Review no 82: The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza): a film by Paolo Sorrentino (Italy)

EUROPE

“To this question, as kids, my friends always gave the same answer. “Pussy.” Whereas I answered, “the smell of old people’s houses”. The question was: “What do you like most, really, in life?” I was destined for sensibility. I was destined to become a writer. I was destined to become Jep Gambardella.“

The Great Beauty is a 2013 film co-written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino. The protagonist is 65-year-old Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), a largely nocturnal critic and journalist, a womanizer and intellectual famous for his lavish parties and for a single book, The Human Apparatus, published in his youth. He has lived in Rome since the age of 26, when he arrived from Naples with the intention of becoming the sort of man who not only got invited to parties, but who had “the power to make a party a failure“.

After celebrating his 65th birthday Jep has something of an existential crisis, deepened when he discovers his fleeting first love, Elisa, has died. When a guest at one of his soirees dismisses The Human Apparatus as a “novelette”, he embarks on a devastating take-down, declaring, “we’re all on the brink of despair, all we can do is look each other in the face, keep each other company, joke a little … Don’t you agree?“.

The film is flooded with religious iconography, and Jep sees nuns wherever he goes, while at the same time beginning a relationship with a middle-aged stripper (that eternal madonna/whore dichotomy!). He begins weeping openly at funerals, which he hitherto seems to have valued more for their performative aspect than as an opportunity to pay his respects.

By the end I had entirely lost track of what was happening, as Jep dined with an eminent cardinal, reputed to be the best exorcist in Europe and tipped for the papacy, and an ancient toothless nun, so old and wrinkled, she looked like she’d been whittled from wood. He flaneured around Rome, and there were signs that he might be experiencing a late evaporation of his writer’s block.

It didn’t really matter that I lost the plot a bit: the well-preserved (well not that well-preserved it turns out, he was 54 playing 65!), vulpine Servillo was never less than compelling, I loved the choral, high church mixed with electro-pop soundtrack, the Fellini-esque cinematography was ravishing, as were the beautiful scenes of lavish interiors and the architecture of Rome. And the overblown, euro-trashy party scenes! They are one of the best things about this movie, and outclass even The Great Gatsby in terms of louche degradation and bizarre extended dance scenes. As The New Yorker wrote at the time of the film’s release: “You could set “The Great Beauty” in America, but only if Harper Lee had spent her evenings at Studio 54.”

“This is how it always ends. With death. But first there was life. Hidden beneath the noise and the blah, blah, blah. Silence and sentiment. Excitement and fear. The spare, unsteady splashes of beauty. “

Review no 81: Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (Japan)

Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley

FAR EAST, SOUTH ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA

My book number 2 in the 20 books of summer challenge has been Convenience Store Woman (first published in 2016). This is a quick and deceptively unchallenging read that reminded me of a Japanese Eleanor Oliphant. It has a straightforward, flowing style, which is very easy to engage with.

Keiko, the narrator, is an outsider who has learnt to mask her true self (or lack of self) in order to fit in with society’s expectations. For almost two decades, since finishing her studies, she has worked part-time in a convenience store, mimicking the cadences and behaviour of other workers, fulfilling every stricture of the employees’ handbook and living according to a strict routine, heating food from the store for her evening meal.

“I couldn’t stop hearing the store telling me the way it wanted to be, what it needed. It was all flowing into me. It wasn’t me speaking. It was the store. I was just channelling its revelations from on high.”

Author Sayaka Murata was apparently inspired to write the novel by her own experience of working in a convenience store for many years. (I was surprised, in Keiko’s case, that she is described as working “part-time”, as she seems to be at work five days a week for many hours – but presumably average Japanese working hours are different to those here in the UK.)

Keiko perhaps has undiagnosed autism, although this is not made explicit. Despite been very socially awkward and having no real interest in other people, she has accumulated a few friends and acquaintances who she sees intermittently as part of a large group, and who begin to question her decision to work in the store without progressing for so long, and to show an uncomfortable interest in her permanent single status.

However, ultimately the story ends satisfactorily for Keiko, with an ending that celebrates, in a very non-polemical way, difference, being true to yourself and marching to the beat of your own drum.

