Author: bythefirelight

Bolaño in La Jornada

~ bythefirelight

There was a good article about Bolaño in La Jornada’s Sunday supplement this week talking about Bolaño’s views of exile. According to Gustavo Ogarrio, Bolaño didn’t really believe in political exile because it made him a victim, which he was not. He also thought it was pointless to be nostalgic about the old country

“Can you be nostalgic for a country where you were about to die? Can you be nostalgic for the poverty, the intolerance, the arrogance, the injustice? The refrain intoned by Latin Americans and also by other writers in other poor or traumatized zones carries on the nostalgia, the return to the country of birth, and to me this has always sounded like a lie.”

“¿Se puede tener nostalgia por la tierra en donde uno estuvo a punto de morir? ¿Se puede tener nostalgia de la pobreza, de la intolerancia, de la prepotencia, de la injusticia? La cantinela, entonada por latinoamericanos y también por escritores de otras zonas depauperadas o traumatizadas, insiste en la nostalgia, en el regreso al país natal, y a mí eso siempre me ha sonado a mentira.”

The article goes on to talk about the novel Amuleto which takes place in Mexico during one of the darker times in recent Mexican history. The link between the dictatorships of Latin America are clear.

The exile, though, is not just political, but literary, yet the literary exile is, too, often over done.

If the novel The Savage Detectives is interpreted and read as the parodic and tragic dissolution of a certain narrative vanguard in Latin America, represented by the search for one of the founding poets of Visceral Realism—Cesárea Tinajero— and the motive for the wild detective investigation of the poets Ulises Lima y Arturo Belano, Amuleto allows another paralel reading, concentrating a parody of the post vanguard in the voice of a melodramatic and earthy poet, Auxilio Lacouture.

Si la novela Los detectives salvajes acepta ser leída e interpretada como la disolución paródica y trágica de cierta narrativa vanguardista en América Latina, representada en la búsqueda de una de las poetas fundadoras del real visceralismo –Cesárea Tinajero–, motivo de la pesquisa detectivesca y salvaje de los poetas Ulises Lima y Arturo Belano, Amuleto admite otra lectura paralela, al concentrar esta parodia postvanguardista en la voz de una poetisa melodramática y telúrica, Auxilio Lacouture.

Roberto Bolaño: los exilios narrados is well worth the read.

New German Literature in the TLS

~ bythefirelight

The TLS recently had a review of some new German novels. All of these were published this year and, of course, are not available in English yet (I hope they are some day). Three of them deal with the GDR and the third, from Switzerland, deals with the Rawandan Genocide and Swiss complicity.

Three of the books sound very intriguing. ADAM UND EVELYN by Ingo Schulze, DER TURM by Uwe Tellkamp, and HUNDERT TAGE by Lukas Bärfuss.

Schulze’s novel is formally impressive. It consists almost entirely of snappy, naturalistic dialogues, portioned out in tasty little morsels in chapters of a few pages each: that the reader is able to deduce the plot events is in itself no small feat.

And the Bärfuss sounds tough but intriguing.

In a final childish burst, wanting to prove to Agathe that he isn’t like the other white people and won’t run away at the first sign of trouble, he hides in his garden as the last foreigners are evacuated. The horrors of the ensuing hundred days are born of order, not chaos: “I know now that perfect order rules the perfect hell”, David says. Bärfuss takes the reader step by step down the path to genocide. He emphasizes the role of Western – and particularly Swiss – aid in supplying the modern tools of organization and communication that made atrocities on such a scale possible: “we gave them the pencil with which they wrote the death lists . . . we laid the telephone lines over which they gave the murder commands . . . we built the streets upon which the murderers drove to their victims”.

Bolaño Reviewed in the TLS

~ bythefirelight

The TLS has a good review of 2666. The review isn’t as fawning as some and tries to locate the source of Bolañomania. Like a previous El País article, the review finds similarities between Bolaño and the American literary tradition.

