Carlos Fuentes has won the González-Ruano prize for journalism for the article El Yucatán de Lara Zavala which is a book review of Península, península, by Hernán Lara Zavala. The article is interesting if you are interested in Mexican history and literature and gives a brief history of the Mexican authors who have used history in their works. The also sounds interesting. You can read another review at Letras Libres too.
Review
Zoetrope All Story: The Latin American Issue
I finished reading Zoetrope All Story: The Latin American Issue a week ago and have sometime to think about the quality of the stories. Before I start, though, I must say it was a pleasant surprise to have the text both in English and Spanish, which gave me a chance to read the stories in the original.
On the whole I wasn’t impressed with the stories. Many of them just weren’t that interesting to me. I’m not sure exactly why. Some of it was the writing style, which didn’t interest me too much, but mostly it was the choice of subjects. The worst was the story about the porn actor. I stopped reading it after a page and a half.
There were several stories, though, that did stand out. Tuesday Meetings by Slavko Zupcic was probably the best. The writing was fresh and the story about inmates in an asylum waiting for the pope’s visit was interesting and funny. Insular Menu by Ronaldo Menéndez from Cuba talk of the privations in Castro’s Cuba with a humor that didn’t dwell on the politics but human survival, although, cat lovers shouldn’t read the story. An Open Secret by the late Aura Estrada had some nice touches, although I think the story had more to do with Juan Rulfo than Borges. And, finally, Family by Rodrigo Hasbún was had some nice shifting perspective.
Zoetrope All Story: The Latin American Issue isn’t the best of Latin America, but a sampling of young writers. Some of these writers are very good and are worth a further look. Considering it can take years before young writers can make it into English, this is a good collection even if it is a little uneven.
The General (El General) – A Review
The General is a documentary about Plutarco Elías Calles, the former President and revolutionary general. But in watching it you will not learn much about the man. Instead, what you learn is fleeting, brief, like the memories of his daughter whose voice describe what he and Mexico were like after the Revolution. The daughter’s memories and the bits of history that fill out his story are fragments of a larger story: the failure of the Revolution to live up to its promises.
The General is Calles’ great grand daughter’s attempt to discover who Calles was and what his legacy was. She looks not only at the historical sources, newspapers, her grandmother’s recorded memoirs, but the lives of the Mexicans in Mexico City. Did the brutality of his regime change anything? Did the Revolution itself change anything? The verdict is no. With 500,000 street vendors in Mexico City 80 years after his presidency, it is obvious what ever he left Mexico it didn’t work. The interviews with the people of Mexico City all come to one conclusion: nothing has changed and the rich still get away with everything while the poor still suffer.
The General is a must for anyone who is interested in Mexico. Although it isn’t a traditional history of Calles, the interweaving of history, memory and documentary makes for a good film.
Lovely Loneliness (Amorosa Soledad) – A Review
Lovely Loneliness is a sweet film of broken romance and the loneliness that follows. Following the Soledad (Inés Efron) as she slowly gets over her boy friend who dumped her, the movie isn’t concerned with plot, but the interior life of Soledad. Soledad isn’t morose, though. Far from it. She goes about her life with a certain style that lets her survive. She is also a little strange. She is probably a hypochondriac. There are many scenes of her going to the doctor’s office or checking her blood pressure with her home blood pressure machine. Between the scenes of her loneliness in her apartment and those of her medical preoccupations, Soledad is a captivating mix of the lost and the eccentric. Efron’s portrayal is excellent and she is quite captivating. The film is funny, too, but jokes are not the point. Instead, it is the slight melancholy that seems to be just off screen as if Soledad was just barely surviving, that makes the movie enjoyable. For a first film, it is a solid movie and one worth watching.
Kanchivaram – A Review
Kanchivaram (A Communist Confession) is a beautiful and sad film, but not an oppressive film of endless sorrow. And despite the foreshadowing of doom that the frame story creates there is humor and a resolution, that dark, is in the end hopeful.
The SIFF guide describes the film quite well:
Every Indian bride dreams of wearing a delicate Kanchivaram sari on her wedding day, no matter her caste. On the day of his daughter’s “first feeding,” Vengadam (Prakash Raj) promises her one of the same expensive saris that he weaves daily for the highest caste in India. Despite resistance from the village community and fears that an unfulfilled promise will lead to a curse, Vengadam risks his livelihood to steal individual vivid silk threads from his workplace. Every night, he secretly and patiently weaves his daughter’s sari. As his daughter’s wedding day approaches, a communist activist initiates strikes against the mill owners, preventing Vengadam from completing the sari and from keeping his promise.
