Review no 20: Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (Iran)

NORTH AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA

Translated from the French by Mattias Ripa (Satrapi’s real life husband) and Anjali Singh

Marjane Satrapi’s memoir Persepolis broke new ground, by exploring her experiences during and after the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war of the late 1970s and 1980s, in the form of a graphic novel. Published in the early 2000s, by 2018 it had sold more than 2 million copies.

As Satrapi writes in an Introduction to the book: “Since [the Islamic Revolution] this old and great civilization has been discussed mostly in connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. As an Iranian who has lived more than half of my life in Iran, I know that this image is far from the truth.”

I ordered my copy from my local Southwark library. Really, it is two books, or even four books, as it includes what was originally published in France as Persepolis I and II (The Story of a Childhood) and Persepolis III and IV (The Story of a Return). I’d taken it out of the library before, but hadn’t got round to reading it, assuming, I guess, that because of its themes it would be heavy-going and hard work. However, once I’d decided I was going to embark on my global cultural tour, I grabbed a copy for the second time – and actually read it. Within just a few pages I was gripped….

….Although my only gripe was that the text is teeny tiny, even with my old-person reading glasses on.

The book is aimed squarely at a Western audience, and is designed to break down stereotypes and challenge misinformation, as well as entertain. Unsurprisingly, the book was banned in Iran. Satrapi herself settled in France in her 20s, although her enduring love for her native country shines out clearly from her writing.

Although I’m not usually a fan of the comic strip format, the device makes the sometimes challenging themes of Satrapi’s story hugely accessible. Satrapi is feisty and funny, describing her experiences of growing up, which veer between the universal and the specific.

Satrapi describes how as a small child her ambition in life was to become a prophet. She believed that she was visited by God, although his pronouncements could be prosaic: “Tomorrow the weather is going to be nice. It will be 75 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade.”

The illustrations, an integral component of the book, are great: evocative and, again, often disarmingly funny. Satrapi is brilliant on facial expressions. Black and white, stark and combining elements of both her Iranian and her adopted cultures, they effectively illuminate Satrapi’s experiences.

Satrapi’s experience in Iran, of course, was in many ways atypical. Her family were part of an educated elite, and had the money to send her to Europe for several years in her teens, to take trips to Europe and Canada themselves, and to pay for Satrapi to move to France to study in her twenties.

So she had a comparatively privileged lifestyle, but that is not to undermine or understate the difficulties Satrapi faced growing up during a time of repression and devastating conflict. And she effectively conveys the horrific toll it took on the people of Iran as a whole. This includes the sudden proliferation of nuptial chambers (as Satrapi explains, when an unmarried shi’ite man dies, a nuptial chamber is built for him so the dead man can, symbolically at least, gain carnal knowledge) and the huge number of streets renamed in honour of fallen ‘martyrs’.

In addition to being a coming of age story and a political memoir, the book is also a tale of familial love. Satrapi’s warm, loving, secular parents were endlessly supportive and caring, and her filthy-mouthed granny is an appealing character (who, incidentally, attributed the pertness of her elderly breasts to a daily 10-minute dip in ice water). Illuminating and entertaining, and a quick read, I wholly recommend this illuminating book.

Review no 19: Artist Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946) exhibition (Finland)

till 27th October 2019 @ The Royal Academy of Arts, London

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Helene Schjerfbeck is described by the Royal Academy of Arts, where her work is on display in the first major UK exhibition of her work, as “one of Finland’s best kept secrets”. This exhibition, of around 65 paintings, is a welcome introduction to an artist who is well-loved in Finland. The exhibition may be relatively small, but Schjerfbeck’s output was prodigious, and she made over 1,000 works of art over her long career.

The stillness and quiet intensity of Schjerfbeck’s work has drawn comparisons with the work of one of my favourite artists, the wonderful Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, who was active at a similar time, although to my mind her work doesn’t match the standard of his.

Schjerfbeck’s precocious talent was acknowledged by the age of 11, when she became the youngest ever student to be admitted to the drawing school of the Finnish art society. Although she travelled, living in Paris, and spending time in St Ives in the UK with artist friends (the gorgeous realist painting below, Portrait of a Girl was produced there in or around 1889), Schjerfbeck spent the greater part of her life in Finland.

