Review no 127: Swedish TV series Love and Anarchy

EUROPE

I’ve turned my eye to TV series from outside my UK/US comfort zone lately. I’m a big fan of French series Call My Agent, set in the offices of a talent agency, which is lots of fun (and further discussion of which I’ll save for a later review). A few people on Twitter suggested that the Swedish series Love and Anarchy, streaming on Netflix in the UK, was a suitable stopgap while waiting for the new season of Call My Agent to drop, so I decided to check it out.

The first thing that attracted me to the series was the fact that it’s set in the closed world of a Stockholm publishing house, which was a plus point from my perspective as my day job is working for a publishing house, albeit in London not Stockholm. I thought it might feel cosy and familiar and remind me of those days when I travelled into central London for meetings and nice lunches out (it’s nearly a year now since I saw a colleague face to face rather than via Microsoft Teams).

The main character in the series is gorgeous thirty-something publishing executive Sofie (Ida Engvoll), who lives with her husband and two children in Stockholm, and has an enviably stunning house, with a beautiful, wide, winding wood-panelled staircase and big, plant-filled open plan rooms.

Sofie joins old school publisher Lund & Lagerstedt as a sort of business development consultant, tasked with co-ordinating the company’s digital transformation, as it strives to remain relevant and profitable in the 21st century (also a very familiar scenario to me, having worked for a long-established publishing company that has been continually forced to evolve throughout the never-ending developments in digital publishing).

However, things rapidly became less relatable, as Sofie soon embarks on an implausible and frankly rather bizarre flirtation with the young IT guy, Max (Björn Mosten).

The implausibility isn’t their attraction to each other: she’s hot and blonde, he’s young and hot with a devil-may-care attitude, they naturally have the hots for each other. It’s the way their relationship evolves that’s so unlikely…

Sofie has an addiction to online porn, though this only really seems to manifest itself in the early episodes. When the IT guy, Max, catches her masturbating over her laptop while working late (I know, right), he records events on his phone, and then sets Sofie a challenge, a sort of dare (or, wait, isn’t it blackmail?!), that she must successfully fulfil in order to ensure that he doesn’t circulate the video.

Things escalate from there, as Sofie and Max begin to set each other reciprocal dares that gradually raise the stakes and become less and less credible.

At one point my husband turned to me and asked me if thought the character of Sofie resembled any woman I’ve ever met. His theory was that the series was written by a horny young guy who’d made the main character a woman rather than a man in order to avoid accusations of being a sexist fantasist. The series is actually written and directed by a 40-something woman, Lisa Langseth, who perhaps thought it was time for a bit of assertive female sexuality and male objectification.

Nevertheless, despite the frequent ridiculousness and inconsistencies in character development, in an era when turning on the news resembles jumping into an icy lake – however much you brace yourself, it’s invariably a horrible shock – Love and Anarchy feels like a harmless piece of escapist fun, and even better, it has actually made me laugh out loud.

Reading plans for January 2021 and blog plans for 2021

Every month, as usual, I’ll be reviewing a couple of international reads; a foreign (to me) film; the work of an international artist; an album, a musician or an example of a national musical style; and, new for 2021, a TV series from around the world.

Other books I read that don’t qualify for their own individual post will still get a summary write-up at the end of the month.

Links to my previous reads and other reviews can be found under Reviews index by country, and my aim is to continue until I’ve reviewed a not-particularly-representative sample of six areas of popular culture for every country in the world for which it is possible to do so.

This is my little act of rebellion against incipient nationalism and the pig-headed closed-mindedness that seems to characterise a hefty chunk of the UK today.

It’s been great getting to know other bloggers over the last 18 months or so since I started this blog, so I’ll join in with a few more book challenges in 2021 when I see them!

I’ve pledged on Goodreads to increase my reading goal from 100 books in 2020 (which I managed to achieve, yay!) to 121 in 2021 (one every three days). This may change when I am weeping amid a pile of proofs for work in April, especially given I have to open up my sub-standard and frankly very dodgy home school in January. Thank goodness my gin subscription (prescription?) arrived today.