Ultimately, Vengadam, who is the leader of the strikers, ends the strike so he can finish the sari before his daughter’s wedding day. In doing so he breaks the bond between the two families and when the father of the groom attacks him for his cowardice in ending the strike, the mill owners discover he is stealing thread. He is sent to prison and only release for two days to see his daughter who has fallen down a well and is paralyzed. Seeing she has no future in a land that neither respects the poor, nor women, he poisons her. Although, he could not provide her the sari on her wedding day, he can provide it for her funeral. The last we see Vengadam he has sunk into madness and is pulling the silk sari that is to short to cover her whole body from her head to her feet over and over, unable to realize he came close to giving her a silk silk.
What makes the film intriguing besides its will written story is the politics of the film. Although they live in misery and poverty, Vengadam has a bicycle and they make enough to eat. They do not live in the starkest of poverty, yet they do earn much from their highly skilled labor. While the organizer is a communist and has pictures of Lenin the workers only are interested in forming a union or a cooperative. The workers suffer for months during the strike, some even die. Yet they are all committed to the strike. Vengadam suffers the least because he had a little money saved up. In a film with such political leanings, the locus of the film is in the personal and for Vengadam the personal is where one suffers. At the end of the film after Vengadam has gone mad, the film makers note that just a few years latter after independence, the state voted communists in and the workers formed cooperatives that exist today and pay the workers well.
Kanchivaram is part history and part political work. It borders on the misery of the poor, yet it is a film that is also of those who should not be poor, those have skills. So in this sense the film is tragic and hopeful at the same time. Sad for one family, but hopeful for the weavers as a whole. This mix distances the viewer some what from the brutality that comes from poverty and makes the film seem lighter than it should. Adding to this is the framing narrative of the bus ride which adds comedy. So after watching it you don’t have so much a sense of injustice exists, but it is too bad for that one family. That shift in focus makes the politics more subtle and ultimately the film more interesting.
Kanchivaram (A Communist Confession) is a beautiful and sad film, but not an oppressive film of endless sorrow. And despite the foreshadowing of doom that the frame story creates there is humor and a resolution, that dark, is in the end hopeful.
The SIFF guide describes the film quite well:
Every Indian bride dreams of wearing a delicate Kanchivaram sari on her wedding day, no matter her caste. On the day of his daughter’s “first feeding,” Vengadam (Prakash Raj) promises her one of the same expensive saris that he weaves daily for the highest caste in India. Despite resistance from the village community and fears that an unfulfilled promise will lead to a curse, Vengadam risks his livelihood to steal individual vivid silk threads from his workplace. Every night, he secretly and patiently weaves his daughter’s sari. As his daughter’s wedding day approaches, a communist activist initiates strikes against the mill owners, preventing Vengadam from completing the sari and from keeping his promise.
Ultimately, Vengadam, who is the leader of the strikers, ends the strike so he can finish the sari before his daughter’s wedding day. In doing so he breaks the bond between the two families and when the father of the groom attacks him for his cowerdice in ending the strike, the mill owners descover he is stealing thread. He is sent to prison and only release for two days to see his daughter who has fallen down a well and is paralized. Seeing she has no future in a land that neither respects the poor, nor women, he poisons her. Th
Stunning colors punctuate this strong Tamil-language narrative, where the setting acts as another character in the well-woven script. Though history contextualizes Kanchivaram it’s Vengadam’s strong desire that drives the film’s mystical tone and sensitive approach to the social realities of India’s caste structure.
Four Chapters – A Review
Four Chapters is one of those films where you have the feeling that you might have gotten just a bit more if you were from the country of origin. While meditative, well shot, and having a slow beauty, the spiritual search seems distant and troubled, as if something is missing. And perhaps that is the point—spiritual journeys are never easy.
Based on Rabindranath Tagore’s Four Chapters, Sachish is a young man who breaks with his father’s Hindu religious beliefs to follow his reformist uncle who is willing to feed poor Muslims, which scandalizes the family. When his brother’s young mistress becomes pregnant and is abandoned by him, Sachish offers to marry her to save her from the street. Again, it creates a scandal and the mistress kills herself before the wedding can occur. His uncle then begings a hospital, but soon sucumbs to a fever and dies, leaving Sachish grief stricken. He joins an ashram where he has given up all worldly attachment and follows a guru. Sachish’s friend comes to the ashram seeking to convince Sachish that the guru is a fraud, but, instead, he stays with Sachish to see if faith could be better than the skepticism of his uncle. While they are with the guru they meet Damini who is a widow and a ward of the guru. She sees Sachish and wants to break him free from his allegence to the guru and marry her. Although she tries, he is unwilling. Eventually, they leave the guru so Sachish can find an even deeper faith. Damini who has no other options marries Sachish’s friend who has grown attached to her. Damini and her husband return to the world of work while the last we see of Sachish he is staring at the sea watching singing Sufis walk by.