The author’s exuberant, informal voice echoed that of several American classics; while he cited Huckleberry Finn as an inspiration, the book clearly bore the imprint of On the Road and The Catcher in the Rye. In addition, many of his themes resonated with the puritan and romantic impulses of the American literary tradition. Bolaño’s world is open to self-invention and redemption, but also pervaded by ineradicable evil. It is bracingly egalitarian in its range of cultural references: The Savage Detectives borrows from the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon as well as from Mark Twain; 2666 references both Herman Melville and David Lynch; figures in his poems include Anacreon, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Sam Peckinpah and Godzilla. Readers of all tastes could thus feel at ease with this disquieting writer, and many sought his other translated works.

If you are still on the fence about 2666, the review is worth a read.

Castellanos Moya in Words Without Borders

~ bythefirelight

There is a short story by Castellanos Moya in Words Without Borders (via, Conversational Reading). It is a funy story about a three way trist in Madrid with a good twist ending, and usually I don’t like twists too much. The more I read of Castellanos Moya, the more I appreciate his humor.

Penguin Book Covers

~ bythefirelight

There is a great flicker sited with over 800 cover photos of Penguin books. If you like books it is worth a look.

Embroideries

~ bythefirelight

Embroideries
Marjane Satrapi

Embroideries is no Persepolis, but that is not to say it is without the same humor that Persepolis had. What makes this book funny are not Satrapi’s adventures, but those of her grandmother and her friends. The women range in ages from their 60’s to their 20’s and the book takes place after a meal when all the women sit together and talk and complain and laugh at the way their marriages and love affairs have gone. Although some of the women have been forced into arranged marriages (in one the man was 69 and the girl 13) and the men have used their power to have affairs, the women have an irrepressible spirit that allows them to laugh at the men and talk about their own fantasies and adventures. The stories are not just ribald humor, but a means to exercise power where there is little. On the first page it is clear what the role of women in society is when Satrapi notes that her grandmother always called her husband by his last name because one should respect one’s husband. Yet once the stories begin, the respect disappears and the verbal vengeance begins. For the reader the conversations are not just humor and power relationships, but a chance to see the hidden lives of Iranian women. It shows there is more to the Iran then just the mullahs.

Graphically speaking, the book doesn’t have quite the style as Persepolis. The black and white line drawings are still there, but at times pages are almost completely filled with words and perhaps a head to indicate who is speaking. The lack of drawings is a shame because her almost block print style is an effective way to tell an understated story. Let’s hope the next book has more drawings.

In One Story: Groff, Jodzio, Grattan

~ bythefirelight

I finished reading several issues of One Story the other day. I tend to let them stack up and then read them all at once as if they were in a collection of short stories. Four stories caught my eye and I thought it would be good to mention them here since usually its books that get all the press (and so I can remember the authors two months from now).

Sir Fleeting by Lauren Groff was the best of those that I read. Filled with excellent turns of phrase and a story that winds through 40 years, it describes the love affair that never was between two people. I particularly thought the narrator was well drawn with a cosmopolitan sensibility that doesn’t make one like the character, but at least respect her. Given that Groff has several published books, she is worth reading more.

Flight Path by John Jodzio and Foreign Girls by Thomas Grattan were both well written and did not have those coying ephinanic I-learned-that moments at the end of stories, which can be a little tiring.  Grattan had some nice moments and left plenty unsaid, and was able to brining a story about cultural alienation of Gorgian emigrants to a close in a way that related that alienation to something most Americans have experienced.

If you haven’t checked out One Story, I recommend you do. It is a refreshing way to present short stories.

Ana María Matute Interview in El País

~ bythefirelight

There is a great interview in El País with Ana María Matute. They talk about how her heath has kept her from writing recently even though she has been completely mentally able to write. When talking about literature they discuss Matute’s works for children and how she has often written from the perspective of children. It has been very important throughout her career to write for them, in part because there wasn’t anything good and she wanted to write for her son. They also talk about how her mother supported her writing, something rare during the Franco Period, and with her help would type up her drafts before submitting them to publishers.

There was fascinating questions about her style.

