crime and punishment (dostoyevksy, tr. david mcduff)

What brought my reading back to this strange, savage novel? In part it has been inspired by working on Rambert’s Repetition, in which a character at one point talks about how ‘everything was written, the truth was to be found in the fiction’, which chimes with the idea of the writer as amanuensis and prophet. In part it was to explore a thought in my head that the world of St Petersburg described in my memory was akin to the worlds that lie just down the road, or even sometimes across the road, in the Americas I now inhabit.

Crime and punishment is a tale from the underworld. An anti-murder mystery, where we know who did it from the very start. Here is the paradox, because we know the criminal is not the image of the desperate criminal, but rather the sensitive student, Raskolnikov, almost likeable, forever intriguing, cursed by his very hand as it enacts the murder he has intellectually decided to commit. In another world, he might have become the muddied intellectual with a career in academia or ‘the media’. But in the impoverished conditions he lives in, his intellect and imagination prove to be the road to hell, or at least Siberia, rather than a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle in Ealing, to pick a name out of the hat. All of which goes to show that the problems of an impoverished society don’t just impinge on the underclass. They also lead to a deformation of the idea of education, or, to put it another way, a Nietszchean re-evaluation of the idea of education: not as a means of furthering the health of society, but as a means of advancing the individual.

Raskolnikov crumbles under the weight of the moral bind he has placed himself in. He would be a superman, but he can’t sustain the illusion. But in his endeavour, as described by the author, we can indeed see the future written, the future which would lead to the Russian revolution, but would also lead to fascism and the love of the figure of the all-powerful leader. The fragile cat’s cradle of society only needs to lose a few threads for the whole thing to unravel. In these Americas, there will be Raskolnikovs aplenty. Driven to desperate acts in the name of their own higher purpose. Nothing much has changed, the great cities and the less-great cities continue to be the site of desperate, unheeded struggles, hidden behind the shop windows of fashion stores and car dealerships. 

raíz (d. franco garcia becerra, w. annemarie gunkel, alicia quispe)

Raíz is an effective piece of filmmaking, which manages to blend the sentimentality of the story of a football-obsessed child who lives as a llama shepherd in the highlands of Peru, with a dash of the Sanjines, as the film tackles the impact of global capitalism on this obscure, and beautiful part of the world. Feliciano is, as his name suggests, a happy-go-lucky child who roams the mountains with his flock, and has particular affection for one llama which he has christened Ronaldo. At the same time, the mining industry is looking to drive the villagers and homesteaders out of the area. Feliciano’s parents are dragged into a conflict the child can only really understand when his flock and Ronaldo go missing, the result of an attack on the villagers by goons hired by the mining company. Set against the backdrop of Peru’s quest to go to the 2018 World Cup in Russia, the film adroitly weaves these twin strands together, and the overall impact is aided by the stunning scenery, immaculately captured by DOP, Johan Carrasco. 

the moustache (emmanuel carrère, tr. lanie goodman)

Carrère’s curious tale of everyday madness. We can all go mad one day, just like that, and end up in a Macau hotel, wondering what we did with our sanity. I wonder if it was in any way inspired by Scorsese’s short, The Big Shave. I once read a book by the author that annoyed me so much that I didn’t write about it here, and almost made me quit this whole process. I can't remember why, or even what the book was called. Maybe I invented it. The Moustache did not have the same effect, albeit one gets the sense that the writer is a cold fish. But that coldness underpins this savage dissection of ordinary bourgeois society, so it’s all good. 

cowboy graves (bolaño, tr natasha wimmer)

Returning to Bolaño after so long feels like coming home. This book is a collection of three separate texts, excavated apparently from his hard drive, composed in the nineties and in the year before his death. As Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas’ afterword puts it eloquently, the themes and characters are culled from the Bolaño universe. Familiar figures pop up. New arrivals appear. The stories range between Mexico, Chile and Europe. There is nothing new here and plenty that is new. To what extent are the stories autobiographical, marked by the presence of Bolaño’s alter ego, Arturo Belano? Two of the tales feature the day of the Pinochet coup, and these have the smell of the real, albeit we know they are not the real, they are fictions, spun from the writer’s skull. The author will always be a touchstone of my literary life. Part of the pleasure of reading is diving into the themes and issues which fascinate the reader. Few writers of my time have scaled the divides of my own life; but the one who unfailingly goes there is Roberto Bolaño.

el castigo (d. matías bize, w. coral cruz)