Four Chapters is even handed in the way it looks at faith. At first it seems as if the guru is going to be a corrupt man, more interested in the physical world than the spiritual. He does need money to run his ashram, but he doesn’t seem to spend it on himself. He is a patriarchal man who thinks women need to be taken care of and supervised. Instead, the criticism is aimed more at the rich families who invite in the gurus, pay them for personal advice, then continue their profligate lives. The gurus are just answering a call. This is why Sachish has to leave the ashram and find something even more spiritual, something that leaves the work of the guru behind. At the beginning of the movie it is Sachish’s father who is spiritual but also doesn’t want to have anything to do with poor Muslims. Sachish who first takes on the asceticism of social reform is natural upset by this and distances himself from his family. It this initial conflict that frames the search for spiritual meaning against the use of spiritualism as something to make you feel better about yourself.
Four Chapters is also interested in looking at how women are treated. Damini has no freedom. As a widow she is dependent of the guru who received her husbands estate, an estate which Damini’s father gave her. She becomes a prisoner in her own estate. To find freedom she must marry again. This is why she trys to attach herself to Sachish. Damini is in a similar position to the woman that Sachish was going to marry at the beginning of the film. She, too, didn’t have any options for life without a man.
Four Chapters is a good film that blends the search for spiritual faith with that of social criticism. It is interested in the subtleties of hypocrisy rather than out and out castigation. That stance makes it a subtle and, at times, slow. Nevertheless, it is worth seeing.
Inland – A Review
The mistake I made in selecting this film was not paying attention to the last line of the review which said the film ” compared to Antonioni.” Oh, the tedium for this loose (which is kind) and boring film. When you read the description below you might think it has potential but only when you get one hour into it do you even know why Malek is in the country side. But what was worse were all the long scenes of almost nothing, just the country side going by. Perhaps there was 20 minutes of dialog in over 130 minutes. Definitely not worth seeing. The only saving grace was the five minute Raï party, which gave you some idea how a traditional party might go. Otherwise not worth the time. If only someone had written a better movie to go along with the synopsis.
Malek is a reclusive topographer who accepts a commission to survey a remote part of western Algeria in order to extend the electrical grid. He arrives to find the area has been decimated by religious fundamentalists who have only recently cleared out. Malek meets the local police, the shepherds who are beginning to return, and villagers who invite him to a makeshift party. In the middle of the night, he is awakened by the sound of explosions. Not to worry, explains a local man. When the cicadas land in the sand, it’s enough to trigger off the buried booby-traps. But as Malek soon realizes, it isn’t cicadas setting off the mines, but refugees trying to reach the coast and a boat for Spain. The next day he finds a young woman, exhausted and terrified, hiding in a corner of his shack. Malek decides to drive her to the border, and together they set out toward some indeterminate vanishing point on the horizon. These present-day realities are interspersed with flashbacks to the idealistic political debates of his youth, and set against a soundtrack that mixes alternative rock, Nigerian Afrobeat, and Algerian Rai. With his minimalist approach to plot and dialogue, and mesmerizing cinematography, director Tariq Teguia has been compared to Antonioni. (from the SIFF site)
The Admiral – A Review
Picking a movie because it was the most expensive Russian film ever made may not be the best way to go. While the Admiral is full of epic battles, the mixing of the love story which seemed wooden and more foreordained than an element of discovery made the movie an epic cliché.
The Admiral is about Admiral Alexander Kolchak who was a Russian Admiral during World War I and after the revolution the supreme leader of the White army. Kolchak is a brave man and an expert naval officer whose prowess leads him to command the Baltic Fleet in the last days of World War I. He is a tough religious man who doesn’t hesitate to put himself in harm’s way. He is also a ladies man and the movie also follows his love affair with the wife of one of his junior officers. The mercurial romance is interspersed throughout the battle scenes and in time they can’t live without each other and she follows him to his eventual execution in 1920.
While the combat scenes were put together well and the opening naval battle is impressive, the film is more concerned with the epic than the characters. It seemed as if the film makers had a series of known historical moments they needed to show but didn’t understand how to create characters to make those moments flow together. History didn’t move the characters against a back drop of action; instead, history moved action against a backdrop of characters. If there were less battles and more scenes between the characters, the story might have held together better. Considering how much time the film makers spent following a Cossack army that was going to save the Admiral, it is obvious that the epic was more important. It is even more obvious when they had his lover read letters out loud while showing combat scenes, making a perverse and clichéd mix of love and war.