You seem especially predisposed to this type of literature [sparse], since you uphold plain and straightforward writing that is not easy to achieve; en fact, you say it is very difficult. Yes. It is that I want the whole world to understand me. I don’t want to torture the reader. No. There are a lot of writers that love to torturer the reader. Not me! [Said harshly] I like that the understand me. For this reason I write. In addition, I’m not such an elitist.

Usted parece especialmente predispuesta a este tipo de literatura, ya que defiende la escritura llana y sencilla, que no es tan fácil de conseguir; de hecho, usted dice que es muy difícil. Sí. Es que yo quiero que me entienda todo el mundo. Yo no quiero torturar al lector. No. Hay muchos escritores a los que les encanta torturar al lector. ¡A mí no! [Proclama con dureza]. A mí me gusta que me entiendan. Para eso escribo. Además, no soy tan elitista.

She also talked about her relationship to the Civil War and recent pushes to investigate the past in Spain.

Undoubtedly it is a traumatic experience. It was tremendous. I still can’t stand fireworks. They have the same sound as the bombs. The bombardments here in Barcelona were terrible. By sea and by air. We lived on Platón Street and back then I saw the sea from my room and I was completely frightened. You feel so powerless…My father would say: take everyone by the hand against the teacher’s wall. And we all would stay that way…[She remains quiet, in suspense, with a face of fear]. I also remember the lines. Those of us who were bourgeois children, those that didn’t go out without one’s father [she makes a face of horror], we quickly had to go stand in line to get bread, where nobody gave a damn. For us it was great! Because we had the liberty to come and go…We looked like mice wanting to go after cheese. My older brother and I discovered freedom. We enjoyed it a lot.

I have found that many people your age reject, perhaps out of fear, the plans to recover the historical memory, to remove this part of history from the past. It is that the way perhaps the fear hasn’t gone, but yes the sadness [remains], the laceration, and the waking of hatreds. I understand that those that have not lived the war have their own feelings, but for me it makes me shiver. To return to relive, to remember. I remember the attempted coup de Tejero [in 1981]. I was with my son in a taxi and we hear the shots on the radio. Look! And I became desperate. “Not again! No, God, not again!” My son asked me: “What’s happening mama?” The taxi cab driver and my son began to talk about what was happening and I would only say: “No, not again. No I will resist it.

Indudablemente es una experiencia muy traumática. Es tremenda. Yo todavía ahora no soporto los fuegos artificiales. Tienen el mismo sonido que las bombas. Los bombardeos aquí en Barcelona fueron terribles. Por mar y por aire. Nosotros vivíamos en la calle de Platón y entonces veía el mar desde mi cuarto y pasaba un miedo espantoso. Te sientes tan impotente… Mi padre decía: cojámonos todos de la mano, contra el muro maestro. Y así nos quedábamos todos… [Se queda quieta, en suspenso, con cara de susto]. También me acuerdo de las colas. Nosotros, que éramos unos niños de clase burguesa, de esos que no salían más que con las tatas [pone cara de horror], teníamos de pronto que ir a hacer colas para conseguir el pan, sin que a nadie le importara. ¡Para nosotros era fenomenal! Porque teníamos libertad de entrar y salir… Parecíamos ratones deseando salir del queso. Mi hermano mayor y yo descubrimos la libertad. La disfrutamos mucho.

He comprobado que mucha gente de su edad rechaza, quizá por miedo, los intentos de recuperar la memoria histórica, de remover esa parte del pasado. Es que de la guerra quizá ya no te queda el miedo, pero sí la tristeza, el desgarro y un despertar de odios. Entiendo que los que no han vivido la guerra tengan un sentimiento distinto, pero a mí me escalofría. Volver a repasar, a recordar. Me acuerdo del intento de golpe de Estado de Tejero [en 1981]. Yo iba con mi hijo en un taxi y oímos los tiros a través de la radio. ¡Mira!, me entró una desesperación… ¡Otra vez no! ¡No, por Dios, otra vez no! Mi hijo me preguntaba: “¿Pero qué te pasa, mamá?”. El taxista y él empezaron a hablar de lo que estaba pasando y yo sólo decía: “No, otra vez no. No lo resistiré”.

