Review of "The Convert" by Stefan Hertmans

 

Well written historical novel, set in the eleventh century, about a young Norman aristocratic girl who meets a young Jewish man studying at the yeshivah in Rouen, falls in love and runs away with him to convert to Judaism and marry. It's well told, so that this almost inconceivable event - which is, as explained, based on a true story - feels plausible. There's lots of great detail, especially of the settings in southern France, and later in Egypt.

There's a split narrative going on, with the author describing his own journey across the places in the text and how he comes to write the book. I didn't like that so much, but in the end it turns out to have been more or less indispensable.

The setting in historic Provence reminded me of Langue[dot]doc 1305, which isn't really at all similar, but evoked some of the same feelings, especially from the landscape descriptions. My review of that here.

Review of Skandal: Bringing Down Wirecard

A Netflix-made documentary about a financial fraud centred on the German e-payments company Wirecard, this was quite gripping because of the style, and because of the constant hints we are about to find out what all this was really about - was the Russian FSB involved? 

Really this is a straightforward fraud in which a company inflates its revenues, pretending that it is earning more than it is, in order to push up its share price. Quite a few people notice that there's something dodgy about its accounts, and the short sellers take notice, and so does the Financial Times in London - but the German government and financial regulators continue to defend their hi-tech darling, and the management takes various actions against the FT journalists, some legal, some much less so.

Eventually the auditors EY - under lots of pressure from the FT and others - announce that there is indeed a EUR19bn hole in the accounts, that amount of declared revenue that can't be found. But no-one from EY appears in the film or explains why it took them so long...what is the point of an audit if it doesn't find things like that? What were the company's bankers doing?

The film has to make financial fraud look interesting, so it resorts to some KABOOM style graphic novel frames, and lots of shots of exotic or scary locations. The main point of financial fraud, though, is that there really isn't much to see, which makes a film sort of tricky. Hence the hints that the FSB were involved, and shots of migrant trafficking in Libya and so on - if that's really relevant it's hard to see how.

Review of "Living My Life" by Emma Goldman

I've never read any Emma Goldman before, though I used to read a certain amount of anarchist stuff, and I've returned to it recently via Kevin Carson, who I mainly think is great. This was the book for Stroud Radical Reading Group this month, and though I didn't read all 900 pages in time for the meeting

I got a lot out of it. EG lived through a huge part of the history of the left, in Europe, Russia and America, and she's a great witness - she picks up on little details that other left authors might ignore, like the tea that Kropotkin and his wife served when they visited him in 1920.

The most interesting part for me was the very long chapter about her time in Russia in the early 1920s, which I think has been published as a separate book. It's very painful to read in some places, because contrary to my vague Trotskyish legacy, it's clear that there were some major things wrong with the revolution as early as 1920 - particularly the already-crushing bureaucracy, and the extent of privileges for Communist Party members - extra rations, better accomodation, and so on. 

She's very good at conveying the pain of someone who doesn't want to line up with the enemies of the revolution, but is finding it increasingly hard to be part of. There's a little bit when she meets up with some Jews in the Ukraine, including a Zionist, a Bundist, some rabbis, and the Zionist poet Bialik. She's interested in what they have to say, and doesn't treat it as an opportunity for a polemic. Inspired by this I went and found something that she'd written about Zionism in 1938, which struck me as much more nuanced than I might have expected.

I note in passing that when she's in the Ukraine and southern Russia she is covering much the same territory that my great-grandfather did, and at about the same time.

Review of "The Island of Missing Trees" by Elif Shahak

 

Ruth read this in her book club, and I needed something that wasn't too heavy, so I gave this a go. It's a sort of magical realist novel with a Cyprus context, a pair of lovers across the Greek-Turkish divide, with a split narrative across different time periods. It was quite enjoyable, and it motivated me to read up a bit on the Cyprus conflict, which I thought I knew about. 

In doing so I was reminded how much the history of the island is bound up with the history of Israel and Palestine. The ethnic conflict there, eventually leading to partition, is in some ways a similar story. Also the illegal migrants of the Aliyah Bet were imprisoned on Cyprus, and later Israelis barred from marrying by the rabbis would go there to register a legal marriage which would then be recognised in Israel. And much later some of the Lebanese militias ran their radio stations, and even their cellular networks, out of Cyprus. 

Review of The Boat That Rocked

Richard Curtis "feelgood" film about a thinly fictionalised Radio Caroline, that didn't actually make me feel that good. Good actors, some nice cinematography and great music, but thin and (inevitably) sexist, and too long. They should have spent some more money on the writers.

Informal distribution and VLC.

Review of The Sea Beast

A Dreamworks animated film, which looked wonderful and had its heart in the right place (diverse "pirate" ship crews, ecological message) but felt a bit thin and contrived. In the end (well, quite quickly) the sea hunter learns to love the sea monsters, who have had a bad press and just want to be left alone.