At some point during January-March I’m planning to take part in the Japan challenge, hosted by Dolce Bellezza, so I’ve been looking out for a ‘Japan’ book. Since it was shortlisted for the International Booker prize last year, I’m thinking of reading The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa.

The main books in translation that I have lined up for inclusion on the blog this month are Azerbaijani romance Ali and Nino by Kurban Said (a bit of a Romeo and Juliet tale, transposed to the South Caucasus) and The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha (Indonesia), described as “the most ingenious and unusual novel you will read all year, where you choose your own story”. I’m also planning to read Fame (“Imagine being famous. Wouldn’t that be great?”) by my new favourite Austrian/German author Daniel Kehlmann.

I enjoy non-fiction too, and I’m currently reading The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold, which is a fascinating and sometimes harrowing piece of Victorian social history. I’ve also got Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein on this month’s pile, which is a biography of Warhol’s muse Edie Sedgwick.

Before the local library shut as we went into Tier 4 restrictions here in London, I bagged a few recent releases, and since there are over 20 people waiting for it, top of my pile for this month is Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, which I’ve heard so much about, and which I’ve seen both praised and panned, so I’m interested to find out how I get on with it.

I’ve been saying that I will read T C Boyle’s The Women for months now, and I’m finally 100 pages in, so I hope to finish this work of historical fiction (based around the complicated love life of architect Frank Lloyd Wright) in January.

What I can’t photograph are the audio books and Kindle books that I have lined up. I have an immense invisible TBR pile on my Kindle which I’m determined to tackle in 2021, so I intend to read Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth this month and make the tiniest of inroads into my virtual teetering stack.

I buy an audio book a month with my Audible subscription, but inevitably I always have a bit of a backlog…. I finished the very silly Finer Points of Sausage Dogs by Alexander McCall Smith today (read very engagingly by Hugh Laurie) and I’m also listening to (and not really loving) Anxious People by Frederik Backman for my “real life” book club.

The real-lifeness of my lovely book club has become very hypothetical over the past 10 months. We met in full in (I think) January 2020, and then had a fun, but less well-attended, evening in my good friend Jo’s garden back in July. It must be time for us to choose some more books, so I need to get through that audio book asap!

That’s an 11-book pile, with one down today, makes 10. However, a late addition to the pile is The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness, as I’ve just seen that the film adaptation is about to come out – bringing the pile back up to 11! Let’s see how I go.

Let me know if you have any of the same reads on your pile for January, I’m always really interested to see what other people think of books that I have also read. I find it infinitely fascinating that two people can come away with entirely different opinions! Similarly, I’m always looking for inspiration for what to read next, although tbh I could probably read from my own shelves for a decade…

Round-up: My Top 10 Films watched in 2020

Despite the tragic closure of the local cinema during the COVID pandemic, I watched lots of films in 2020. I watched the standard US/British fare that I consume all the time. And I watched lots of films that I would have considered to be way outside of my comfort zone just a couple of years ago.

My top 10, in no particular order (with links to my reviews, where available), were:

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (UK/USA, 1975) is my go-to comfort watch, and I have seen it countless times, in time of sadness and at times of high festivity. It necessarily made a reappearance on my telly in 2020. And surely everyone loves Tim Curry in suspenders. Or would, given the opportunity.

Overall I preferred Taika Waititi’s Nazi comedy Jojo Rabbit, which I saw at the cinema pre-pandemic and which makes my top 10, to the Oscar-winning South Korean film Parasite (also a rare 2020 cinema watch – and obviously extremely good).

Another film that treads the difficult line between humour and bad taste is the 2004 movie Team America: World Police. Actually, come to think of it, Team America crosses that line and then pees all over it, but it was a hoot, with the best puppet sex scene I’ve seen in a long time. In fact, possibly the only puppet sex scene I’ve seen, ever.