Review no 80: Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun (Sudan)

Translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette

AFRICA

This collection of short fiction by Rania Mamoun is engagingly written in simple, direct prose. Published in Arabic in 2009, it has recently been published in English translation by Comma Press (2019). Representing the first major collection to be published in English translation by a female writer from Sudan, the book is very short, at just 69 pages, so a perfect choice for the 20 books of summer challenge that I’m participating in. I polished it off in a day.

The stories comprise a mixture of musings on universal themes, such as thwarted romantic relationships, mixed with heart-breaking social realism and a glimpse of insight into life in Sudan. Nevertheless, the book studiedly refuses to discuss directly the conflict that many associate with the country.

The story In the Muck of the Soul is particularly strong, a moving portrait of desperation and health poverty, with an overt filmic influence, which successfully skirts mawkishness. Stray Steps, featuring a pack of altruistic dogs, introduces a bit of magical realism to the mix, while the collection also features some very good flash fiction, with the pithy A Week of Love and the powerful One-Room Sorrows. The book has been the worthy recipient of an English PEN Award.

Review no 79: Kiss of the Spider Woman – book by Manuel Puig (Argentina)

Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Colchie

AMERICAS AND THE CARIBBEAN

“I grew up in the pampa in a bad dream, or rather a bad western” – Manuel Puig, quoted by S. J. Levine (2001)

Puig’s (1932-90) writing is famously experimental, with a pre-occupation with gender roles and sexuality (he was himself gay), and a strong cinematic influence – he even trained as a cinematographer, and Kiss of the Spider Woman is clearly influenced by Hollywood B movies. The book, published in 1976, is set against the background of political instability and repression that characterised Argentina in the 1970s. Puig was subject to political harassment and death threats, and although he wrote the novel in exile, he was well-versed in the experience of political imprisonment and torture, having spent time interviewing people who had experienced exactly that.

For most of its length, the novel is constructed as a dialogue between two prisoners, Molina (who has been imprisoned on charges related to his homosexuality) and Valentin (a political revolutionary). Changes of speaker are represented by dashes (similar, in fact, to the Samantha Schweblin novel I read for the blog), and the narrative is multi-layered and studiedly dissonant, without a single, unifying voice. Amid the dialogue, come chunks of interior monologue, divulged in a stream of consciousness. There are copious, academic-seeming footnotes, often evaluating homosexuality from the perspective of famous intellectuals such as Freud and Marcuse, and extending over many pages. Finally, the latter part of the book takes the form of an undercover police report.

Although Molina and Valentin are initially quite antagonistic, there is an overt homoerotic element to their interactions, and an increasing attraction and connection. Their conversations are punctuated by a series of stories within a story, as Molina relates the plots of various movies for his cell mate’s entertainment. Thus, there is a powerful intertextual relationship between literature and film. The prison environment is described in the barest of terms, while the films are relayed in microscopic detail, with Molina revelling in his fantastical accounts of the female stars’ beautiful outfits and hair styles. Kiss of the Spider Woman was itself later adapted for both film and stage, and I’m determined to seek out the movie.

From the opening lines of the novel we are, disorientatingly, thrown right into one of Molina’s stories:

“-Something a little strange, that’s what you notice, that she’s not a woman like all the others. She looks fairly young, twenty-five, maybe a little more, petite face, a little catlike, small turned-up nose. The shape of her face, it’s … more roundish than oval, broad forehead, pronounced cheeks too but then they come down to a point, like with cats.”

Impressively and perhaps inspiringly, Puig was confident in several languages and he worked in tandem with his translators in producing the English, French, Italian and Portuguese versions of his books. The book’s unusual form works to weave together a critique of patriarchal societies while it entertains, and perhaps to suggest that gay people might play a revolutionary role in changing society for the better.

Review no 78: Restless by Kenneth Moe (Norway)

EUROPE

Translated from the Norwegian by Alison McCullough

Restless is a novella, first published in 2015, and published in 2019 in smooth English translation in a beautiful edition by the small press Nordisk Books, which focuses on Nordic books that offer an alternative to the ‘Scandi noir’ stereotype.

This debut work of fiction comes with the endorsement of Norwegian literary heavyweight Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose publishing company printed the original edition, and who edited the book. Restless is written as a series of notes to a woman, known only as “you”, with whom the nameless writer is obsessed, and who does not return his desire, although there have been teasing moments of connection.

From the outside, the reader has the impression that the author is taciturn, controlled and reasonable, but inside he is riven with insecurities, crippling health anxiety, loneliness and insatiable lust, and he pours his sometimes disturbingly personal and most intimate feelings out onto the page, amid an exploration of the consolations and otherwise of literature. He lives in a dark flat, sleeping too much, losing the distinction between night and day, overweight and supported by a student loan for a course he’s no longer taking.

“Imagine that I were capable of stalking you on the street, of throwing stones at your window at night; of shoving threats and the hearts of animals, psychotic mix tapes and home-knit scarves through your letterbox; of killing and ending up in prison for you – because what else constitutes trying hard enough? Is it ever time to give up on love?“

The swirling, internal, obsessive nature of the prose reminded me a bit of a male-perspective Loop by Mexican writer Brenda Lozano, which has been much praised, and which I reviewed back in March. However, here the overwhelming feeling is of enveloping despair, frustration and self-loathing, and I found its evocation of crushing depression almost unbearable to witness.

Review no 77: The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides (Cyprus)

NORTH AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA

The writer of The Silent Patient, Alex Michaelides, is a successful screen writer who was raised in Cyprus by his Greek Cypriot father and English mother, and has lived in the UK since the age of 18. The book (published in 2019) has been a huge international bestseller. I hate crime novels at the best of times (it baffles me that people find the genre cosy, I find it terrifying and a bit sickening!). But this was a pick for my book club, and it seemed that it might be gripping and distracting and light, and just what we all needed.

Alicia is a successful artist whose husband Gabriel was found brutally murdered at home. She is assumed guilty of the crime, and admitted to a mental institution after refusing to speak at all in the days, weeks and months following the crime. Theo is a therapist who is determined to help her find her voice again.

But the writing is so clunky as to be near unreadable (for me – thousands if not millions disagree!), the plot is full of enormous holes and the pop psychologizing was enough to drive me to drink. The heavy references to Greek tragedies I found somewhat interesting, but in no way sufficient to compensate for the books manifold deficiencies. I must admit there was a good twist, which I didn’t see coming, although I might well have done if I had been more engaged in the plot. Anyway, I hated it, but that’s another one ticked off!

Review no 76: Loveless (Russian film)

EUROPE

Loveless (2017) is a relentlessly bleak Russian film, directed and co-written by Andrei Zvyagintsev. It’s a bit like a Mike Leigh film, but imagine one devoid of humour or any base-level sense of human connection and goodness.

Warring couple Zhelya and Boris are breaking up, with little consideration for their 12-year-old son, who they openly consider to be burden. Zhelya feels she was trapped into marriage by her pregnancy and subsequent traumatic birth, and both parents are now involved in relationships with new people. There is no evidence of any semblance of love or affection for little Alyosha, a quiet boy, who is often left alone in the flat, and who gets himself to and from school with little to no parental engagement.

After overhearing his parents fighting over their mutual desire not to have custody of him, and throwing around talk of boarding schools and orphanages, Alyosha naturally looks utterly devastated. However, neither parent realises when he doesn’t come from the school the next day because neither of them is there, both spending the evening until late with their respective paramours. Zhelya does come back to the apartment eventually to sleep, but it is not until a teacher calls the next day that she realises he is missing.

All the adult characters are repellent. When aspirational Zhelya confides in her boyfriend Anton that:

“I’ve never loved anyone. Only my mum when I was little. And she … never cuddled me, never said anything nice. Nothing but rules, discipline, school“

it might serve as an explanation for her warped nature, but it doesn’t excuse over a decade of parental abuse. Older boyfriend Anton, meanwhile, lives in a stylish Moscow apartment that has an actual tree growing out the floor (in an artsy, moneyed way). He is positively creepy, saying very little except occasionally dropping phrases along the lines of “I like studying you” to Zhelya. However, one line powerfully encapsulates the whole premise of the film:

“Lovelessness. You cannot live in that state“

Husband Boris is more concerned about the impact of his divorce on his image within his very socially conservative company than the impact on his son, and his younger, pregnant girlfriend is utterly without self-awareness, muttering into her dictaphone “Dream of having a tooth taken out. What does it mean?” (in possibly the lightest moment in the film – with the exception, perhaps, of the time when Boris describes his mother-in-law as “Stalin in a skirt”).

