The underworld  that Krause describes kept itself to itself. At the same time, there are other prisms through which the culture Krause celebrates can be seen. The Curry and I investigated this with Nicholas La Barrie in Tempest. I also thought of the elusive and enigmatic figure, The Text God (T.T.G.), whose pithy graffiti on the footbridge over the railway lines Gabriel would have seen just as I did. The graffiti contained both an anger and an energy, but suggested other methods of channeling that energy, methods which are just as anarchic, but perhaps less destructive, both to the subject and the object of the subject’s ire. 

the monster enters (mike davis)

Mike Davis’ book, an updated version of The Monster at our Door, written in 2005,  is about the threat of Avian Bird Flu, and the devastating effect that would have on society were it to turn into a pandemic. There is an introduction, written at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic last year, when the book was reissued. The most terrifying thing about the book isn’t what he gets right - the shortage of PPE, the governmental confusion, “Pandemic planners admitted that the  bulk of the  public… would simply have to cower in their homes” - but what hasn’t happened this time round. Because Davis, an analyst of slums, of mass production farming methods, of the way in which human demographics have become a time bomb, predicts that if the Bird Flu pandemic ends up being as bad as is feared, it won’t be millions dying, but billions. Presently, according to World of Meters, we stand at 3 million official Covid deaths, though that figure is sure to be higher and is still rising at an alarming rate, but we’re not yet in the territory that Davis predicts. For all the way in which society has felt threatened by terrorism, bio-terrorism, (Davis is very good on the way the war on terror allowed an emphasis on military spending, even in the realm of biological threats), the greatest danger to our way of lie, whatever that is, was always likely to come from a virus. Should we ever come out of this rolling Covid nightmare, one hopes that those who regulate budgets pay more heed to the Cassandras. Davis’ final observations on the way the pharmaceutical industry works only add to the sense that the free market is a long way from being the best socio-political mechanism for the future welfare of the human race.  

untraceable (sergei lebedev, tr antonina w. bouis)

Untraceable has a name like an eighties pop song (by Alison Moyet or T’Pau?). It’s a novel which connects the bombast of Soviet Russia with the clinical nature of Putin’s Russia highly effectively, tracing the way in which chemical weapons were developed and used as part of a covet armoury. The results of this policy has bee seen in the UK, in those cases we know about, at Salisbury and in the murder of Litvinenko. The maguffin in the book is a lethal potion known as Neophyte, developed by a Soviet scientist who then defected to the West. Now, decades later, two Russian agents are sent to finish him off with a dose of his own medicine. The novel is short but sweeping in scope, incorporating events from the Second World War, the Chechnyan war and the present day. There’s a hint of Sorokin in the author’s occasionally forays into a more lyrical register, a poeticism which adds a garnish to the thriller-esque territory the novel adopts as a narrative mechanism. Will the defector survive or will the hapless agents get to him before he can escape? However, because the novel incorporates so much historical and poetic material, it never really feels like a thriller. It’s more a meditation on the nature of an evil that seeks to create an untraceable poison. What kind of society would require this tool? And what does it say about the connection between Putin’s Russia and Stalin’s that both seek to employ it? 

when we cease to understand the world (benjamín labatut, tr. adrian nathan west)

I am not sure how I came across Labatut’s spectacular text. It was only in the final section, when the word araucana cropped up, that I realised the writer would appear to occupy the same Southern Cone as me. I had assumed the book to be the work of some nebulous Frenchman, out to save the planet from the repercussions of the first world’s scientific acts of hari-kari. 

Labatut’s book is about the way in which the world has evolved and been formed over the course of the last century, and not, as the epilogue makes clear, for the better. The book looks at half a dozen or so high priests of science, including Heisenberg, Bohr and Schrödinger, and the way in which their theories interacted with their lives. We learn how these eminently masculine souls wrestled with their flesh and their minds to come up with ways of contemplating the world which not only seemed at first extra-terrestrial, but also laid down the matrix upon which, the book contends, modern technological society is structured. From computing to global warming.

This in itself, the writer’s capacity to convey ideas of enormous complexity in a graspable, human fashion, would be one achievement. However, When We Cease to Understand the world achieves something else. The longest chapter in the book deals with sub-atomic theory, the idea that an atomic particle is both a wave and a fixed point. How this seeming paradox came to be defined and what it means for the world. We start to read the book as a work of non-fiction. It is discussing real people, real events, real history. However, as the book evolves, it gradually starts to inhabit spaces that seem beyond the author’s objective knowing. The inside of a scientist’s mind. The secret world that only they can know. We, as readers, perhaps assume that the author has somehow obtained letters or a journal written by the scientist, to allow him, the author, this privileged access. Only as the book hurtles towards its atomic finale, do we start to glean that this is not a work of non-fiction, but a work of fiction. Or perhaps it is both fiction and non-fiction at the same time? 

chico ventana también quisiera tener un submarino (w&d alex piperno)

Blend the longeurs of Uru-cine with a dash of Apitchatpong and a soupçon of Doctor Who and you end up with something like Chico Ventana. The tardis in this instance being a squat concrete construction which appears in the Philippines, disconcerting a small village. Meanwhile, Chico is a crewman on a cruise ship off the coast of Patagonia, and Elsa is leading a banal life in my friend’s flat in Montevideo. Somehow all these worlds are connected by a couple of portals (rather than portholes). Why they are connected, to what end, remains opaque. Although, as Snr Amato observed, there’s clearly a Globalisation/ Butterfly Effect subtext. The actions in the Philippine village will determine what happens to the cruise ship which in turn will cause a minor flood in my friend’s flat. Everything connects.

The film felt at its strongest when it observed with a certain acidity other parallel lives, those of the tourists aboard the cruise ship, urged to take a photo of a whale, or dance in the shadow of glaciers. At this point it felt as though there was a subtext to the subtext, something the Montevidean episode might have benefitted from. Likewise the portrayal of the Philippine village, with its gory superstitions, felt slightly done by numbers, for all the charm of the exotic. There’s something about Chico Ventana which gives it the feel of a greater story trying to break out of what ends up being a somewhat solipsistic one, even down to the closing images which justify the film’s extravagant title. 

The fact that large swathes of the film take place in my friend Chamorro’s old flat, where we sat and edited and even filmed once, added another level of parallelismo to a story seeking to emphasise the arbitrary connections that may exist in the world. Which also only helped to emphasise the way in which life in Montevideo constantly teeters on the brink of the surreal, a city where fact and fiction are always closer than you might think.