the ascent (voskhozhdenie) (w&d larisa shepitko, w. yuri klepikov)

There are so many films from the USSR or Russia set in the second world war that it’s not hard to think there’s nothing new to see. The Ascent, a film I had never heard of, proved this thesis wrong. It has to be one of the most remarkable, harrowing films I have ever seen. The director, Larisa Shepitko conjures an astonishing bleak, visceral film which drives itself forward over the course of two hours to a gut-wrenching conclusion. The first hour of the film sees two partisans, Sotnikov and Rybak struggle through a snowbound landscape in search of food to take back to their group. This is almost all filmed with hand-held camera, which tumbles through the snow with the two partisans, sinks up to its waist in the snow, genuinely makes us feel as though we are also there, fleeing for our lives. Cinema as immersive experience. Just as it seems they’ve succeeded in their mission, Sotnikov and Rybak run into a German patrol and Sotnikov is wounded. Rybak saves his life, but seeking to hide in a farmhouse, they are captured. This is a plot twist that it complete contrast to anything Hollywood might have come up with. What we assume to be a film about how the plucky heroes’ escape, turns into something completely the opposite. A tale of torture, betrayal, collateral damage, death. In short, a stunningly convincing and unsettling portrayal of the realities of having an enemy force invade your homeland and the price that is paid in both physical and spiritual terms. The Ascent is another example of the remarkable talent of Soviet cinema. The Soviets didn’t just lose the Cold War, they also lost the culture war, but in their cinema we can discern a sensibility in complete contrast to that of their enemies, a capacity to create cinema that is immersive, compelling, terrifying and beautiful. Perhaps Soviet cinema whispers to us that there was another course for humanity to take, another way to put the technology into practice. Or perhaps this is just a wilfully romantic notion on my part.

madame bovary (flaubert)

Madame Bovary. A name everyone knows. It stands for something, represents some kind of idea of womanhood, but what exactly? Reading Flaubert’s first and most famous novel, one is struck by the almost (but perhaps not quite) misogynist treatment of the protagonist. She is married off to someone she soon she realises she doesn’t love. She’s seduced by a miserable rake, who ditches her when she demands to be taken seriously. She treats her husband appallingly. She racks up huge debts, allowing herself to be manipulated by the local tradesman. She has another affair with a younger man which is clearly destined to end badly, and does. Her debts bring ruin to her family. She’s a half-hearted mother, at best. She commits suicide rather than face up to the consequences of her actions. She drives her husband to an early grave and her orphaned daughter to a miserable fate. She is venal, selfish, capricious, unfaithful, in all senses of the word. Yet her name is venerated and she is held in mystical esteem. How to explain this paradox? How to rationalise the author’s near misogyny with his creation of an iconic female heroine? In the end, this must come down to the potency of naturalism. Because, no matter what you think of Emma Bovary, she feels like a completely convincing, authentic character. And of course, her flaws, manifold as they are, are elemental in this authenticity. Great fictional characters are, as the books tell us, flawed characters, servants of their whims, their desires. Emma Bovary might the most perfect example of this thesis and what might be termed, clumsily, the paradox of idealisation. 

paths of glory (w&d stanley kubrick, w. calder willingham, jim thompson)

