the mighty dead - why homer matters (adam nicolson)

Nicolson’s book about Homer is compelling. The challenge is laid down by the title and the book, to my surprise, lived up to it. Nicolson’s remit is broad, from Keats to Simone Weil to Sinuhe, an ancient Egyptian writer. His speculation about the origin of Homer’s twin poems takes him from the Irish coast to Bahrain. The key theory that emerges from the book is a fascinatingly counter-intuitive one to our common understanding of what it means to be Greek. Rather than being the great seers of civilisation, Nicolson presents Homer’s Greeks as savage warrior people, emerging from the steppes of Central Asia. The Iliad charts their confrontation with the far more advanced civilisations of Asia Minor, which they both ransacked and stole from. The book’s historical range is vast, covering at least ten centuries, which clearly gives scope for a great deal of more speculative hypothesis. Still, it’s the very scale of the book which gives it weight. Nicolson is looking at history through a long lens, and through that lens we discern the ebb and flow of power as it has been exercised across the Mediterranean and Western seaboard of the Atlantic, over the course of thousands of years. Within this, Homer’s tales capture a more elemental version of our origin myth (the ‘our’ standing for all those peoples and civilisations locked into that geographical zone), and indeed, through Homer, Nicolson traces the conflicts which existed prior to the birth of the idea of Europe or classical civilisation, as we now understand it.

nb - The above was written a few weeks ago. It would be more than feasible to view the current war, initiated by Russia against Ukraine, within the terms of Nicolson’s Homer. Ukraine’s much lauded European values standing for the Trojans, against the more Philistine band of Russians, coming from the Eurasian steppe, who have no hesitation in raising cities in order to achieve predominance. This observation is offered in order to reaffirm that Nicolson’s innovative reading of the historical impulses which lead to the writing of the Iliad and the Odyssey feels persuasive, and it is one of the book’s great achievements to show how culture is a thread that binds across the centuries, how Homer was writing for a society so ancient that we don’t even really know where it existed, but he was also writing for every generation that came since in this place we call Europe, and beyond. 

the power of the dog (w&d jane campion)

 As I sat in the Renoir’s boxy downstairs Phoenix screen, having paid a small fortune, I thought to myself that, from the point of view of this blog, it is for the best that by and large in Montevideo I don’t get to see the hot new releases and that this blog is not part of that conversation. Because the issue of hype contorts everything. I went to see Power of the Dog with much anticipation, and after half an hour or so, as these lines attest, I found my mind drifting somewhat, on the verge of a kind of ‘is this all you’ve got’ disappointment, which had more to do with my expectations than the actual film. The film is beautifully realised, (that word which in the lexicon of Spanish cinema does so much good work), and in many regards impeccable, and perhaps that was part of my problem with it. It felt so highly polished, with barely a loose end flapping, that it seemed as much a finely rendered product as a distinctive work of art.

On a more discursive note, it’s interesting to place Power of the Dog within the orbit of the reimagined 21st C Western. The work of Kelly Reichardt, with Meek’s Cutoff and First Cow, comes to mind and I am sure there will be others. There is not a gun fired in Power of the Dog, or even seen. The West becomes a space where personal relationships have room to evolve, for better or for worse, in a relatively ungoverned environment, where societal pressures exist at arm’s length. Where power doesn’t function as it has been depicted in the work of Hawks et al, but in a more cerebral fashion, which Cumberbatch’s Phil, who graduated from Harvard, has sought to reject, but eventually finds himself snared by. These films are made from the perspective of the conflict the cowboys eventually lost. Modern USA is festooned with faux cowboys, who stride around cosplaying values which their prosperity has helped to defeat. Campion’s film negotiates these choppy waters with restraint, subtlety and anthrax. It’s a curious and perhaps beguiling combo, only I wish I had got to see it a year later, in the relatively hype-free environment of the city I normally inhabit. 

travelers (helon habila)

I want to say: read this book.

I want to say, read this book so that you can go through the door and see the other side of the stories on the news you look at and think, how terrible, and then move on from.

At least give those souls, those African souls, the space to breathe before the world swallows them up, the space that Habila permits them in his novel.

I want to say that there is one moment, which is a contrived literary twist, which is a writer’s trick, that is so powerful that it kicked me in the belly like a child trying to get out.

I want to say: burn the borders.

I want to take my hat off to a writer whose portmanteau novel manipulates narrative and character with the dexterity of a magician.