Booksmart (2019) is another US comedy, but that’s where the similarities end. This film is an intelligent, fun end-of-high-school movie that’s not just for teens, and that successfully skirts any schmaltz.

I watched a few documentary films. The brilliant Midnight Traveler (2019) provides personal reportage of the gruelling and dangerous journey undertaken by one family attempting to find asylum in Germany after the dad of the family (and filmmaker) found out that he’d been marked for assassination in Afghanistan.

For Sama (2019) is another intimate portrayal of a family fighting for survival, which documents the power of personal resolve and resistance during the Syrian conflict. Both should be required viewing for complacent viewers in the West, and both are edge-of-the-seat engrossing.

Another nail-biting, real-life account was the palm-slickingly addictive Free Solo (2018), which followed attempts by climber Alex Honnold to climb the 3,000 ft, vertical El Capitan rock formation without ropes or any other protective equipment, and to the barely contained horror of his girlfriend. Just don’t forget to breathe.

I watched plenty of films directed by female directors this year. The award-winning Capernaum (2018), identified as the highest-grossing Middle Eastern film of all time, provided a sensitively filmed and moving portrayal of living hand to mouth in Lebanon, while the Senegalese film Atlantics (2019) was haunting in every sense.

Finally nape-tingling good Italian film The Great Beauty was probably the most visually arresting film I’ve seen this year. Released in 2013, I came late to the party … but what a party it was, in a year of peak nostalgia for parties past.

Round-up: My Top 10 Books of 2020

One (the only?) good thing about a pandemic is that it certainly frees up time in the long empty evenings and weekends for reading. I will have read 100 books during 2020, breaking my previous records by a significant percentage. (I know this because I’m a fully signed up book nerd and log all my books on Goodreads.)

My top 10 reads, in terms of enjoyment/grippingness rather than admiration alone (they’re not always the same thing!) are listed here, in no particular order.

Broken April by Albania’s most famous export, Ismail Kadare, is not a new book, but it was new to me, and its mixture of melodrama and fable really grabbed me when I read and reviewed it in the winter.

The Shadow King by Ethiopian-born writer Maaza Mengiste provided an insight into a chunk of African history I knew nothing about. I reviewed it just before the pandemic hit and found it thrilling and moving. The novel was later shortlisted for the UK’s Booker Prize, so I must be getting something right.

Prolific US author T. C. Boyle’s LSD-laced novel Outside Looking In provides a vicarious, reimagined insight into the living experiment embarked upon by charismatic showman shaman Timothy Leary and his followers in the 1960s, and I could not put it down.

Argentinian-author Samanta Schweblin, whose novella Fever Dream is highly regarded (reviewed by me here), followed it up with an even better book, Little Eyes. Longlisted for the Booker International Prize, I would have been tempted to read it based on the cover alone (see above), but it really brings the boys to the yard. It’s a speculative novel based around the concept of a kind of newly designed Furby with a consciousness. The conceit works!

The astounding Second World War memoir When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father’s War and What Remains by Venezuelan-born writer Ariana Neumann is part detective story, part boys’ own adventure and part devastating family memoir. I tore through it and my review is here.

The Bass Rock by British-Australian writer Evie Wylde (2020) is cleverly structured like a Russian doll, a bit Gothic, and a totally gripping – and often very witty – tale of female subjugation and endurance throughout time.

The nastily compelling novella You Should Have Left by the phenomenal German-Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann was polished off in less than a day, but has stayed on the edges of my consciousness ever since. A book that makes a self-aware nod to Kubrick’s The Shining, it really gave me the creeps.

I was also enthralled by the devastating Trinidadian family tale Golden Child by Claire Adam, a book that any parent will find hard to forget, and the winner of the Desmond Elliot prize for debut novelists in 2019. I reviewed it here.

I reviewed American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins early in the year. It tells a gripping and thrilling tale of the treacherous journey many Mexican would-be migrants feel compelled to take, though some thought that as a US citizen Cummins wasn’t the right person to be telling this story (I don’t agree).