Schjerfbeck’s life does not appear to have been chock-filled with happiness. She spent some years caring for her elderly mother, though they are understood to have had a bumpy relationship. Her own health suffered from the legacy of a childhood accident, which left her with chronic pain. She never married although she evidently wanted to – she was briefly engaged to a Parisian man who devastatingly left her; and seems to have had a massive crush on her 34-year-old friend Einar Reuter, whom she met at the age of 53. Schjerfbeck painted a sensuous portrait of Reuter as a bare-chested sailor (he wasn’t a sailor). Unfortunately her feelings weren’t reciprocated, or if they were, not for long, and Reuter married someone else, the news of which Schjerfbeck feared might kill her.

Schjerfbeck’s style varied widely. She enjoyed painting portraits, and she was very interested in fashion, subscribing to Parisian sartorial publications. As exemplified by the nautical painting of Reuter, she liked to paint her subjects in roles that they did not inhabit in real life. Her painting The Motorist, depicts her nephew as a debonair young man about town – although he didn’t drive a car.

Perhaps the most affecting room in the exhibition is filled with self-portraits, the first painted at the age of 22, and the last at the age of 83. An early self-portrait, from 1895, appears at the top of this post. The self-portrait below was painted in 1944. As she aged, Schjerkbeck’s self-portraits became more abstracted, revealing, the RA tells us, her “fascination with the physical and psychological effects of ageing”. As she ages, her form becomes blurred, her features hazy: a pictorial representation of breath becoming air. Or maybe her eyes were going.

Review no 18: The Farewell, film by Lulu Wang (China)

FAR EAST, SOUTH ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA

China/US film The Farewell premiered at Sundance in 2019, and has received glowing reviews. Lulu Wang, who wrote and directed it, emigrated from China to the USA as a child (like the film’s principal character, Billi, played by insanely talented rapper and actress Awkwafina, who also starred in the film adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians). The American scenes are largely in English, but once the action moves to China, the film is subtitled. The semi-autobiographical movie (‘Based on an actual lie’), which is very funny in places, is an ensemble piece, playing on family dynamics and cultural differences.

The premise doesn’t necessarily sound likely to provide fertile ground for comedy. When Billi’s paternal grandmother (her Nai Nai, played by the wonderful Shuzhen Zhao) is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Nai Nai’s sons’ families arrive en masse from the USA and Japan to her home in China, but the sons refuse to let Nai Nai know that she is dying. Instead, an extravagant wedding celebration is hastily arranged for Billi’s Japanese cousin, and his more or less mute (non-mandarin-speaking) wife-to-be.

Feisty Billi, who, although a fluent mandarin speaker, is culturally very much assimilated into US society, finds the decision to keep her Nai Nai’s diagnosis secret morally dubious. Billi’s Western and Eastern identities come into conflict with each other, and she struggles to reconcile them. At one key point in the film her paternal uncle sums up the dichotomy:

“You think one’s life belongs to oneself, but that’s the difference between the East and the West. In the East, a person’s life is part of a whole.” 

Amid the drama, many of the funniest moments come from the near-universal, and therefore hugely relatable, experience of dealing with relatives who are simultaneously hugely irritating and a source of security and profound joy.

This emotionally intelligent and ultimately heart-warming film is a captivating and highly entertaining exploration of love, cultural identity and empathy.

Tove Ditlevsen (1917-78), The Copenhagen Trilogy (Denmark)

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Translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunally (vols 1&2) and Michael Favala Goldman (vol 3)

Penguin Books recently published Tove Divletsen’s autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy as a beautiful three-volume set, entitled Childhood, Youth and Dependency (in Danish Barndom, Ungdom and Gift). They are gorgeous editions, and a pleasure to own, but it is a little contentious to have published the collected work as three individual books (each retailing for £9.99 at full price), as each edition is very slender, with the first, Childhood, coming in at just under 100 pages. Being a pedant, I also found it a little annoyingly non-uniform that the penguin logo on the spine is much smaller on the first volume than on the other two. But these memoirs are just wonderful!