Bize’s chamber piece is what they might call whipsmart in the pages of TimeOut, if TimeOut still exists. A single shot sustained over 90 minutes, marked by the setting of the sun in a forest beside a main road, with the nagging tension of a lost child and a disintegrating marriage. The single shot film is perhaps the acme of low budget filmmaking, (cf La Casa Muda, Victoria etc), a skill which when well-executed demonstrates the Aristotelian power of cinema as a rival to the stage. El Castigo (The Punishment), takes place in a space which is perhaps no more than 500 square metres, where the action is occurring offstage. Ana has punished their 7 year old child by leaving him at the side of the road for two minutes, after he nearly caused a crash. When they come back the child is missing. With this simple premise, the film dissects her and Mateo’s marriage, and the possible collapse of their comfortable lives. It’s beautifully acted by Antonia Zegers and Néstor Cantillana, and, as is necessary, brilliantly filmed by Gabriel Diaz. In a medium which so often rewards those who do the flashy things well, doing the simple things well becomes the mark of a bold sensibility, prepared to swim against the tide. 

el viento que arrasa (w&d paula hernández, w. leonel d’agostino)

Hernandez’ film opens with a great set piece as the lay preacher/ evangelist, Alfredo Castro, does his stuff in a rural backwater. His daughter, Lena, is the one who looks after him and runs the show. They are an oddball team and given the daughter is reaching an age when she’s more interested in boys than god, we know they’re heading for trouble. Trouble arrives when they break down and find themselves holed up in the ramshackle hillbilly hideaway of mechanic Gringo and his disfigured teenage son. Everything is bubbling up, but at this point the narrative stalls somewhat, trapped like the characters in an endless afternoon in the back of beyond.

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. 

los últimos (w&d sebastián peña escobar)

Los Ultimos is a discursive documentary based around the work of a couple of mardy botanists who are doing what they can to preserve the Paraguayan forests, which, as one might imagine, are being culled, like every other great forest in the world. Much of the film is predicated on the viewer’s relationship with the two men at the heart of the film: Ulf, a German national living in Paraguay, and Jota, a Paraguayan expert on birdlife. They are a craggy, cranky team. Ulf, in particular, has perhaps a predictable take on late capitalism and the conspiracies which surround it. If you don’t engage with this pair, the movie loses much of its bite, and there is a meandering element to the documentary, which in part captures the scale of the forest, but in part might be said to work against the urgency of the film’s message. 

some sort of epic grandeur (matthew j. bruccoli)

This being the first biography of Fitzgerald I have read, this review is not so much a critique of the Broccoli’s comprehensive account of the writer’s life, more a reaction to what it tells us about the man, his marriage, and the business of writing.

Firstly, the account of the Fitzgerald’s marriage is heartbreaking. The way two people can be so perfect for one another and so toxic at the same time. In spite of the collapse of their relationship, the love they continued to share, a broken, useless, destructive love, is present in the letters they continued to send one another. Fitzgerald doesn’t come out of the story well; but neither does Zelda. They are both flawed and  feast off each other’s flaws, flaws which once nourished their genius but later consumed it.

Fitzgerald in Hollywood is another film in itself. The greatest writer of his generation treated like just another hack. Perhaps he wasn’t cut out for screenwriting, (or perhaps he was), but this sequence of the biography speaks to the way in which Hollywood is a business, reputations are meaningless, and even the greatest talents are potentially talentless within this world.

Fitzgerald was a drunk, just as much as Bukowski. Why did he drink? In order to place a distance between himself and the world he inhabited which matched his soul’s distance? The irony of the world’s most elegant writer getting into fights, getting slung out of the theatre, behaving in a manner so embarrassing that even his closest friends turned their backs on him, is immense. But perhaps his elegance had no real place in the word, only in fiction. As a way of coping with the feeling of lacking any sense of belonging, he drank to excess. Drink insulates one against the cruelty of the world, but it also insulates against feeling like you don’t really belong. 

cross of iron. (d. peckinpah, w julius j. epstein, walter kelley, james hamilton)

Peckinpah’s films represent an apex macho worldview, which is so macho it permits the existence of weakness. Cross of Iron feels like it might be the apex of this apex. It takes a squadron who are perhaps in the worst situation any humans could possibly find themselves in, a German battalion on the Eastern front, (once again Crimea), as the front collapses. Peckinpah’s grand conceit, apparently financed by German money, is to have these doomed characters be German. The enemy becomes heroic, with the uber American, James Coburn, playing the fearless squadron leader. Steiner. Hence the characters are transformed into everymen, and the film lays bare the irreversible cruelty of war, no matter which side of the fence you belong to. The capacity of mankind to inflict suffering on mankind transcends historical divisions. The film itself struggles to hold up, with the director making the most of his tank and explosion budget, but its intentions feel entirely honourable.