I'm a UK-based editor for a major publisher. I'm making it my off-duty duty to experience books, films, art, TV, music and food from every country in the world (where feasible). See drop down menus for my progress.
Gloria was released in 2013, and is co-written and directed by Sebastián Lelio. The movie tells the story of a late middle-aged woman who embarks on a conflicted romance with an older man. She’s feeling lonely – her children are independent, although you have the sense that their lives are not panning out as she might hope, and she feels a bit unanchored and surplus to requirements. She has been separated for many years, and is lonely, with an uninspiring office job. Her upstairs neighbour is noisy, and possibly mentally ill, and a hideous hairless cat keeps turning up in her flat and bothering her for food.
I found the cast reassuringly unstarry, the leads are not Hollywood gorgeous, and Gloria (played by Paulina García) wears a pair of unflattering, enormous glasses throughout. At night Gloria starts going to singles clubs, to dance – she loves music and loves to dance – and to try to meet a man.
When she meets the older Rodolfo, their relationship seems a bit unlikely from the outset, as he’s not someone you might imagine would have caught Gloria’s eye. Nevertheless, they embark on a passionate relationship (complete with plenty of full frontal sex scenes). However, pitfalls lie along the way, as it becomes apparent that Rodolfo remains at the beck and call of his adult daughters (in contrast to Gloria’s family life).
The film has a great soundtrack, and some fabulous set pieces, with some hands-over-the-eyes scenes (not nudity related!). Bittersweet, with moments of melancholy humour, the ending is perfect and not a little heart-warming.
I followed up with Gloria Bell, a US 2018 remake of the film, starring the more obviously beautiful Julianne Moore. Unusually (I think!) the remake is also written and directed by Lelio. It’s very faithful to the original, although Rodolfo is now called Arnold, which amused me for some reason.
One reviewer notably commented on the fact that the movie (in both its iterations) can’t be accused of failing the Bechdel test, and it was refreshingly unusual, in both versions, to see a late middle-aged woman carrying a film.
Hernan Koch’s acclaimed 2009 novel has a seemingly normal family dinner in a fancy Amsterdam restaurant as its focus, and the plot unspools over the course of a single evening. First published in English translation in 2012, it feels like a shorter book than it is, due to its page-turning intensity, and although the climax of the book is not subtle, the whole effect is gripping and unsettling. The novel was an international best-seller, and has already been the subject of three film adaptations (none of them massively successful, as far as I’m aware).
The book is narrated by former teacher Paul, who goes out with his wife Claire to meet his brother Serge and his sister-in-law Babette for dinner. Serge is a bit of a local celebrity, being a prominent politician, and even a contender for prime minister. The aim of the dinner, described in painstaking detail, is to formulate a response to a crime carried out by their teenage sons. However, as the novel twists and turns and the family leisurely work through their courses, the complacent reader becomes increasingly and unwillingly complicit in a situation that is deeply disturbing. It’s impossible to say much more without ruining the book, which I enjoyed hugely, though some readers may feel manipulated. One Goodreads reviewer describes it as “middle class, lite-lit of the worst kind”, and another derides its despicable characters. I don’t think it can be accused of being boring though.
We read We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo for my book club a while ago. My friend Emily likes to seek out books by African authors, so I suspect this was her choice (we all put suggestions into a little bag, anonymously, and then someone pulls out two!).
Published in 2013, this is NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel, and it attracted a lot of positive attention on publication, picking up a few prizes along the way. Bulawayo spent her childhood in Zimbabwe, moving to the USA for her college education, where she has remained. The book’s first chapter, “Hitting Budapest”, initially appeared as a short story in the Boston Review, and subsequently won the Caine Prize for African Writing.
We Need New Names is an episodic coming of age story focused around a young girl called Darling, who we first meet during childhood in Zimbabwe, where she lives in a shanty town called Paradise. Later Darling moves as a teenager to Michigan, where she hopes to find a better future living with her aunt.
Bulawayo doesn’t ignore the bleakness of aspects of life in Zimbabwe, where schools have closed and witch doctors are flourishing amid strikes by medical workers and grinding poverty. And nor does she turn away from the often false promises of the American dream. But she writes with verve and pep, and a useful dose of humour.
Ruben Östlund’s film Force Majeure (released in Sweden as Turist) came out in 2014, and has recently been the subject of an American remake (re-titled Downhill, starring Will Ferrell, and apparently dire). The original Swedish film, focused around a father’s mishandled response to an apparent avalanche, is great, both funny and cringey. A family with young children, holidaying in the Alps, have to deal with the fall-out after the husband, Tomas (played by Johannes Kuhnke), responds instinctively to the threat of an avalanche by running away … then refuses to admit what he did. It’s an expertly handled blend of dark comedy and an uncomfortable exploration of masculinity.
Later release The Square (2017) also manages to combine laughs with toe-curling discomfort. It stars the appealing Danish actor Cleas Bang, who plays Christian, an idealistic and flawed gallery owner. Other members of the cast include acclaimed American actor Elisabeth Moss (playing a journalist) and British actor Dominic West (in the role of a visiting artist). The film, a winner of the prestigious Palme d’Or, centres on the pretensions of the modern art world, which I guess are an easy target for parody. The Square of the title refers to an area outside Christian’s art gallery, designated “a sanctuary of trust and caring” within which “we all share equal rights and obligations”. (In fact, it started off as a genuine social experiment by the director.)
An interview in the British press has quoted Östlund (previously a director of extreme sport videos) as saying ““Basically, all my films are about people trying to avoid losing face.” If you have a strong tolerance for squirming discomfort, both these films are brilliantly entertaining.
Homegoing was published in 2016 to much praise. Gyasi was born in 1989 in Ghana, but grew up mainly in the USA. However, Homegoing, her first novel, was apparently inspired by a trip back to the country of her birth in 2009.
At first the novel was a little disorientating, as the story cut away after the first pages to another character’s perspective, and it develops in that way through the course of the novel, following the interconnected lives of generations, whose lives diverge dramatically. It ends up as a collection of linked short stories, really, and I’d have preferred a more coherent narrative, as I found some of the stories worked better than others.
Initially set in the late 19th century, the action opens on the Gold Coast (later Ghana) with Maame, an Asante slave within a Fante household. She runs away, but her newborn daughter, Effia, is left behind. Maame later has another daughter, Esi, with an influential Asante. Effia ends up as the wife of a British slave trader. In stark contrast, her hitherto cossetted half-sister is captured in a raid and, in a slightly heavy-handed reversal of fortunes, eventually finds herself in America as a slave. Each chapter is narrated from the perspective of one of the sister’s descendants, travelling through successive generations until the present day.
Gyasi brings a new, often gruelling focus on the participation of West Africans in the slave trade, and in its epic scale and ambition the book is impressive. However, it felt a bit like a history lesson in places, and some of the characters felt a bit of an incoherent hotchpotch, with each compelled to somehow represent the imagined experience of a whole generation. Nevertheless, some episodes worked brilliantly, with the decisions that sealed one generation’s happiness being seen to visit misfortune on a subsequent one, for example.
A couple of weeks ago I was looking through my shelves for pandemic lit, and was reminded of the book The Wall by Marlen Haushofer. This book, her most famous work (published in the 1960s, and appearing in English translation in 1991), seems to have fallen off the radar a bit since the author’s death in 1970, but was a very well-known feminist novel in the German-speaking world in its heyday. It was also revived as a film a few years ago, which I may need to check out.
