Review no 98: A World Gone Mad: The War Diaries of Astrid Lindgren, 1939-45 (Sweden)

Translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death

EUROPE

Astrid Lindgren is best known for her iconic children’s book character Pippi Longstocking. But she also kept diaries throughout the Second World War, recording world events, and tracking with horror the progress of the war from her home in officially neutral Stockholm. I found the diaries to be a mixture of the fascinating and the prosaic. She records in detail the news as she interprets it from her reading of the papers and from insights from friends and colleagues. This is mixed in with interesting details of family life, even listing the presents that her children receive for their birthdays and at Christmas, and with detailed descriptions of the food eaten at special meals.

21 May 1940

In the evening I was out at Anne-Marie and Stellan’s at Stora Essingen. We went for a walk around the island in the light of the full moon with the scent of lime blossom and budding bird cherry in our nostrils. Lovely, lovely! But the Germans are advancing by forced march; nothing can stop them.

However, sometimes the diaries lack essential detail – one year is particularly gruelling for Lindgren due to some kind of personal crisis, but the diaries as published are cagey and non-revelatory, so it all felt very obfuscating. Maybe Lindgren’s surviving daughter (who provides the preface), edited the detail out as an invasion of privacy too far, or maybe Lindgren didn’t confide all in her diaries – we know that Lindgren’s marriage subsequently broke down, so I can only assume her personal crisis relates to this later event. No doubt I’m being intrusive, but so much context was missing from this part of the diary that it just felt confusing.

Overall, though, Lindgren comes across as a loving, engaged and resolute, and I was very happy to spend time with her. Towards the end of the war, Lindgren reads Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European (which is on my to read list, too), and is moved by his writing. I’ll come back to that book soon, but for now I’m moving away from the Second World War – it’s not healthy to spend too much of my reading time there.

Review no 97: Honeyland (film from North Macedonia)

EUROPE

I’m aware that by choosing to spend a summer evening watching a film about North Macedonian bee keepers I have basically become a parody of myself.

The film, however, directed by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubo Stefanov, comes laden with plaudits. It was nominated for the Oscars in the categories both of best international feature film and best documentary (the first time that this has happened, apparently), and won three awards at Sundance in 2019.

It focuses on the life of a middle-aged ethnic Turkish woman, Hatidže Muratova, one of the last “wild bee-keepers” in Europe. With sun- and wind-battered skin, and teeth that appear never to have seen a dentist, she is living with her octogenarian mother (who hasn’t left her bed for four years and has some kind of terrible suppurating sore around her eye, which surely would benefit from hospital treatment), in a stone house in the countryside, scaling crumbling scree and rock faces to tend to her bees. Living conditions are rudimentary in Bekirlija, the abandoned village in which she lives, without utilities or paved roads – basic in summer but punishing in winter. We learn, almost in passing, that Hatidže lost three sisters in childhood, all of them under the age of 10.

She travels to the North Macedonian capital Skopje to sell her honey for around 10 euros a jar, where she seems like a fragment from the rural past, with her peasant clothing, but negotiates confidently with the traders, and ponders shades of hair dye. Her honey, she makes clear, is untainted by extra sugar, is pure and delicious, and she claims for it both medicinal and nutritional qualities.

However, a family moves in nearby, with several children, also seeking to capitalize on the talents of the local bees. Hatidže plays and sings with the children, and it is obvious she would have made a brilliant mother, through she has never married. In a reflective, regretful moment she wistfully asks her mother whether her parents actively discouraged suitors. The children, meanwhile, are hardy and practical: one boy matter-of-factly delivers a calf.

I fretted about safety and hand washing, and thought my own life would look crazy in contrast. The family often deal with the bees with zero protective gear: the filthy children are horribly stung, but this is just part of daily life. Life is beautiful and bleak, and tech is more or less non-existent.

Hatidže comes to resent the family’s intrusion on her world however, as Hussein signs a deal with a local trader to mass produce honey, in a desperate effort to keep meals on the the table for his children – a decision that threatens to destroy the fragile and symbiotic ecosystem within with Hatidže has made her life.