Watched on Netflix via smartphone and Chromecast.

Review of "A Modest Proposal...to solve the Palestine-Israel Conflict" by Karl Sabbagh

This was sitting around for ages, and I thought I'd really better read it. And I started out wanting to like it. It's an argument in favour of a One State Solution, with some elaboration as to how aspects of it might work. These days I am mildly in favour of a one state solution, largely because I can't see how the two state solution which I once supported might ever come about, or how it would work if it did. I feel much the same way about a one state solution. Not every conflict is a puzzle that has a solution if only you can find it. But I can sort of see a way in which Israel and the territories it occupies might evolve into a single democratic state, through a civil rights movement and a democracy movement that was not focused on nationalism. 

So I was predisposed to like the book. But the more I read, the less I liked it. Sabbagh comes from a Palestinian nationalist perspective. He admits that there might once have been antisemitism, and that the Holocaust was a bad thing, but moves swiftly on from that to how it wasn't the Palestinians fault and why should they have to suffer for it? So he is great at recognising the extent to which Zionism was a colonialist program which could not have been realised without the support of British imperialism, but he is wilfully blind as to where the impetus for it came. Without antisemitism there would have been no Zionism, or it would have been a weird little footnote in history. 

He talks about the countries that the Jewish immigrants to Palestine came from, but only in the abstract. There is no sense that these were countries that practised increasingly severe discrimination against Jews, or that there was any reason why long-established Jewish communities no longer felt at home in them. He writes about the unwillingness of the Jewish immigrants to Palestine to give up the citizenship of the countries from which they had come and accept Palestine citizenship, as if this proves something about their colonialist and exclusionary intention. Well, maybe it does - but it was happening in a context in which the possession of the right piece of paper might mean the difference between life and death for many uprooted Jews. Perhaps it wasn't so unreasonable to not trust to the bureaucratic kindness of British colonial administration, or to the welcome of an Arab community that had made it very clear that it didn't want any Jewish immigrants.

There's lots more partial history. Like I said, I know that the Zionists really did intend to take over the whole of Palestine, and that they really did plan for there to be fewer Arabs there - perhaps no Arabs at all, despite what they said for outside consumption. But it's not necessary to pretend that this was the realisation of an American-British imperial plot. The British did not support the Partition resolution at the UN and abstained on the final vote. And he doesn't mention at all the extent to which the USSR, and its satellites in Eastern Europe, and the Communist parties in Europe, the middle east and elsewhere all supported partition and the creation of Israel. 

He suggests that the Jews all left the Arab countries in the early 1950s because they were tricked into it by Zionists. It's true and well documented there were Israeli false flag operations in some Arab countries. It's not true or even plausible that Jews in Iraq led happy integrated lives until this happened - the antisemitism in Iraq is well documented too. You have to be deeply embedded in an Arab nationalist viewpoint to find this sort of thing convincing.

The emigration of Moroccan Jews to Israel is a much more complex and nuanced business, with efforts by the Moroccan government to persuade Jews to stay and to return - nothing similar in Iraq or other countries, and limited success despite the miserable racist experience that the Moroccan Jews had when they arrived in Israel and for years afterward.

There's a lot in the book about how the principles of Palestinian return would be applied and paid for, but very little about how a one-state solution would work. What languages would be used in schools and in the civil service, for example? Would there be any institutions in place to ensure that one community did not dominate another? It would have been really good to have had some examples of where such things have worked out well - the way that the Swedish minority is treated in Finland comes to mind. It's not hard to think of examples where it hasn't worked out well, which I think places a special duty on those who do advocate a one-state solution. 

I suppose I think, in a not very well worked out way, that it's possible that Israel - racist as it is - could evolve into a democratic state. This would be uneven. Some things would be harder to change than others...some of those things - the name of the country, the flag, etc, have enormous symbolic significance, to Jews and to Palestinians. Maybe there are other things to focus on in the medium term, as a part of a struggle to bring democracy and maybe even socialism to the region. It's taken us a hundred years to get to here, with nationalism and counter-nationalism. Perhaps with a perspective of where we want to get to in the next hundred years we could start to see some positive change in our lifetimes, rather than the poisonous waiting game that both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism play in the belief that time is on their side.

Review of The Last Black Man in San Francisco

Bleak, beautiful, slow film about gentrification and alienation. The main protagonist is a young black man who is more or less homeless - he's couch surfing at the house of a slightly older friend, who in turn lives with his dad, and fantasizes that he's a playwright. There are other purposeless young black men hanging about on the street corner, not quite menacing, not quite friends. The central character is obsessed with a beautiful gothic mansion that his family once seem to have occupied, though they may have been squatting there illegally - it's not entirely clear. His father is a frequent nomadic squatter, and the house's formal occupant herself loses the house when her mother dies and she has to split the inheritance with her sister - giving the young man a chance to move in for a while and play at living there.