I hadn’t previously heard of Tove Ditlevsen, although in Denmark she is apparently a household name, whose work is widely taught in schools. Ditlevsen was a poet and novelist, although much of her other work is sadly not yet available in translation. Indeed, this is the first time that the full set of her memoirs has been made available in English.

I expected that the writing would be a little bit old-fashioned, quaint and maybe hard work. However, the tone is approachable, and the writing felt so fresh that the books could have been written yesterday … apart from the fact that the Copenhagen depicted here is under Nazi occupation for a time.

Ditlvesen is a born writer:

“I’m odd because I read books … and because I don’t know how to play.”

And when Copenhagen is liberated from the Nazi occupation she notes:

“We dance, celebrate and enjoy ourselves, but this historic event doesn’t really penetrate my consciousness, because I always experience things after they’ve happened; I’m rarely in the present.”

As I progressed through the books I fell in love with the voice in these memoirs. I had read of Ditlevsen’s death from an overdose, and imagined depression would emanate from the pages – like the feeling you get from reading Sylvia Plath’s journals. But Ditlevsen is drily witty, and I found her writing so open and appealing that I felt she was someone I would have liked to have as a friend.

Nevertheless, the tone of the first book does sometimes veer towards pathos in its evocation of Ditlvesen’s seemingly endless childhood, growing up in poverty with a harsh mother, a golden older brother, and living in a family that dismisses as foolish her determination to be a writer:

“Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own.”

“Whenever I walked down the street or stood in shops, I always looked with a mixture of joy and envy at mothers who held their small children in their arms or caressed them. Maybe my mother had done that once, but I couldn’t remember it.”

However, the tone is much lighter in the second book and in earlier parts of the third volume, and Ditlevsen’s accounts of late adolescence and early adulthood are often great fun. There were several times when I laughed out loud at Ditlvesen’s clumsy and engaging navigation of adulthood, her efforts to hold down jobs and find a publisher for her poems, and her deadpan accounts of her often tumultuous relationships.

“The next morning Ebbe comes home in terrible shape. His jacket is buttoned crooked and his scarf is all the way up to his eyes, even though it’s spring and mild weather … He stands there swaying in the middle of the floor and does a few awkward steps of the ‘baboon dance’, a solo dance he always does at a certain point in his drunkenness, while everyone around him claps.”

Ebbe is Ditlvesen’s charming but feckless second husband, who she falls for after embarking on a short-lived marriage to undeniably useful, somewhat elderly, and vaguely creepy editor Viggo.

Dependency, the third volume of the Ditlevsen’s memoirs, and the one part never to have appeared in English before, is her master work, but you definitely benefit from having read the two earlier volumes. By the time you reach the third book, you have come to know Ditlevsen so intimately that the unswervingly described account of her marriage to the controlling and – quite literally – toxic doctor, Carl, packs an emotional punch.

In Danish, the title of the third book, Gift, translates as ‘marriage’, but also ‘poison’, and that double meaning is cleverly retained for the English translation, Dependency. I gasped aloud at some of Ditlevsen’s experiences during her transformation into an opioid addict. She vividly depicts the horror of life at the mercy of addiction, and the incessant difficulties that come hand in hand with recovery: Ditlvesen’s visceral account of her life as an addict is probably the most enlightening account of drug dependency that I have ever read.

But she never loses her wit, such as this darkly amusing account of a dinner with Evelyn Waugh:

“When I asked him what brought him to Denmark, he answered that he always took trips around the world when his children were home on vacation from boarding school, because he couldn’t stand them.”

I’d have loved to have known what became of Ditlevsen’s own children, but the one biography I tracked down is still only available in Danish. I really hope more work by and about Ditlevsen becomes available in English translation. Her writing is some of the best I’ve read this year – and I read a lot!

Review no 16: Samanta Schweblin, Fever Dream (Argentina)

Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

AMERICAS AND THE CARIBBEAN

This is a short sharp shock of a book, a hallucinatory horror story that builds up a constant hum of excruciating tension over its 150 pages.

Published in Spanish as Distancia de rescate (Rescue Distance), the modern gothic, body-swap novella is apparently inspired by Argentina’s environmental problems, and is probably best consumed in one suspenseful sitting.