The protagonist, holidaying in the Austrian mountains, wakes to find herself apparently the only living survivor of a bizarre event that has caused an invisible wall to spring up, beyond which all humanity seem to have been instantly frozen, struck dead doing whatever they were doing when the wall appeared (perhaps the result of some kind of a nuclear event?). This premise sounds ridiculous, and I guess it is, but the seriousness and reflectiveness of the prose means it doesn’t seem silly, just odd and terrifying
The nameless, middle-aged woman, in her previous life the mother of two grown-up daughters, now finds herself unexpectedly completely alone except for a loyal, loving dog, Lynx, a cat or two, a cow she calls Bella and her calf, Bull. The woman, who was staying with her cousin Luise and brother-in-law Hugo before humanity was seemingly wiped out, makes use of her slightly neurotic brother-in-law’s living arrangements, which means, as a consequence, she is initially handily well-stocked for surviving the apocalypse.
Nevertheless, Hugo’s supplies can only take her so far, and she is compelled to learn various survival skills, such as basic animal husbandry and farming, and finds herself revelling in her body’s unexpected capabilities even while her anxieties mount as to how she will endure.
The book is a first-person, diary-style account of the protagonist’s experience of life in the dystopia in which she finds herself. My copy includes an accolade from Doris Lessing on the cover, comparing the book to Robinson Crusoe. And it is perhaps a sort of female version of that tale. The woman’s painstaking descriptions of the tasks she undertakes day to day are meditative – and sometimes monotonous. I suppose there is an inherent monotony in relating the essential tasks of seasonal survival!
“One day I shall no longer exist, and no one will cut the meadow, the thickets will encroach upon it and later the forest will push as far as the wall and win back the land that man has stolen from it. Sometimes my thoughts grow confused, and it is as if the forest has put down roots in me, and is thinking its old, eternal thoughts with my brain. And the forest doesn’t want human beings to come back.”
The woman has plenty of time to reflect on the nature of her isolation, and the nature and meaning (if any) of humanity, while caring for her animals and being totally self-reliant. Becoming reliant too on the company of her fellow living creatures, she is heavily aware of the burden of care that they have entrusted to her, and also nails the constant underlying concerns that underpin motherhood:
“I’ve suffered from anxieties like these as far back as I can remember, and I will suffer from them for as long as any creature is entrusted to me. Sometimes, long before the wall existed, I wished I was dead, so that I could finally cast off my heavy load; a man wouldn’t have understood, and the women felt exactly the same as I did. And so we preferred to chat about clothes, friends and the theatre, and laugh, keeping our secret, consuming worry in our eyes.”
Her physical appearance becomes irrelevant, even as she marvels as her increasingly gender-less, strong, wiry frame.
“I thought about my old life and found it unsatisfactory in all respects. I had achieved little that I had wanted, and everything I had achieved I had ceased to want.”
At times, the woman’s life seems almost utopian, as she basks in nature during the summer months, surrounded by the uncomplicated warmth of her animals.
“I’d spent most of my life struggling with daily human concerns. Now that I had barely anything left, I could sit in peace on the bench and watch the stars dancing against the black firmament.”
At other times, the harsh brutality of her existence is all too evident. A bout of terrible toothache is all but impossible to bear, and when it settles she ponders how her teeth are “fixed in my jaw like time bombs“. (Now that my own local dentist is closed for who knows how long I’ve been feeling this, and obsessively tending to my own teeth, after having a nasty abscess and root canal treatment at the end of February!)
It was a little unsettling (bit of British under-statement there) to re-read this book at a time when a killer virus is raging its way throughout the world, with a vaccine seemingly a long way off, and with no real knowledge of whether it is possible to build up long-lasting immunity. When the protagonist sees her life in an unblinkered way, it forces the reader (er, me!) to confront new, very uncomfortable realities in their own life.
A few years ago my husband and I set ourselves the task of working our way through the IMDB’s “top 250” list of the highest rated films by users of the app/site. We worked in reverse order, and gave up after a few months after encountering a fair amount of dross, amid the gems.
I was never convinced the list contained the “best” films (though it is always going to be subjective). It struck me that perhaps the demographic that was rating films on IMDB was skewed towards young people (maybe under 30), and men, so it included a preponderance of (to me) tedious action flicks. If I ever revisit this task, maybe this time it would be a good idea to start at number 1 in the list rather than number 250!
Checking back at the list today, which obviously changes over time, I’ve noted one thing that never seems to change: The Shawshank Redemption is still sitting firmly in first place – and 3 Idiots also remains fairly high up, given the list is dominated by US blockbusters, sitting at number 80.
3 Idiots is a 2009 Hindi buddy movie co-written and directed by Rajkumar Hirani and set at an engineering college. It is billed as a comedy-drama, but I didn’t find it funny. I have never seen so many men weeping and threatening to commit suicide in one film, let alone a comedy.
However, I liked the romance between Piya (Kareena Kapoor) and Rancho (Aamir Khan), which was lovely and fluffy and romantic, and the high point of which came with the Zoobi Doobi song. You don’t get that in Western films, which are all too often focused around cynical, damaged people (see, for example, the Silver Linings Playbook, also billed as a romcom).
All the actors were much too old for their roles as students, especially Aamir Khan who, according to IMDB, was born in 1965, making him 44 years of age on the films release in 2009. And the film was really, REALLY long at 170 mins, making it probably the longest film i have ever sat through (I walked out of JFK 120 mins in, as I had to catch a train).
I faded in and out, but fortunately the plot was straightforward, in that it centred around the principal of an engineering college (a straightforward baddie) and his students (straightforward goodies), on a path to maturity and redemption. The slapstick and romance gave the film a sweetly innocent feel. I’m not all that familiar with Bollywood movies but perhaps this is a defining thing of the genre.
I followed this film up with Taare Zameen Par (titled Like Stars on Earth internationally), a 2007 Indian Hindi-language drama film produced and directed by Aamir Khan.
I preferred this to 3 Idiots, although it shared the similarly simplistic narrative structure and lack of depth of character. I don’t know if this is typical of Indian cinema in general, or just the two Indian films that I have seen. Typically, it seems, for Indian films, this movie is long, at around 2 hours 45 minutes.
The plot centres on a 8 yr old boy, Ishaan, who resembles a young Freddie Mercury, with a big goofy grin and lots of imagination. From an academically pushy, middle-class family, Ishaan is expected to succeed at school, but does not, owing to his undiagnosed dyslexia. To these eyes, it is obvious that he has dyslexia, and his teachers’ unsympathetic attitudes seemed bizarrely unreconstructed; there are no SENCOs in this school. “I suppose you have seen his test papers with big fat zeros in every category” chides the boy’s primary school teacher in a meeting with his parents.
Ishaan’s workaholic business-dad duly packs him off to boarding school, where he mopes heart-breakingly, and has a life of untold misery. I must admit I did shed a few tears at times – the film is cynically designed to bring a tear to the eye. Fortunately for Ishaan a charismatic supply teacher, Ram, played by the irrepressible Aamir Khan, is on hand to save him from his fate. He recognises (finally!) Ishaan’s textbook symptoms and helps him with his letters while organising some kind of art day to provide Ishaan with a creative outlet.
Suddenly all the hitherto evil boarding school teachers have a personality change and become lovely, championing Ishaan for his achievements under Ram’s tuition. I did like the way no-one assumed that Ram taking an interest in Ishaan was indicative of underlying paedophilia, as would certainly be the case here in the UK. (Well, we did harbour Jimmy Saville.) And the songs were great.
I have long admired the work of acclaimed American artist Edward Hopper, probably most famous for his work Nighthawks. His life and work has been written about particularly evocatively by Olivia Laing in her book The Lonely City.
That book talked about the effects of loneliness on creativity, and on the particular isolation of experiencing a feeling of loneliness in a city, where it is possible to be surrounded by others and yet remain disconnected.
Room in New York, 1932. Oil on canvas.