It’s always intriguing to watch the early work of a maestro. What one sees in this film is Kubrick striving and occasionally achieving transcendence over material whose profundity is undermined by some B-movie tropes. Hence we have the secondary character actors with their quirks; the melodramatic set-up of a trial; the chiselled jaw of the leading man. The opening scene feels stagey, as two generals bat back and forth some heavy-handed dialogue. Initially, one struggles to see what’s distinctive about the film, what’s going to set it apart. Then, all of a sudden, we hit a battle sequence. It’s relentless, noisy, unpleasant, and lasts a good five minutes. Men try and cross No-Man’s-Land and they are cut to ribbons. The noise is positively off-putting and more than this, the sequence is purposefully anti-romantic. The sequence is the godfather of other famous war scenes: Saving Private Ryan; Atonement; Dunkirk. It’s far more shocking and savage than anything in Mendes’ recent 1917. It’s the first time the film reveals Kubrick’s brilliance at constructing epic moments and more soon follow. The editing and the cinematography of the court room scene is both precise and done with a flourish. Daringly, rather than keep the camera close on Douglas as he delivers his crucial, grandstand speech, we follow him from behind a chair, the camera tracking him as he strides back and forth. Kubrick’s cinematic vision subsequently shines through in two further grand set-piece scenes: the closing bar scene where a young German woman brings French troops to tears with a song and, most impressively, in the austere execution scene, which  foregoes any dramatic histrionics to deliver a terrifying representation of harsh injustice. It’s in these elaborate scenes that the film reveals the nascent craftsmanship of Kubrick, a director seeking to elevate his art above and beyond any kind of commercial imperative, something that feels remarkable and unusual for a 1950s Hollywood financed movie. 

curious footnote:

The actor Timothy Carey was fired during production. He was reportedly extremely difficult to work with, even to the extent of faking his own kidnapping, holding up the whole production.

ivan’s chidhood (w&d tarkovsky, w vladimir bogomolov, mikhail papava, andrey konchalovskiy)

 The face of a goat. A tracking shot across a field. A ruined church. An icon. Trees in water. Birch trees. Albrecht Dürer.

There are a thousand and one images to be harvested from Tarkovsky’s first film. He was a painter. He was also a philosopher. He married the two disciplines and came up with cinema. An art form he did indeed invent, even if some say it had been around for nearly a century when he got going. 

The war. The sudden drastic switch to documentary footage. Dead children, Goebel’s cowardly offering. A death cult. The documentary footage jarring, all wrong compared to the aesthetic splendour of all that has preceded it, but all right too, for this is a film about a boy who died, who was captured and executed. A boy whose life was enshrined in childhood. 

Sound, like water, a relentless rebarbative rhythm, the rhythm of being alive. 

Image on the front line, language left behind in the rearguard. Words are for the moments when joy or tears are called for. Words are for joking or flirting. Not for when you reach the frontier between life and death. A frontier Ivan crosses, never coming back. Neither to his companions, nor to us, nor to language. 

the blizzard (sorokin, tr. jamey gambrell)

Sorokin is such a curious writer. His novels feel like fantastical B-movies. Full of melodrama and cheap horror. Yet at the same time they feel as though they’re hitting the contemporary Russian nerve. The Blizzard describes a doomed journey by a doctor to deliver a vaccine to a remote town in the depths of Mother Russia. A journey he seems destined to never complete as the conditions conspire to thwart him. Gradually the world the story occupies becomes stranger and stranger. Giants, nano technology, dwarf horses. Meanwhile, deep Russia remains unchanged, a world of vodka and stoves, tiny communities which are islands of warmth in a world of snow. This mish-mash, hotchpotch, is weirdly compelling and ends up feeling entirely allegorical, a telling portrait of a country which seems to concurrently exist in both the past and the future, with the present being of only minor importance.

correction (thomas bernhard, tr sophie wilkins)

 I’m not sure where this novel sits in the oeuvre of the Austrian arch-miserabilist, Bernhard. A figure both shunned and venerated. Years ago, when I was friends with Mr C, we used to discuss his work and I guess I used to read his novels, but it’s all a blur now, all part of that hinterland life which is also known as ‘the past’. 

It might be that I came to Correction expecting something more nuanced than I encountered. In so many ways this feels like a piledriver of a novel, reminiscent of the sound of the road being dug up outside your window when you’re trying to work. It’s a meditative, relentless, exasperating noise, yet not without its fierce beauty. This novel of two parts, the first half dedicated to the narrator’s account of his friendship with the misanthropic Roithamer, the second a reworking (or correction) of Roithamer’s text stroke diary, which he was keeping in the weeks leading up to his suicide. Reading the text is like stumbling forward in a blizzard. Sometimes the words overwhelm, threaten to asphyxiate; at others the snow clears and the clarity seems all the more so for the text having been so dense and illegible moments before.