Arabic Translation – A History

~ bythefirelight

The Complete Review has a link to a review in the National of a new history of translation and Arabic, Prison-house of Language. The author raises some interesting issues about translation and power, but what caught my eye was this paragraph.

The translation of Arab literature into western languages yokes it to western sensibilities and conventions. As Kilito muses, “Who can read an Arab poet or novelist today without establishing a relationship between him and his European peers? We Arabs have invented a special way of reading: we read an Arabic text while thinking about the possibility of transferring it into a European language.” That long thread of Arab language and culture unravels under the heat of the European gaze. “Woe to the writers for whom we find no European counterparts: we simply turn away from them, leaving them in a dark, abandoned isthmus, a passage without mirrors to reflect their shadow or save them from loss and deathlike abandon.”

I have had the feeling at times when I read a story that was originally writen in Arabic, that it is so different in style and approach from the common ways of writing stories in the US and Europe that I’m not sure what to make of it. Is it good? Os it considered good there and I just don’t understand? Hassouna Moshbahi’s The Tortoise in Sardines and Oranges is a perfect example. Using the refrains “that was my first adventure” and “they beat me” the story mixes day dreams, boyish adventures and descriptions of everyday life in Tunisa. There is no ephinanic moment, no Frytag’s triangle, so what is going on? At such moments I think of the reverse, too, when Nagib Mahfouz talks about looking for models for his fiction. In each case, the cultural associations on each side make it difficult to know what the tradition is.

El País Reviews Bolaño and Bolanomania Again

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

El País has another article about Bolanomania in the United States. (You can see a previous post I did on the subject here). It talks about some of the reviews he has received, how most talk about his biography as much or more than the books and notes the controversy over his heroin usage. The article also notes that one’s reputation after death is based on luck. The author notes that the translation into English has created a different Bolaño, a Bolaño that Americans read from within their own cultural framework. Nothing surprising there. He goes on to compare Bolaño to Kerouac and suggests Americans are placing reading Kerouac and the Beat’s vitalism into Bolaños vitalism and from this reading they are culturally locating Bolaño.

Probably the North American reader recognizes a diction en these novels that es not dissimilar and lets the reader make the book their own, with local flavor and its riches. In English the books are not only very literary and miticulous, pasionate and brillant; they are, over all, vitalist.

The grand tradition of North American vitalist prose, in effect, has been the setting where the various styles of fiction characteristically Yankee were defined. The greatest stylist of this style is Jack Kerouac, and his On the Road, written in 1951 and rejected by 19 publishers before its publication in 1957, is a a modern classic. Even though the Beat Generation ended up being devoured by its own reputation, its works are more serious than the image of its authors, simplified to the point of being taken granted, and converted into merchandise. The brilliance of that vibrant, radiant, fluid, and unpredictable prose echoes like a spell in the pages of Bolaño.

Probablemente el lector norteamericano reconoce en estas novelas una dicción que no le es ajena, y que le permite hacer suya, con apetito local, su riqueza. En inglés no son sólo muy literarias y minuciosas, apasionadas y brillantes; son, sobre todo, vitalistas.

La gran tradición de la prosa norteamericana vitalista, en efecto, ha sido el escenario donde se definen los varios estilos de la ficción característicamente yanqui. El mayor estilista de este estilo es Jack Kerouac, y su On the road, escrita en 1951 y rechazada por 19 editoriales antes de su publicación en 1957, un clásico moderno. Aunque la generación Beat terminó devorada por su biografía popular, sus obras son más serias que la imagen de sus autores, simplificados al punto de darse por leídos, convertidos en mercancía residual. El brillo de esa prosa vivaz, irradiante, fluida, imprevisible, resuena como un conjuro en las páginas de Bolaño.