It's depressing, but worth sitting through.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Jumping From High Places

Italian sort-of feelgood movie, about a young woman living in Bari who suffers from anxiety, and decides as part of a promise to a best friend who died suddenly that she will confront each of her separate fears - going on a boat trip, taking a flight, and so on.

It's not very taxing or tense to watch, and there are beautiful people and locations to look at. 

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Harriet

Conventional biopic about Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave who became an abolitionist, suffrage campaigner, and general all round heroine. She's famous to Americans, less so to a British audience. It's well made if conventional and a bit long, and justly celebrates her life and the realities of the Underground Railroad, including the awful impact of the Fugitive Slave Act.

Watched on BBC iPlayer in two tranches, because though it's not gory, it's not feelgood watching either.

Review of La Famille Bélier

This is the original French film, on which the subsequent American remake CODA was based. It's a bit unfair that I saw the American one first, because now it's the French one that feels a bit unnecessary. They are very similar - similar humour, similar plot development, and so on. A few differences - the French family are farmers not fishermen, the deaf dad runs for mayor rather than takes over the fish market, and so on. Curiously I think the American one was slightly more subtle - the French one is more knockabout, though the duet that the kids sing in the French version is more sexualised than anything that I could imagine in an American high school movie.

But they are pretty similar, and you don't need to watch both.

Watched on the big screen at Lansdown Film Societ.

Review of "Them: Adventures with Extremists" by Jon Ronson

I didn't much like this. Jon Ronson is not a person to engage seriously with the issues that he raises. He's trying to get laughs by reminding us that self-important conspiracy theorists still need to get the shopping in and so on, but it ends up humanising them rather than diminishing them. He mainly doesn't do any debunking, so it's hard to know what aspects of their narrative he accepts - and it sometimes seems like quite a lot, especially when he writes about the Bilderberg Group. 

There's a lot to be said about organisations like that - how they attempt to impose some sort of coordination on the chaos that is international capitalism, and how useless they mainly are at it, for example. There's a lot to be said about conspiracy theories, and why they are becoming so widespread and what role they play politically, but you won't find it here.

Review of "Rivers of London" by Ben Aaronovitch

It's not often I give up on a book, but this just isn't worth finishing. It's a bit like Harry Potter for...for grown-ups? Except that it's not all that grown up. There's a secret department of the Metropolitan Police that deals with magical matters, and our first-person narrator stumbles into when, as a beat policeman, he witnesses a horrible murder and then gets a tip-off from a ghost. It's not interesting, it's not well-written, I don't care about the characters...so enough. I notice that it's one of a series, which is depressing.

Review of Bacurau

This won lots of awards and has very good ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, but it felt like a pointless splatterfest to me. A small isolated town in North Eastern Brazil is threatened by its corrupt mayor who cuts off the water, and then brings in a bunch of racist psycho murderers from the US and Europe to kill all the residents in some horrendous paid-for game. 

It's tense, and for a while there's an air of mystery as we try to work out what's going on, but ultimately it's horrible and pointless. It's resolved with all the murderers getting blown away by the townsfolk who arm themselves with ancient firearms from the town's museum. Yeah, it's a metaphor for colonialism and stuff, but it's also two hours I won't get back.

Review of "The Descent of Man" by Grayson Perry

I love Grayson Perry, so I was sorry when this book got off to a bad start - too much unfocused whining about "Middle Class" White Males. I think "Middle Class" is a dangerous and obfuscating term that hides much more than it reveals...we've been royally fucked over by bankers, and some kinds of professionals do have more privileges and a better quality of life than some people who work with their hands and their bodies. But surely teachers and social workers are "middle class", in the cultural sense, even though they sell their labour power to survive. Really, so do engineers and scientists...and for the most part they don't run the world or the country, and they aren't responsible for how fucked everything is.

But after the first whiny chapter the book looked up a lot, and he's really astute and clever about gender and masculinity. It's definitely worth reading, and I'm going to watch the associated TV series. I was particularly taken with the way he talks about how men perform their gender, and also about his references to Lori Gottleib's work on gender equality in housework and sex - the research appears to suggest that men who do more of the housework get less sex, and less enjoyable sex, from their female partners. This deserves further consideration, and for once by women as much as by men.

I would really like see what he's got to say about the trans wars. Uncomfortably I have friends...mainly women...on both sides of an argument that I don't entirely understand.

Review of "The Ghetto Fights" by Marek Edelman

A short, gripping, but painful to read book about the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, and the prelude to it. Especially painful is the account of how so many Jews desperately wanted to believe that the stories of extermination camps were not true, and that they really would be relocated to find work in the East...and the way in which traditional Jewish strategies of accomodating to even the most oppressive authority, which had been "successful" in the past, turned out to be so terribly wrong in the case of the Nazis.