There is no redemption in this beautifully stark film of loss and guilt and inter-generational inadequacy. Please someone find me some funny books or movies to get into! I seem to have a knack for sniffing out pure miserableness.

Review no 75: Artist Mona Hatoum (Palestine)

“No one has put the Palestinian experience in visual term so austerely and yet so playfully, so compellingly and at the same time so allusively” – Edward Said

In 2016 I was introduced to the work of Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, when I attended an exhibition of her work at Tate Modern in London.

Hatoum was born in Lebanon to Palestinian parents in 1952 (and does not have Lebanese citizenship). She found herself stranded in the UK in 1975, during what was intended as a visit to the country, when conflict broke out in Lebanon. She subsequently went to art school in the UK, and has since then been based between London and Berlin.

“I grew up in Beirut in a family that had suffered a tremendous loss and existed with a sense of dislocation.“

Influenced by surrealism and minimalism, and encompassing conceptual art and performance art, Hatoum, perhaps inevitably, makes work which explores displacement, conflict and contradiction.

Her early work was often performance art. This explored the relationship between politics and the individual, but, equally, the resilience and vulnerability of the body. Most famous, perhaps, is her 1980s street performance in Brixton (London), set against a background of race riots.

In contrast, in the late 1970s Hatoum ran 240 volts through a suspended collection of metal household objects (such as scissors, strainers, rulers and corkscrews) to light a bulb at the bottom: such relatively dangerous installations were displayed in short sessions to an invited audience.

In the late 1980s her work increasingly began to focus on large-scale installations and sculpture, again often using repurposed or unusual materials. For example, Recollection (1995) made use of her own hair, collected over years, and arranged in rolled balls on the floor or hung in strands from the ceiling. Another work is a necklace constructed from fingernail clippings. Art resulting from activities that in the typical life would make you seem at best odd always makes me muse on the thin line that separates identification as genius with a surfeit of creative talent from, instead, being labelled a tragic misfit.

Meanwhile, Hot Spot (2006), is a sculpture representing the world, by means of a stainless steel, cage-like globe, with the continents outlined in red neon tubing, representing flash points and the constant threat of conflict that encircles the planet. The whole thing buzzes with unsettling energy.

Hatoum has also made installations and sculptures inspired by homewares or domestic interiors, which seem to suggest political surveillance and state oppression, while challenging and foregrounding assumptions about femininity and adding an element of threat to the everyday.

It all sounds quite heavy, but kinetic sculptures, such as + and – (1994-2004), which mechanically combs sands into a zen garden with one side of a rotating metal arc, then smoothes it flat with another – or household objects taken totally out of context, scaled up or changed to make them familiar but uncanny, meant that the exhibition was accessible to my young children (at the time aged 7, 9 and 12), who came along too.

Hatoum’s work is not without elements of humour, either. She noted on arriving in the UK that “people were quite divorced from their bodies and very caught up in their heads, like disembodied intellects“. This bodily disconnect is challenged by Don’t smile you’re on camera! (1980), which embraces the voyeuristic appeal of video. A camera was pointed at the audience, and panned up and down slowly. On a monitor facing the audience, a shirt would fade away and, disconcertingly, “a ghost image of bare breasts appears behind, creating the illusion that the camera can see through people’s clothes“. Hidden assistants would film their own half-naked bodies and mix those images in with the film of the audience, to challenge the audience’s perceptions in this way.

Review no 74: The Pact We Made by Layla Alammar (Kuwait)

NORTH AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA

This book, the cover of which came emblazoned with plaudits, was another I read as part of my membership of the Shelterbox Book Club (which for a donation of £10 a month sends me a regular book for discussion as part on an online book club, and also helps to provide emergency shelter and resources for families affected by disaster worldwide). I previously reviewed A Girl Made of Dust, also read for the Book Club, so it may seem that the books focus on the female experience, but actually there is plenty of balance.

Author Layla Alammar was brought up in Kuwait, the daughter of a Kuwaiti father and an American mother. She subsequently moved to the UK, where The Pact We Made (published in 2019) was longlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award.

The main character, Dahlia, is intriguing. She is from a moneyed, cosmopolitan Kuwaiti background, and has a good job in finance, but her life is not her own. She feels dissociated from her life, and has to endure an endless succession of suitors, a bit like an unmarried, modern-day Penelope. Although her parents (and especially her father) are relatively liberal, elements of traditional Kuwaiti culture prevail, and they seek to marry her off to someone suitable, in a similar way to her sister. But Dahlia rails against the prospect of an arranged marriage, while her two best friends already seem happily settled, although at least one of the marriages is by no means as perfect as it comes across from the outside.

Dahlia’s parents are enormously protective, with the exception of one huge failure of protection that has overshadowed the family since Dahlia, now in her late 20s, was a teenager. There are indications of unresolved teenage trauma. Dahlia loves to draw, to express her personality and enjoy freedom of expression, and she loves the liberation of swimming. The importance of art is a recurring theme, and Dahlia often draws the same motifs over and over again, and she is drawn to a a number of Western artists, notably the bleak visions of Spanish 18th century painter Goya.

I found the whole novel a bit modern-day Jane Austen-y, with its obsession with making a good match, but from a contemporary, Middle Eastern perspective. I got some really interesting insights into Kuwaiti culture, where young women like Dahlia and her friends are able to enjoy a buzzing nightlife, and where Dahlia hangs out with male friends, but where male privilege goes unchallenged and unchecked. There is a heavy reliance on parental approval and whim, and an obsession with reputation (made or ruined on an alliance with a suitable – or not -man) and making a good match.

“To be a child again, blissfully ignorant of everything to come, or a man, able to get in a car and drive to Istanbul – thirty-odd hours and you’re there.”

Although the book challenged various stereotypes a Western reader like myself might hold, I must admit I was disappointed to read yet another tale of sexual abuse. It seems to be the go-to storyline du jour, and not wishing to underplay the awful experiences of those who’ve been through it, I’m fed up of reading variations of the same horrible theme reheated and rehashed over and over again.

The book’s very ambiguous ending was perfect, however, and the reader is left wondering whether Dahlia’s life-changing decision is going to liberate her, or whether, through her efforts to break free of the strictures that limit her in Kuwait, she has just made herself even more powerless.

Review no 73: Rebecca by British author Daphne du Maurier (1907-89)

EUROPE

I read this book for the first time when I was about 18. I enjoyed it more this time, reading it more than 25 years later, but I also found it much less romantic.

The copy I read was one I found in a charity shop a few years ago, but I hadn’t picked it up until recently, when it felt like a suitable comfort read amid all the coronavirus madness.

When I embarked on it though, I found this very evocative inscription, which made it well worth every single penny of the £2 I’d spent on it!

The opening line, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again“, most be among the most famous in British fiction, and I recently learnt that du Maurier based the book’s setting on a beautiful Cornish house, Menabilly, that she had her eye on for a long period, and in the grounds of which she used to trespass. She eventually managed to become a tenant of the crumbling house and its grounds for years, until the owners decided they wanted it for their own use.

Coincidentally, during the UK lockdown the National Theatre has made its recorded performance of Jane Eyre available to view on Youtube, and watching it reminded me that there is nothing new under the sun, since Rebecca is so obviously informed by Jane Eyre, if not entirely based on it (and I believe this a debt du Maurier herself acknowledged).

I love a country house novel, and I love a ghostly mystery, and hints of romance and intrigue. Rebecca has evidently, in its turn, influenced a bunch of other books that I’ve really enjoyed: My Lover’s Lover by Maggie O’Farrell being a book I remember tearing through in a day, while I’ve recently listened to Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock as an audio book, and that too contains echoes of Rebecca; plus there have been direct responses or sequels to Rebecca written by authors as diverse as Susan Hill and Sally Beauchamp, as well as of course the Hitchcock film adaptation of Rebecca with its overtly sapphic element, and the 2020 Netflix adaptation.

Reading the novel from a 21st century perspective, I found Maxim in Rebecca far from attractive. He’s a bit scary really, isn’t he? The book is firmly situated in a particular inter-war period of British history (it was published in 1938), and Maxim is very much the strong silent type. He’s also prone to terrifying rages and quick anger, even during, say … an inquest.

“No, Maxim. No. You will put his back up. …. Not that voice. Not that angry voice, Maxim. He won’t understand. Please. darling, please. Oh, God, don’t let Maxim lose his temper. Don’t let him lose his temper.“

The book is all very Freudian, and all very good fun, though I wouldn’t want to be in the second Mrs de Winter’s shoes, the wife who feels so much in first wife Rebecca’s shadow that we never even learn her name.