Looking at the film as a product of Russia and not just an epic, it becomes obvious that there is a certain amount of hagiography at work in the film. Kolchak is a fervent nationalist and a man who believes in a strong hand on government. When offered the command of navy from Kerensky he says only if he can have strict discipline. In combat he fearlessly leads his men putting himself where he could be killed and leading them in prayer before each battle. He is the perfect mix of the ideal non Soviet Russian: brave, religious, and strict. What is even more interesting is what is missing from the movie: his insistence on exterminating rebellious groups; his execution of 25,000 Russians who rebelled against him; his inability to keep his allies, the Checs and the Poles on his side. Instead of a complicated picture of yet another Russian dictator, the film makers have created a hero of the lost cause. In Putin’s Russia, perhaps this is the model of the new Russian hero.
While the Admiral is steeped in clichés, it is certainly put together well and is an interesting look into what Russia thinks of its past.
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A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature – A Review
A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature
The book traces the development of modern Arabic literature from the early 20th century, finding its first exemplar in Taha Hussein in Egypt. What makes the literature modern is its break from Arabic poetry, which was the primary form of literature, towards prose based, in part, on western models. The early works, especially in Egypt, were concerned with defining what the new Arab states would be like and what is the role of tradition and western influence. Usually these works were written in a realistic manner. Illustrating that point, the book focuses on the works of Mahfouz and shows how his earlier works fit that model.
Latter as disappointment and dissolution came to the Arab world, it too was reflected in the literature. Authors like Al-ghitani began to use more post modern (although in his case he goes to much earlier times for source material) approaches to describe the problems besetting the countries of the authors, such as the the power of the west, the despotism of Arab regimes, and an uncertainty about the future.
Each author he covers, with the exception of Mahfouz, receives about a page or two of coverage. A Brief Introduction sticks to works, primarily novels and short fiction, available in English and originally written in Arabic. This approach leaves out authors such as Assia Djebar, who writes in French, and doesn’t examine the breath of a writers work which would be useful to non Arabic speakers. However, in reading the book a reader will find a great list of books to read, if the reader can find them.
While A Brief Introduction is a useful introduction its brevity makes for some choppy sections and the inclusion of poetry, a subject in itself, seems forced and might have been left for a different book. That said, his descriptions of the books he does write about make for a good guide and should arouse one’s curiosity.
The Maid – A Review
The Maid is one of those claustrophobic movies that seldom roams into varied locations and keeps to one character almost all the time, yet feels open and finds in the littlest of actions an expansive interior world. The interior world for the viewer, though, is a mystery, because it is unverbalized. The Maid is a visual movie, almost seeming like a narratorless documentary. It is in the subtle scenes and excellent acting of the actor who plays Raquel that makes the anything but dry.
As the movie opens that employs Raquel is trying to celebrate her 40th birthday. She is unwilling to celebrate it with them, though. Is she shy, or afraid? It is not clear. What is obvious is she is a quiet, pensive character. She goes about her work quickly and efficiently, but also disturbs the older daughter while sleeping in a fit of vindictiveness. She protests to the mother of the family about bringing in another maid to helper, saying she has always taken care of the family for 20 years. When a maid is brought in anyway, she locks her out of the house. When another maid is brought in she locks her out of the house too. Through all this strange behavior, though, the family keeps her. Finally, though, what ever was bothering her leads to her collapse and she ends up in the hospital driven in a panic by the family as if she was their own child. While she is in the hospital the family brings in a new maid, Lucy. Lucy is unlike the other maids and when Raquel returns to work and tries to lock her out of the house instead of trying to get back in the house, begins to nude sunbathe. It breaks the ice between them and they soon become friends and Raquel goes with her to her family’s farm for Christmas, something it is implied she hadn’t done since she’d lived with the family. When Lucy leaves, Raquel is disappointed, but instead of retreating into her old shell, takes up one of Lucy’s hobbies, jogging. As the movie ends Raquel is running down a street in listening to music and dressed just like Lucy when she went jogging.
Raquel is a mystery. What is bothering her and why is she taking it out on the family? What is apparent is her need for a wider experience, not so much in adventures in the world, but among friends. She has lived with a very paternal family that appreciates her, but does constrain her. She has lived with them for 20 years and has known almost nothing else. She is cut off from her family for a reason that is never explained but obviously bothers her. She is part child that has never grown moving into the family at 20 and a perfectionist who can no longer stand the exactitude. When she goes to Lucy’s she goes to bed with Lucy’s uncle but is unable to consummate the night probably because it is outside her experience. Moreover, the family she lives with is very religious with crucifixes in every room and prayers every night. Between her youth, her inexperience and the family she lives with, she is struggling to grow up. When Lucy comes, she presents a new avenue, not just another maid just like her. The final scene of the film is of Raquel taking on not only the persona of Lucy, but a new persona that is free of the house and her past.
