Review of "The Glass Room" by Simon Mawer

 

I was a bit bored with this to start with...it seemed sort of plodding, and I wasn't very interested in the characters. The rise of Hitler, the Anschluss, and so on, all felt very predictable and formulaic. Somehow it came alive for me when the consequences of the main male character's affair with a Jewish Viennese prostitute started to play out, and by the end I was moved and engaged. Not sure that I will be reading any more Simon Mawer though.

Review of "The Spinning Heart" by Donal Ryan

A really hard read, about a rural (or perhaps peri-urban) community in the west of Ireland in the aftermath of the property boom and collapse. It's told from multiple perspectives - each chapter written by a different first person narrator - but describing linked events. Along the way it shows how the boom and collapse exacerbated tensions and fault lines that were already present in the community.

Not a long book, but I could only read a few pages at a time, because it felt so intense. Highly recommended.

Review of That We May Face The Rising Sun

Well that's nearly two hours of my life that I'm not getting back. Slow, beautiful but very dull Irish film about a handsome young Irish writer and his beautiful European (French? German? Impossible to say and not explained in the narrative) living in a remote Irish village as sometime farmers, though still pursuing their more urban careers - in the absence of internet or even telephones. 

There's an awful lot of not much happening, apart from some knowing smiles between the couple, and drinking booze and tea between the couple and the other villagers. 

I fell asleep for at least half an hour but I didn't seem to have missed anything.

Oddly the man character reminded me of the man from the Oxo advert series from the 1970s, which I didn't even know I had remembered. Looking again it turns out to have been a false memory, there's little resemblance. Maybe I was thinking of the Tom character from 1970s sitcom The Good Life, where the resemblance is really very strong.

Watched at the Lansdown Film Club.

Review of "Travels with Myself and Another" by Martha Gellhorn

Martha Gellhorn made her reputation as a war correspondent, but most of this book (compiled, I think, from previously published essays) is about all the other stuff that happens around the edge of the fighting. The first long section takes around China during the war between the Japanese and various Chinese forces, and it's brilliantly evocative of the misery of travel - the damp, the dirt, the waiting...

And then she's in the Caribbean, sailing between islands to try to find German U-boats...which she doesn't find at all, but she does encounter lots of other stuff - racists, expats of various nationalities and persuasions, some American air force people. 

It's not all war time. She goes to French West Africa as it transitions to phoney independence, and she writes about the racism of the French residents but also her own racism, and in particular the visceral, unwelcome physical reaction she has to the smell and the appearance of some (but not all) Africans. 

There's lots more - her attempt to go on a safari with a guide who is a Kikuyu gay Presbyterian "driver" who can't really drive and doesn't know the country at all is brilliant.

Really enjoyable read.

Review of "Timothy's Book: Notes of an English Country Tortoise" by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Gentle, enjoyable book about...well, a tortoise, imported into a C18th village in Surrey, where it lives in the sometimes-care of a country vicar who is a naturalist. It's based on a real tortoise, and a real vicar, and most of the book is based on his field notes, which were eventually published. 

There's lots of beautiful nature writing, and the additional twist is the imagined perspective of a tortoise, which is slower, but also much longer-lived, than any of the humans in its environment.

This sounds really dull, and I was a bit put off by four pages of celebrity endorsements and quotes from reviews, but it was actually a great read. Oddly I have no memory of how it came to be on our bookshelf, though I see it was purchased from Oxfam in Muswell Hill.

Review of Moulin Rouge

I haven't watched this since it came out back in 2001, and it was an absolute joy to watch - fabulous sets, lovely costumes, surprisingly good singing from a younger Euan McGregor and Nicole Kidman. Lots of nice details that bear looking at more than once, like Kylie's cameo as the anise fairy early on.

I noticed that the very large elephant in the forecourt of the Moulin Rouge nightclub is surprisingly similar to the the animatronic "Sultan's Elephant" that came to London in 2006 - did the latter borrow from the former, or were they both based on something that existed previously?

Watched in the Common House at Springhill via a USB stick and informal distribution.

Review of Rose

A Danish film about a middle-aged woman with schizophrenia whose sister (and sister's husband) takes her on a coach trip to Paris. It's not billed as a comedy, but there are some very funny moments in it, along with lots of pathos and tragedy. I don't know to what extent schizophrenia is like this - and there's not much attempt to portray Rose's inner world, just her outer behaviour. 