In the film, we watch Hatidže follow airplanes with her eyes as she see them cross the skies, and we assume they are utterly alien to her. Since her mother’s death, however, she has travelled to Hollywood for the Oscars, and to several international film festivals. The BBC also reports that the directors purchased a home for Hatidže in another village, where she can live near to her brother and his family – but that she always returns to her former home for honey-making season.

Review no 96: Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar

AMERICAS AND THE CARIBBEAN

World-renowned peripatetic installation and performance artist and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar was born in Chile in the 1950s, but settled in New York in his 20s (as so many successful artists from around the globe seem to do). He studied architecture at his father’s insistence – I suppose it monetizes drawing quite effectively – and in the video above he notes that he has never regretted his architecture training, using it as a tool in his art work, which seeks a balance between “the dire, and poetry”. (The video was created by The Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the UK, which held an exhibition of his work in 2017, and now features one of his works as part of its permanent display.)

Jaar often focuses on political outrages, humanitarian trauma, inequality and injustice around the world, and is perhaps most famous for his six-year Rwanda Project. That project sought to bring home the horror of those impersonal atrocities broadcast on the news channels in the mid-1990s, and at the same time to create “a memorial for the people of Rwanda”. His task was to “represent the unrepresentable”: a genocide in which about a million people were killed within 100 days.

He travelled to the war-torn country, but some of his testimony he considered to be so disturbing that for his work Real Pictures 1995 he permanently sealed the images in black boxes: they challenge the viewer to consider what is more devastating, the image, or the imagined image, in a sort of dreadful manipulation of the Schrödingers cat conundrum. In many ways Jaar’s Rwandan works, including “Lament of the Images”, a blinding light made up, as he notes, of “the totality of all colours”, is about the necessary “absence of images” (my italics).

Jaar’s Rwandan work was due to be displayed in 2020 at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in South Africa in its first exhibition in Africa, but the coronavirus epidemic caused that to be postponed.

In contrast, Jaar’s earlier, very famous 1987 work A Logo for America, a 38-second animation, interrogates the USA’s place in the world and challenges US hegemony over the use of the term “America”. In the style of a (now necessarily rather retro) electronic billboard ad, a phrase flashes up in large capital letters: “This is not America”, followed by a map of the USA. Next, come the words “This is not America’s flag” superimposed on a graphic showing the familiar stars and stripes flag, then comes the word “America” alone, the “R” of which is transformed into a rotating graphic representation of a map of the Americas as a region. I remember from when I read American Dirt that the other countries in the Americas would never dream of referring to the USA as America: it is always the United States. As Jaar said of his work “It is a reflection of a geopolitical reality of the dominance of the United States. It goes beyond semantics; language is not innocent” – as any good discourse analysis student knows (yes I was one).

More recently, in 2020, Jaar created a video work in response to the COVID-19 crisis in New York. Between the Heavens and Me adapts BBC news footage of the mass burial of unclaimed coronavirus victims on Hart Island (which many New Yorkers had never heard of until COVID-19 began to run riot) by unpaid prisoners – in a form of slave labour.

These dead would have been unable to afford a funeral or been without next of kin. The nameless internments took place without ceremony, or anything to mark a life lived.

At mid-2020 the work had not yet been made public, but it had been widely documented. In it, the original news footage has been slowed right down, and the commentary replaced by mournful music played on a Tunisian lute. Jaar is quoted by The Economist as saying “My brain could not comprehend what my eyes were seeing … the poorest people in New York … the anonymous, the invisible, the no-name people being buried by prison inmates, many of whom are poor and black like them.”

Jaar has followed the news avidly throughout his life – in the mid-1990s he is reported to have subscribed to 79 different newspapers and magazines (even more than me!). The article in The Economist quotes Clara Kim, senior curator at Tate Modern in London, who notes that the enduring power of Jaar’s art work is the way that he inhabits two roles simultaneously: not only that of an artist, but also that of a witness to events of global and enduring historical significance.

Review no 95: Holiday Heart by Margarita García Robayo (Colombia)

Translated from the Spanish by Charlotte Coombe

AMERICAS AND THE CARIBBEAN

From the cover and title you might expect this to be a relaxing beach read, but although beaches do feature, it is not particularly restful. Instead, it is an acerbic and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny look at a dysfunctional Latin American family, which reminded me a little in tone of Fleischman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

“Tomás rarely cried. All they usually heard through the monitor was him reciting his newest words and expressions in his sleep: pterodactyl, guava, shitty place.”

