gonzo (d. alex gibney)

When did you first discover Hunter S Thompson, and under what circumstances? The answers to that question will be manifold, curious, terrifying, in the best sense of the word.

My first encounter was The Rum Diary, and it didn’t enamor me. A few years later I picked up the second volume of his collected correspondence. Its one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Fear and Loathing doesn’t come close. His most celebrated work hints at the reality of the man’s imagination, but the letters reveal it, containing some of the most outrageous prose I’ve ever read.

Writing prose about the things Thompson claimed to be doing, and doing them, are different things. In a sense, we’re better off not knowing the truth. Thompson failed as a novelist because he had one of those imaginations that couldn’t be contained within the bounds of fiction. He himself could and probably did go far further than any character he could dream up; and in the life he lead he met sufficient people who could join him in his personal gormengast to mean there really was no point in him trying to hang their clothes on characters who didn’t exist.

As Gibney’s film suggests, Thompson ended up trying to inhabit the neo-fictional character he’d turned himself into. Only he wasn’t – fictional – and it would appear the results were almost as disastrous as they would have been had he stuck to his dreams of emulating Fitzgerald & co and becoming a novelist. I don’t think there could be any footage sadder than that included in the documentary, showing an addled Thompson, childlike in his inanity, singing along to Candle In the Wind, over and over. This should not be how great writers are immortalized – the action of his quietly spoken son, sadly underused in the film, shooting three shots into the air the moment he realized his father was dead, is far more appropriate.

Gibney’s film suffers from not really seeming to know which story it wants to tell about the good doctor. It goes down various alleyways, tells bits of stories, runs out of time, moves on, and dawdles towards an overextended close. It is the curse of the biographer never to tell the story that the subject’s fans wish to hear, but it did seem strange the film never even mentioned Thompson’s trip to Vietnam, and dealt in such a cursory manner with Oscar Acosta, Thompson’s sidekick on the road to Las Vegas immortality. The complexities of a home loving, gun toting, drug taking pillar of the anti-establishment, were grappled with, but the movie never seemed to have any kind of a grasp on the disparate material it was attempting to weave into a narrative.

Maybe it’s hard to make a film about a writer. As a critic I’d urge you not to bother to go and see this film, which is frankly a dirge of a hagiography of someone who didn’t deserve one and wouldn’t have wanted one. Take your ten quid or ten dollars or whatever loose change you’ve got, walk to your nearest bookstore, and pick up a copy of his letters. Stand and read a few in the bookstore. If you don’t find yourself laughing or gripped within five minutes, put the book down, and use your money to watch the film. If you have, buy it, read every word, then buy as much as you can take, and then when you’ve had enough, think about watching the film. But do it through closed fingers, because it turns into a horror movie for all the wrong reasons, and the good doctor deserves better than to be immortalized on celluloid in his dotage when he has already achieved immortality with his words in his greatness.

the man from london (d. bela tarr, w. tarr & lászló krasznahorkai)

Bela Tarr is a name to conjure with. On several occasions I've come near to making his cinematic acquaintance, but it's never quite happened. With a film of his finally out on release in London town, the critic makes his way through a sodden, Wintry Brunswick Centre, its Christmas fare suitably bedraggled, with a sense of anticipation.

The Man from London is also a title to conjure with. It turns out that the film is adapted from a Simenon novel. I wonder if school children still learn French with the assistance of Simenon novels. If they don't they're the poorer for it. Moody, dank, black and white - all words which can be applied to the Belgian crime writer's oeuvre and Tarr's adaptation of this novel. I spent quite a long time trying to work out where the film was set: an ancient harbour town with winding streets, presumably within shooting distance of the Channel. Probably, I thought, some small Normandy or Brittany port with a regular cameo on the shipping forecast and which the adventurous motorist can reach after a two day boat crossing from Lyme Regis. When the credits revealed the film was in fact shot in Bastia, on Corsica, it threw everything which had come before mildly off-kilter.

