Review of "Burial Rites" by Hannah Kent

Gloomy but very well written first novel about a murder and subsequent execution in early C19th Iceland. That's not a very promising summary, but the book was really compelling...though I can't say it was enjoyable, it did hold me the whole time, even though I knew how it would end. The life depicted is almost impossibly grim - not much good old days here, with filth, freezing to death, miserable food, back-breaking work. 

The book is very modern, with multiple narrators and time periods, and inserts of official documents and other found material. There's some background material about how it came to be written...but why was a woman from Adelaide studying Icelandic in the first place? We're not told that.

Review of Napoleon

I'm afraid this lived down to expectations. Very long, a bit boring. No good acting, no good dialogue, and no insights into the history depicted. Nothing useful about the French revolution, and nothing in the depiction of the battles that actually explains how they went and how Napoleon's generalship contributed to the French victories. The depiction of Waterloo is mainly just a mess, unlike the 1970 film with Rod Steiger as Napoleon.

Review of Maestro

Long and not entirely satisfactory biopic about Leonard Bernstein. It doesn't mention any of his political engagement or activism, but that's not my main gripe. It was quite boring (had a little doze) despite really good actors. It was boring in a rather special way, in that it didn't feel as if the dialogue mattered at all. It was often quite hard to hear, and the narrative was mainly carried by facial expressions. It didn't really feel like there was a story or a script. Stuff just happened, as if what we saw on screen were the linking shots between the real (somehow excised) scenes that were supposed to make up the film.

I'm sure that this was deliberate - this is a work of one man's passion, with lots of other big names (Scorsese, Spielberg) behind it, so it can't have been omission. So I just don't get it.

Watched at the cinema - Crouch End Art house - and beautiful to look at on a big screen, and yet that still wasn't enough.

BTW the 'Jewface' thing didn't bother me at all, the nose prosthetic was really good, though Cooper's whiny voice was annoying.

Review of Nuovo Olimpo

Unexpectedly good Italian gay romantic drama, about two guys who meet in a cinema that's used for casual gay sex hook-ups, develop an intense connection that's not just about sex, and then lose contact because of a protest broken up by violent riot police...and the rest of the film is about the loss that affects both of their lives, and the lives of others that they touch. It's beautiful and well done (unlike a lot of Italian films that I've watched lately) and I didn't even mind that one of the two men is a film-maker...films about film-makers often piss me off.

Long but I still had a feeling that something had been cut from it without quite enough care...there were some character developments that didn't quite add up. Still, well worth watching...we watched on Netflix.

Review of Polite Society

Lots of promise, largely not delivered. Written by the woman behind "We Are Ladyparts", which was brilliant, but this isn't. It's like someone thought that they should do a toned-down version of Ladyparts, so it's still set in a British-Muslim family context, but it's less harsh about the constricting nature of that family life for those who don't fit in - here the young heroine isn't a lesbian, she just aspires to do martial arts and be a stuntwoman. So non-normative, but more in a silly way than a threatening one.

And it is mainly just silly. It's knockabout in a way that makes it seem like it was intended to be a kids' film, but with enough sexual content to make it inappropriate for that. Maybe there's an Asian martial arts movie genre that I am not familiar with, so I'm missing some of of the parody references. Some occasional funny bits, but mainly not all that funny.

Review of "Non-Jewish Zionism: its Roots in Western History" by Regina Sharifa

There's lots of good stuff in this book, and much that I wasn't really aware of. I was aware that Protestant Christianity was a lot keener on "the Old Testament" than the other flavours, and that consequently there has often been a weird kind of philosemitism about it. Protestants, especially the English Puritans, often identified themselves with the Israelites. And that led to a kind of romantic notion of restoring the Jews to the Holy Land, either in fulfilment of millenarian prophecies or as a good thing in its own right. This made some Protestants proto-Zionists before there was any Jewish Zionist movement, and made politicians steeped in that kind of Christianity particularly receptive to both philosemitic ideas and plans for the appropriation of Palestine from the Ottomans.

Lots of this was going on before there was any kind of Jewish Zionism, but it did make British and American politicians in particular receptive to the Zionist movement when it emerged. The same romantic notions of Jews meant that the same politicians who were proto-Zionists didn't like actual Jews very much; they failed to live up to the image of ancient Israelites, and they wanted emancipation and equal rights rather than national restoration.

Where I think the book falls down is that its picture of Jewish Zionism, when it emerges, is utterly divorced from the context in which Zionism grew among Jews. There's no account of the upsurge of antisemitism in the Russian Empire, and then in its Polish successor state. The word "pogrom" does not appear in the index, and there's no reference to the May Laws of 1882. The Nazis mainly appear in terms of the Ha'avara agreement with German Zionists, and this is - as is so often the case - represented as if it were a convergence of equals. We learn that the British initially promoted and encouraged Jewish immigration to Palestine, and that they later put up quotas to stop too many Jews arriving; but although the book talks about other western countries refusing to take Jewish refugees, there's not much recognition that the Jews who were trying to migrate to Palestine were desperate refugees too, not pith-helmeted colonists.

I note in passing that there's nothing about the Communist honeymoon with Zionism either, though there is a discussion about the influence of Zionists (again via Christians) on the American labour movement.

Review of "Wagons West: The Epic Story of America's Overland Trails" by Frank McLynn

A long and grindingly detailed account of the wagon-driving pioneers who colonised California and Oregon in the years before the Gold Rush. The book had its merits - it was great for reading last thing at night, because it invariably put me (and Ruth, if I read it out loud to her) to sleep very quickly. 

For the most part the stories of the individual wagon trains seem to follow a common pattern. Lots about what provisions the pioneers took. Stories about how they got into trouble, mainly through stupidity. The miserable privations that the pioneer women experienced, with huge amounts of women's labour needed to keep the men in the style to which they quickly became accustomed. Mainly good relations with the native Americans, who were kind and helpful to the pioneers, and who received little recognition or kindness in recompense. "Attack by Indians" was what the pioneers worried about most, but in so far as some of them died it was a result of stupid behaviour (children sitting on wagon yokes and so on). The book isn't really in line with anti colonial sensibilities; it details how the pioneers were motivated by the possibility of cheap land, but doesn't reflect much on how it came about that there was all that land that "didn't belong to anyone" there.

I skipped some of the middle of the book, coming back to the final chapter about the Mormon wagon trains, which was weirdly fascinating. The book ends just before the gold rush, which transformed California, its population and the trail. I hadn't really been aware that both California and Oregon, the destination of the land-hungry pioneers, were both outside the control of the United States at the time of the trails - Oregon was not really under anyone's control but was part of a dispute with the British, and California was part of Mexico until after 1848.