Published in Spanish in 2017 as Tiempo Muerto (Dead Time), the book, which has just been published in English by Charco Press, is evocative and sometimes self-referential. Lucía and Pablo are Colombian immigrants living in the USA who have succeeded in financial terms, but whose marriage has failed to adapt to the demands of family life. Pablo feels nostalgic for Colombia, while Lucia find patriotism a bit ludicrous. While Lucía simultaneously relishes and resents the sudden need, with the arrival of twins, to be consumed by familial responsibilities, Pablo finds himself screwing a yoga teacher and flirting with his under-age students. Neither character is particularly likeable, but I found some of Lucia’s preoccupations – with her career, semi-sacrificed on the altar of motherhood, and with her sense of domestic injustice, relatable at times. When Pablo, who is definitely a bit of dodgy shagger, has a heart attack, suffering from what the medics tell him is “holiday heart”, brought on by excess indulgence, the couple reflect on their relationship – though I did rather wonder what they had seen in each other in the first place.

Review no 94: The Lives of Others (Germany)

EUROPE

I watched this much-lauded 2006 film, which won the Oscar for best foreign film in 2007, with my husband the other night. I liked it even more than I liked the GDR-era interiors.

Written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (that’s quite a name), this debut film is set in 1983 in East Berlin, where state surveillance is endemic. Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) finds himself charged with listening in to the bugged interactions of Brecht-inspired writer Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his actress girlfriend Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck).

Christa is also engaged in an unwanted sexual relationship with a physically repellent, powerful and manipulative government minister, Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), who provides her with promises of career development and some mysterious imported pills, and who is all too keen to see Dreymann thrown into jail.

Initially steely and unwavering in his commitment to uncovering clandestine dissidence, however, Wiesler begins to find himself become more sympathetic to the lovers as he is increasingly swept up in their personal relationship, which highlights his own loneliness, characterised by a particularly depressing encounter with an unappealing prostitute.

Sometimes melodramatic, the film is a fascinating insight into a morally dubious time in German history that now feels like another world.

Review no 93: Margarita Cabrera – Mexican artist

AMERICAS AND THE CARIBBEAN

I had originally intended to discuss the now ubiquitous Frieda Kahlo for my post on a Mexican artist. I find her fascinating, and feel that her personal story is pretty inspirational given her level of physical disability (something that I’m particularly interested in as I have a beautiful teenage daughter who is living with a disability). I went to see the Frieda Kahlo exhibition at London’s V&A museum in 2018, which focused not on her art, but on the objects that made up her life, and which was really interesting and largely escaped mawkishness. And her sense of personal style was amazing!

But, said teenage daughter had been set some lockdown art homework, which involved researching marginalised artists, and one of the artists on her list was a contemporary artist I had never come across before: Margarita Cabrera. So to H’s total disgust I inexplicably embarked on my own homework FOR FUN.

Cabrera was born in Mexico in 1973 and moved to the USA at the age of 10; she is now based in El Paso. Cabrera has been widely exhibited in the USA, and her work forms part of the permanent collection of over 20 museums. As well as creating individual projects, she also works collaboratively with displaced immigrants to create sewn, soft sculptures, representing everyday items such as backpacks, bikes, pot plants ordomestic appliances.

Her works document the obstacles, sacrifices and achievements experienced by migrants, focusing, in particular, on US-Mexican relations.

Her show A Space in Between has been shown at several US galleries, including the Talley Dunn Gallery. The exhibition featured sculptures of cacti created with fabric made from the uniforms of border patrol guards. Many of the collaborative works were decorated with traditional Mexican tenango embroidery by immigrant workers, depicting people and animals, and documenting individual experiences of crossing the border, while referencing Mexican craft traditions.  The terracotta pots in which the plants are displayed also allude to and make use of traditional Mexican materials.