In 2017 Samanta Schweblin was featured on the second Bogotá39 list, featuring the best 39 Latin American authors under the age of 39. Fever Dream appeared in English translation in the same year, and instantly received a lot of attention. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017 and won the Shirley Jackson Award for best novella in the same year. Schweblin had already won the Spanish language Tigre Juan award in 2014, the book’s initial year of publication.

I first heard of Fever Dream via social media. Then during August – since 2014 also known as Women in Translation (WIT) month – I saw that it had been included at number 3 on a fascinating list of the 100 best books by female writers in translation compiled by the founder of WIT month. I decided the time had come to get hold of a copy.

Fever Dream opens with a woman, Amanda, lying incapacitated and mortally ill in a hospital bed, with a boy sitting by her side, whispering into her ear. He “explains” that:

“It’s the worms. You have to be patient and wait. And while we wait we have to find the exact moment when the worms came into being.”

So Amanda begins to run through her memory of the events leading up to her arrival in hospital, starting with her meeting with the boy’s mother, glamorous gold-bikini-wearing Clara. Clara lives next door to Amanda’s holiday rental, where she is staying with her almost preternaturally self-contained and mature little girl, Nina, who sweetly carries around a giant stuffed mole.

A sense of foreboding surrounds references to the little girl:

“Where is Nina now, David? I need to know.

Tell me more about the rescue distance.

It changes, depending on the situation. For example, in the first hours we spent in the vacation house, I wanted Nina close by at all times. I needed to know how many exits the house had, find the areas of the floor with the most splinters, see if the creaky stairs posed any danger … So the rescue distance is important?

Very important.”

The screw tightens, and as Amanda searches her memories to piece together events the boy sometimes stops her:

“This isn’t the exact moment. Let’s not waste time on this.

Why do we have to go so quickly, David? Is there so little time left?

Very little.“

I don’t always find lists that seek to establish some kind of canon to be the best places to find new reads. Like prize lists they can be problematic and subjective (my recent bad – so bad! – experience with Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte being a case in point). However, in this case Schweblin fully deserves the plaudits, and I’d be interested in reading more of her work … when I’ve got through the remaining 375 or so books I need to work through for this little project/life sentence (see the full list at https://readingandwatchingtheworld.home.blog/the-countries-by-region). If you have any suggestions or recommendations do get in touch!

Review no 15, Dora Maurer: artist (Hungary)

Exhibition @ Tate Modern, London, UK from August 2019 until July 2020

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“Generally I am not as interested in the finished work as I am in the way it comes about, which is to say the question of realising a task that I have set myself, the idea” – Dora Maurer

I went to Tate Modern recently to see an exhibition of the work of Hungarian artist Dora Maurer, which is on display until next summer. Maurer was born in Budapest in 1937, and the exhibition highlights work from the 1970s onwards. During the course of her long career she has made use of a wide variety of media, including photography, video, painting and sculpture.

Maurer emerged as an experimental, avant garde artist, whose work ran counter to that sanctioned by the state-sponsored socialist orthodoxy in place around her at the time. She trained as a graphic artist and printmaker, and also worked as a curator and teacher.

The early work demonstrates her enduring obsession with movement and geometric composition. I found the microscopic focus on mathematical precision, and the effect of minute tweaks to angles and poses a little challenging, and not easy to interpret. What comes out of this exhibition though is a real sense of enjoyment in the thrill of creation, and deep engagement in the process of making her art.

One room is dedicated to video work, including a hypnotic triptych of films, entitled Triolets. The spliced together videos move mechanically from side to side to a wordless female warble. This work demonstrates Maurer’s long-standing curiosity about the nature of repetition, movement, perspective and perception, and what she has termed ‘displacement’. It also exemplifies her interest in the effect of music on these processes in her art. (And caused two of my children separately to remark “why are you listening to cult music?” as I played the video back on my phone.)

My companion at the exhibition (let’s call her ‘the redhead’) noted similarities to Bridget Riley in Maurer’s later work, which was much more boldly coloured, as she moved away from black and white. She experimented with layering colour, watching it change in the light and, as ever, subverting perceptions, here through anamorphosis.