And I was charmed by Miss Austen, published in 2020, by British writer Gill Hornby, which told a enormously enjoyable fictionalised tale of the fate of writer Jane Austen’s real life missing letters (and, if you’re keen on audio books, the audio version is read by the engaging Juliet Stevenson).

Finally, here are a few more honourable mentions that didn’t quite make the top 10:

Tove Ditlevsen’s amazing and engrossing ‘Copenhagen trilogy’ (published in English in 2019, and read and reviewed by me in 2019, too early to make the cut for 2020, but I didn’t do a round-up last year, so here it is).

Italian novelist Claudio Morandini’s Snow, Dog, Foot, published by Peirene and reviewed on the blog in February, was another unexpected joy.

The Sickness by Venezuelan writer Alberto Barrera Tyszka was thankfully Covid-19-free and another great read.

What are your top reads of 2020? Have you read any of my favourites?

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Review no 126: Three Apples Fell from the Sky by Narine Abgaryan (Armenia)

NORTH AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST, CENTRAL ASIA AND THE SOUTH CAUCASUS

Translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden

First published in Russian in 2015, Three Apples fell from the Sky is a whimsical and fable-like book by the Armenian writer Narine Abgaryan. It features a huge cast of characters living in the isolated mountain village of rural Maran but, like the Yacoubian Building, also reviewed by me this month, I found the novel lacked real depth of character or intensity of feeling, instead going for more of a broadbrush, scatter-gun effect.

Historically, Armenia has been marked by repeated tragedy: in 1915 the Turks systematically murdered huge numbers of Armenians in what is widely considered to have been an act of genocide, and the country’s past has also been marked by famine and the devastating impact of earthquakes. Similarly, the villagers in this novel experience, and often don’t survive, repeated disasters: earthquake, massacre, war, famine and even a plague of locusts.

The book has been garlanded with praise, and is a winner of the prestigious Leo Tolstoy Yasnaya Polyana award for traditional-style works written in or translated into Russian and of the Russian National Bestseller Prize. However, I found getting through the book to be an exercise in endurance. I found the prose stilted and the structure incoherent, and the narrative dotted with unfeasibly long sentences, which could have done with an edit. Perhaps I am too habituated to contemporary Western fiction (though, in my defence, I can hardly be accused of being blinkered in the breadth of my reading matter, hey).

The book comes with an endorsement from Russian author Ludmila Ulitskaya, who is quoted as describing the book as “balm for the soul“. I found the recurrent tragedies anything but a balm, and certainly not countered by the book’s more heart-warming moments. I should probably give more detail about the story itself, but I was so keen to finish the book that the last thing I feel like doing right now is wasting more time summing up the plot! Ha!

Review no 125: The Avalanches album We Will Always Love You (Australia)

I’ve been listening to the new Avalanches album on repeat since it landed on Spotify in the UK on Friday. The Australian electronic dance duo’s first sampletastic album Since I Left You was released in 2000. That album, featuring the instantly iconic Frontier Psychiatrist, was a point of mutual appreciation for me and my new boyfriend (now husband) at the time.

His likes tended towards indie, while I was a bit of a raved-out raver, and Avalanches ticked a few boxes for both of us. Then they disappeared, and their comeback album of 2016 passed me by entirely.

The new, 25-track, multi-guest album is pretty long, at about 71 minutes, and opens with the spooky Ghost Story, and the voice of a hesitant-sounding young woman: “Hi, I’m sorry I left so suddenly… I will always love you...”, as if communicating from somewhere beyond the ether (but identified, more prosaically, by the band as a teenage break-up voicemail recorded by the artist Orono).

The second, gospel-influenced track, Song for Barbara Payton, references the tragic, alcoholic Marilyn Monroe-lite actress, who died – far too young – in the 1960s, interspliced with a brief reprise of the sample from track 1.

Title track We Will Always Love You, featuring Blood Orange, combines shoe-gazing rap with a rapturous chorus. The Divine Chord, with guest artists MGMT and Johnny Marr, and Interstellar Love subsequently introduce a welcome dose of joyful, whirling psychedelia.

Ghost Story Pt. 2 comes with a reprise of the first track, together with added Clanger noises. But then we’re back to laidback dreaminess with Reflecting Light, albeit heavy on the chipmunk-singing (a term I’ve coined because it brings to mind the ear-splicing, animated Alvin and the Chipmunks franchise, which features a bunch of animated, wannabe pop star chipmunks). There’s a surprising amount of chimpmunkery around on the popular music scene these days, so maybe those damn rodents were onto something.

Oh the Sunn! goes more upbeat, unexpectedly featuring Jane’s Addiction’s Perry Farrell. We Go On continues the dancey vibe, belying the content of the really rather mournful lyrics, sung by Cola Boyy and a sampled Karen Carpenter: “We go on, hurting each other“.

Until Daylight Comes, featuring Tricky and children’s chanting, gets more sinister, with the refrain “I was the light, I was the light“. Meanwhile, Wherever you Go, featuring Jamie xx and Neneh Cherry, makes sure we don’t lose that banging, transcendent vibe: “on the dance floor, that’s where you get yours“.

Music Makes Me High bring the much-needed party to 2020 (as long as it’s a party for no more than 6 people, and you’re all outside standing 2 metres apart).

Later, Running Red Lights, sung by Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, is uplifting and joyful in sound (though I guess partly a paean to lovestruck traffic violations). It’s instantly catchy, but I can see it becoming unbearable after multiple listens, so if you’re in it for the long haul this is nowhere near the best track on the album.

The album closes with Weightless, which is composed mostly of self-indulgent ‘space beeping’. The band say their new album explores “the vibrational relationship between light, sound and spirit”. Elsewhere I read that it was inspired by the impact of Carl Sagan’s wedding proposal in 1977. The EEG of his loved-up wife-to-be Ann Druyan, Creative Director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message Project, was transmitted into space as part of an audio time capsule that aimed to communicate elements of the human condition to extra-terrestrial life.

This all sounds a bit pseudy concept album, but why not? I really love, perhaps will always love, We Will Always Love You.

Review no 124: The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany (Egypt)

MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA

Translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies

This Egyptian best-selling novel, written by former dentist Alaa Al Aswany, was first published in 2002, and immediately had an enormous impact, becoming a national bestseller and the world’s best-selling work of fiction in the Arabic language. The Yacoubian Building has therefore achieved something that very few Middle Eastern novels manage: a huge popular readership, not only domestically, but throughout the wider region and across the world.

The book, in its broadest sense, describes the changing fate of a building, a beautiful but now faded apartment block built during the 1930s:

“ten lofty stories in the high classical European style, the balconies decorated with Greek faces carved in stone, the columns, steps and corridors all of natural marble … an architectural gem that so exceeded expectations that its owner requested of the Italian architect [his signature] on the inside of the doorway … as though to immortalise his name and emphasise his ownership of the gorgeous building“

The novel’s focus on a crumbling architectural gem serves more widely as a metaphor for the history of Egypt pre-Arab Spring, with the gradual disillusionment experienced by many of the characters, who find themselves, variously, embroiled in family feuds, sexually coerced and manipulated, and thwarted in their attempts to make their way in the world on the basis of merit.

It is noteworthy that the book openly discusses subjects such as political corruption (“it’s true that Egyptian elections are always fixed in favour of the ruling party“), police brutality and homosexuality – areas that Middle Eastern writers might typically be expected to have been more circumspect in describing around the turn of the millennium.

However, to a Western reader, the narrative voice can appear sexist and homophobic. Aziz runs a bar frequented by gay men, and “he is a victim of that same condition“. About wives, we read: “When the children are asleep … and the room they all live in is clean and tidy, and the husband has come home … and asked for his wife, is it not then her duty to obey his call, after first bathing, prettying herself up, and putting on perfume?” The book, for me, was more socially conservative than it seems to think it is.

The Yacoubian Building is Dickensian in scope, carrying a message about the failings of society and with a diverse range of characters. Like the Yacoubian Building itself, the novel is densely populated, and this did initially make it difficult for me to remember who was who, as I struggled to keep all the unfamiliar names straight in my head. Also, like Dickens, we have surface-level characterisation and a reliance on stereotype.

One of the most powerful elements of the novel is its examination of the transition of a young, ambitious police academy hopeful, Taha. He gradually becomes disillusioned by the doors that are shut in his face in secular Egypt under Hosni Mubarak, as a result of his humble background, and turns to radical Islam, encouraged to propagate a “true love for death in God’s cause, and [a] deep contempt for the evanescent pleasures of this world“. Meanwhile, Taha’s former childhood sweetheart Busayna is shocked to discover that her male employers assume that sexual favours are part of her contract of employment.

I found the prose didn’t flow as easily as I would have liked, whether to do with the style, different narrative norms or the translation (or, of course, a mix of all three!). However, the book’s vivacity lends itself to film, and a quick Google search showed that it has already been adapted successfully both for film and for the small screen. I feel that I might enjoy the movie more.

Film review: 8, or The Soul Collector, a South African horror film (2019)

“I am the wanderer always searching. You are in me, and I in you. And we will meet again. I cannot be tricked. I cannot be fooled. I am the wanderer. And you are mine forever.” – Lazarus, played by Tshamano Sebe

I hadn’t seen any African horror films before (I’m discounting Atlantics, which felt supernatural rather than horrifying). 8, otherwise known as The Soul Collector, written and directed by Harold Holscher, is set “somewhere in South Africa” in 1977, against the background of the apartheid regime.

The story centres around the white family of William Ziel (Garth Breytenbach), who returns to the large farm he has just inherited, after years of absence from the area. He is accompanied by his uptight wife, Sarah (Inge Beckmann), and their creepily, porcelain-doll beautiful orphaned niece, Mary (played by Keita Luna).

Shortly after their arrival, Mary wanders into the forest that borders the farm, where she meets an old farmhand, the all too appropriately named Lazarus, who was present at William’s father’s death. He chats to Mary in a friendly fashion, and Mary seems quite chill with the the whole set-up, despite the fact that he is accompanied by a maggot-infested monkey corpse.

Aunt Sarah is immediately suspicious of Lazarus, but after he helps William to get the unco-operative electricity generator going William allows him to stay in the old barn. Mary and Lazarus, both with a history of deep personal loss, soon form a strong bond.

There’s just one problem. Lazarus engaged in some ill-advised necromancy after the death of his little daughter in a fire many years before, and has since been indebted to unspeakable dark forces. Had he not read The Monkey’s Paw or watched Pet Sematary?!

This film contains many of the standard Hollywood-style Gothic tropes (with the ‘haunted house’ iconography of the farmstead, and frequent jump scares), mixed with uniquely African folk horror elements. There are fantastic performances from both the conflicted healer Lazarus and the wise and mystical village elder Obara (played by Chris April).

From early on in the film, even before encountering Lazarus, Mary displays an unexpected knowledge of elements of African folklore, unsettling her aunt Sarah and uncle William, though she matter-of-factly informs them that her info comes from school, or from a book.

Lurking behind all this, of course, is the fact that the film is set during the apartheid era, and there is a sort of background hum of suspicion and innate hostility in William and Sarah’s interactions with the black characters, evident not only in their behaviour towards Lazarus, but towards the local community as a whole.

The intrusion of the outsider into a close community is a standard trope of horror movies (think of The Wicker Man or the excellent Midsommar). Nor is the ingrained racism of outwardly benevolent white people towards black people something that can now be written off as historical – as evidenced by Jordan Peters’ brilliant Get Out.

8 defies straightforward interpretation and comes with bags of potential. It is never boring, but I came away thinking that the film didn’t quite live up to that potential. Nevertheless, it was a real treat to step outside the standard US/European horror genre and experience something eye-openingly different. And amid the scares are beautiful shots of the epic mountains and enormous skies that seem to be a feature of film from South Africa and adjacent countries.

(I first published this post in December 2020.)

Review no 122: Black Book, a Dutch movie

EUROPE

(In Dutch with English subtitles, running time 2hr 25mins)

Black Book (titled Zwartboek in Dutch) is a 2006 action thriller directed and co-written by the prolific Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, who returned to his native Netherlands to make the film after years of success in Hollywood.

He is best known internationally for directing glossy American films from the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as Robocop, Basic Instinct (the film that made Sharon Stone famous, if not notorious) and the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Total Recall.

His latest films have been French-language projects: the hysterical and confusing Elle, which I watched on its release in 2016, and the upcoming film Benedetta, based on the book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, which sounds like it might need to work hard to appear more than simply titillating (the art work for the film features a sexy nun flashing a bit of nipple).

Black Book, which claims to be inspired by actual events, retains key elements of Verhoeven’s aesthetic – overt eroticism, high gloss, glitz and lots of imaginative violence – and is set in occupied Holland during the Second World War. It tells the story of a young Jewish chanteuse, Rachel Stein (played by Carice van Houten, probably best known as the sinister, hot priestess Melisandre, otherwise known as the ‘Red Woman’, in Game of Thrones).

After tragedy strikes, Stein obscures her Jewish identity, becoming ‘Ellis de Vries’ in order to infiltrate Nazi HQ and assist the Resistance by ingratiating herself with the military leadership. Sebastian Koch (perhaps most well-known for German film The Lives of Others, which I reviewed earlier this year) plays the target of Ellis’s subterfuge, Ludwig Müntze (the ‘Hauptsturmführer’), but he is revealed as a conflicted Nazi who is nurturing an inner pain.

This film has all the standard Hollywood action tropes, but also allows room for a little nuance. How far a person might be willing to go to save their own skin becomes a central theme. This is particularly salient given the constant twists and turns of the plot. What makes someone good? Is it possible to be a ‘good’ Nazi? Can someone automatically be assumed by us to be ‘good’ if they work for the Resistance?

The film was noteworthy for being, according to Wikipedia, three times more expensive than any other previous Dutch film. Fortunately for the makers, it has also been the Netherlands’ most commercially successful film. It is highly regarded in terms of quality, too. We (my husband and I) found it consistently entertaining. Not just us: in 2008 the Dutch public voted it the best Dutch film ever made and, looking at IMDB, users have rated it a healthy 7.7/10. US review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes summarises it as “shamelessly entertaining” – sounds about right.

Review no 121: Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan

AMERICAS AND THE CARIBBEAN

“In Plain Sight” teaser at https://www.mariangoodman.com/exhibitions/416-tavares-strachan-in-plain-sight/

“You know, when you’re a kid on an island of 250,000 people, you have to stay in your lane. I wasn’t really good at that.“

– Tavares Strachan, quoted in Elephant magazine, autumn 2020

During September and October this year work by US-based Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan (b. 1979) was on display at the Marian Goodman Gallery in London, presenting an “immersive and site-specific experience“. A Guardian journalist described it slightly differently, as “baffling, complex, not to say deeply complicated” (while giving it a five-star review), although looking at and into Strachan’s work it seems no more confounding to me than any other conceptual oeuvre!

I didn’t make it out of South London into the Central London galleries between our first and second ‘lockdowns’, and I’m not much inclined to now, until the new Covid vaccine is hopefully wheeled out in early 2021 (I’m biting back the feeling that it is all too good to be true, after all the dire news in 2020).

In 1972 John Berger noted that “The days of pilgrimage are over, it is the image of the painting which travels now“, which gives me a handy ‘out’. Nevertheless, I’m inclined to agreed with the art critic Ossian Ward, who some 40 years later wrote in his book Ways of Looking, that “encountering a work of art in the flesh is paramount to its understanding“.

As a sort of compromise solution, many galleries have set up online viewing rooms and gallery walk-throughs so that people can engage with art as it is hung in an exhibition (and, presumably, buy it), while they are unable to visit either due to temporary restrictions on movement, or due to safety fears. The Marian Goodman gallery is one of these institutions, so although I missed the physical show, I was able to view some of the work online, and download a handy list of the works exhibited (together with little thumbnail pictures).

Strachan has a fascination with human aspirations and physical limitations, as well as the obstacles that have traditionally been imposed on people by cultural strictures and structures, rather than by the limits of the human body.

Specifically, his art has been influenced by the life of Matthew Hensen (1866-1955), an African-American explorer who, in 1909, took a key role in the first recorded expedition to reach the North Pole. For some reason (entrenched racism, presumably) his name seems to have been virtually erased from history.

Strachan’s interest in inhospitable climates, in the achievements of Matthew Hensen and in the power of the individual is not new. For his 2005-06 work The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want he arranged for the excavation a 2.5-ton block of ice from the Alaskan Arctic. The ice was then transported to the Bahamian capital Nassau using some kind of special refrigeration unit and was displayed in a solar-powered freezer in the courtyard of Strachan’s childhood primary school.

The piece is, quite literally, monumental, and evocative at the personal level of individual biography, as well as in the much wider sense of referencing the fragility – but also the adaptability – of the natural environment and the dissonant beauty of displacement. My husband points out that this work of art could also be interpreted as a massive ‘fuck you’ to Strachan’s old school, given it seems to involve plonking a massively inconvenient hunk of Arctic ice in the playground.

Strachan’s later multimedia, multi-part work Orthostatic Tolerance (2010) makes reference to the physiological stress that astronauts experience when leaving and re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. As part of the work, Strachan experienced some of the training received by Russian astronauts as well as taking part in experiments at the Bahamas Air and Space Exploration Center; as part of this ‘installation’, he endured 16 units of G-force.

More recently Strachan has been working on an ongoing written work of art called The Encyclopedia of Invisibility (2018), included in the London exhibition, which currently comprises some 2,400 pages and 15,000 alternative entries. These describe individuals, locations, objects, concepts, works of art and scientific phenomena that have been un(der)recognised or have simply … disappeared, including both an ancient Israeli unit of measure called the omer, and Richey Edwards of British band the Manic Street Preachers. On archival paper, leather-bound, the work was exhibited in a glass case evoking the silent power of books compiled in past centuries by colonial-era white men, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, in a work that questions the validity of our collective memory.

Also included in the recent London exhibition, the immense double-panelled 2020 painting Every Knee Shall Bow (measuring some 2.5m x 2.5m) immediately brings to mind the Black Lives Matter campaign and the colonial past of the Bahamas. The pop-culture style painting features Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie on the cover of a 1952 magazine, while Queen Elizabeth gazes out at the viewer, foregrounded by incongruous (to me) snowy owls. Importantly, in terms of context, the Queen ‘took the knee’ when she met Selassie, with emperors deemed to be of higher rank than simply royalty.

The upstairs gallery at the Marian Goodman Gallery was given over to a collection of busts entitled Distant Relatives, individually named for influential people of colour throughout recent history in the USA and the Caribbean. They are named for, for example, the writers James Baldwin and Derek Walcott, nurse Mary Seacole, Henrietta Lacks (whose cells revolutionised the understanding of cancer), and the explorer Matthew Henson (of course). However, the realistic busts are often obscured by elaborate African masks, their individual features symbolically erased by the foregrounding of their African ethnicity.

Strachan’s neon works are also iconic, and his latest is intended to be installed in Colorado in the near future, on a massive scale. Conceived prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, but resonating very deeply with the situation in 2020, individual words make up the simple phrase “We are all in this together“, whether interpreted as a call to action or as an expression of unity.