Review no 92: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Vietnam)

FAR EAST, SOUTH ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA

This 2019 novel attracted plenty of attention. Written by poet Ocean Vuong, who left Vietnam in infancy as a refugee, it is an epistolary novel – sort of. It reads for the most part as a memoir of growing up as gay, as part of an ethnic minority, as poor and as an outsider in present-day America. As ever with these things, the author insists it is fiction, so I would assume it’s a mixture of the two – does that mean it’s auto fiction? I’m never quite sure what that is exactly.

The novel takes the form, very loosely, of a sprawling episodic letter to the writer’s non-English-speaking mother, with whom the protagonist, known as Little Dog, has a complicated relationship, since her approach to child-rearing combined love with blatantly violent abuse. It’s a bit of a paradoxical kind of letter, too, since it’s written in English prose (very poetic prose), a language that the intended recipient doesn’t read or speak. Thus, taken literally, the whole emotionally charged screed is pretty much wasted, which I guess is the point, and even the explanation for the depth of the unloading that goes on.

Poetic language is often fine, even a positive, but to be frank I feel like maybe Ocean Vuong’s poetry actually isn’t that great. The novel was engaging enough, and devastating on the impact of the conflict in Vietnam on a whole generation of young women and children. And men too: the protagonist’s grandmother’s American ex-lover is scarred, emotionally, by his time during the conflict in Vietnam. The novel is also damning too on America’s current lost generation of young men, strung out on drugs and lacking hope for the future.

Overall, I felt the book started off really good, and then fell apart for quite a long time around the middle, when I was tempted to skim pages and felt it was all a bit … wanky, to reclaim a phrase from my youth … by which I guess I mean off-puttingly self-conscious and self-regarding. It’s a thin line isn’t it, as I generally love an arty, intellectual, confessional memoir-type affair, but this didn’t work for me. And this is another book that I wasn’t supposed to be reading right now, since I have nominated a whole bunch of other books for the 20 books of summer project (I’ve got to the stage with it now where I’ve started swapping out choices!).

Review no 91: Cook Off – a movie from Zimbabwe

AFRICA

“Cook Off – the first film from Zimbabwe to be shown on Netflix” said the headline. Well, I’d better watch it then, I thought – especially as reports told me that since 2000 only a handful of full-length films had been made in Zimbabwe. And even better, it wasn’t going to be a depressing watch, focusing on Zimbabwe’s political and economic woes. Instead, this very low-budget 2017 film (it reportedly had an initial budget of just $8,000) is an uplifting diversion, a rom-com focusing on a young mother’s efforts to win a television cookery contest; she is entered into the competition by her son, who is a big fan of her cooking.

Written and directed by Tomas Lutuli Brickhill, Cook Off is not the slickest film ever. The acting is a bit amateurish at times and the whole thing looks a bit like it’s been shot on someone’s iphone. But you would never know that it was made as Robert Mugabe’s corrupt regime was collapsing around him; the cast agreed to defer their appearance fees amid massive hyperinflation, and the set was repeatedly beset by power cuts.

The lead actress, Tendaiishe Chitima, who plays single mum Anesu, was great, and she gave a really appealing performance as a women taking charge of her future, and using her talent to pursue the show’s substantial cash prize. There were plenty of other likeable characters, too, including hip hop star Tendai Ryan Nguni, or Tehn Diamond, as fellow competitor Prince, Anesu’s good-hearted romantic interest.

The film employed the TV set that had been used for making a real-life Zimbabwean cookery show. The challenges set for the contestants in the fictionalised TV contest didn’t seem particularly challenging or necessarily indicative of being Zimbabwe’s top chef: Eggs Benedict, and posh fish and chips. The subject matter was cosy, with a bit of very mild intrigue amid the sweet romance and gentle humour. Overall, it was an easy watch, which may be just what we all need at the moment.

Review no 90: Harald Sohlberg: Norwegian artist

EUROPE

“It’s this kind of attention to detail that makes you believe a world could exist in a dewdrop” – a critic’s comment on encountering the work of Harald Sohlberg, reproduced in the exhibition catalogue.

In 2019 I saw two exhibitions of work by Norwegian artists in London. At the British Museum I went to see prints by Edvard Munch (1863-1944), and at Dulwich Picture Gallery I saw the Infinite Landscapes exhibition of prints and vivid paintings by Harald Sohlberg, who was active around the same time (1869-1935), in the first solo exhibition of his work outside his native country. The two artists would have known each other well.