“…all the decrepit garbage of this totally decrepit European civilization, or rather, to hold nothing back, this totally decrepit modern world of ours, this era that keeps grinding out nothing but intellectual muck and all this stinking constipating clogging intellectual vomit is constantly being hawked in the most repulsive way as our intellectual products though it is in fact nothing but intellectual waste products…”

thus bad begins (marias, tr margaret jull costa)

 After finishing Marias’ novel, the third of his I have now read, I sought out some commentary, mostly Anglo-Saxon. There was praise, but there was also criticism. Notably from McCrum in the Guardian, who wrote: “The problem is simple: Thus Bad Begins is far too long. Vanity is the thing that kills successful writers and too much of Marías’s 14th novel reads like a self-conscious parody of earlier work. It is, as Hamlet might say, a bad case of “words, words, words”. So: countless elegant, and serpentine, sentences, sinuous meditative passages mixed with provocative paradoxes, but not enough substance.”

I quote McCrum in order to open up some kind of dialectic between Anglo-Saxon literary trends and, let us say, Hispanic literary trends. Because., and one hopes Marias might agree, it is precisely the words, words, words which lend Thus Bad Begins its remarkable power. The narrative as such is banal, even melodramatic, as the author himself suggests. Literature is made up of banal stories, which are little more than the warp and woof of everyday gossip. A man is cruel to his wife. His wife is unfaithful. Another man, a confidant of the husband, sleeps with the wife. There is nothing new under the sun (or as Marias prefers, beneath the light of the moon). What distinguishes this tawdry story, is the author’s capacity to extort shards of moonlight, which shine through his purple prose, and which reveal that the reason the story has some bearing in his hands is because it tells us something about the banality and the exceptionality of our own lives.

As such McCrum’s vapid criticism seems to gloss over at least one of the most brilliant passages I can recall reading. One where Marias talks about the moon and rumour and Shakespeare. His narrator, whose shallowness as a character within the story is beautifully shadowed by his nagging wisdom as a narrator, recounting the story twenty years later, succeeds in elevating this banal tale to another level altogether. Only, and here’s the rub, it isn’t quite so banal, because this is also a tale about evil, about vile acts, and how we compartmentalise our lives and learn to accept this evil, letting it seep into our everyday normality, even accepting that this evil should be rewarded, both in financial and affective forms. Setting the story in 1980, shortly aft4r the end of Franco’s dictatorship, Marias’ tale highlights the way that those who profited and indeed were permitted to indulge their vices under Franco’s regime were never brought to justice, were never forced to come to terms with their actions. Society turned a blind eye (Muriel, the film producer at the heart of the story, is literally one-eyed), and the perpetrators found a way to carry on doing their thing. The relevance of this scenario echoes today in the country where I am writing; and in the articles upon the release of the novel in the USA, many noted that it came out just as Trump was about to ascend to the presidency. In a world of Epstein and Trump and Manini Rios and Bolsonaro, it’s not just the monsters that need to be taken into account, it’s all those who benefitted from society’s’ reluctance to look evil in the face, to allow it to “get away with it”.

There are other layers of subtlety to the novel. Notably in the way it treats Muriel’s misogyny towards his wife, Beatriz, a misogyny which leads to tragedy. Marias must be aware that this will alienate his female readership. The narrator, De Vere’s, lackadaisical criticism of his boss’ misogyny will also be held against him, not to mention his actions. As such, Marias would appear to be seeking to vilify a whole generation, using a stiletto rather than an axe. De Vere pardons and even effectively condones Muriel’s cruelty, just as Muriel pardons and effectively condones Van Vechten’s vice. The tendrils of fascism reach out and corrupt everything, even the country’s finest sons. It’s a cold-eyed vision, one which is stitched into an Ellroy-ian interperation of power, offered by the remarkable sub-plot of the real life US producer Harry Dean Towers and his relationship with actors such as Herbert Lom and Jack Palance. For anyone of my generation, the extended scene with Herbert Lom is one of the most amusing. unlikely but ultimately plausible scenes you will ever read.