This work, using acrylics and titled Projected Quasi Images, was commissioned in the 1980s by collector Dieter Bogner for the walls of a Viennese castle, and it reminded me a little of the old Transport for London seat covers (though not in a bad way). However, if Maurer’s work sometimes has a familiar, even derivative feel, with a career dating back to the 1960s, it is quite likely that her ideas preceded or inspired those of others rather than vice versa.

Later her focus on colour became even more profound, as her interest grew in “the way colour behaves, its vibrations and imaginary movements” (art historian Dávid Fehér). The most recent series, developed during 2007-16, which explores colour and rhythmical, three-dimensional movement, has been described by Maurer as ‘form gymnastics’. The example below is one of her Overlappings paintings.

The exhibition does not seem to have been widely publicised, but is well worth a visit, and there is no charge for entry.

Review no 14: Salman Rushdie, Quichotte (India)

FAR EAST, SOUTH ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA

“It may be argued that stories should not sprawl in this way, that they should be grounded in one place or the other, put down roots in the other or the one and flower in the singular soil; yet so many of today’s stories are and must be of this plural, sprawling kind, because a kind of nuclear fission has taken place in human lives and relations” – Quichotte, p.114.

I chose Quichotte by Salman Rushdie for my book by an Indian male author, although Rushdie left India in his second decade of life to attend an English public school, and now lives in the USA.

I was partly swung by the fact that this book was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize. The fact that I’d never read a book by Rushdie before sealed the deal. He’s a big name of course. His acclaimed novel Midnight’s Children won the Booker in 1981, as well as the ‘Booker of Bookers’ marking the prize’s 25th anniversary in 1993, and the ‘Best of the Booker’, marking the prize’s 40th anniversary, in 2008. Frankly I should have read Midnight’s Children instead, shouldn’t I.

Quichotte is influenced by Don Quixote, the classic work of early metafiction by Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes. I haven’t read Don Quixote, as that felt too much like homework even for me, but evidently Rushdie’s choice of structure owes a lot to that work.

Quichotte is the name of a fictional Indian-American man and TV addict who sets off on an ill-advised quest to woo his favourite TV host, Salma R. By some kind of magical realist alchemy, early in his road trip he conjures up, Pinocchio-style, a son, a real son, Sancho, and they buddy up. Disorientatingly, we are rapidly made aware that Quichotte is himself a character in a novel by a man pen-named Sam DuChamp, an Indian-American writer of trashy spy novels. Sancho, a supernatural entity inhabiting a fiction within a fiction, is full of metaphysical questions about the nature of existence and, meanwhile, a romp is taking place involving Miss R and the supply of illegal narcotics.

The prose is free-wheeling and playful, and full of hot-blooded flights of imagination and self-consciously clever, circular cultural references old, retro and startlingly up to date; it can reference classical mythology, popular film and social media emoticons in the same breath. However, I found Quichotte one of the most frustrating and self-indulgent books I’ve read for a long time, or maybe ever.

Despite Rushdie’s argument in favour of the sprawl, I found this novel wandered too much, to the extent that it just became, well, boring. The endless lists (exemplified by a seemingly inexhaustible digression on snoring), in-your-face punning and knowing asides became infuriating, even as I admired Rushdie’s erudition and verbal dexterity. Here’s a typical passage, on Salma R.’s use of electro-shock therapy: “It felt like a Christmas visit from the Sanity Claus. (She heard Chico Marx laughing, Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! You can’t fool me. There ain’t no Sanity Claus! But there was, there was. He was a voltage-powered elf who cleaned up your sanity.)”

Rushdie is well-known for his use of magical realism, but in this novel I found it too brash, unlike the pared-back manipulation of the device in Téa Obreht’s latest novel Inland, for example. The book’s self-conscious post-modernism, with its layered plots and narratives, and stories within stories, means the reader is kept from being drawn into the world(s) that Rushdie has created. The book isn’t designed to be immersive, and (Don Quixote-style) you can never forget that you are reading a work of fiction. It felt as though Rushdie wanted to show off, more than entertain; he’s a taker not a giver.