The Munch show was interesting, and notably displayed a black and white lithograph of The Scream. But I enjoyed Sohlberg more.

Although Sohlberg travelled to several countries, he tended to depict the landscapes of Norway. His paintings often feature landscapes, such as rural towns or churches, in which humans are obviously present and active, but in which they do not feature. His work is, nevertheless, intensely humane. Sohlberg is often described as contrasting modernity with the classically traditional, and he uses a richly nuanced palette to create luminous scenes that evoke the mythical and the emotional.

Detail from Morning Glow (1893), exhibition catalogue:

Sohlberg trained as a decorative painter, and also had a firm grounding in perspective and technical drawing (in addition, he was a keen photographer). Despite his formal knowledge, he tends to play with perspective so that, as the exhibition catalogue notes, the pictorial space seems to be seen from different vantage points at the same time. In the 1890s Sohlberg moved towards a technique of using glaze to build up layers of smooth colour over his visible pencil lines, sometimes using a ruler. This painstaking technique created paintings that at the Dulwich exhibition seemed to somehow glow.

Fisherman’s Cottage (1906):

“Sohlberg noted that the word ‘unusual’ cropped up in every review of his work, which he interpreted as meaning that he did not paint ‘like the modernists’ or in accordance with ‘the development of painting in general” – quote from the exhibition catalogue

Meanwhile, an extract from a 1915 letter describes Sohlberg’s efforts to capture the sublime of the Rondane mountain range with his iconic Winter Night in the Mountains, which is reproduced below:

“Before me in the far distance rose a range of mountains, beautiful and majestic in the moonlight. Like petrified giants.”

Winter Night in the Mountains (1914):

Review no 89: When Time Stopped – A Memoir of My Father’s War and What Remains by Ariana Neumann (Venezuela)

AMERICAS AND THE CARIBBEAN

Having downloaded this book to my Kindle, I was reluctant to start reading it. I didn’t want to read a memoir of the devastating and no doubt horribly familiar experiences of the author’s Jewish father during the Second World War. I felt that I couldn’t bear to revisit the events of the Holocaust, which we have become well-versed in: I’d visited the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam, I’d watched enough documentaries, I couldn’t bear to read about the horrific events again.

However, I’m really glad that I did start reading this brilliant memoir, which is undeniably moving, but also reads like a thriller and paints a vivid picture of a charismatic, audacious young man, and the universally brave people close to him.

Growing up as an only child in a glamorous, moneyed family in Catholic Venezuela, Ariana Neumann initially had no idea that her father, a successful businessman and philanthropist, had a mysterious past. Except sometimes he woke up screaming and shaking in the night, and he spoke Spanish with a heavy Eastern European accent – and as child Ariana happened upon a document showing a picture of her father as a young man, but giving an unfamiliar name. Neumann’s mother knew very little either, telling her only that her husband Hans had had a bad war.

Hans was a workaholic and not prone to personal revelations. At home, in his rare free time, he would spend hours pouring over his antique watches, fiddling with their mechanisms to ensure they kept perfect time, and alluding during his lifetime only obliquely to his youth in Czechoslovakia.

However, on his death he bequeathed to his daughter a mysterious box containing documents and unfamiliar objects. Ariana, intrigued and grieving, was determined to uncover the past.

“For my father the past was lost, imperfect and irremediable, unlike his watches with their mechanisms that he could always repair with patience and time and the right tools … And yet he had retained and left me mementos of experiences that he had tried to leave behind.”

Her painstaking research brought her into contact with hitherto unknown relatives from all over the world, and shone a light, not only on her father’s past, but on that of her uncle Lotar, who had also survived the war, as well as other family and friends. One of these is Zdenka, Lotar’s non-Jewish wife, who nevertheless – in an act of almost unbelievable bravery – stitched a Star of David onto her jacket and twice smuggled herself in and out of a concentration camp to bring much-needed supplies to her husband’s relatives.

The story of Hans and his survival rests on a mixture of extreme chutzpah and good fortune. I won’t summarise it here, because it will ruin the read, but his actions parallel and even exceed those of Zdenka in their audacity. A remarkable man, and a courageous and determined family.