Alaa Al Aswany Reviewed in the New York Times

~ bythefirelight

The New York Times has a mixed review of Alaa Al Aswany’s new book. The reviewer doesn’t like it quite as much as the The Yacoubian Building. The book, which takes place in the US, does sound a little off and not as interesting as The Yacoubian Building.

Al Aswany writes about his Egyptian characters with charm, gentle humor and genuine conviction. It’s his depiction of Americans in their natural habitat that baffles. A beautiful young black woman is fired from her job at a shopping mall, supposedly because of her race; unable to find work, she succumbs to the indignity of posing as an “adult lingerie” model — for $1,000 an hour. A middle-aged woman, shunned by her husband, ventures into a sex shop to buy a vibrator and is treated to a lecture on the G spot and its role in female emancipation (“A woman is no longer a tool for man’s pleasure or his physical subordinate”), complete with bibliographic citations (Gräfenburg, Perry and Whipple).

Turbine – New Zealand Writing

~ bythefirelight

I’ve been reading through Turbine recently. There is some good stuff, but what caught my eye, and what I wish more magazines would do, are the audio clips of the authors reading the work. It adds more favor when you hear the words in the author’s own words, especially if the English you speak is spoken differently than their’s.

El País – Best Books of 2008

~ bythefirelight

El País has published there list of the best books of 2008. It is an interesting list and comparing it to the lists I’ve seen in major English language presses it is quickly obvious who many translations made the list. Chelsa Beach is number one on their list.

Sea of Poppies

~ bythefirelight

Sea of Poppies
Amitav Ghosh

Sea of Poppies, much like Glass Palace, is what one might call post-colonial recovery fiction, a novel that not only takes on the British colonial system with all its prejudices and injustices, but seeks to recover or reimagine the lives of people who left no records. In doing so Ghosh has created a trilogy with a large cast that represents the range of Indians and British whose lives either depended on or were disrupted by the colonial system. The novel’s scope and language are ambitious and one can easily get lost within the intertwining stories and arcane language. The question I had as I was reading the book, though, was if the history of it was enough? Sea of Poppies is richly plotted and all the threads of history and characters come together beautifully, but in recapturing the lives of the forgotten, are the characters really recovered?

The short answer is it is hard to say: the wealth of research is strong and obviously the details are quite good. And the scope the historic sweep of the novel is very accurate, something Ghosh does very well. And unlike the Glass Palace, there didn’t seem to be any dead spots in the novel—every scene was important to the story. Yet if there are no records then what are you recovering? One can recover the facts—rates of pay, living conditions—but the internal lives of the characters is much more difficult. So when one reads about the spiritual beliefs of one of the characters—especially when you are completely unfamiliar with the culture—are you rediscovering what they really thought, or what we’d like to think they thought? For the western and wealthy Indian characters, Ghosh is accurate in their portrayal. For the villagers and the Lascars, though, it is difficult to know, and, most likely, it will always be difficult to know. So the inner life is a best guess (true all inner lives are best guesses, but some can be based more closely in the actual), one that serves the story and that is not a bad thing, just a limitation.

Keeping those limitations in mind, the novel then is a fictionalization of the great colonial enterprise and if the inner lives of the characters are just guesses, the destruction of so many lives is exposed at the macro level, not in the emotional struggles but in Dickensian horror—the description of the opium plant is the perfect example and will make it clear how horrible the trade was. At times, the politics of the trade takes center stage and underscores the focus of the book. As one British characters says, “We need only think of the poor Indian peasant — what will become of  him if his opium can’t be sold in China? Bloody hurremzads can hardly eat now: they’ll perish by the crore.”

Yet for all the callousness of the British characters, it is not a harsh world in its fictional outcome. Certain characters are living in poverty and don’t have a much of a future, but there is never an overwhelming sense of impending doom or urgency, and just when one of the main characters is threatened with death, something will come along just in time to save him. Instead, Ghosh makes clear from the beginning that all the main characters will be in Deeti’s shrines, suggesting that everything is going to work out just fine. The lack of narrative tension, perhaps, is the result of so much history, not only the details, but telling the story as if it already had happened. The experience of reading is not about what is going to happen next, but where is everyone going to end up in the end, since you know it is all going to work out anyway.