There's plenty of time to ponder the nuances of the film. (Such as how good is Swinton's French accent; and who does that Englishman sound like, again revealed in the credits). The Man from London is as leisurely paced as anyone could hope for, even if it comes in at a Tarrishly concise, Tarr 132 minutes. The opening shot, alone, lasts about 15, as the camera gradually tracks back and forth, following the events that occur when a ship, coming from Britain, docks. Not a great deal ever seems to happen, but what doesn't happen is compensated for by the possibilities of what might happen. This is emphasised by Tarr's roving camera. The film is composed of a succession of luscious camera moves, as a scene is introduced and then gradually explored. The camera is almost constantly on the move, hunting out details, peering behind pillars, suggesting to the viewer that something's lurking round the corner, even when it turns out there's actually nothing there. The times there is something - a suspicious looking man standing in a pool of light; a butcher going about his trade; or a man balancing something on his nose as he dances with another man with a chair - are always good enough to keep you wanting to find out what might or might not be round the corner. For the viewer it's a slow game of suspense, and sometimes hard work, but, as is the way with hard work, it can prove to be remarkably rewarding.

When Maloin, the lead, goes to his cabin, where the man from London has holed up, the camera parks itself outside until he emerges. It stayed there long enough for me to go through the thought processes of firstly thinking: I've probably got time to count the number of planks of wood that make up the door of the cabin; to then actually counting the planks of wood; and then thinking that it didn't seem like very many. I don't think I'd call this sequence suspenseful; I kind of knew by the time I'd got to the second thought process that the camera wasn't going to let me know what was happening inside, I'd just have to wait. It almost felt like a brief time-out - time to look at a wooden door - accept my exclusion, and wait for the film to come back to me. You watch The Man from London on Tarr's terms, not your own, and if you don't like it, you can always leave.

In the end, The Man from London is something of a fable, with the feel of one of Kafka's gentler short stories. It's one of those rare films which I felt would have benefited from being watched with a partner. You can curl up into it, let the time go by, share the experience, come out no more than a little bit the wiser, but having spent time dedicated to the act of spending time together. There's a lovely timelessness to the film, which goes with its understated humour. People tend to describe Tarr as austere or in some way punishingly intellectual, but on this evidence there's more of a warm-hearted and emotional intelligence at work than a heavily cerebral one; albeit one that likes to tell its stories at a leisurely pace, knowing that stories, like fire, can keep us warm through the long Winter nights, and the longer they last, the better.

rostov luanda (d. abderrahhmane sissako)

Rostov Lunda is a documentary road movie, detailing the director's quest to find Baribanga, an old Angolan friend who he once knew in Russia. Sissako wends his way through Angola, with only an old photograph to help him. He stops to ask people if they've seen his friend wherever he goes, and as he does so, he creates a portrait of the former Portuguese colony, a state shredded by decades of civil conflict in the aftermath of independence.

Of course, had Sissako found his friend in the opening days of his journey, it would have made for a different film. The longer it takes to find him, the more mileage there is in his travelogue. Perhaps it is not altogether fortuitous that it is on his last evening he finally learns Baribanga isn't in Angola at all, but Berlin. Along the way Sissako meets a surprising and touching collection of individuals, of mixed racial descent. Angola is another rainbow nation, where the disenfranchised can be black, white or of mixed race. All are unified by their ability to have survived, where so many others haven't.

Sissako talks about how Angolan independence was seen as an inspirational moment in African development for his generation when he was younger. The troubles the country was heir to were testament to what has gone wrong on the continent. However, the director's selection of stories seems calculated to cultivate a new optimism; not least when a stately black woman explains how she was finally cajoled to learn to stand and use her feet again after years of sitting, lured by the irresistible pull of dance, a dance she demonstrates for his camera. Likewise, the underlying narrative ends with a satisfying conclusion, when Sissako finds Baribanga in Berlin.

don't sleep there are snakes [w daniel everett]

There's a lot to be said about this book. Thankfully it's late as I write, and sleep-time beckons, otherwise I could easily while away a day or two musing on the various issues it raises.

The book itself is an account of the time the author has spent living with a remote Amazonian tribe, the Piraha. He has lived with them, on and off, for over thirty years. The book is split into three parts: firstly detailing how he first travelled there as a Christian missionary with his wife and young family; then discussing the language of the Piraha, a language no-one else (except his wife and kids?) speak beyond the tribe; and lastly, briefly documenting how the converter was converted, after the Piraha's reaction to his Christian teaching forced him to re-evaluate and eventually abandon his faith, losing his wife and family as a consequence.

Everett is now a professor of linguistics. The second part of the book, devoted to the Piraha language, explains how it has no recursion, which would mean that every sentence written here (and almost every sentence I've ever written) would be impossible in their language. Everett sees this as in some way connected to what he calls the Piraha's 'Immediacy of Experience' - which kind of means that you can only know what you experience yourself, and only say what you know. So for them, the notion of a man who died over two thousand years ago having any impact on their way of life of thinking is preposterous. Everett sees their world view as being a source of immense happiness to them; happiness defined as being something that people who are pleased with the lot they have been given experience. Features of their society he observes include the absence of hierarchy, depression and the ability to count. The latter might seem most surprising - Everett says that he and his family have attempted to teach the Piraha to count, but they just can't get their heads around it, something which perhaps helps to protect them against the practices of the wider world which has gradually been revealed to them over the course of recent decades. Apart from developing a taste for booze, which they are aware needs tempering, he claims that they have very little desire for artifacts of modernity. They believe their way of life to be an excellent one and not in need of any alteration.

The world that Everett describes is far from Utopic: people die young, there is great hardship, and constant threats from wild animals and settlers trying to appropriate their land. The tribe is diminishing and there's no knowing what the future holds for it. All the same, Everett seems to argue that their world view, which is to some extent contained within the structures of their language, is one which has a sophistication, in terms of its efficacy in ensuring the worth which they feel their time on the earth has to give them, which outweighs seemingly more complex social and linguistic structures in other parts of the world. And that's another sentence which could certainly not be translated into Piraha.

There is a whole other strand to the book which deals with the way Everett's work with the Piraha appears to subvert the now-orthodox Chomskyian view that linguistic structures are the product of a universal human genome (I think that's right) . However, you don't need to be a linguistics student to get a grasp of Everett's arguments about the way the Piraha's language interacts with the way in which they perceive the world, and the things which this might have to teach us about the way in which we see the world. (Us being anyone who isn't a Piraha, so that's far from some simple critique of Western culture.) 

It turns out that this past week has been the centenary of the birth of Levi-Strauss, whose name, perhaps surprisingly, doesn't even get a mention in Don't Sleep There Are Snakes. (Although for lovers of footnotes and acknowledgements such as myself, it is bemusing to see Cormac McCarthy's name referenced as someone who has helped the author in the writing of the book.) Levi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques is in some ways a similar book to Don't Sleep There are Snakes, detailing how time living amongst indigenous Brazilian tribes helped its author to shape not only a philosophic world view, but also fresh techniques for the practice of his chosen scientific discipline. Daniel Everett's book describes a similar journey into the heart of the unknown world (once upon a time called the uncivilised world, or heart of darkness) which reveals a culture which may not have produced many of the technologic advances associated with civilization, but instead has settled for mastering the technology of some kind of happiness, which is all its inhabitants feel they need.

the silence of lorna (w&d jean-pierre & luc dardenne)

The Dardenne brothers are figures who float at the edge of the Anglo-Saxon consciousness. Occasionally fashionable, a film of theirs will be feted, before they're forgotten again. The Silence of Lorna hasn't generated much critical acclaim, but in some small way it seems as though their films are an event, as filmmakers they're worth checking out no matter what they're doing. Not a state that can be sustained indefinitely - pace Allen and even Scorsese - but The Silence of Lorna suggests that the brothers are near the top of the game, and if this was a weekly review of note rather than an unsung warble from the blogoshpere I'd be beseeching as many readers as possible to go and see it.

