Visitation (Heimsuchung) by Jenny Erpenbeck (Germany)

Translated by Susan Bernofsky

Book 13 of my #20booksofsummer

Visitation is a short novel, at just 150 pages, which I’d picked up in the past and then abandoned, largely because I think it isn’t the novel I’d expected it to be, and I needed to adjust to that. I’d imagined a straightforward fly-on-the-wall narrative, focusing on one Manderley-esque house over perhaps a hundred or two hundred years, whereas Visitation is more abstract than my expectations, less hard-edged and more poetic. It’s very clever, but I still don’t know that I enjoyed it.

First published in German in 2008, the novel appeared in English translation in 2010. The German title, Heimsuchung, evades straightforward translation into English. My German stops at GCSE level, but the author has said that the word translates as “devastation”. However, it can also be broken into its composite parts: “Heim” (home) and “suchung” (searching), or “home-seeking”. The house around which the book revolves, then, represents both sides of this interpretation: a longing for a lost home, and the horror of the terrible events of the 20th century in Germany. But the depth of meaning doesn’t stop there, since “Heim” is a not a neutral word, it is loaded with secondary meanings, around obligation, around politics … the Nazis were big on the notion of Heim.

The narrative evokes a house and a plot of land that is owned by several different families over the course of the 20th century, while the events of history play out in the wings. Both the house and its location are based, in large part, on Erpenbeck’s own family history, as she spent happy times as a child at her grandmother’s lakeside house in Brandenburg.

At the beginning of the novel, a plot of land near Berlin, on the side of a Brandenburg lake, is intended as part of a dowry, to consolidate wealth between two families. However, when the marriage doesn’t take place, the land is sold.

An architect builds on the land and acquires a neighbouring plot, together with access to the lake and a “little bathing house”, from its Jewish owners, who are trying to raise funds to flee to Brazil. Later, we find out the fate of that Jewish family, and we see how, in her last days, doomed 12-year-old Doris treasures her warm memories of swimming and playing in the lake with her family.

During the Second World War the house witnesses scenes of carnality and violence, and afterwards its grounds conceal valuables when the architect and his wife flee East Germany. Another family receives the house upon their return from exile in Russia, and the house impassively watches the owner’s legal battle to retain it after German unification, in the face of a restitution order. Amid all this change, only one character remains in situ: the semi-mythical, unnamed gardener, who continues to work on the land as he ages.

It was interesting to see 20th century German history from the East German perspective, but I struggled with the style. The prose is pared down and minimal – like a kind of anti-Knaussgård – with barely any dialogue, and most characters remain nameless. I found the introspective and impersonal nature of the writing meant that I sometimes didn’t feel particularly inclined to read on. In the German, Erpenbeck’s writing is known for its lyrical, poetic quality, but in the English translation the paragraphs are quite long and dense, and, dare I say, off-puttingly so.

The tale of the house and its various occupants is bookended by a Prologue, giving a brief account of the historic events that shaped the landscape over many thousands of years, and an Epilogue telling us of the demolition of the house, after which “the landscape, if ever so briefly, resembles itself once more”. The novel thus emphasises the illusion of ownership, the often arbitrariness of legal diktats, and the fact that human concerns and activities, however monumental or devastating their impact, are only an infinitesimally tiny part of earth’s slow history.

“Perhaps eternal life already exists during a human lifetime, but since it looks different to what we’re hoping for – something that transcends everything that’s ever happened – since it looks instead like the old life we already knew, no one recognizes it.”

A Children’s Bible: A Novel by Lydia Millet (USA)

Book 12 of my #20booksofsummer21

“So maybe art is the Holy Ghost. Maybe art is the ghost in the machine“

A Children’s Bible (2020) by the US writer Lydia Millet focuses on a group of families who have rented a large house on the coast for the summer. The parents are disengaged and mostly drunk, while the children are left to amuse – or should that be fend for – themselves. The action is recounted from the first-person perspective of teenager Eve, as climate disaster unfolds.

The parents are presented as passive liabilities: self-satisfied, entitled, self-indulgent, fat, they drink cocktails all day, listen to bad music and dance embarrassingly. They are basically me!

The descriptions of the adults, presented in the novel’s trademark spare, unflinching style, are darkly comic. The image of them indulging themselves in scenes of Nero-esque bacchanalia while Rome effectively burns works well as an allegory of the middle-aged complacency that I am accused of by my own children in my apparent refusal to face up to the current climate emergency, distracted instead by the more immediate distractions of a new summer jumpsuit or a nicely mixed Sbagliato.

The children meanwhile are more tuned in, and more importantly, they have agency: time after time they make use of their pretty impressive survival skills to escape treacherous situations, while the parents, a sort of indistinguishable bovine mass, turn away from the reality staring in them the face for as long as they possibly can, in one scene just deciding to blot it all out by taking a cartload of Ecstasy and having threesomes.

Although often bored, or at the mercy of others or of outside events, and caught between stasis and the need for action, the young people devise routines that they use to structure their days, while the parents – used to their made-up non-jobs (creating art installations, writing niche academic papers read by five other academics, making crappy films) – are bribed and coerced into co-operation, and are increasingly regarded as a liability.

“[The parents] made Sukey hand over her sister for a day, so they could ‘have some cute baby time’ (gag). She protested, but we decided the prize was probably legit. Sukey submitted to the majority, then paced back and forth most of that day, worrying the parents would wreck the baby.

Her sister was barely two months old, said Jen. How much damage could they actually do?

Sukey retorted that they couldn’t be trusted with child-rearing. On that front we had to agree.”

Just before the terrible storm that changes things for the characters of this novel for ever, Eve’s much-loved nine-year-old brother Jack is presented with an illustrated children’s bible by one of the featureless adults. He is inspired to assemble a menagerie of wild animals in a sort of arborial Ark, including an owl with an apparently broken wing, the first in a series of biblically-inspired events (which even include a birth scene in a stable).

‘”Hey Evie!”, called Jack. He’d just come out of the barn, Shel tagging along behind him. “We took the bandage off. He flies!”

A blur of bird flew away from them onto the roof. It landed and perched on the peak.

Fast healing, was what struck me first.

What struck me second was, maybe the bandage had actually been the culprit.

I mean, they were little kids. Not vets.”

Millet’s deceptively straightforward, witty prose makes this a page-turning, swift read — the novel is relatively short, at 224 well-spaced pages in my edition, and cannot be pigeonholed as a work of bandwagon-jumping ‘cli-fi’. A Children’s Bible was a National Book Award finalist, and has been shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize 2021.

Polish series Wataha (The Border/The Pack)

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I watched the first season (2014) of this enormously atmospheric, HBO-produced Polish six part crime thriller, set among an elite Polish-Ukrainian team of border guards, and freely available on streaming services here in the UK. Known in Polish as Wataha, and originally translated as The Border, it was later translated more literally as The Pack (like a ‘pack of dogs’ – or wolves, with wolf imagery recurring throughout the series).

Set amid dramatic natural scenery, with thick forest evocative of a Grimm’s fairy tale, the cinematography is beautiful. The series opens with high drama. The border guards, who are tasked with combating people traffickers, are celebrating in a remote mountain cabin after a successful mission, when a bomb explodes, killing the whole team, with the exception of Captain Victor Rebrow (played by Leszek Lichota). His girlfrend, Ewa (Julia Pogrebinska), is missing, and presumed dead. A text is found on Rebrow’s phone, sent just before the explosion. It reads “Boom”. Subtle this show isn’t.

Rebrow returns to work at the head of a new ‘pack’, with the aim of discovering the identity of his previous team’s killers. Being the sole survivor of the attack, suspicion immediately falls on Rebrow, particularly from icy Prosecutor Iga Dobosz (Aleksandra Poplawska), a woman with the empathy of a sock, who struts about looking withering in spike heels. But things inevitably become more complicated as Rebrow’s back story gradually emerges. I’m no great fan of crime thrillers, but this one is different enough to be intriguing, with a haunting soundtrack that complements the murky atmosphere, although the dialogue (or the translation?) is often let down by cliché. And it amused me that the border team’s tracker dog is called Osama.

Danish film Another Round (Alcootest)

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Directed and co-written by Thomas Vinterberg

“With this movie, we want to examine and salute alcohol’s ability to set people free” – Thomas Vinterberg

Another Round won the award for Best International Feature Film at the recent Oscars, as well as the Bafta for best film “not in the English language”. I took myself off to the flicks a few weeks ago to watch it, in my first cinema visit since early 2020 (when I probably watched last year’s big Oscar-winning film, Parasite, which I reviewed here).

The film is dedicated to Vinterberg’s daughter Ida, who was to have appeared in the movie, but who tragically died in a car crash in the early stages of production. Vinterberg was somehow able to complete the film, many scenes of which are set in his daughter’s real life school.

The premise is straightforward enough. Mads Mikkelsen plays Martin, a middle-aged teacher whose marriage is barely functional, a man who seems utterly devoid of energy, and whose lessons draw complaints from students and parents alike.

At a lacklustre dinner to celebrate the 40th birthday of his colleague Nikolaj (played by Magnus Millang), Martin opens up about the disappointments in his life, but after shedding a tear or two, he throws off his Nordic melancholy with the help of a few drinks, and has fun getting hammered with his friends (who also include PE teacher Tommy, played by Thomas Bo Larsen, and music teacher Peter, played by Lars Ranthe).

The friends subsequently instigate an experiment, based on a theory by obscure, real-life Norwegian psychiatrist Finn Skarderud, which posits that humans are born with a deficit in their blood alcohol levels of 0.05%. They agree to drink sufficient alcohol to rectify this deficit during their working day (knocking off the sauce by 8pm), and to record the results.

The results of the experiment fulfil a predictable arc, recording early successes in reinvigorating the curriculum, breathing life into the friends’ lessons and restoring some much-needed intimacy and spontaneity to Martin’s marriage and to his relationship with his children. However, inspired by their newly positive (and permanently a bit pissed) outlook on life, the four friends decide to take the experiment to the next level, and go all out, with results that veer between tragedy, anarchy and farce. The film takes on a serious topic from an often humorous and always irreverent angle, though it doesn’t turn away from the human cost of the men’s absurdist project.

Mads Mikkelsen is a revelation in this film, booting Claes Bang out of the top spot on my Scandi crush chart, and performing an unexpected, joyous and jaw-dropping dance routine that helped bring the film from straightforwardly good to superlative.

Artist Rashid Al Khalifa (Bahrain)

So, I’m determined to experience art (as well as books, film, music, TV and even food) from every country in the world., where it is feasible for me to do so. Some of the smaller countries are proving more difficult than others though, with Middle Eastern island nation Bahrain (population 1.5 million) till now remaining yawningly blank on my index of countries and my progress made throughout the globe over the past two years.

However, I’ve been blown away by the work produced by contemporary Bahraini artist Rashid Al Khalifa (born in 1952). Although a member of the ruling royal family, his avant-garde work is not what you might associate with pre-conceived notions of art produced by ‘the establishment’.

Pressure Wave, 2018.

I really wish I’d caught this exhibition of his work, shown in 2018 at London’s Saatchi Gallery. Surprisingly perhaps, his early works were more traditional: desertscapes, seascapes, and abstract nudes. His work, spanning four decades, can be seen on his website here.

Using enamelled stainless steel, in recent years he has created large-scale geometric structures (‘Pressure Wave’ 2018 is pictured above), which are resonant of the city skyline. These works of hard-edged geometric abstraction evoke the history of the modernist grid, and could be seen as relentlessly impersonal. But these hanging installations seem to vibrate, creating a matrix that plays with optical illusion. Shadows form patterns in fine lines on the floor of the space in which they are exhibited, depending on the light, the degree of gradation and overlapping effects. Al Khalifa considers these shadows to form an intrinsic part of the work, which, as Elle Germany noted, ‘come to life with the slightest movement to create a sort of light show’.

Talk to Me by T. C. Boyle (USA)

Book 11 of my #20booksofsummer, Review no 169

AMERICAS AND THE CARIBBEAN

Progress has slowed on the blog in recent weeks, as work has ramped up to crazy levels and I’ve been working till late every day, though some time off is in sight.

I finished Talk to Me by T. C. Boyle a while ago, but haven’t had time to write the requisite review until now (I don’t write a post for every book I read, but this is one of my #20booksofsummer, so it needs a short post).

Earlier I’ve mentioned my liking for some of T C. Boyle’s earlier work (particularly the acid-laced novel Outside Looking In), and Talk to Me, published this year, focuses on something that I have had an enduring interest in: chimp communication studies.

When I was at university I studied linguistics, and we briefly focused on efforts to teach language to animals, in particular through chimp studies using American Sign Language, to test the bounds of animal cognition and, even more interestingly, animal consciousness.

Perhaps the most famous study involved a chimp called Nim Chimpsky, a play on name of Noam Chomsky, the well-known linguist and political scientist, who first conceived the idea that humans – uniquely – are born with an innate mechanism for processing and creating highly and regularly structured language, encompassing a broad range of concepts from the literal to the most abstract. Chomsky’s influence featured strongly on my university syllabus, and my tutor Jamal Ouhalla wrote a book building on Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar (and dedicating it to me and my class mates).

Anyhow, the 1970s Nim Chimpsky experiment didn’t work out for the chimp: although the animal appeared to be able to communicate, by the time the study was over he had matured into a strong and potentially very dangerous male, and despite his emotional attachment to his caregivers was at one stage sold to a medical testing facility. A fascinating chimp biopic – both heart-breaking and heart-warming and based on a book about the Project Nim experiment, was released in 2011.

Later during my second degree (in psychology this time), we touched on Jane Goodall’s work with chimp communities – whose savagery can be quite startling – and which inspired William Boyd’s best novel Brazzaville Beach.

Talk to Me focuses on a young university academic and psychologist, Guy Schermerhorn, who raises a chimp, Sam, with the help of volunteers. Sam likes pizza, McDonald’s, gin and a spliff, and forms a strong bond with Guy’s pretty student assistant (and soon girlfriend) Aimee. He learns to communicate fluently with sign language, but things get complicated when funding dries up and Sam is reclaimed by his owner, the cruel eye-patch wearing Dr Moncrieff. From there it all gets a bit Thelma and Louise.

The book is engaging and nicely paced, and lightened by humour, and adds to the small collection of novels out there based on the premise of “chimp as pseudo-family member”, and until now best-represented by We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler.

Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories by Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus)

Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

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Book 10 of my #20booksofsummer, Review no 168, and finished just in time for the beginning of Women In Translation month #WITMonth

First published in Russian in 1985, and published in English translation in 2019 in the UK by Penguin books.

Belarusian writer and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich is renowned for her books of expertly condensed interviews focusing on the female experience of the Second World War in the USSR, and on the legacy of Chernobyl. She won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”.

This recently translated book is composed of the accounts of those who were children in the USSR during the Second World War, when Belarus came under Nazi occupation; 66% of Belarus’s Jewish population died. Alexievich, herself born three years after the end of the Second World War, interviewed her respondents during the 1970s, when these child survivors had reached adulthood. Each individual statement is headed simply, with the person’s name, age when war broke out or when they were first impacted by it, and their current occupation. There is no authorial comment or commentary, but this compendium of oral accounts speaks for itself.

The book is, of course, often devastating reading. How could it not be? I actually found it so viscerally upsetting that I’m not going to discuss the content in any sort of detail. Suffice it to say that I read many poignant, relentlessly distressing accounts, all true stories, recounted in a fragmentary way after a gap of many years, which at times quite literally made my blood run cold.

Alexievich’s respondents become distressed in retelling stories that have often remained buried for many years, and her project raises a few ethical questions. There are frequent ellipses, which creates the impression of accounts broken off amid intense emotion, though it may be more of a device to indicate where edits have been made.

Again and again, amid stories of traumatic bereavement, abject poverty and devastating hunger, are references to toys, or the lack of them.

One respondent, aged 7 when war broke out, remembers her little brother being so hungry that:

“he said to Mama, ‘Let’s cook my duckling.’ This duckling was his favourite toy, he had never let anyone touch it. He slept with it.”

Elsewhere, a woman remembers her two dolls being traded for a bag of rice to prevent the family from starving, while another remembers a pitiful lucky find:

“I found a doll somewhere, not really a doll, only a doll’s head. I loved it. It was my joy. I carried it around from morning till night. It was my only toy.”

I was horrified to learn that small children who found themselves in Belarusian orphanages were forced to donate blood to help Nazi soldiers, as German doctors at the time believed that the blood of children aged under five would hasten their recovery. There is something so dreadfully vampiric about this idea that is stood out for me even amid graphic accounts of lost lives, and it is an occurrence that is recounted not just once, but repeatedly by these respondents, as they reflect on their stolen childhoods.

This book is hugely important as a historical document recording the inexplicably cruel events of a particular time and place, and of the horrors visited on a generation. But I’m sure most people will, quite justifiably, want to avoid.

Booker Longlist Predictions: How did I do? Plus Review of Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford

My forecasts for the Booker longlist, announced yesterday, weren’t too bad: I predicted four out of the 13, which I’m pleased with. I’ll see how many I can get through, though I might give the Lockwood a dodge as her frenetic style makes me feel slightly faint.

I’ve already read two of the books on the longlist. I really liked Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. I’m a fan of most of his writing, and his deceptively simply prose conceals some deep existential thinking. Like the brilliant Never Let Me Go, Klara and the Sun deals with a naive protagonist who is constitutionally incapable of seeing the full picture. Enjoyably poignant, this tale of humanoid AI consumables adapting to and comprehending (or not) human feelings and failings is much better than Ian McEwans’s Machines Like Me, but not quite the masterpiece that was Never Let Me Go. Klara and the Sun has a really beautiful, textured cover, too, even if we’re not judging the books by them!

Then there is Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual, which I didn’t tip for the longlist, but which is certainly a thought-provoking and absorbing read. My review, which I originally published in January this year, is reproduced here:

In the novels’s opening chapter, t+0: 1944, the narrative details an imagined rocket attack in chilling, slow-motion detail, as it strikes and instantly kills five children, out shopping in South London on an ordinary Saturday with their families: five-year-olds Alec, Vern, Ben and twins Jo and Val. The vivid unspooling of the catastrophe brought to mind the opening story in Mark Haddon’s powerful short story The Pier Falls in its sense of dispassionate inevitability.

“It cannot be run backwards, to summon the dust to rise, any more than you can stir milk back out of tea. Once sundered, forever sundered. Once scattered, forever scattered. It’s irreversible.”

Nevertheless, fiction does have the power to rewind time, and Spufford recreates a future for his tragically snuffed-out characters. Spufford conjures those children back from the dead with the incantatory “Come, other chances. Come, unsounded deep. Come, undivided light. Come, dust.”

We skip forward in time by five years, and the children – untouched – are now 10. We learn things about these normal working class children that will stay with them throughout their re-gifted lives: whether it’s a love of music, a keen intelligence, or a searing sensitivity.

We revisit Alec, Vern, Ben, Jo and Val at intervals, a bit like the ’60s TV series 7 Up, as we watch the ways their lives diverge, their sadnesses and successes, their bad and good decisions, and the way those decisions influence the course of their lives, however outwardly mundane they may be.

The evocation of each decade of the latter part of the 20th century is a feat of pastiche, which, if it occasionally lapses into cliché, is counterpointed by its pinpoint accuracy.

I found sensitive Ben most vividly drawn, diagnosed at a young age with schizophrenia, whose nightmare years are balanced by a period of domestic contentment. This part of the book gives value to the notion of perseverance through the darkest of times, in the hope of a brighter future: and although it could easily seem trite, Ben’s story is so well-handled that it feels genuinely wise and hopeful.

This a deeply humane novel, with light a reoccurring motif, and with a whiff of benevolent religiosity. However, the prose is spiritual rather than hectoring, and at its best both illuminating and luminous. The book opens with the words “the light” – in that case the terrifying, destructive light of the murderous rocket attack – and it closes, too, with light: “The grass grows bright with ordinary light … and the light is very good“.

With its opening pages awash with wish fulfilment and second chances, there are obvious thematic parallels with Kate Atkinson’s instant classic Life after Life, as well as Ian McEwan’s canon-fodder Atonement, but Light Perpetual is far from derivative and holds its ground next to those two novels.

The opening to the novel is based on a real event. In 1944 a V-2 rocket killed 168 people in a branch of Woolworths on New Cross Road in London; 15 of the dead were younger than 11. Light Perpetual does not attempt to unearth or reimagine the histories or thwarted futures of those real children, but the author acknowledges that the novel is “partly written in memory of those South London children, and their lost chance to experience the rest of the twentieth century“.

Frances Spufford has written one previous, extremely well-received novel, the multi-prize-winning work of historical fiction Golden Hill (which I liked well enough but didn’t love), as well as some diverse works of non-fiction: The Child that Books Built (about his childhood love of reading), Unapologetic (about his Christian faith) and Red Plenty (about the USSR in the 1950s). This new work may be his best yet.

Booker Prize 2021: Longlist Predictions

I often try to second-guess the judges of the Booker Prize, and I almost always get it wrong, although I know at least as much about trade books and contemporary literary fiction as most broadsheet books journos. This will be the first time I’ve committed myself to my hunches for the longlist (announced on Tuesday 27th) in writing. I’ve listed books I’ve read, or books I want to read that fit the criteria for entry, but I suspect my list might be a little too mainstream, with lots of big names.

According to the Booker website, the prize “awards any work of long form fiction originally written in English and published in the UK and Ireland in the year of the prize, regardless of the nationality of their author.”  So short stories and memoir are out, but we’ve definitely had a graphic novel on the list before, so that’s a possibility. Entries must be published in the UK – or Ireland – “between 1 October of the year prior, and 30 September of the year of that award”.

I feel the list typically comprises a mix of well-established names, under-the-radar debut writers, and a smattering of names from outside the usual suspects of the UK, Ireland, the USA and Canada and Australia, with Nigeria and India being favourite recent sources of literary nominees. The panel always seem to love a bit of post-colonial angst, and a dystopia or two. Then maybe a surprise high-end crime novel or thriller to throw us out of our smug lit-fic rut (though these books never make the shortlist – see eg Belinda Bauer’s Snap, Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister the Serial Killer or Tom Rob Smith’s excellent Child 44).

I wanted to include Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts on my longlist, but although she normally writes in English, this time she has first written her novel in her adopted language of Italian, before translating it herself into English, so I feel this disqualifies her, although this didn’t stop the books team at The Times for tipping it for the longlist in their latest newsletter…

Given the delays to publishing schedules inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic, I feel this year there will be strong field – I’ve added and then taken off A Burning by Megha Majumdar, the new Elif Shafak and We are All Birds of Uganda by Hafsa Zayyan, and I could have listed about 20 titles …. but I’ve gone for the maximum allowable number of titles, with 13 (rather than 12) predictions.

If I get them all right my husband says I qualify for a prize (he suggest a packet of fruit pastilles, which is a crappy prize). I think instead I might treat myself to a copy of a book 😁.

Here are my choices:

  1. Lean, Fall, Stand by Jon McGregor

2. The Promise by Damon Galgut

3. The Magician by Colm Toibin

4. The Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

5. Talk to Me by T. C. Boyle

6. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

7. Second Place by Rachel Cusk

8. How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

9. The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

10. Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

11. The Manningtree Witches by A. K. Blakemore

12. Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

13. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyazi

Film Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter … and Spring (South Korea)

I initially had low expectations of this 2003 film, directed by Kim Ki-Duk (who died of COVID-19 last year at the age of just 59). The film, though, is a visual treat, set around a Buddhist monastery floating on a lake in a beautiful forest.

The first part of the film (“spring”) centres on the day-to-day life of a monk and his young pupil, who occupy a kind of innocent idyll, until in adolescence (“summer”) the modern world intrudes, with discombobulating results. We follow the young apprentice’s life as it passes into the later seasons of life, with gaps of roughly 10 to 20 years. Kim Ki-Duk himself played the apprentice in the last stage of life.

I’m intrigued by Buddhist practice, and enjoyed this meditation on the passing of time, the eternity and circularity of the natural world, and the fallibility of human nature. The film was drenched in Buddhist symbolism and imagery, and I’m sure I missed an awful lot, as I’m not well-versed in that. It wasn’t exactly action-packed and the meditative pacing meant my mind wandered at times, as I was, tellingly, tempted by the alternative diversions of social media and my emails, but the movie was lovely to look at, and very moving at times.

The best bits were the cinematography, the beautiful location and the tai chi – which I have only previously seen done badly by pretentious Trustafarians on Clapham Common, but which was truly awe-inspiring when observed in someone who knows what they are doing and does it well.