The even handedness of the film as it finds Raquel and Raquel finds herself is what makes the film so good. It is a search without the conventions of search; a movie of self discovery without the clichés of self discovery. It is a movie where the questions you are left with will begin the search and extend the film beyond the theater—the mark of a good film.
Star Trek – A Review
You have a few options when thinking about a movie like Star Trek. You can either lambaste it for the silliness of the action genre, or try to think about it on its own terms, within its own genre. Certainly the former can only lead to disappointment, because this is a pure action movie filled with explosions and malevolent characters that create a black and white element. As an action movie, Star Trek is typical: characters without depth, or are action standards such as the troubled hot head. Granted Star Trek relies on a back story with forty years of history that fills in the gaps, but take that away and the movie is easily summed up: bad guys come to town, brave hot head saves everyone.
Thinking about the movie in its own terms as sci-fi or part of the Star Trek family the movie does improve, but not really that much. Sure, a fan of Star Trek has to see it to know what is being done with the story, but it doesn’t have much more to offer. What made it weak wasn’t so much the rewriting of the Star Trek time line, but the silliness of it. How can a bunch of cadets become captains, etc. so quickly? For good or bad, Star Trek had the logic of a different world where there were rules that lead one to where they are. In this movie, to get Kirk to be the captain, the film makers had to jump him from cadet to captain in five minutes. It seems like a quibble, but it was the kind of shortcut that is typical of an action movie: a nobody saves the day.
I will skip tiresome introductions and pet phrases of the supporting cast, something that seemed to be required, but was usually tedious and seemed to be more about pleasing the old Trek fans, than creating a more plausible story. I suppose Wrath of Khan was probably the best of the films, most likely because they were able to balance the characters so much better. Besides possibly the Borg Queen, is there a memorable villain from another Star Trek movie?
The movie is two hours of time spent, nothing more, even if you are a fan of Star Trek.
Jetlag – A Review
Jetlag by Etgar Keret is a short but fascinating collection of five short stories set to drawings by five different Israeli artists: Mira Friedman, Batia Kolton, Rutu Modan, Yirmi Pinkus, Itzik Rennert. Keret, one of Israel’s best writers, creates what might be better called fables. His stories are brief and always have an element of unrealty to them. The unreality, though, is designed to turn the reader back to the strangeness of reality.
The first story is about a magician who suddenly begins to have trouble pulling the rabbit out of the hat. One time he pulls a bloody rabbit’s head from the hat and in a another he pulls a dead baby. But the audience seems to love it and a child keeps the bloody head of the rabbit as a memento. Instead of magic revealing the wondrous, the unfathomable becomes the way the audiences accept death and the grotesque as entertainment. The magician gives up his trade, and finishes the story saying,
…I don’t do much of anything. I just lie in bed and think about the rabbit’s head and the baby’s body. As if they’re some clues to a riddle, as if somebody was trying to tell me something; that now it’s not really the best of times for rabbits or for babies. That it’s not the best of times for magicians.
In the story Jetlag the narrator finds himself on an airplane where a flight attendant is paying extra attention to him. At first it seems as if she wants him to join the clichéd mile high club with her. A ten year-old girl at his side tells him he should go have sex with her, then claims she is a 30 year-old dwarf smuggling heroin. Eventually, the narrator goes to the back of the plane to talk to the flight attendant. She doesn’t want to have sex with him, but instead, wants to give him a parachute because the plane has orders to crash. The flight attendant says they crash a plane every year or two so that passengers will take flight safety seriously. As the story ends he says, the rescue looked quite heart warming on TV. Again, Keret takes liberties with a reality that has become all too common—the disaster coverage on TV—and uses it as an opportunity to look at it as a fiction, switching genres to make it observable. What should be a horror, becomes just entertainment.
In each of the stories Keret is able to say something about modern society, its violence, its loneliness, its spectator culture, and question how it effects us. His stories are marvels of compression and an unreality that seems real.
Chef’s Special – A Review
Big Night meets the Bird Cage might be the best way to describe this gay cooking comedy. It was funny in the way that slapstick and exaggerated characters can be: fun for a while, but not good for a repeat viewing. It was an at times funny movie filled with stereotypes that were played well: the flamboyant gay man, the ex-punk, the desperately lonely woman, the parents who are unable to understand the gay son and either make constant jokes or are constantly praying to God for his salvation. Mix all those together and you’re bound to get some laughs. At times, though, the movie seemed a little slow, in part because it is more than just comedy. The chef also has two children with whom he has a bad relationship. In particular, the relationship with the son is troubled and the film is much more serious. In these scenes the film slows down and could have been treated a little better in serious film. The real problems between the two are somewhat distracting and would be better served in a less comedic way where the topic is respected more.
The description from the SIFF guide describes the part of the film quite well: “Maxi is a master chef who wants a Michelin star so badly he can taste it. After years of toiling in his chic Madrid restaurant, he feels he’s on the brink of culinary superstardom—that is, until Maxi’s two estranged children show up on his doorstep. Not only are the children grieving over the recent death of their mother, they must now come to terms with their father’s openly gay lifestyle. To complicate matters further, Horacio, a sexy Argentine ex-soccer star, moves in next door, diverting the attentions of both Maxi and Alex, the restaurant’s unstable maître d’.” The soccer player, though, is in the closet becuase he is afraid of the homophobic sports world.
In all it is a light romantic/family/food comedy that has its moments.
Manga, Genre and Osamu Tezuka in Words Without Borders
Yani Mentzas makes some interesting points about how one should view the work of Manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka, and how in general the graphic novel should be approached when trying to make it more serious.
Narrative comics can mature in two diverging ways: either by jettisoning the juvenile framework in favor of standards borrowed from realism, or by staying within the framework to analyze and foreground its themes, especially the controlling one, “that which exceeds man.” My personal preference is against the former path, which leads to comics that give an impression of wanting to be art, cinema, or literature rather than comics and that indeed seem only the more shame-faced the better they are. I believe the latter is the royal road of intelligent comics in that it sees the merits of cartooning’s openness to caricature, acceptance of absurdity, and unflagging curiosity about that which exceeds man.
I’m not sure I agree completely but he does have a point. However, I think there is a mistake in equating the medium, pictures and words, with the genre, superhero or fantastic stories. Having tried to read Charles Burns’ Black Hole, a richly drawn work, I couldn’t stand the fantasy element. On the other hand, Shortcomings a fine graphic novel is so chatty perhaps it would have been better as a play.
He does make an interesting point about the transition to or the search for more serious work. A market does need to develop for everything:
What’s more striking in fact is the comparable paucity of these elements in the early oeuvre of the master who’d eventually come to employ them so deftly. We could attribute this difference to the fact that aging tends to inculcate a greater interest in spirituality, but Tezuka’s mature phase began when he was in his forties, which is hardly old. The better answer has to do with intended readership; to simplify a little but not much, in his early period before 1970 Tezuka wrote for children, while he had grownups in mind after the seventies due to an immense demographic shift in manga buying.
News from the Empire – A Brief Review
I just finished Fernando del Paso’s News from the Empire
New Urban British Fiction in the TLS
The TLS has a good write up of some interesting first fiction from Britain. It sounds interesting, perhaps because the themes and settings resonate with an image on Britain I have from the 80s.
Coventry, the setting for Mez Packer’s witty, fast-paced thriller, Among Thieves, was settled by Jamaicans in great numbers in the 1950s and 60s thanks to the opportunities for work. Jamaican ska music, a speedy jazz-tinged shuffle-beat, took off in Coventry, as it did elsewhere in urban Britain, and before long its driving, dance-floor rhythms attracted groups of skinheads and scooter- riding Mods. (Sometimes, if suitably dressed in Crombies and sharp Trevira suits, Jamaicans were even allowed to join the skinhead gangs.) Ska was, triumphantly, a Commonwealth music, which brought together the poor whites and poor blacks of Britain. In the late 1970s it was revived in Coventry by local “2 Tone” bands, such as The Specials and The Selecter, who sought to emulate the Jamaican ska legends Derrick Morgan and Desmond Dekker.
Packer’s novel unfolds in the Midlands city in 1984, at the fag-end of the 2 Tone period when, as the author tells us, it was “cool to have black mates”. Jez, a ska-loving “Cov lad” and a wheeler-dealer, is sent to Spain with a Jamaican rude boy associate, Bas, to change a suitcaseful of fake dollars; the counterfeit money came from a disastrous drug deal made with IRA gangsters back in Coventry. As it charts ever more dodgy Spanish business, the novel recalls Robin Cook’s cult crime memoir The Crust on its Uppers (1962), about a similarly doomed attempt to smuggle counterfeit notes abroad. Packer, like Cook, crams her novel with comic characters such as the murderous Albanian Mehment Lucca, whose Balkan sense of justice leads him to commit an eye-for-an-eye revenge killing. The other bad hats include Pads and Andy, middle-class Coventry students who deal in drugs and credit card scams when not studying Politics and Sociology. The novel is spiked with Jamaican vernacular (“raasclot”, “bwoy”) and a rich criminal slang. Packer lovingly evokes Coventry in the 1980s, a city on the point of disintegration, it seems, its theatres and social clubs closed down – as conjured by the Specials in their hit single “Ghost Town”. Packer, who has a gift for quirky conversational description and social satire, is a promising new novelist.
Ghost Town by the Specials
Flannery O’Connor Discussed on Leonard Lopate and NYRB
A new biography of Flannery O’Connor has led to a lengthy review of the book and an appraisal of her work by Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Review of Books, and an interview on the Leonard Lopate Show with the author of the book. Both are quite interesting for anyone who has enjoyed her works.
From Oates’ intro:
Short stories, for all the dazzling diversity of the genre, are of two general types: those that yield their meanings subtly, quietly, and are as nuanced and delicate and without melodrama as the unfolding of miniature blossoms in Japanese chrysanthemum tea, and those that explode in the reader’s face. Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) came of age in a time when subtlety and “atmosphere” in short stories were fashionable—as in the finely wrought, understated stories of such classic predecessors as Anton Chekhov, Henry James, and James Joyce, and such American contemporaries as Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, and Jean Stafford.
But O’Connor’s plainspoken, blunt, comic-cartoonish, and flagrantly melodramatic short stories were anything but fashionable. The novelty of her “acidly comic tales with moral and religious messages”—as Brad Gooch puts it in his new life of O’Connor—lay in their frontal assault upon the reader’s sensibility: these were not refined New Yorker stories of the era in which nothing happens except inside characters’ minds, but stories in which something happens of irreversible magnitude, often death by violent means.
Javier Sáez de Ibarra Wins the First Internacional Prize for Short Stories
El País reports that Javier Sáez de Ibarra has won the first Premio Internacional de Narrativa Breve Ribera del Duero (International Prize for Short Stories Ribera del Duero). I don’t know what weight to put in awards, even ones that come with €50,000. However, the article and accompanying interview has some interesting items that makes me want to find an example or two of his writing.
The short story is a genre that is not well esteemed by editors, little ready by readers, and not well understood by critics: there still are those who criticize a story that doesn’t have a surprise. Inovations are not well received.
“El cuento es un género poco estimado por los editores, poco frecuentado por los lectores y mal comprendido por los críticos: todavía hay quien le reprocha a un relato que no tenga efecto sorpresa. Las innovaciones no son bien recibidas”.
He also said that the Internet is helping to save the shor story.
In a certain sense the short story has taken refuge in the Internet. There are many blogs that publish stories and those that criticize stories. An example? El síndrome de Chéjov, Vivir del cuento, Café y Garamond, La luz ténue or the critic Fernando Valls’s.
“En cierto sentido, el cuento se ha refugiado en Internet. Hay muchos blogs que publican cuentos y en los que se hace crítica de cuentos. ¿Algún ejemplo? El síndrome de Chéjov, Vivir del cuento, Café y Garamond, La luz ténue o el del crítico Fernando Valls”
I’m not sure if I believe that in the US we pay more attention to short story writers. He did list a few other autors of note: Hipólito G. Navarro who was on El publico lee and sounded interesing; from Peru Fernando Iwasaki; from Guatemala Eduardo Halfon; from Mexico Pedro Ángel Palou; and from Spain Luciano G. Egido y Juan Carlos Márquez.
The Watchmen – A Review
The Watchmen is, perhaps, the best comic book movie ever made. It is a large qualification and one that does the movie a disservice, but despite the reworking of the typical comic book themes and an ending that avoids the superhero defeats super villain formula, some elements still cannot escape the genre and make the film a little awkward at times.
Based on the 1986 graphic novel, The Watchmen tells the story of a group of super heroes that were anything but the clean cut exemplars of American culture that Superman represents. Instead, in an excellent title sequence you learn how some were killed in scandalous ways, one ended up in a mental hospital, and others resorted to drink. It is a foretelling of the scandals, immoral behavior and the self righteous crusading. One of the great strengths of the film is to see superheroes as something other than heroic. When The Comedian shoots and murders his pregnant lover in Vietnam because he doesn’t want to have anything to do with her, it is a moment that undoes the whole facade of the heroic and makes the comic fantasies that have come before seem silly. What is worse is the all powerful Dr. Manhattan doesn’t do anything. Superman with his perfect sense of right and wrong has been replaced by a hero who is too unconcerned with the problems of everyday people.
The movie, too, avoids the usual convention where the super villain fights the super hero in a battle that goes on for five to ten minutes and millions of dollars of special effects. For the all the complexity that the super heroes might exhibit, the film in the end comes down to the grand battle, which is really a let down because it seldom has anything to do with the characters the heroes have. The Watchmen, on the other hand, avoids the problem because the conclusion of the film is based in a moral ambiguity: can one kill millions to save billions. Sure there is a fight between the heroes but it comes to nothing and only proves they dislike each other. It is a relief to see the lack of a grand show down, because it makes the movie about decisions, not power. If everything is about one’s powers then it doesn’t matter how complex the character is (or how mopey they are, which seems to be the case usually), it is the luck of the one’s powers, which naturally always tilts towards the good, that defines the movie and the characters.
The Watchmen is an excellent representative of a narrative imagination that was common in the 80’s where the extremes of right leads one to see concentration camps coming any day now. In The Watchmen there is a sense that the government would be completely happy to start building the camps to deal with the restless people. Both the Comedian and Rorschach are quite the right leaning vigilantes who see nothing good in the scum of the world as it has descended in to a cesspool of criminality. It is the same fear that shows up in various American punk bands of the time such as the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and the Suicidal Tendencies. In each there is a preoccupation with government power that turns fascistic.
The Watchmen, though, has its flaws. Its length is not necessarily one, although some may suggest 3 hours is excessive. The biggest problem is it can’t escape its comic book past. For all the cleverness in rewriting the genre it still uses conventions of the genre. So, at times the narration is weak, a cross between Raymond Chandler and a teenage kid when Rorschach is narrating, and boring when Dr. Manhattan is narrating. Moreover, Rorschach’s insights into human nature are quite tedious, as are some of the flashbacks that describe the various back stories. Silk Spectre II and Night Owl are a little light in the characterization department, and rewriting the way women are portrayed in comic books is certainly not the focus of The Watchmen, which is obvious from Silk Spectre’s costume. Having a lesbian character, Silhouette, only servers to underscore the male fantasy that is at work in the characterizations (granted, she is also the victim of a hate crime). Finally, Silk Spectre I could be quite a complex character, but loving one’s abuser is simplified so much that it suggests if you try to rape someone you may still have chance to have her fall in love with you. If one is going to embrace that theme, you really should dig deeper.
The best comic movie is probably a turn off to those who don’t care about the genre, either in film or the comic books themselves. Yet it is worth seeing if only to understand how far comics have and have not come over the years. Despite the seeming silliness of costumed heroes they are one of the great American inventions.
Vickie Christina Barcelona – A Review
Vickie Christina Barcelona should probably have been called Vickie Christina New York, since Barcelona has little to do with the film and New York, the alter ego of Woody Allen, is really where the movie should have been set. The film is filled with his usual preoccupations: failed relationships and the quixotic quest for happiness in a relationship. While Crimes and Misdemeanors and Deconstructing Harry weren’t necessarily funny, they were more they were more than just the light exotic fantasy that Vickie Christina Barcelona is.
Perhaps if the movie wasn’t so full of clichés it might have been a better movie. The first and most egregious was Penélope Cruz’s dark haired bundle of fire. The feisty, dark haired Spanish woman who is only interested in fighting but who can channel her passions to become the most intense lover, is an old cliché. Perhaps Allen had just seen Carmen when he wrote the movie? Then there is Bardem, the Spanish man, in other words, the Spanish lover who chases anything with a skirt, a cliché that only lets Allen explore his real interest, Vickie and Cristina. He is not interested in Spain, but a stereotype of Spain that lets him play with his real interests.
Unfortunately, the clichés are really the only Spanish elements in the film. Except for the occasional Spanish guitar music (which was often out of place: Catalan music in Oviedo, Spanish in Barcelona), the film might as well have been shot in New York. Yet had the film been shot in New York it would have had its own clichés that still would make the film one of his lesser efforts.
What makes the film weakest is Vickie and Christina are obscured by Bardem and Cruz and never really have a chance to be more than Americans on a lark. One has an affair the other a menage a trois, and both escape from their ordinary lives. The escapes, however, tell you little and though confusing for them, they are meant to be liberating as the women find themselves in the midst of new adventures. The escapes are contrasted against Judy, another American, who doesn’t love her husband. She is the antipathy of Christina—she wants adventure but is afraid to be free. Yet she is the more real character. The other two are on vacation and just as Bardem is something exotic, the freedom they have in Barcelona is the idealized freedom one feels in a city where one neither has to work nor to try to really belong.
In the hands of a lesser director the film would have been terrible, but Allen is able to make the film seem interesting despite the narration that instead of being cleaver, seems banal. Ultimately though, cliché and fantasy sinks the film.
By The Firelight 