I want to remember how this took me back to the once upon a time of Peter and Supergirl, the Nigerians who came to London and didn’t want to leave, who a naive Anthony didn’t drive to the airport, who were the Royal Court play that the Royal Court would never stage, because history is banal and cruel and our stages don’t know how to represent that.

Although Habila´s novel does.

I want to think of Peter, the actor with the hat pulled over the brim of his eyes, an actor of sheer charisma, the one the female director said could have been her Benedict or her Woyzeck, but who threw in all that so that he could clean floors in office buildings in West London, forever looking over his shoulder, because that was better than waiting for something which Nigeria was never going to offer him. Whilst his friend told me on the drive to the airport: “They will ask me - why did you come back? And they will look at me with disrespect because no answer will be sufficient."

Habila’s novel makes you want to talk about so many things, because it talks about so many things. Three continents, two cities, one sea, a myriad of stories.

Read this book. 

parallel mothers (w&d almodóvar)

About a year ago, in one of the occasional semi-official quarantines which have peppered our lives to a lesser extent in Montevideo than in other parts of the world, we went on a mini Almodóvar spree, watching four of five of his back catalogue in a row. Some were strong, but others felt as though they were Almodóvar by numbers. Take a man or a woman on the edge of a crisis, introduce a charismatic co-star, see what happens. The very early work is perhaps as notable for the zest and energy that was present in the representation of a Spain emerging from the shadow of dictatorship as for the narratives themselves. Almodóvar was a coordinator of colour and high jinks who loved to be an agent provocateur.

I note all this, which is not to say that there have not been many a classic in the midst of his earlier and middle years, but because what is apparent is that this is a director who is just getting stronger with age. His stories become more humane and are touched by more subtlety as he has gone on. Parallel Mothers is the apotheosis of this. A film which looks at the issues of motherhood, relationships and history, blending them all together in a mezcla which probably shouldn’t work, but actually triumphs.

From a narrative point of view, one of the most interesting elements is what happens in the last twenty minutes. There are moments when Parallel Mothers is pure melodrama, as Cruz works out which partner she’s going to end up with. Just when you think that this decision will be the key dramatic resolution of the film, Almodóvar sidesteps it completely. The key dramatic resolution of this film is of the past with the present. The connection that needs to be resolved between the generations. There is something both subtle, crude and profound about the way in which Janis, Cruz’s character, can have an adulterous affair, then get involved with the real mother of her own child, then go back to the lover, and all this is, in the end, fine. Because there are greater wounds to be healed, and greater tragedies that need coming to terms with. In this, Almodóvar seems akin to the novelists Cercas or Marias, and one understands how profoundly the Spanish Civil War, the children of whose victims are still alive, still exerts its influence over the Spanish psyche.

All of this in a drama which is at once frothy and tragic, which has that Almodóvar flair, but also succeeds in talking about cot death and sexual abuse without ever turning the film into something didactic or heavy handed. His actresses and actors excel, but this cannot help but be because they are representing characters with an indisputable humanity. I read somewhere the other day that the film is on the verge of grossing a million pounds in the UK alone. Almodóvar’s art gets both more complex and more affecting, and the curious thing is that, even in the Anglo Saxon world, this makes for commercial success as well. The film is also testament to the virtues of a less commercial aspect of art, that of permitting the artist to evolve over decades, permitting us to watch how they refine their palette and expand their horizons. 

hangsaman (shirley jackson)

Hangsaman is one of those books that reward in the reflection as much as the reading. It’s a quasi-surreal tome which tells a story from the POV of a late teen woman-girl, Natalie, which veers between comic description of college life to nightmarish passages which intimate rape and psychological breakdown. The novel takes place at Natalie’s home, dominated by her rarefied, pseudo-intellectual father, and at the college where she is sent to. In the college she is both the odd one out but also the observer, whose ability to describe the absurdities and cruelties of college life permits Natalie the breathing space she needs to survive. This is a weird book, coming out of the suburban backwoods of post-war USA, hanging the strange Lynchian dirty washing on the line for the reader to gawp at. It’s Lolita told from the other side, where the psychological damage of people’s actions and the world’s hypocrisy flowers on the protagonist’s strange skin. 

vida de familia. (w&d josé luis font, w. enric ortenbach, arnau olivar)

Another in the list of lost films from the Franco era, I stumbled across Font’s family drama having a few free hours to spare on a passing visit to Madrid. It is an intriguing film, which looks at the way that the unit of the family served to stifle Spain with both its conservatism and its decadence. Eduardo is a doctor from a wealthy family who wants to open a clinic in an old house which has been left to go to ruins by a family who can’t think of anything to do with it. He and his forthright wife, Elisa, launch a campaign to get the family to permit this development, but his aunts and uncles are intransigent. The issue goes, in Dickensian style, to the courts, but no resolution seems imminent. The film is both an intimate portrayal of an upper class family, but also a sweeping portrait of late sixties Barcelona. A fascinating B story reveals the social divisions, as Eduardo’s dissolute cousin has an affair with the landlady of a bar, a relationship he’s terrified to reveal to his mother, the patrician Aurelia. The film is in black and white, which feels appropriate, but there’s one quietly astonishing sequence when Eduardo & Elisa visit the old house they want to recover. All of a sudden, Font switches to colour, the camera panning around the stately home and gardens which are in ruins, a compelling metaphor for a suffocating society letting past glories go to seed. 

el sicario (charles bowden & molly molloy)

Sicario is the story told in his own words of a Mexican man who worked for a major Cartel in the nineties before finding god and fleeing, aware that his life would be in constant jeopardy. The writers Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy met with the man along with filmmaker, Gianfranco Rosi, who recorded the interviews and later released a documentary. To those with a passing knowledge of the Mexican cartel world, which is also, as the book makes clear, the Mexican political world, the book’s material will be depressingly familiar. The account goes a long way towards confirming the way in which the police, military and political structures are effectively owned by the Cartels, each of which is a shark in shark filled waters, constantly in danger of being attacked itself.

Bowden writes an introduction to the book which gives a description of the man, commenting on his very ordinariness, his invisibility. This introduction suggests how easy it is for elements of this narco-terror to assimilate into society. It also provokes the frightening thought that these people, this violence, might already by present in your society or mine. Just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The book also brought back memories of the insidious suggestion of the infiltration of this violence into daily life which we encountered in Michoacan. Both from the exaggerated police presence and also from the anecdotal evidence which constantly came our way, even though we were only there for ten days.

Ps: this is the other side of the coin to Don Winslow’s Power of the Dog, the more downbeat, working version of that writer’s more glamorised account of similar territory. 

la peste (camus)

Camus’ novels were mandatory reading when I was a teenager. La Peste possessed a mythic resonance, a book which talked about a past our grandparents knew, one which we were so lucky not to have experienced. The received idea that this is a novel about the war, and that the plague is a metaphor. Clearly, today, the metaphorical elements fade as we contemplate how Camus’ vision of the plague compares to our own version. In so many ways, it feels incredibly accurate in its depiction of the various stages of an epidemic, as well as the way in which it charts the psychological cost of the experience. Two things perhaps stand out. One is the way in which the internet has altered the experience. In comparison to the absolute isolation and claustrophobia of Oran’s plague, the internet has permitted us to experience our plague as a testing ground for what some would call the metaverse. Our world shrunk, in so far as planes and boats stopped moving, but the internet permitted a semblance of normality to be maintained, or even a new normality to be constructed. The second is that La Peste offers a heavily masculine view of the world that renders it, today, feeling as though it’s only offering a partial story. I recall, as that teenager, consuming the novel avariciously. Re-reading it I found much of the story, the detail and the characters, had stayed with me. But on a second read, it feels perhaps more limited in scope. The existential quest for meaning, or rather a reason to get out of bed in the morning, remains, but Camus’ philosophising feels less urgent now than it did then. Perhaps this is because I was only at the beginning then, I was grateful to find a writer willing to engage with these issues, guiding me towards the relevance of the everyday. Now that I have inhabited so many everydays, the novel’s Sisyphean defence of the value of a constant engagement with the banal demands of the daily struggle feels less inspiring. Furthermore, this is now an account of a life we have all lived over the course of these past two years, and Camus’s veneration of the small heroes, whilst apposite, feels tired. We want to move on, we want to start dreaming again. 

last night in soho (w&d edgar wright, w. krysty wilson-cairns)

There are obvious pleasures to be gleaned from spending time in Soho and Fitzrovia whilst sitting in a cinema in Montevideo. Wright does a decent job of bringing the barrio to life, revealing both its erstwhile glamour and seediness. He’s a director whose visual flair more than compensates for the occasional lumpiness of the plot, which feels like a vehicle for him to show off its dazzling set piece scenes. This doesn’t really feel like a horror movie and the CGI effects of massed banks of grey faceless men are perhaps one of the film’s weaker elements, but the tale of the ingenue in Soho has a timeless feel and is handled with more charm and less schmaltz than might have been expected. 

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.