Review of "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian" by Marina Lewycka

Everyone loved this book when it came out, didn't they? I didn't like it so much. First there's the picaresque humour - the old man acting stupidly and irrationally over the obvious exploitative and semi-crooked "tart-ish" woman, who is also what would be called by many an illegal immigrant. The first-person narrator is politically wise to the nastiness of the stereotype, but she's really having her cake and eating it - managing to have a narrative that's a bit racist and sexist while also maintaining a distance from it. And picaresque - laughing at the stupidity of an old man - doesn't sit well with me. I never understood how anyone could find Don Quixote funny.

And the Ukrainian nationalism too. The book was written before the "Orange Revolution" and all of the stuff that followed, though after the break-up of the USSR. In the post-invasion period many progressives have become a lot less critical about the darker side of Ukrainian nationalism, and the people who bang on about it tend to be "Red-Brown" stooges for Putin. But it's there, and the book mentions in passing Stephan Bandera, and Symon Petliura, as Ukrainian nationalists without even alluding to their Nazi and pogromist histories. I can't believe that most readers of the book will know who they were, and won't learn that about them.

Review of "Lessons in Chemistry" by Bonnie Garmus

Another really enjoyable novel. I watched the TV series first, which was also great, and then when it finished I was missing the characters so I read the novel. Which turned out to be a little different from the series - the Afro-American characters and the anti-racist theme of the series isn't really a thing in the book, though the main character Elizabeth Zott is a supporter of civil rights and racial equality, just as she's a feminist - probably a premature feminist, because she's between the two waves of feminism.

The TV series seems to have put some more complexity in, but also left out some of the scratchiness that's in the book - hard to write about without spoilers, but in some ways it's more critical of conservative and conventional America.

Review of "North Woods" by Daniel Mason

 Really enjoyable novel made up of different stories set in the same place through history.  I feel there ought to be a name for that but I can't think of it. In this case it's a rural local in Western Massachusetts, on the boundaries of forested wilderness. It gradually becomes more tame over the various stories, but not evenly - it goes from wilderness, to orchards, to farmland and then back to holiday-home wilderness. 

It works as a prism for American history - racism, colonial expropriation, slavery - the lot. There's a bit of a supernatural theme running through it too, with ghosts and fake mediums who turn out to have real experiences with ghosts. As with Cloud Atlas, the different episodes are told in different styles, and there are fragments of songs and poems and some pictures scattered through.

A joy - I was sorry when it finished.

Review of "Popular Resistance in Palestine A History of Hope and Empowerment" by Mazin B. Qumsiyeh

I was disappointed and upset by this book. It's not specially well written, and it feels poorly edited too - sometimes the same episode is described twice, or the same point made, within a few pages. 

But that's not the main thing that's wrong with it. Its politics and its account of history are often really bad. The first four or so chapters are a "discussion" of the role of violence in struggles of resistance, but there's nothing remotely analytical about it. Sometimes the resistance (wherever) uses violence, and sometimes it doesn't. He's obviously keen not to be seen as criticising armed struggle, whether or not it's appropriate or effective. 

Worse, there's really no distinction between different kinds of armed-struggle tactics or strategies. Sure, the South African regime and its supporters called the ANC "terrorists", but for the most part its armed wing stayed away from indiscriminate attacks on civilians, focusing instead on infrastructure. Whereas the Palestinian armed struggle focused on soft Israeli targets, with lots of attacks on civilians - kidnappings, hostage taking, and exactly the kind of bombings and shootings that had earlier been deployed by the Irgun against Palestinians in Mandate Palestine. The question here is not the abstract "do Palestinians have the right to use violence" but what kind of violence should they use. For both Fatah and later Hamas, the rhetoric was revolutionary but the tactics were those of fascism.

After this there's a long chronological account of Palestinian resistance, beginning with the Ottoman period.  The Zionists start to arrive, but there's absolutely nothing about where they are coming from or why.  As with other Palestinian and Arab Nationalist accounts of "the Zionists" they are presented as pith-helmeted colonialists. There's no indication or reflection at all as to why Jews were leaving the Russian empire. Of course the Palestinians of the time can be forgiven for not thinking about that so much - something bad was beginning to happen to them, and they correctly understood that it was going to get worse. But someone now writing a history owes their readers something better.