The book was published in English in the immediate post war period by the Bund, in the US, but it was only published relatively recently in the UK, and by Bookmarks, the SWP's publishing house. So there is a foreword by John Rose, an SWP member who has also written some decent history books. I was pleasantly surprised by this. Rose goes over the story of how the author, Marek Edelman, has been largely ignored by mainstream Jewish and Israeli audiences, because he remained true to his Bundist principles and continued to oppose Zionism. But I'd say he does this in a surprisingly generous way. He doesn't at all play down the contribution of Zionist fighters from the various Socialist-Zionist groups, or repeat any of the allegations about Zionist collaboration with the Nazis. And he includes in afterwords the bad responses he's received from Zionist commentators, as well as his responses (which seem to me to be be scrupulously fair) to those when they were published.

It might have been interesting to have seen some discussion as to what the history means for the argument between Socialist-Zionists and Bundists. Zionists have generally acted as if the Holocaust proved that they were right all along. Bundists have often suggested that the way Israel has turned out proved that they were right all along. Still, this book probably isn't the place for that.

Review of "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: A Graphic Novel by Scarlett and Sophie Rickard"

I tried to read the actual book by Robert Tressell a few times, but never got very far. It seemed dauntingly long (though I usually don't mind long books) and a bit dull. So Scarlett and Sophie Rickard have done me a great service. The book is beautiful, and they've brought it to life in a way that (I think) keeps the feel of the original but makes it much more digestible.

That said, I still didn't really enjoy it. Much of the detail about grinding poverty in the Edwardian era seems all too contemporary, with working poor having to decide how to pay their rent to private landlords, while keeping enough back to both heat and eat. I'm sure there must have been times when the book just felt like a period piece, but it doesn't now.

I didn't enjoy the politics all that much. I don't Tresell was ever a Marxist really, and his cod version of the Labour Theory of Value doesn't feel very convincing. It's even less so given that the workers in the book are all painters and decorators, so they really don't fit with the narrative of surplus value that it tries to illustrate. When the book's socialist intellectual tells the workers that they ought to stop voting for Liberals or Tories, and instead "elect revolutionary socialists to the House of Commons" I couldn't help wishing that he'd actually spent a bit more time learning socialist theory.

The old socialist who tells the hero that he's given up, and the toiling masses deserve what's coming to them because they are so stupid...? Hard not to give in to that, particularly in the week of King Charles III's coronation.

And the fairy-tale ending in which one of the painters, George Barrington, turns out to be a socialist rich man temporarily playing at poverty so that he can develop his socialist understanding, and then gives out some big presents for Xmas before he leaves? Well, finger heading for throat.

I read the Wikipedia article about Tressell afterwards, and he's quite a nuanced character, with a bit of a background in the SDF who apparently never joined a union, and may have supported segregated labour markets in South Africa (like much of the rest of the white labour movement there).

Review of La Belle Epoque

If Guy Debord made a romcom this is what it would be like. This is a really unusual film, but no less enjoyable. In some ways it reminded me of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", because it has themes of identity and memory, but there's arguably nothing fantastic to make the plot line work - no magic, no implausible technology. The protagonist's son, a producer, makes content for streaming platforms, and as a sideline offers people direct personal experiences using the sets and actors - so that they can go back in time to an earlier era and just be there. And the protagonist, whose marriage is on the rocks, wants to go back to 1970s Lyon where he met and fell in love with his wife.

And it's brilliantly done - the bar they met in (the eponymous Belle Epoque) is lovingly recreated and populated, a woman plays the younger version of his wife-to-be, and he falls in love with her. And then this plays out, with all of its contradictions and difficulties.

That's not a plot summary - it's actually much more sophisticated and more interesting. It probably bears watching twice, which I almost never say.

Watched on BBC iPlayer via smartphone and Chromecast.

Review of Rango

A real disappointment, and an illustration of how a film can be less than the sum of its parts. Great art and animation, some good visual and verbal jokes, a great cast (though what was the point of having Bill Nighy in it as a voice and then having him put on an American accent?)...but let down by the plot and the pacing. Too many big scenes crammed in, too many set pieces...I can't exactly put my finger on it, but this just dragged, even though it's no longer than a regular Disney animated film. Curiously the bits that dragged the most were the action scenes.

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill from a USB drive, new DVD player and informal distribution.

Review of "Now we shall be entirely free" by Andrew Miller

I've only read one Andrew Miller book before - "Pure". That was great, and so was this...set for the most part in Regency-period England and Scotland during the Peninsular War, which looms large in the story though isn't really depicted except through the recollections of the characters. It's beautiful, clever, with a strong plot, lots of brilliant period detail and insight, and superb characters. A page-turner and a literary work at the same time.