Living in a small house with three children and a husband, loneliness has often felt more like an unachievable goal rather than a problem.
However, the state of effective global lockdown imposed by the coronavirus pandemic has made all of us more cut off from others in our life, and some feeling of loneliness and isolation is inevitable.
Cape Cod Morning, 1950. Oil on canvas.
I can’t get out to art exhibitions in a pandemic, despite living in what is, in normal times, a cultural hub. So I found myself reaching for my shelf of art books (often hardly opened), and looking for my book on Hopper.
I’ve not been the only person recently to pick up on parallels with his work and the times in which we’re living. But, like the melancholic women in his painting, I have found myself with my face pressed against the glass, voyeuristically wondering what the people opposite might be doing in their own sealed-off rooms.
Hopper is a master of depicting people sitting alone, and creating scenes featuring deserted rooms or empty streets, which convey a sense of absolute aloneness. Paradoxically, then, his paintings ultimately capture views without viewers, even while we are gazing upon them.
Morning Sun, 1952, Oil on canvas and Room in Brooklyn, 1932. Oil on canvas.
Normal service will resume on the blog later this week, but in the meantime I’ve spent a happy hour ‘arranging’ all my unread books, double stacked and higgeldy-piggeldy, on a single shelf. This is an attempt to persuade myself to use the time when I would otherwise be shopping for books, or going out, or whatever else I used to do when I wasn’t working or looking after my children, to read my way down the pile a bit. My shelf includes books I intend to re-read, especially in terms of pandemic lit, although I’m also currently re-reading, and very much enjoying, Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’.
So I’m planning on no book buying during the remaining duration of the lockdown (although I did guiltily stock up on a handful of new books at the beginning, when I panicked that Amazon might close its doors or focus on groceries etc.).
Much of the world is locked down as a result of the COVID-19 epidemic, and normal routines have been dramatically changed. I’m finding it hard to concentrate on things I usually love, which include watching films (preferably at the cinema) and reading voraciously.
Here are a few thematic ideas for books and films that might give some kind of insight into how to cope during a global pandemic.
BOOKS:
José Eduardo Agualusa, A General Theory of Oblivion (Angola): a fictional account of a woman who, on the eve of Angolan independence, bricks herself into her apartment in Luanda and survives there alone for decades.
José Saramago, Blindness (Portugal): if you think your own country is mismanaging the current pandemic, then take comfort in the fact that they’re not doing as bad a job as the authorities in this book.
Marlen Haushofen, The Wall (Austria): a woman finds herself cut off from the rest of mankind after she discovers that a mysterious wall has cut her off from the rest of humanity, including her own children, who are all presumed dead. See, it could be worse.
Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (Netherlands): world-famous testament to an incredibly talented writer and to the suffering and endurance of her and her family, who were forced to take refuge in a secret annex in Amsterdam under constant fear of discovery during the Second World War.
Ling Ma, Severance (China/USA): a satirical, fictional look at the world from the first perspective of a first generation millennial negotiating life in the USA after humanity has been brought low by a global pandemic.
Margaret Atwood, The Testaments (Canada): another kind of dystopia, but at least its different enough from the one that we’re currently inhabiting.
Emily St John Mandel, Station Eleven (USA): unexpectedly uplifting view of society after a pandemic, and an appreciation of the power of culture to save humanity.
Tété-Michel Kpomassie, An African in Greenland (Togo): an account of an incredible journey by an incredible man. A work of non-fiction travelogue and memoir to inspire your own imaginary or real post-epidemic global adventures.
FILM:
Parasite by Bong Joon-Ho (South Korea): contains essential advice on how to lie low in the basement of someone else’s luxury home for an extended period of time, for free.
Monos by Alejandro Landes (Colombia): beautiful if brutal setting and a nice reminder that at least you’ve not been taken hostage by a brutal teenage guerrilla group.
Imogen is Reading and Watching the World: On Books, Film, Art & More 