This tendency is exacerbated in the history of the Mandate. By the time the book reaches the 1930s it acknowledges that the flow of Zionist immigrants is increasing, but there's absolutely no account as to why. The author manages to talk about the history of this period without mentioning antisemitism or the Nazis. The only mention of the Holocaust in the book is to illustrate a point about the bad education that Jewish children in Israel receive. There's nothing at all about who made up the wave of Jewish immigrants in the immediate post-WW2 period, or about the mass emigration of Jews from Arab countries that came after that. Again, it would contradict the view that "the Zionists" were all European and American colons.

When it gets to 1967 there's a brief mention of Ahmed Shukeiri, the Egyptian-backed first head of the PLO, though no mention of his call to throw the Jews into the sea or his promise that no Jews would survive the coming war.

Overall the history in the book is like a mirror image of the bad history that I received from my Zionist education. There's lots about the pro-Zionist sympathies of the British (we were only told about the bad period in which the British tried to restrict Zionist immigration, not the preceding 16 years in which they had enabled it), and then the Americans. There is of course nothing about the way in which the USSR and the international Communist movement acted as midwives for the birth of Israel, because that would contradict the narrative that Israel was a creation of imperialism. 

It's a shame, because somewhere in there there's a better book struggling and failing to get out.  There's a lot of good documentation about the popular non-violent struggle. The account of the post-1948 and then post-1967 resistance is informative and told me lots I didn't know. Somewhere in this period some good Israelis begin to appear, though without any discussion or reflection as to what that might mean. There's a little bit of an account of Palestinians who are prepared to accept a permanent presence for Israelis, though usually in terms of them being sell-outs. At one point he does actually quote with approval that "there's no place for a second nation in Palestine", though he is far from consistent about this.

I read this on a Kindle, so it's harder to illustrate this with quotes and excerpts. In a way I'd like to write more, because this is an important juncture in the evolution of my perspective on Israel-Palestine...listening to Palestinian voices, but then not finding them easy to listen to.

Review of "The Jazz Scene" by Francis Newton

This has sat on my shelf for more than a year. Someone was clearing out his Jazz books collection, and I took this one, mainly because I remember that "Francis Newton" was a pseudonym for the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who wrote Jazz reviews for various left wing publications.

Anyway, it turns out that it is a very good book, intelligent, informed and very sensible about Jazz, its audience, its players, and its history. The author (whatever we want to call him) situates Jazz in its historical and social context, without resorting to vulgar Marxism or daft economic determinism. Really great, well worth reading. 

Review of Benedetta

A Paul Verhoeven historical drama with heresy, blasphemy, lurid visions and lesbian nuns. Not ridiculously over the top like Ken Russel's "The Devils", this nevertheless managed to be quite salacious, but also anticlerical and anti-religious in a good way.

Benedetta is given to a convent as a quite young child, but almost immediately begins to have visions. These become progressively more lurid, but she's also doing miracles - bleeding wounds of Christ, that sort of thing. The local clerics decide to believe her (good for the pilgrimage trade), others are not so sure but she sees them off. Then the Papal Nuncio gets involved, and it's torture and burning at the stake...

Watched on Channel 4's app via Chromecast.

Review of Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle

A disappointing, ramshackle, often boring film, with occasional glints of interest. It's a fly-on-the-wall documentary - no narrative or narrator - made by a son about his eighty-year-old mother.  She's not an obvious choice for a film. She's overweight, unattractive, and she doesn't stop talking. She has not much interest in other people, and little insight into her own life.

The title comes from her own declaration of what she wanted from life. The film rather glosses over how it came about that her and her husband were wealthy enough to buy the castle. It seems that money was inherited, but it's not entirely clear from who. The family were Falangists, and some members were executed "by the Reds" during the Civil War. The woman (Julita) talks about her own membership of the Falangist youth, the uniform she wore and so on; but later on she criticises Franco for abolishing the Republic, because her present-day political views extend to disapproval of the Spanish monarchy and monarchies in general.

Much of the film centres on the amount of crap that she has accumulated and preserved. The castle, and the now abandoned engineering factory that her husband once operated, are absolutely rammed full of junk - broken objects, tattered remnants of clothes that might one day be mended, and many small and labelled boxes with dolls house furniture, pins, stationary, and so on. 

That's sort of poignant, because I can't help feeling that my own life is full of crap that I am holding on to and shouldn't. The film is inter-cut with footage from home movies of the family when the children were younger, and they look to have had a fun, happy childhood - beach holidays and so on. Again, I look at that and wonder what the arc of my own life would like if it were made into a film like this.

But most of the time it's boring and depressing, and I missed some of it when I fell asleep. Ruth missed almost all of it, but still saw enough to remember how much she didn't like it.

Watched at Jane Opher's house - the old Co-op on Horns Road - as part of an ongoing series of Spanish films. The occasion was enjoyable even if the film wasn't.

Review of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

I watched this as part of my birthday celebrations. A few months ago I found myself - unusually - listening to Radio 4, and there was a program about musicals where they raved about this as one of the best musicals ever. And then it was scheduled to be on the Stroud Film Festival, but I missed it.

So I obtained it and put it on in the Middle Floor at Springhill Cohousing - a bit of a challenge because the file was too big to copy on to a USB, and my mini PC sometimes forgets how to produce sound output from its earphone jack. But all sorted, and the showing was a success; quite a few people came, and they - like me - enjoyed it.

But it's a weird musical. Apart from the fact that there's no spoken dialogue at all, everything is sung - it's an anti-romantic romance. Sorry for the spoiler, but the main story line is that the young woman does not wait for her lover to return from the Algerian War, but marries someone else instead, because she is forgetting her absent lover even though she is carrying his child.

He comes back, marries someone else (the woman who had cared unceasingly for the dying aunt who raised him), and when the original pair meet again the moment of love has passed. There is no sense that they might yet get back together, just a feeling of a future that didn't happen.

The beautiful theme song for the film, performed by many artists, is "I Will Wait For You", but she doesn't.

Review of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

I've belated become a John Le Carre fan. I think this film captures the atmosphere of the books, especially the shabby interiors of the intelligence agency premises and safe houses. I liked the acting, but somehow I literally lost the plot - I couldn't figure out what was happening. I read the Wikipedia article about it, and realised that I'd fallen asleep and missed a major section, which might have made it easier to follow.

Watched on BBC iPlayer

Review of "L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City" by John Buntin

The ratings and reviews of this book seem to be overwhelmingly positive, and I see it's been turned into a TV series. Still, I wasn't all that impressed, though it was something to read in the small hours to help me go back to sleep. 

The central conceit is that it's a dual biography of mobster Mickey Cohen and LA Police Chief William H Parker. But Cohen is a lesser figure, and his biography and career are not all that interesting. Parker bestrode the city as it grew, and dominated its politics and its policing, and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Buntin really wanted to write a biography of him, or should have anyway. 

The author has had a lot of help from the LAPD and various Parker-related foundations and organisations, so though it's pretty obvious from reading the book that the man was a megalomaniac and a racist, and a right-wing operator who couldn't get on with other right-wing operators (especially J Edgar Hoover), the author doesn't want to say so. The book almost ends with Parker's death, though there's a longish epilogue that covers the 1991 riots. It's not clear whether it wants to say that the riots were Parker's legacy, or that if he'd been in charge they would have been crushed more effectively - I think it wanted to have it both ways, which makes it confusing and unsatisfactory.

I read this on kindle, so I'm not putting up a cover picture. 

Review of Shoshana

 

This is a film about Shoshana Borochov, a real person who was the daughter of Dov Ber Borochov, a "Marxist Zionist". There's lots to say about his ideas and his politics, which were in my lifetime influential in a retro sort of way about young Jews with contradictory ideas about Zionism and revolutionary socialism - but the film doesn't say much about his, though it alludes to the way he would have liked Zionism to have turned out nice. 

The film is about Shoshana's relationship with a British policeman, who is part of the Mandate authority trying to fight against the Irgun and its breakaway faction Lehi. This troubled love story is the centre of the film

The Irgun suspended hostilities against the British for the duration of WW2, Lehi didn't, and famously tried to develop a relationship with the Nazis on the basis of common hostility to the British Empire.

The film does make some efforts to show the different currents within the Palestinian-Jewish community in Palestine, but it's pretty cartoon-ish. We see that the mainstream Zionists (Labour Zionists, though it doesn't really say so) don't like the Revisionist Zionists (Irgun, and then Lehi) much, but there's not all that much substance to the disagreement - though the mainstream Zionists do call the Irgun fascists, which is justified. There are occasional Palestinian-Arab victims depicted (an Irgun attack on a bus, and then bombs in marketplaces) but there are no voices from the Arab community, no Arab characters...apart from one scene where the Mandatory Police carry out frightening round-ups in a village.

The Revisionist Zionists want to proclaim a Jewish (or rather a Hebrew) state right now, even though there's nothing like a Jewish majority. The mainstream Zionists are gradualists, and believe that continued Jewish immigration will eventually produce a Jewish majority, at which point the locals will accept a Jewish state. I can't help wondering when they thought this was going to be - the 1950s? The 1960s? With the British providing the umbrella under which this demographic and political shift would take place?

The film ends with the very beginning of what Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinian Arabs the Nakhba...but all that's shown is a group of disorganised Arab fighters running to attack a group of Haganah fighters, lying in wait with machine guns. There's no refugees, no displacement...nothing of the civil war between the Haganah and the Irgun either. 

A few details are worth noting. We see the Irgunists flyposting their posters, with the emblem of a fist holding a rifle over a map including both Palestine and Transjordan, and the slogan (in Ivrit) "Rak Kach" - that is, "Only Thus". Until this point I hadn't really appreciated the continuity between the Irgun and the Kahanist party, which was of course called "Kach".

Also, Shoshana and her mother seem to be speaking to each other in Russian - presumably this was much more common in the Yishuv than we are given to understand, though Dov Ber Borochov was a Yiddishist as well as a Zionist, and the party he founded (Left Poalei Zion) was also pro-Yiddish. 

At one point in the film some bright-eyed young Zionists say that they have recently arrived from Kiev - was this ever possible in the 1930s?

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of "Altered Carbon" by Richard Morgan

The hardest science fiction I've read for a long time, and a mashup of cyberpunk and hard boiled detective noir. I really loved it. It's been on my Kindle for years, but somehow I never got round to reading it. I must say that I couldn't follow every twist and turn of the plot - the fact that characters can die and be restored most of the time, and that they slip in and out of each other's bodies - sorry, "sleeves" - makes this harder. I couldn't explain who turned out to have done it if any of my lives depended on it. Still, it was good if not great, and I will be back for more. I have a feeling that I started to watch the TV series once, and I might even have another look at that.

Review of Radical Love: The Life and Legacy of Satish Kumar

I watched this in the company of about a hundred people who were devotees of Kumar and thought he was perhaps literally God's gift to humanity. Some of these people were friends whom I admire, and others were fascist-adjacent woo lovers, so perhaps he is some sort of Rorschach inkblot on to who you can project whatever you want. 

I was depressed and bored by the film, which at just over an hour felt way too long. Lots of spiritual practices and pilgrimages, described as if they were effective political actions. A long section with Vananda Shiva, which brought to mind the film about her watched in the same place, and which left me with the same uncomfortable feeling. 

So yeah, watched at Hawkwood as part of Stroud Film Festival. Based on the venue I had an expectation about what the film would be like, which was not disappointed. However, Ruth and I walked there across the fields and through the woods by moonlight, and that was wonderful.

Review of Conclave

A papal election thriller, with lots of twists as the various candidates are revealed to have things in their past, or even in their presents, that don't look good in a putative Pope.

Very lush to look at, but not that much actually happens - unsurprisingly, because the cardinals doing the voting are locked in to the Vatican, so all that we can really see are side conversations and voting procedures.

Sort of tense without being actually interesting, though it held our attention.

Watched via USB and informal distribution.

Review of No Other Land

Absolutely relentless documentation of the way that first the Israeli army, and then settlers, try to evict a group of Palestinian villagers from their land in the West Hebron hills. It's crushing to watch, and there's no Hollywood-style redemption. One of the film makers is a Jewish Israeli, and the villagers are suspicious of him - not unreasonably, as we see him leaving the West Bank via the Israelis-only road back into Israel. 

There's been a lot of controversy over the film, which won an Oscar for best foreign film. Unsurprisingly many Israelis think it's propaganda, but some Palestinians also condemned it because the Israeli-Palestinian team that made it didn't use the right words to denounce Israel's occupation and genocide, and were therefore guilty of "normalisation". Fortunately other Palestinians, including the villagers most directly affected, were wiser.

Watched via informal distribution, even though it was available for free on Channel 4...mainly because I wanted to show it from a USB stick on the DVD player in the Springhill Common House. Only it wouldn't play there, even though it worked fine at home.

Review of "Falling Angels" by Tracy Chevalier

It's been a long time since I read any Tracy Chevalier - so long that there aren't any reviews of the books that I did read in my blog. I had a sort of feeling that I didn't like her all that much, that "Girl With A Pearl Earring", which I did like, had been a one-off.

But this - about the English way of death, and the transition from the Victorian to the Edwardian period, is really great. Told through multiple narrators, including children and adults, and with multiple perspectives on the same events, with a background of the emerging suffragette movement. Just great.

Review of "Where The Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens

I really enjoyed the movie a few years ago, and reading the book I see that it was really faithful to the text. I enjoyed the book too - the nature writing is lovely, the plot carried me along - shame that I couldn't enjoy the ending twist, having seen the film.

Review of Love, Divided

Spanish rom-com about two introverted people living in adjoining apartments who develop a relationship without actually meeting- he's an extremely introverted game designer, she's a wannabe classical pianist/singer. After some initial conflict about noise the film becomes about the relationship between the two, and their other relationships - she with her ex-husband and imperfect mentor, he with his business partner and friend.

It's contrived but not too bad. I was pleased that I understood a lot of the Spanish.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Leave No Trace

Sad but nicely executed film about a young girl and her dad living rough in the woods in an effort to avoid contact with authority and bureaucracy. He's a traumatised ex-veteran, she's a bright girl who appreciates what she has with her dad, but also what she's missing. 

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Triangle of Sadness

Heavy handed buy enjoyable satire about wealth and power. Young bloke model Carl is in a relationship with model-influencer Yaya, who is narcissistic and exploits him. The depiction of this, which makes up the first part of the film along with various gruesome auditions for Carl, is skin-crawlingly awful but compelling. Then she blags a trip on a luxury cruise with rich and powerful people, all of whom are horrible in different ways...and then there's a pirate attack and a shipwreck. 

Bits of it are horrible slapstick - lots of vomit as the ship hits a storm, for example - but the film carried me along.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Baby Girl

Well, that was quite hot. Not my kind of erotic fantasy, but still quite sexy. Nicole Kidman is the CEO of a warehouse automation company, and has an affair with a young intern who gives her what she needs, which turns out to be humiliation and domination. She has a kind, loving husband, but it's not what she needs in bed. She's already been masturbating over that kind of porn while he sleeps next to her, but the intern guy is the real thing.

There's a certain amount of exploration of the issues - nothing too clever or deep, but enough to be interesting. Lots of gloomy and seedy hotel interiors, and some glossy ones too. Nicole Kidman gets to wear some nice clothes too.

And there's a treatment of the overall nastiness of corporate politics, with several people trying to blackmail Kidman's character as they find out about the affair.

Watched at the Vue Cinema.

Review of A Complete Unknown

That Bob Dylan film, which everyone has seen and everyone has liked. Not surprising, because it's very good...the acting, the cinematography, the singing - all the actors sing the tunes themselves, and do it very well. It reminded me very strongly of the days when we all had a different relationship to music, when it felt like you had found something special to you - even if you had taped it off someone else's vinyl, it felt like you had in some sense co-created it. Whereas now it just comes out of a tap in the wall, and the issue is more about how to discover or filter what's out there. 

I had a strong sense of Dylan as a genius (even though we rarely see him actually doing any writing work, just performing or jamming with others) but also as a thoroughly selfish narcissist. It's hard to feel that the politics ever really meant anything to him except as a stepping stone to a career. On the other hand seeing this film inspired me to obtain and watch "I am a noise", the Joan Baez biopic, and that has footage of the two of them singing at the 1963 March on Washington, and it's hard not to believe that must have meant something, at least at the time.

We watched this at the cinema, and I'm glad that I did. Everyone else in the cinema was of a certain age and was a fan, and I really felt a connection with tehm.

Review of Citizen Ashe

Tennis biopic of Arthur Ashe. I've watched a few tennis films lately, and I think this was the least interesting. Although the film says that Ashe was in the forefront of the struggle for Black liberation, he mainly seems to have fulfilled this role by winning at tennis. I remember that he played in South Africa and thought that had been a bad thing, but Nelson Mandela sought Ashe out when he came to the US for the first time, so maybe not.

Watched on BBC iPlayer, eventually, after several false starts.

Review of Timestalker

Embarrassingly bad. Gave up after 40 minutes

Watched via informal distribution...at least we didn't pay money to see this.

Review of Number 24

A film about the Norwegian resistance during WW2, with all the familiar themes of betrayal, collaboration, etc. It's a fairly conventional treatment - the resistance are all brave heroes, the collaborators are all monsters. It's not at all like "Black Book", the film about the Dutch resistance, which emphasises the blurred lines between resistance and collaboration.

It's gripping and well made, but not much stayed with me. Ruth on the other hand was overwhelmed by it...maybe I watch more war films than her.

On the other hand, I've just read the Wikipedia article about how collaborators were treated after the war ended, and I can't help thinking that would have made a much more interesting film.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "The Flaming Corsage" by William Kennedy

I can't remember what happened between me and William Kennedy. I really liked his books, and then I stopped reading them. This has sat on the shelf for twenty years unread. I had a feeling that I'd started it and hadn't liked it, but I don't remember actually doing that.

Anyway I read it, and it was great. It's set in Albany around the beginning of the C20th, and it tells the story of a talented Irish-descended man who makes it...into the educated, cultured Protestant elite. He ascends from journalism on a local paper to play writing, and he marries into wealth and privilege too. There's lots about sex, and relations between rich and poor, Catholic and Protestants, men and women. The plot is quite complex...towards the end I lost it a bit, even though I was still enjoying it. It's quite a complex narrative structure too, with some switches of time-period and of narrative form...some "found" material, including fragments of the character's plays, reviews and newspaper articles, and so on.

Anyway great, and good to have rediscovered Kennedy.

Review of "Trumpet" by Jackie Kay

A striking book about a Jazz trumpeter, told through the eyes of the people who are affected by the trumpeter's death...The trumpeter presented as a man, but was actually a woman. His "wife" (were they legally married?) knew, and loved them all the same; but the son did not know, until told by the undertaker, who also had had no previous warning until he begins to prepare the body. The trumpeter's mother, still alive in a care home in Scotland, does not know that her daughter who left home but still writes to her, has spent a life as a man. There's a horrible tabloid reporter after a story, who seduces the son in an effort to get an inside track. 

It sounds creepy, but it's sort of beautiful. There's not a lot about trumpet playing, but it's enough of the story to be of interest to me as a trumpet aspirer.

Review of I am a noise

Fantastic biopic of Joan Baez. I wanted to watch this because I'd just watched "A Complete Unknown", about Bob Dylan, in which Joan Baez is just one of several women that he has brief relationships with. 

I was expecting another music biopic, but it turned out to be a heart-rending documentary about Baez's really quite sad life - broken relationships with friends, family and lovers, and mental illness. This is clearly someone who talent (extending beyond music, her drawing is really good too) and success have not made at all happy. And this despite a genuine commitment to political struggle, that gave her a sense of purpose, but still didn't make up for the sadness that has haunted her since childhood.

I was struck also by the talent of her less well known sister, Mimi Farina, who lost the lover of her life at 21 and died of cancer at 56 - Mimi is responsible for the tune of "Bread and Roses", one of my favourites.

Watching the footage of her and Dylan singing at the March on Washington in 1963 it's hard not to be affected by the hope that's present in that huge multiracial crowd, and also hard not to feel that the hope was betrayed - look at America now.

Review of To Leslie

Decent film about alcoholism. The eponymous Leslie is broken by drink and can't hold anything together, but she finds life and meaning at an out of town motel where she takes up residence, and a job cleaning. To her (and our) surprise the manager gives her one chance after another as she repeatedly fucks up. We gradually learn his back story as well as hers. Yeah, this is one is described as "heartwarming" but there's a lot of pain to go through before you get to that.

Review of "Orbital" by Samantha Harvey

A beautiful gem of a book...very short, barely even a novella, but I couldn't read it quickly because it was so beautiful. It's set in the International Space Station, more or less as it is now, though there's another moon mission in progress - the only thing in the book that makes it speculative fiction rather than just naturalistic fiction. 

It describes the back stories and inner lives of the occupants - Russians, Americans, Japanese - but also their sensuous experiences of the space station, and the physical sensations of being in weightless, and the impact on time perception of living through so many dawns in each 24 hour period. 

So well done, it's hard to believe that she hasn't been there.

And of course it's also about Earth, and what it looks like from the space station (humans largely invisible except at night), and there's the tiniest brush with climate turmoil - bigger, more unpredictable storms, changing seasons on the ground.

Review of "The Axeman's Jazz" by Ray Celestin

Nicely paced historical thriller/crime novel, set in an atmospheric New Orleans in the early 20th century, with lots of Jazz (one of the protagonists is a young Lewis Armstrong, not yet Louis) and sleaze and graft. A narrative that swaps between viewpoints - it's "close third" person narrative but the person swaps around, and it's well done. Actually based on a true story, so sprinkled with occasional genuine newspaper articles.

I hadn't previously heard of Ray Celestin, who doesn't seem to have written any other novels, but I will keep an eye out for him.

Review of "How Novels Work" by John Mullan

Nice, serious but not academic book about literature. Focused on slightly more serious fiction rather than the most popular stuff - so David Lodge and John le Carre are in, Bridget Jones and Katie Fforde are out. Well-written essays on structure, literary devices, narrative person and so on, without too much technical language and plenty of explication. Lots of stuff worth reading (and stealing) for aspiring authors!

Eulogy for my Mum Sylvia Green

 My Mum Sylvia Green died on the night of 2nd February 2025. This is what I said at her funeral.

Most of us knew Sylvia as an exemplar home-maker - a wife, mother, grandmother, and of course daughter. She fulfilled all of these roles to the max, and though she didn't really think men and boys needed to know how to cook, she did manage to teach me most of what I know about that.

And she was a transmitter of Jewish culture too, in language and home ritual and family stories, and of course food. Most of what is important to me about my Jewish identity is what came to me from my Mum.

But though she would have been the last to say so, she was also an intellectual. She loved books, and theatre and film. She would tell me the story of a film that she had seen, and it was like I'd seen it myself. She was a wonderful story-teller. 

This was despite the fact that she'd had almost no formal education at all. Her school life wad disrupted by the war. She stopped school at nine years old when the family moved to Brighton to escape the Blitz, and she never really went back. 

Her psyche was shaped by the war. She told me stories of the terror of nights spent in air raid shelters, of coming in the morning to find familiar buildings gone or in smoking ruins. Her rather was a registered alien, never naturalised as British. He had to report weekly to a police station. And he was never naturalised because of what happened to his own father, deported to Russia during WW1 for refusing to be conscripted in to the British army.

All of that shapes a person. My mum struggled for years with depression. Most of that struggle took place inside her. She never let it impact on how she behaved towards others. Mum was always in motion, always doing things for other people. Even when I visited her in the care home where she sat wheelchair bound, she was offering to go and make me a meal.

She was resilient and brave. When Louis was born in Sydney, she got on a plane, by herself, even though she had never spent a minute abroad without Dad before. She took a courier flight to Australia via Tokyo, and she told us how she'd left the hotel to go for a walk in a city where she spoke not one word of the language and could not read the street signs. 

Although it was Dad who told the stories of his activist past, Mum had her involvement too. She was probably the only person who took part in the 35s Group of Jewish women protesting for the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate and also went to Greenham Common, with Ruth, Minnie, Sharon and Karin to protest against cruise missiles.

And I want everyone to know how much fun she was - not only when she was a lovely booba to our boys, but also when I was little, and we sued to schlep all over London to medical appointments, and we would make up stories about the people we saw in the tube - who was a spy, which one was going to a secret meeting, and so on. 

And that's how I want to remember her, not as she was in her very last years, but how she had been for all the years before.

Post script - thinking of all the things we went through, like her teaching me to drive, and the time we had a front wheel tyre explode on the motorway en route to Manchester and did a 360 skid into the hard shoulder, and me walking round the lake at Valentines Park with her, trying to offer her undergraduate-grade psychotherapy...

Review of Catch and Release

Odd mixture of romcom, slapstick comedy, and tragedy. Young man dies suddenly, and his fiance discovers that he has a secret life, including a possible partner and child in another city.The film explores the woman's developing relationship with the ex-partner's roommates and friends. The klutzy friend delivers the slapstick notes, which really jar with the rest of the narrative. There's also a mean-but-sexy best friend.

Watched on Netflix, and it passed the time. I suspect that there might have been a better, more interesting film in there failing to get out.

Will and Harper

Another trans film (a road trip documentary), and a not very interesting one. Two people who were comedy writers together go on a journey across the US so that they can re-establish their friendship after one of them has become a woman. They wisecrack along in a not very funny way, they visit some awful ugly places, and they eventually arrive at the destination, by which I was sufficiently bored that I don't ever remember where it was. It was...er, heartwarming....all the rednecks that they met along the way were very kind and accepting, and they had no bumps in the road in their own relationship. I'm glad for them that they made it, I'm less glad that I had to watch it.

Review of "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone" by Rajiv Chandraskeran

 

A not altogether satisfactory book about the US occupation of Iraq. Lots of fun anecdotes about how awful and stupid the Americans were, but not that much analysis. Not much questioning of the reasons for the war, and though it's made clear almost in passing that neither they nor anyone else found Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, it generally seems to take the view that the regime was bad so overthrowing it was a good thing, just badly managed thereafter.

It's funny how the Americans put in to run the occupation administration were firm believers in free markets for everything and that government couldn't do anything well - and because they were all cronies appointed on the basis of their personal connections to US Republican Party worthies, they illustrated this perfectly. The possibility that there might be people in public service who could actually do things properly doesn't seem to have occurred to them. Nor does the idea that anyone who actually knew anything about the Arab world, or spoke Arabic, might have had anything to contribute.

I note in passing that when I worked, briefly, in Hong Kong for a team of Americans bidding for a GSM mobile licence, they rarely ventured outside the hotel. They were staying in rooms (and suites) in a big hotel, and they worked in offices on a different floor. They ate in the hotel restaurant and rarely went out at all. I took a few trips on the MRT underground network to other fairly central districts, and I took a ferry across the harbour every day from my hotel, and the knowledge that I picked up doing this was treated as something wondrous. 

Emilia Perez

Astonishing Mexican film - a musical (of sorts) about a drug warlord who decides to disappear and transition to become a woman, leaving behind his trophy wife and their children. He's helped by a desperate and cynical criminal lawyer who finds herself helping the corrupt rich and powerful to evade the law and the consequences of their choices, and takes the job helping the warlord. 

It's often terrifying, as it should be - the world of drug warlords is full of violence and terror. But it's also very clever, and depicts brilliantly a number of complex emotional journeys. And it's often stunning to look at too.

So good that we watched it twice within a month, which I almost never do.

Watched on Netflix - I think it was one of their originals.

Review of Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Absurdly, there appear to be people who didn't like this - not as good as the early ones, and so on. Ignore them, it's great. Lots of cinematic references - it's worth watching again to see how many I will catch, and lots of great visual jokes. I loved the narrowboat chase, where a pedestrian on the canal towpath is walking faster than the boats involved in the chase. 

It helped that I watched it live, as it was broadcast on BBC (how often do I do that?) and with my family, so that it evoked all the warm fuzzy feelings of watching previous Wallace and Gromit films with the boys. But is was just lovely anyway.

I note in passing that the threat of, and fear of, technology has moved on. In The Wrong Trousers the technology is just malfunctioning. Here it's clearly hacked by a bad actor, the evil penguin, who uses the internet to take control over Wallace's robot gnomes, which don't have very good IT security.

Review of Ballywalter

One of several films that I watched this week about alcohol and alcoholism, and how it fucks people up. This one takes a while to get going. A young woman drives a taxi in Ballywalter, a small town along the coast from Belfast, and it's not going too well for her. She lives with her mother and sister, she's dropped out of university and the taxi, which is decrepit and barely still functioning, belongs to a bloke who might be an ex. A bloke in the town, living on his own after a split from his wife and family because he killed someone while drunk-driving, starts getting a regular ride from her to a comedy course that he's doing in the city, and the film is about the relationship between the two of them. They don't become lovers, but they do become each other's redemption.

Worth watching. We watched it on BBC iPlayer, which once again describes this as a comedy, for no obvious reason.

Review of "Utopia Avenue" by David Mitchell

I mostly loved this book. Lovely descriptions, great characters, poignant moments, and set in and around the music industry just before the time of rock megastars...so that some of the real people who later become megastars (Syd Barrett, David Bowie, even the Beatles) drift in and out of the scenes. 

I'm not quite old enough to remember this period, but the tail end of it was visible to me as I grew up. Denmark street was still full of decrepit music shops, and I remember some of the clubs that he writes about - especially Bunjies, where I often went with friends on a Saturday evening.

I even quite liked the way that characters and places from David Mitchell's other books turn up for a while, and then slide out of the story. Some of it is set around Gravesend, also an important location in The Bone Clocks. 

But (spoiler alert) there's a part where Mitchell's supernatural frame-tale of a conflict down through the ages between evil drinkers of a human souls and their eternal opponents organised in "Horology" becomes important to the plot, and I really didn't like that. It must be really important to Mitchell, but it feels to me like a turd on an otherwise beautiful carpet. It could so easily have been done without, which only makes it even clearer that he really cares about this. 

It did spoil my enjoyment a bit, but on balance I still really liked the book.

Review of "The Priest, The Poet and The Pimp" by Malcolm Eva

First, to declare an interest - or rather two interests. Malcolm Eva is a friend, and he's also a self-published author (like me) who I have encouraged to go down that route.

That said, this is an enjoyable, nicely written book, with a well constructed narrative, interesting characters and a great feel for location and period. It's a period that I lived through as an adult, but which now seems almost as remote as the time of WW2...it's hard to imagine a world without the internet, search engines, and smartphones. Of course the plot would barely work with them. The texture of that world, and a time when the part of west London depicted was still dingy rather than gentrified, is very vivid.

I was a little bit worried with the Muslim pimp praying on vulnerable white girls - it's not hard to see how that could turn nasty - but there's more than one good Muslim character too, so I didn't have to wait too long to exhale. 

Definitely worth a read, and I hope Malcolm gets on and finishes his other novels-in-waiting.