But perhaps this is unfair. There are also many plus points in this novel. Rushdie is not short of imagination, which is a boon, and if you’re prepared to go along for the ride, this book is no doubt wildly entertaining. Rushdie adeptly tears apart the bizarre modern nature of reality, where what is shown to us via screens can seem more real than reality, but simultaneously strangely distancing. He asks important questions about belonging and the meaning of truth, and provides a damning study of the brainless racism that is still endemic and increasingly apparent in countries like the USA and the UK. But … I found it overlong and way too in your face – sorry.

Review no 13: Félix Vallotton (1865-1925), Painter of Disquiet (Switzerland)

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I’d seen reproductions of Swiss artist Félix Vallotton’s work posted up all over the London transport network to advertise the recent exhibition of his work, and was determined to make it to the Royal Academy before the show ended on 29 September 2019.

Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Vallotton left home for the French capital, Paris, at the age of 16. The RA’s exhibition guide says that Vallotton was described as the “very singular Vallotton”, and his versatility is astounding. He painted vivid and intense still lifes and landscapes, but was also well known for his piercing, satirical eye, his involvement with the resurgence of printmaking and his illustrations for satirical and left-wing journals. A contemporary of French artists Bonnard and Vuillard, he remained outside the mainstream.

The early still life above is brilliant in its technical virtuosity, with the hyper realistic reflective surfaces of the jug and the rumpled fabric. Later work included illustrations for the literary and artistic magazine La revue blanche, and his emergence as a prominent graphic artist.

Vallotton’s woodcuts were especially acclaimed, and a series of intense vignettes catalogued scenes of domestic intrigue and hypocrisy. For example, his work Cinq Heures, references the time, after work, when a bourgeois professional might call on his mistress at home before returning to his wife.

In a review in The Times, the critic Rachel Campbell-Johnston stated that Vallotton could be “an awful painter”, but I couldn’t disagree more. His technical skill is undeniable (as in the painting above), and when eschewing realism, his paintings are full of brooding intensity or knowing vitality. I loved the large, perhaps semi-ironic tryptych Le Bon Marché (which I was prevented from photographing, as the gallery hadn’t been able to attain permission to reproduce it) recording crowds in a 19th century department store, and the rise of incipient capitalism in Paris.

Later work focusing on interiors and home life retained that brooding and intense feel, following Vallotton’s marrage to the widowed, and rich, Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques. With the marriage came three step-children.

The painting reproduced at the bottom of the post below, The Red Room, Etretat, was modelled from a society photograph of his wife, but into it has been plonked Gabrielle’s baby niece, determinedly ripping a piece of paper into scattered pieces, and familiar enough for anyone who has spent time with small children. A pleasant domestic scene, though does it indicate a sense of unease at the disorder of family life?

In the painting Woman Searching through a Cupboard an uncanny feel is added to that feeling of domestic horror everyone has surely experienced while despairingly trying to unearth a crucial item when it’s long past bedtime.

Another painting, Le Ballon, shows a charmingly bonneted child chasing a ball, but the looming shadows from the over-arching trees lend a sinister feel to an evocation of childhood innocence. Parallels have been drawn between Vallotton’s output and the later work of Edward Hopper, and even Alfred Hitchcock. From 1904, however, Vallotton moved onto the female nude, and then landscape, and his arch subversion of the everyday largely disappeared from view.

All in all this was a fascinating and atmospheric exhibition of work by an artist I was unaware of before this year. His work is well worth searching out.

Review no 12: Edna O’Brien, The Little Red Chairs (Ireland)

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Irish writer Edna O’Brien is probably best known for her classic prize-winning novel Country Girls, published in 1960.  It dealt with sex and social issues in post-World War 2 Ireland, and was reportedly not only banned there, but set alight and denounced in church.

O’Brien’s career has spanned some 60 years, and she has been garlanded with praise. Her work has focused on women’s interior feelings, and their difficulties in relating both to men, and to society. Literary behemoth Philip Roth described her as the most gifted woman writing in English.

She published her latest, intriguing-sounding novel, Girl, this autumn, at the age of 88. Her subject matter has moved far beyond the Ireland of her youth: the latest work follows the experiences of a girl captured and forcibly married into Boko Haram.