Marias’ novel is not bite-sized. It is vast, sweeping, ambitious. It is composed of a glory of words, words which rush up against the reader like the relentless tide. Words which have the fluency and power of the tide. Thus Bad Begins is a remarkable achievement, a devastating vision of the sweeping infiltration of vile deeds and rumour into the warp and woof of civil society. 

among the lost (emiliano monge)

Perhaps it is easiest to talk about this novel in terms of references. The novel itself quotes Dante’s Inferno, including passages from the poem in italics. The conceit here is the passage of the damned. Dante chronicled a journey through the circles of hell. Monge’s tragic pilgrims are Central Americans, trying to find a passage from their cursed lands to the Eden of the USA. However, they find themselves caught in the brutal trap of Mexico, where they are sold into slavery, or murdered. This summons up the spirit of Cormac McCarthy, another quasi religious writer who saw in the lands south of the Rio Grande a medieval fresco of good versus evil. It is the evil whose story Monge tells. His story is presented through the eyes of the people smugglers, those who treat the pilgrims as cattle to be milched and ultimately butchered. The protagonists are a doomed couple, themselves victims turned oppressors, abused by a trafficking ring run by a cruel, immoral priest. The narrative seeks and perhaps succeeds in engendering sympathy for its unlikely anti-heroes, who find themselves, just like the cargo they traffic, unable to fend off their violent fate. Which perhaps summons up a final point of reference, which is Milton, the poet who placed Satan at the heart of Paradise Lost. 

I confess to having found this mannered novel somewhat discomforting, which is presumably the intention. There is something about the literariness of its tone and ambition which sits awkwardly with the untold stories contained within its pages. Victims remain nameless. Their presence little more than background noise in Monge’s dystopian tableau. They are the bizarre figures in Bosch’s vision of hell, struggling to escape the frame, forever trapped in their anonymity.

the hatred of poetry (ben lerner)

Lerner’s slimline elegant dissection of the problematics of both writing and reading poetry can be devoured in one sitting. Essentially, of course, The Hatred of Poetry is a love letter to poetry. Lerner’s neo-Platonic thesis is that all poetry is measured against an archetypal and fictional idea of ‘poetry’ to which the poet can aspire but never reach. “Hating on actual poems, then, is often an ironic if sometimes unwitting way of expressing the persistence of the utopian ideal of Poetry…” As someone who struggles with the act of reading poetry for altogether different reasons, reasons wrapped up in the relentlessness of modern life, the presence of so much else that needs reading, the lack of space for poetry, (utopian or otherwise), I felt as though there were many aspects of the poetry debate, and the decline of poetry (If such a thing exists) that Lerner skirts around.  Even if the universal Whitmanesque poet appeared (a possibility he challenges), would anyone actually read him/her? How universal can a marginal sport be? The sense of academics shouting at each other in empty rooms perhaps permeates the text; nevertheless it is an engaging, nimble-footed read. Even if it left me wondering whether I shouldn’t have dedicated the time I spent reading the book in reading some actual bloody poetry…

the spark that lit the revolution (robert henderson)

Henderson provides a dogged account of Lenin’s years in London, in the course of which he provides a great overview of the strange half-life of the Russian revolutionary movement. Reading about these insular figures, who had very little interaction with local culture, be it in London, Paris or Geneva, it seems astonishing that they would change the world beyond recognition. The accident of the Russian Revolution or the Marxist inevitability? It’s hard to imagine who might be their contemporary equivalents, or imagine a society which is any way developed or contained within the geopolitics of the modern world succumbing to the kind of revolutionary zeal of Lenin and his contemporaries. Who might now  be sitting in the British Library, seeking to bring about the downfall of political structures as we know it?