The film is Lorna's story. Played with a restraint which is the all the more impressive for those brief moments, crucial to the narrative, when it's broken, by Arta Dobroshi. Lorna features in just about every scene in the film. She's an immigrant, who has settled in Belgium, and married Claudy, a hopeless junkie, in order to get her visa. This is part of a deal whereby she will marry a rich Russian following the end of her marriage to Claudy, after which she will finally get to settle down with her sweetheart, Sokol. Together they plan to open a cafe, and you kind of know that Lorna possesses the drive and the nerve to make it work, to become a 21st century success story of the globalised world.

There's only one hitch, which is that the fixer of the deal, Fabio, has decided the safest thing for everyone is if Claudy has an 'accidental' overdose and dies. No matter what the harsh realities of life dictate, and in spite of the fact their marriage is a sham, Lorna can't come to terms with this. When Claudy decides to quit heroin,  he turns to Lorna for help, and she can't help but provide it. She tries to fix a divorce instead, and, when Claudy's on the point of regressing back to drugs, she sleeps with him. After Claudy dies of an overdose, arranged by Fabio, Lorna realises or decides she's pregnant, and in spite of the fact she knows its going to fuck everything up, she refuses to have an abortion.

It's a simple tale, and classic storytelling. The neo-realist filming style, as plain and unadorned as can be, contributes to the narrative's believability. In another context the story might be melodramatic, but in this one, and told this way, it feels like a report from the front line of the global village, where the simple act of choosing to keep a child can become one of almost absurd courage. Lorna's insistence of preserving her humanity in spite of the price she will have to pay for it is heroic, and leads to a denouement containing a whole forest full of tension.

The directors succeed in coaxing a remarkable performance from Dobroshi, as well as from Jeremie Renier as Claudy. The film's simplicity is its strength. The Silence of Lorna is a film made in the image of its heroine: discovering a sense of value in what lies beneath the surface, in spite of the world's constant seeking of value in what can be seen on the surface alone.

the baader meinhof complex (d uli edel, w. edel & stefan aust)

The easiest way to explain what's wrong with this film is supplied by the music covering the credits, which come after two and a half hours of screen time. As the film ends, and the credits roll, a highly portentous and obviously scored tune pounds out. Then, after a couple of minutes (this is a long film and there is no shortage of credits), Dylan's Blowing in the Wind cuts in. For Dylan aficionados, this is something of a relief. He sings the whole song, but unfortunately there's more credits still rolling. So the film reverts to the former, bombastic score. At which point I left, although given the credits continued to roll they may still have had time to slip in one of Mahler's shorter concertos.

This ending is indicative of a film which doesn't seem to sure how to place or pace itself. In contrast to Downfall (made by the same producer), which was immersed in the unities of time, place and action, The Baader Meinhof Complex sprawls over several years, and moves all over Germany with detours to Rome and a PLO training camp in an unnamed part of the Middle East. The film focuses on the three principle members of the terrorist group, Baader, Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin, but the other members appear and occasionally take centre stage, (such as when Holger Meins dies), without having been developed in any way, perching somewhat uneasily on the twenty minutes of fame the film allows them. Furthermore, whilst Ensslin's attraction for the bad boy of the Social Revolutionary movement is understandable, (Andreas Baader is portrayed as a kind of anti-Che, a solipsistic, narcissistic egoist), the studious Ulrika Meinhof's choice to become so closely linked to him that their names will go down in history together is never really explored with any kind of subtlety.

The length of the film seems like further evidence of the fact the filmmakers weren't too sure of what they were doing. There's a lot of contextualisation (ie news footage from Vietnam); and a consistent dosage of 'action' sequences, as fetching young Germans who look like something out of an 80's ID magazine shoot show off their prowess with machine guns; but, until the gang is arrested, the narrative and the apparent mission of the urban terrorists has very little shape. Once they are arrested the film develops a point of focus in the prison, although it still can't resist sending young blondes off to wreak havoc where they can get it.

No matter how historically accurate the film is, it doesn't really help the viewer to understand what the individual members of the Baader Meinhof group were really fighting for, and why they apparently engendered so much sympathy in spite of the gratuitous violence of their methods. There are moments of flair in some of the set piece scenes (notably the early demonstration against the Shah's state visit) but even these run out of steam in the plethora of bullets and explosions; and the real complexities of the doomed triangle which composed the leadership of this curiously effective urban guerrilla movement are merely hinted at.

waltz with bashir (w&d ari folman)

Hot on the heels of Hunger comes Waltz With Bashir, another piece dealing with near-forgotten episode from the eighties. Oddly both pieces summoned up similar memories of being in the library of Freddies, as the house I lived in was somewhat comically named. The library was primarily used as a snooker room, but the papers were also laid out there, and 1982 was around the year when I first began to take a regular interest in the wider world. The massacre of Sabra and Chatila affected me. I cut out a picture from the paper, not dissimilar to the images at the end of Folman's film, and kept it in a yellow hardback book I had been given for Christmas (selected essays of Bernard Levin). 

Folman's film is about many things, and I'd hope he'd recognise the purpose of my introductory flannel. Like McQueen's film, he is looking at the way history is constructed, which also means the way in which we choose to either remember or forget that which has gone before. The film explores his own memories of being in Beirut as an Israeli soldier at the time of the massacre. As such it is also a film about memory - including one diverting sequence where a psychologist explains the human tendency to construct, even invent memories, noting that memory is an active, ongoing project for each individual. Folman, whose autobiographical story the film tells, has blocked out any recollection of being in Beirut, and the film narrates his mission to recover his memory, thereby erasing a collective amnesia on his country's part about the role it played in this war crime.

Any news we receive about Israel nowadays is tied up in its role in the geopolitical struggle that country was always heir to, and how it is conducting that struggle. In the midst of this maelstrom, its hard not to feel that Jewish culture, such a key component of European culture, gets forgotten. Folman's film reminds us of a heritage which its easy to feel has been lost since Judaism found a home. Folman's mission is a humane, rational enquiry. He talks to his psychologist, who makes the connection between the death camps of Beirut and the camps of the Holocaust, and the implicit Nazification of Israeli foreign policy at that time. These are bold points, made with a light touch, as pretty images float across the screen.

Which, of course, is Waltz With Bashir's USP. How does a factual essay about war crimes; Jewish identity; and memory, get a mainstream release? It does it by making itself as an animation. Folman's drawings are witty, pretty, striking and thought-provoking. The animation allows him to recreate a city in the midst of civil war, and describe the invasion of Lebanon by the Israeli army. It also allows him to include several fantasy and dream sequences. The poetry of the images buys him space for the more banal documentary talking heads images (which nonetheless exude a quirky fascination in comic strip form). After Persepolis, I was somewhat wary of the notion of an animated political film, but Waltz With Bashir uses the medium to remarkable effect, not least because of the quality of the animation itself. But more than this, the choice to make the film in an animated form allows the director to clandestinely smuggle issues into the cinema which he wouldn't be able to do any other way.

Waltz With Bashir is a brave film. Art cannot redeem the mistakes of the past, (and the film's sudden shift of tone at the end might be a nod to the limits of the power of artistry), but it can contribute to an understanding of what has gone before. Furthermore, it is also part of the discourse of history, and by refusing to let his personal amnesia lie, Folman might have gone some way towards helping his collective nation recognise the responsibility it bears for its part with regard to Sabra and Chatila, a responsibility it would normally prefer to be clouded in the fog of long-lost memory.

the book of secrets [w. M G Vassanji]

The Book of Secrets, set in Tanzania, spans the best part of the twentieth century. The book of secrets itself appears to be a diary, written by a British colonial officer, Corbin, during his time as the colonial overseer in the backwoods town of Kikono, in the lead up to the first world war. The diary appears to be fairly innocuous, apart from the suggestion of a possible affair with a local woman, Miriamiu, whose husband accuses her of not being a virgin on her wedding night. Miriamiu's son is a pale skinned boy who ends up becoming wealthy and traveling to England. The book suggests that the colonial official and his possible son met and might possibly have possibly broached the subject of paternity, or might not have done.

Vassanji's narrator is Pius Fernandes, a schoolteacher in Dar Es Salaam, who is given the diary, which has survived through the century, and who takes on responsiblity for investigating its origins. This narrator recounts the various stories of the people who may or may not have been connected to the diary. These are a varied bunch, from Corbin to the son, Ali, to the woman Ali later runs off to England with, to the English poet who makes Dar Es Salaam his home. The narrative meanders across the years, and has a knack of engaging the reader in a particular character only to let that character's storyline drift out of the narrative as it moves on to the next. As a result, it feels as though the reader is continually restarting the project of the book and the quest for the true significance of the Book of Secrets. This particular reader never really got to the bottom of the diary's significance - it felt like something of a Maguffin around which Vassanji could embroider his knowledge of Tanzania, past and present, and the diverse communities that inhabited the country. 

The diary and Pius's mission to discover its secrets insinuates both the idea of a dramatic resolution to the book as well as some kind of key to the recent history of Tanzania. As it becomes clear that the book will not deliver on its insinuation, the reader has two courses of action. One is to become a little frustrated with a literal pretentiousness (understanding that word to mean an undelivered pretension to communicate something which is, in the end, never communicated); and secondly to enjoy the ramblingly assembled portrait of a faintly idyllic part of the world.  

of time and the city (w&d terence davies)

Two weeks without going to see a film seems like something of a hiatus. There are films out there I wouldn't mind seeing, but I think it might be a November thing, a time of year when the mind begins to kick against the habits that have seen it through the best part of the calendar, and a sluggishness sets in. Battling against that, I went with the sister to the Renoir, to catch the lauded Davies's essay on all things Liverpool. Terence Davies, a somewhat mysterious figure, whose films both the sister and I remembered watching about twenty years ago, but about which, save the fact that these too are lauded, and have perhaps grown in stature as a result of their subsequent obscurity, very little came back to haunt.

Of Time and The City is best described as an essay film. It uses found footage and Davies' own narration to compose a picture of Liverpool through the twentieth century. A point of comparison might be Andersen's epic and witty Los Angeles Plays Itself. Davies film is shorter, and seemingly more elegiac. We know the film is supposed to be elegiac from the opening frames, when a stentorian, thespian voice recites poetry over black and white footage. The footage is captivating. The twentieth century revealed as the film documents the poverty of Davies' childhood and the energy of a now-lost industrial age. 

The footage is captivating, but the narration remains stentorian. After not very long you realise the voice is Davies' own. The narrative dabbles with a variety of moments: Davies' discovery of his homosexuality (wrestling and bonfire nights); the Korean War (for no discernable reason); the coronation of the queen, which Davies rails against. And then, finally, tower blocks and modern architecture.

Almost every film I see nowadays has some kind of commentary on the tower block. (As though its a Borgesian subset of 'film', a previously unnoticed genre.) Of Time and The City, following in the footsteps of Import/ Export; Gomorrah and even Dekalog, which I've watched on DVD recently, seizes on the urban alienation of 'The Tower Block'. The film lingers on images of slums being destroyed, and replaced by dystopian blocks. The footage shows them in their shiny newness and then spends an age describing their degradation, the images counterpointed by some pulsating Mahler or Bruckner. To no one's great surprise, Davies doesn't approve of tower blocks and makes sure you get the point. The fact that they replaced the slums he also disapproved of is glossed over. The delight which the film seems to take from its use of these depressing images verges on the sadistic. As though the filmmaker is saying: Can you belive it? People actually lived there! In response to the Tower Block genre there are two things I'd like to say. First, the image of the tower block as symbol of urban alienation from now on ought to be banned. Secondly, I'm biased, as I live in a tower block, with views over South London, and I promise you, it's not that bad. (Dekalog seems to suggest that there's nothing wrong with living in a housing estate, as there really are plenty of other things for people to get worked up about.)

After the tower blocks come... well to be honest it really doesn't matter all that much. Davies has more fun putting images of his beloved city together with some of his favourite tracks, and continues his meandering elegy. Towards the end - (shortly before mandatory helicopter shot, something else that also, sadly has entered the compendium of visual cliche, though that's not to say that hopefully, at some point in cinematic history, someone won't use it slightly better than a stock BBC documentary about rural churches of coastal Britain) - Davies shows lots of pictures of young Liverpudlians out on the piss, and declaims his disaffection and disconnection from the city he once knew. Any sentient viewer must be wondering why this camp old thespian thinks he should feel at home with a group of teenagers out on the lash on a Friday night, but that point seems to escape the film's narrator.

Earlier this year I went to see a play by a respected UK playwright, part of a series of pieces he'd assembled addressing the issue of the Iraq war. A reasonable endeavour, clearly, even admirable. Sadly, the plays were, on the whole, portentous, overblown, and left this member of the audience with next to no feeling of having connected with the war or Iraq. Given one is inclined to berate British art for failing to grapple with ideas, it's obviously churlish to point out that maybe the reason why we don't create more thoughtful art is that we're just not very good at it. Or perhaps we're not very good at it because we don't do enough of it. Whatever the truth, it's apparent in Of Time And The City. A piece which has all the ingredients it needs (footage and music) to create a remarkable piece of cinema about the city of Liverpool, but is let down by the fact that its creator doesn't really seem to know what he's trying to say. 

lust [w. elfriede jelinek]

Lust is not a straightforward read. In theory it tells a small story, which takes place, so far as I could make out, over the course of a couple of days. Gerti is married to the swinish factory owner, Hermann. She meets a student, Michael, and they have sex. Later she tries to run away to be with Michael, but he's not interested, Hermann comes and gets her and brings her home, and she murders their child. 

That's what happens, but Lust isn't really about what happens but the way in which these actions are described. Jelinek's prose is composed of dense, poetic, pornographic  paragraphs. She's a writer who can't resist a pun, which suggests that her translators have their work cut out. Trying to get to grips with her text is like wrestling with a bibliophilic python. It's hard work, and matched by the writer's bleak analysis of modern life. 

Lust is a book about lust, and large chunks of it are dedicated to painstaking descriptions of sex. Gerti is fucked every which way by a husband who has remarkable stamina and who sees his wife as his chattel, to do with as he pleases. It seems somewhat surprising that this hasn't put Gerti off sex, but when she meets Michael, the attraction seems to be primarily physical. You won't read a dirtier book than Lust, but that doesn't mean there's anything particularly erotic about it. Sex is another commodity in a world which has been reduced to pure commodification.

For what it's worth, my favourite chapter was the one which described the skiers, in all their florescent gaudiness. It reminded me of a Peter Doig picture I saw earlier this year, a white mountainside populated by small figures in bubble gum colours. Jelinek's critique of modern living merits the application of words like 'coruscating'. Her unremitting bleakness and baroque prose isn't going to appeal to a mass audience, although it has secured her the Nobel prize.