I read her last novel, published in 2015 after a 10-year hiatus. The Little Red Chairs is a humane novel which appears to have been strongly influenced by events in the life of the convicted Balkan war criminal Radovan Karadžić.

Karadžić successfully evaded arrest for nine years, apparently living in plain sight in the Serbian capital Belgrade as well as in Vienna , Austria, and working as some kind of alternative healer and sex therapist, peddling the use of “human quantum energy” to resolve sexual problems.

In The Little Red Chairs a man accused of Balkan war crimes, presenting himself as an expert in holistic healing and sex therapy, incongruously arrives in an Irish village. Doctor Vladimir Dragan, with his white beard and top-knot, pronounces about herbal medications and talks Latin.

Doctor Vlad, with folkloric charm, enchants those around him, and one woman, Fidelma, goes so far as to ask for his help in conceiving a child. Labyrinthine, the book has both comic and terrifying moments, as Doctor Vlad’s past begins to catch up with him.

The book has a broad canvas, travelling from rural Ireland to London and to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, the Netherlands. It brilliantly conjures up the everyday as well as the arcane, and asks searching questions about the nature of evil.

Review no 11 – Rojo (Red): film by Benjamín Naishtat (Argentina)

AMERICAS AND THE CARIBBEAN

First, you don’t need to know anything about 1970s Argentinian politics to enjoy this film, but I dare say it helps. Frankly I know next to nothing about Argentinian politics and I was blown away.

Second, you may struggle to track Rojo down to a local cinema. My local Picturehouse in South London didn’t seem to be showing it, so I travelled to Russell Square to the Curzon Bloomsbury. What a gorgeous cinema, small but perfectly formed, and specializing in world cinema and art house films.

I expected to be the only member of the public in a screening of an obscure Argentinian film at 10.40 on a Monday morning, but the place was buzzing with people, particularly cultured pensioners, queuing for coffees and freshly baked cakes and filling the seats.

The film, written and directed by Benjamín Naishtat, opens with a suburban house, from which people emerge, one by one, with abandoned domestic items. People are starting to go missing, but no one seems to be talking about it.

The film is set in 1975. The year before, President Juan Perón died and was succeeded by his wife, Isabelita. However, austerity measures and high inflation led to strikes and popular discontent. Finally, in March 1976 a military coup resulted in the installation of a three-man junta. Hundreds were arrested, Isabelita Perón was exiled, and suspected left-wing activists, including students, were tortured and murdered.

We are given none of this historical background, and the political situation is only hinted at. The action centres on the life of Claudio (played by Darío Grandinetti) , a lawyer, his teenage daughter Paula (played by his real-life daughter, Laura Grandinetti) and his wife, Susana (played by the excellent Andrea Frigerio). They live a privileged, upper middle-class life that involves tennis, free tickets to events, gallery openings and sailing through road blocks. I liked the cars and the artfully retro interiors, homes, offices and restaurants, full of polished Formica and overflowing ashtrays.

The film is heavy on symbolism. A bullock is wincingly castrated and a stuffed wild cat snarls from inside a glass case. In Paula’s dance class she enacts a highly choreographed tableau of entrapment and repressed violence. An eclipse scene hammers home the principal point: don’t look directly at things, you could get hurt. Flies multiply. The fabulous score, by Vincent Van Warmerdam, helps to accentuate the tension throughout, loading even the most unassuming episode with a sense of pervading dread, occasionally defused with humour.

Early, key events, when a disagreement in a restaurant between Claudio and another man escalates, are compelling and full of menace. When the lawyer’s wife enters the scene time slows down, her face is shown in close up, every gesture and every feature are lovingly hovered over.

Someone’s brother goes missing, and a Columbo-style, celebrity super-sleuth enters the fray. Sinclair (played by Alfredo Castro) is a great character, and suspicious of the inscrutable Claudio. Meanwhile, someone’s son goes missing, but no one seems to care. Claudio’s life has become something of a noirish waiting game, as the tension builds, tightening like a fist.

All the performances are excellent in this gripping film. Watch the trailer here: