Review no 129: Albanian artist Anri Sala

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Prize-winning Albanian video, installation and photographic artist Anri Sala was born in isolationist, still-communist Albania in 1974. He currently lives in Berlin, and has been widely exhibited internationally.

The Marian Goodman Gallery in London describes his oeuvre as: “transformative, time-based works … constructed through multiple relationships between image, architecture and sound …” So what does this art-speak actually mean?

The 2003 video installation Dammi i Colori (Give me the Colours) takes as its subject matter changes introduced under Edi Rama, a central figure in 21st century Albanian politics. He was Mayor of the capital, Tirana, when the video was filmed, and is currently the Albanian PM.

I know more about Albanian politics than most people living outside the Balkans, due to the nature of my day job. But I had no idea until today that Rama used to be a painter, and actually flat-shared with Sala in Paris.

A bit of background: Albania came close to civil conflict in 1997, following the collapse of pyramid investment schemes. The country has, of course, opened up significantly since the collapse of the Soviet bloc and has been on the path to reform, but it still has a long way to go before it is likely to fulfil its goal of European Union membership.

Under Rama’s leadership, and as part of a programme of urban regeneration, in the early 2000s the city’s buildings were painted in vivid colours (presumably as a less costly alternative to an expensive construction project). Dammi i Colori pans through the streets of Tirana, while Mayor Rama explains what it involves and his desire to see the capital transformed from ‘a city where you are doomed to live by fate [to] a city where you choose to live’.

The film’s title references an aria from Puccini’s 1900 opera Tosca, sung by an artist working on a portrait of Mary Magdalene (while reflecting on his lover Tosca). The title can, thus, at a stretch, be interpreted as reflecting Rama’s ambitions for the city, as it sought to recover from instability and the past unrest that had resulted in significant damage to the capital.

Tate Modern quotes Sala: “I wanted to show images from a place where speaking of utopia is actually impossible, and therefore utopian. I chose the notion of hope instead of utopia. I focused on the idea of bringing hope in a place where there is no hope … It is about dealing with the reality where the luxury of time and money is missing.”

Having lived through the rapid period of change that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in early 1990s, Sala’s work is, as artmargins.com neatly put it, preoccupied with “capturing disappearance in progress“. (And he’s not above mining an influential friendship to do so.)

Jumping forward 10 years, Sala’s punningly titled work Ravel Ravel Unravel, shown at the Venice Biennale, explored not only a piece of music, but the unintended act of asynchronicity. It was inspired by Ravel’s 1930 piano concerto, Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major, which was commissioned by the pianist Paul Wittgenstein (elder brother of the famous philosopher), who had lost his right arm in World War I.

Sala separately filmed two expert pianists performing the left-handed work, their right hands remaining still. Both films were then screened, simultaneously, in a single room under the title Ravel Ravel. The walls of the gallery were treated, to dampen any echoes, so that minor discrepancies between the two performances were thrown into relief. Sala felt that the performances “paradoxically create an ‘other’ space”, quite apart from the two individual video performances.

Another two rooms, titled simply Unravel, featured a French DJ as she attempted to sync two vinyl recordings of the performances. The film in the first room of the two was silent, focusing only on her face, while the other room allowed visitors to the gallery to both hear and see her actions.

Other works have used fireworks and informal DJ sets, and one was produced in co-operation with the rock band Franz Ferdinand. But music isn’t always central to Sala’s work.

Whizzing back in time to 2002, No Barragán, No Cry (below) is a photographic work created in response to the former Mexican home of the late architect Luis Barragán. On the roof terrace there had been a wooden sculpture of a horse, mounted on a plinth, but the contents of the house had been disrupted after Barragán’s death.

Sala notes that “the thing I most remembered was the thing that was no longer there.” So, yes, Sala grabbed himself a horse, and briefly balanced it on the plinth. This image disturbs me, and although Sala claims the horse was not harmed in any way I can only image it was put through something of a stressful ordeal. Animal welfare issues aside, however, the artist’s obsession with “capturing disappearance” remains evident.

No Barragán, No Cry (2002, colour photo)

Review no 128 – This is not a Burial, it’s a Resurrection: a movie from Lesotho

SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

In Sesotho with English subtitles (2019, running time 2h)

A film based around plans for the disinterment of family members is about as far away from the Hollywood mainstream as it is possible to get (though there was Coco I guess).

Written and directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, This is not a Burial, it’s a Resurrection opens, mythical, atmospheric and mysterious, with the line: “This place. Legend says it used to be called the plains of weeping.” Foreign missionaries in contrast, we learn, called it Nazareth.

Soon we are introduced to an old woman, Mantoa (played by Mary Twala Mhlongo, who died in 2020). She is so worn and thin as to be, at first sight, virtually genderless, crying out for her recently deceased adult son. Her husband is long dead, her daughter and grandchild too, and her face is deeply lined and etched with grief. With this final loss, the loss of her son, in a South African mining accident, her life has become meaningless.

The unnamed narrator (played by Jerry Mofokeng Wa Makhetha), accompanied by a wooden, piping instrument, the lesiba (hear what they sound like here), informs us that “now that her son was dead she didn’t cry, nor look up to the heavens. Besides God, reality too felt further and further away“.

Putting on her best dress, Mantoa goes to bed and waits for death to come for her in the house her husband built, though it remains punishingly absent. Her grief enfolds her completely, and she takes what amounts to a vow of silence, “regarding God and
nature in silent contempt”.

This is sad film, but also a film that is gorgeous to look at, set among the beautiful and ethereal mountains of rural Lesotho, which is surrounded on all sides by the territory of South Africa. Mantoa’s small house is shot with painterly care, too, with its sparse interior, its deeply coloured internal walls contrasting with the yellow flowers to the side. The camera lingers lovingly on the detailing of her ornate, black lace, high-collared dress, while all the time that haunting, piping music plays.

Mantoa, speaking out to complain about the state of the neglected cemetery, learns that the villagers, who have lived peaceably for many years, are to be forcibly resettled; their land is to be flooded and a dam built. The Ministry will provide funding to those who choose to move the graves of their family.

The old woman unexpectedly finds within her an untapped spirit of defiance, which she uses to inspire her local community. She angrily, unsparingly, ignores the exhortations of the local priest, telling him bitterly that there was no meaning in the deaths of her husband, her children, her grandchild, and no meaning in the death of his own wife who “will die over and over again for the rest of your remaining life. That’s grief. It’s a senseless suffering, there’s no meaning to it.“

Nevertheless, in an impassioned address, Mantoa expressed how she feels attached with an inviolable bond to the soil that contains generations of her relatives, “their umbilical cords and the placentas of her mother“, and asserts that the whole land would need to be exhumed in order for them to be able to leave it. I’ve since learnt that in parts of Africa the tombstones of ancestors can serve as a sort of marker of land ownership.

Meanwhile, the villagers are increasingly afraid of losing their livelihoods. The land they live and work on has been leased on trust for generations, eroding any sense that they lack official rights of ownership over it – while they have already witnessed the destruction of other areas of the local environment to make way for the march of (unwanted but inevitable) infrastructural development.

The film is a totemic meditation on life and death and the imposition of unsought change, and successfully re-creates a way of life that is threatened by the pervasive drive towards modernisation, while also evoking a more spiritual world, where the dead continue to occupy an important space alongside the living.

It is a beautifully shot, lyrical film, filled with arresting imagery of the natural world, with enormous skies taking up most the screen, and those astonishing mountains. It is a film that is slow and sorrowful – and was described by 2020’s Africa in Motion film festival as gentle, but I didn’t find it gentle, I frequently found it brutal.

In 2020 the film was a worthy winner of a special jury prize at Sundance for “visionary filmmaking”, and it has been nominated by Lesotho in the category of best international feature for the 2021 Oscars. It is the first time that tiny Lesotho has entered the competition. This is not a Burial, it’s a Resurrection is, no doubt, not for everyone, but I for one am glad to have watched it.

Review no 127: Swedish TV series Love and Anarchy

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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.)