Sea of Poppies is an impressive bit of writing and worth the read and I hope the rest of the trilogy is written soon. The novel may feel a little preordained as it seeks to fulfill its purpose, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting.

A Literary Resolution

~ bythefirelight

I don’t like resolutions that much, but I think this one will work. My plan is to read one book in Spanish for every two books I read in English. I won’t be reading monsters like 2666 in Spanish, but shorter 200-300 page books should make this a doable resolution.

Best First Line In A Film Review

~ bythefirelight

Kenneth Turan’s review of Valkyrie has this great first line.

Hollywood and the people who brought you World War II have been making beautiful music together for decades, and “Valkyrie,” the new Tom Cruise vehicle, doesn’t disturb that melody.

Author Interview Shows – El publico lee

~ bythefirelight

I was watching El publico lee on Canal Sur the other day and I began to think about who this show differed from some of the others I’ve seen in the recent past on in the US. For those of you who don’t know, El publico lee is a Spanish author interview show. But it also has people from the general public who have read the book and ask the author questions. Between the sets and the seriousness Canal Sur gives to the author it makes for, perhaps, a better show than those I’ve seen in the US. That said, I’ve never thought Book TV on CSPAN2 was that bad, except that it doesn’t cover any fiction. If you understand Spanish I would give it a look. My one complaint is they don’t archive more than two weeks of shows, so if you miss it, that’s too bad. I never did get to watch the end of the interview with Najat el Hachni and the book sounded interesting.

Bolaño, Enrique Lihn, and Jorge Edwards

~ bythefirelight

I found one review and one story whose discovery were perfectly timed. The first, is a review in Letras Libres of a new book by Jorge Edwards. The second is a short story Meeting with Enrique Lihn by Bolaño in the New Yorker. The two items coincide nicely because the Bolaño story, although not particularly evident in the story what role Lihn performs in Bolaño’s personal pantheon, he is obviously someone, unlike Paz, worthy of moving through a dreamscape.

Edwards book, according to Edmundo Paz Soldán, uses a character based on Lihn to represent a generalized view of one whole generation, the generation of the 40’s and 50’s, before Bolaño and after Neruda. The book has many similarities to The Savage Detectives: the bohemian life style, the traveling here and there, the nightlife, the disgust at the established poet, in this case Neruda. But unlike the savage detectives, the Poet’s writing is what takes center stage.

En Los detectives salvajes, Belano y Lima son la periferia de la neovanguardia, hombres en fuga que para resistir al sistema, a la institución de la literatura, se entregan a la poesía como una experiencia vital. Para el Poeta de Edwards, la experiencia es intensa, pero la obra se antepone siempre a esta: “En los últimos días había empezado a escribir de nuevo en uno de sus cuadernos escolares. Eran hileras de versos que se curvaban, se entrechocaban y se desplomaban por las orillas, asomándose a veces en el otro lado de las páginas.”

In the Savage Detectives, Belano and Lima are peripheral to the neovanguard, men in flight to resist the system, literary instruction, and to live poetry as a vital experience. For Edward’s poet, the experiences are intense, but the work is always first: “In the last few days I had begun to write again in a student’s notebook. They were lines of verse that curve and chatter and tumble down by the shore, peeking out at times on the other side of the page.

It is an interesting article and gives a wider frame of reference to Bolaño, especially given the story in the New Yorker. It seems Bolaño wasn’t the only Chilean poet to reject so throughly what came before.

On a different note, the opening sentence is a great little capsule of Chilean literary controversies of the last few years.

El mundillo literario chileno suele alborotarse cada tanto con polémicas genuinas y otras que son más bien gratuitas. En las últimas décadas le tocó a Alberto Fuguet y Sergio Gómez debido a la antología McOndo, y a Roberto Bolaño y Diamela Eltit, enfrentados por unas declaraciones nada diplomáticas del primero; este año el turno ha sido de Jorge Edwards (Santiago, 1931), ese escritor de modales tan finos que es fácil confundirlo con un diplomático (de hecho, lo ha sido durante muchos años).

The Informer – 1935

~ bythefirelight

Each era makes bad films in its own way and with its own conventions that come from accepted styles of acting and writing that when used well still work 70 years latter, but when misused make a film laughable remnant of a time long past. The Informer commits several sins that it make it hard to take seriously.

The film tells the story of an an ex-IRA man, Gypo Nolan, who was kicked out of the IRA because he couldn’t execute a man and let him escape and as a consequence is now broke. Gypo is desperate to leave Ireland with his girl because neither the English nor the IRA trust him. To raise money he turns in his friend for 20 pounds, the same price for two tickets two America. His friend is killed when the English try to arrest him and Gypo begins to feel guilty and heads out into Dublin on an all night bender where he spends all his money. The IRA figures out it is him and they take him to a trial where he is judged and eventually killed while trying to escape.

What makes the film so silly is not so much Gypo and the adventures he has in Dublin while he drinks. In many ways the Gypo’s drunkenness is one of the best examples of the exuberant internalization acting style of the 30’s, where the actor mixes some of the pantomime from the silent era which gives him pronounced movements with loud and boisterous talk to make the characterization in language as much as in movement. No, what makes it silly are the supporting roles. One could see a Gypo go off the edge, even if to our sensibilities it is more an metaphorical than a realistic portrayal. The supporting characters are stiff and wooden and, worse, they add the weakest of melodramatic elements. The head of the IRA unit is a stiff and by the book man and his love is the sister of the man who was betrayed. In one comic scene they express their love is such melodramatic ways you can’t help but laugh, and if you don’t laugh its because you are wondering what this scene is doing in the film. Moreover, she is the least impassioned woman you have ever seen. Her brother has been murdered and she attends the trial in such a calm manner you’d think she was there for a parking ticket. The week melodrama and the stiff acting don’t balance well with the impressionistic (possibly influenced by the Germans) parts of the film.

The way the IRA is portrayed is also strange. The IRA is a force of complete restraint and law, and not only do its commanders insist on fair trials, but even the accused are willing to accept the verdicts. When Gypo is shot by the IRA and is dying he asks for forgiveness of the sister and accepts that he shouldn’t have betrayed his friend and the IRA. The IRA only has one gun man who is evil, but the IRA is shown to be able to handle him and his desire for excess, and those who do the executions such as Gypo, and latter another young innocent, are too good to do it and will not commit murder. There is little complexity to the role of the IRA and at worst they are a flawed force for good.

Munich

~ bythefirelight

I’m not too interested in whether Munich is a good film (in the sense of well shot, well acted it is) but in what way Spielberg questions the use of violence, since throughout the movie his characters express, hesitation, and finally those still living refuse to have anything to do with violence. Particularly, it is the character of Avner Kaufman that seems to suggest some week thinking on the part of the film maker. It is not so much that Avner looses faith in the mission, nor that Ephraim’s mechanical and ruthless planing is upsetting, but you have the impression that the reason for the movie to be is so that it can have a character renounce the violence. Sure the characters argue about the mission and the growing sense of its endlessness, but it is not the violence they are renouncing, but the endlessness of it. These are two different things, and the movie mixes the two ideas quite freely. They are not the same and what seems like a film that renounces the eye for an eye violence is confused and though it suggest there is an endlessness to it, it does not say attacking your enemies is wrong. Instead, one could suggest it is acceptable as long as the goal is defined (of course, these goals often change once the violence starts). Or one could suggest as long as long as the killing is not endless, or you rotate out your assassins more frequently, these kind of missions are acceptable.

The danger with films that are anti-war or anti-violence is that they seldom are. As Anthony Swaford pointed out, anti-war films are just as easily pro-war films. And in the hands of Spielberg who is often tempted by his great skills as a film maker to make an entertaining film, the message, what ever it is supposed to be, is usually confused.