I was particularly touched by the way that Rose is more confident and competent when she's in France (where she had a teenage love affair with a married man that precipitated her illness) and when she's speaking French.

Along the way I learned that D-Day is really important to Danish historical memory - I had no idea about this, and about the exiled Danish sailors who participated.

Watched at Lansdown Hall through the film club, and one of the best films I've seen there for a while.

Review of "Mr Phillips" by John Lanchester

How I struggled through this. I like John Lanchester's writing in the LRB, but his fiction leaves me cold. This was particularly depressing. Mr Phillips is a man in his 50s, who has been made redundant from his accountancy job but hasn't told his wife or anyone else yet - and like the Japanese salarymen who might perhaps have inspired the book, he gets dressed for work and heads out for his usual train as if he was going to work. Then he wanders around London all day, thinking about his life, and thinking a lot about sex, and having some interesting and some dull experiences. 

He reflects on the pleasures and frustrations of modern life - this book was published in 2000, but it already feels like ancient history...this is a world with compact disc shops in railway stations. There are no smartphones - there may have been one mobile phone mentioned. There's no internet, no online anything. 

And Mr Phillips, who is eight years older than me, feels like a person from another era. I know he's supposed to be a big dull and emotionally sclerotic, but none of the people I know who are eight years older than me are like this.

Review of "Cahokia Jazz" by Francis Spufford

I really loved this book, but I haven't managed to write a review since finishing it more than two weeks ago - I wonder why not?

Let's started with what I liked. It's alternative history, which is a genre I enjoy - speculative fiction merged with history, what's not to like? And I like the scenario of this one, which is that the variant of smallpox that arrived in North America with the first Europeans was the non-lethal variety, so the Native American population was not devastated. And it ties really nicely into what I recall from The Dawn of Everything including how advanced Native American civilisations were, the existence of potential other routes of development, and Cahokia itself, a Native American urban civilisation.

Spufford has imagined how such a civilisation would have advanced into and alongside the modern, urban, industrial civilisation of the United States - the alt-history Cahokia is part of the US but still somewhat distinct politically and much more distinct culturally.  It's well imagined and beautifully described.

I also like the way that Spufford has avoided those long passages explaining the course of the alternative history - in the best tradition of alt-history there's an author's after-note, but no long explanatory passages. 

As in his book Golden Hill, Spufford - an English white bloke, as far as I know - has a great insight into the workings of race in America. The main character is of Native American descent but grew up in a white-run orphanage, so he both is and isn't connected to the Native American civilisation of Cahokia. And he's a Jazz musician, so his friends are mainly Black Americans, and he's partly connected to their world too.

The actual murder mystery plot, and the other characters - are great too. I was really sorry when it ended.

I'd like to say a bit more about the ending, which has some parallels with what happened at the end of The Lincoln Highway, but that would be a spoiler.

Review of His Three Daughters

Moving but not exactly enjoyable film about three women - two sisters and a half-sister - gathered in a New York apartment to be there for their father in his dying days. There's a few palliative care nurses who come in and out, and a few other characters, but mainly it's just the three women and their difficult relationships.

It feels like it could have been a stage play without much difficulty, even though the youngest of the woman sometimes goes outside the apartment to smoke weed.

Definitely worth watching - and I'd be grateful if someone could explain the ending to me.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of The Big Sleep

Watched this again last night - I've seen it before but I felt like watching it again. I've read the book, which was also confusing. I think I read somewhere that Chandler cobbled it together from bits that he had written, with the result that it's stylish and atmospheric but the plot doesn't really make sense. Also that the screenwriters on the film asked him to explain the plot, and he couldn't. On top of that I think that some things seem to have been cut from the book's narrative - wasn't the Geiger character involved in some sort of porn racket, and wasn't Carmen Rutledge being blackmailed because the photos of her were porn? I didn't get that from the film, though I did have a few little sleeps of my own during it.

Despite all this I did enjoy it. I note in passing that Lauren Bacall was not conventionally pretty, and that Humphrey Bogart would be scrawny by the standards of today's Hollywood. The men all wear great suits and hats, the women - even the minor characters - wear great outfits.

Watched on BBC iPlayer via Chromecast. 

Review of Elizabethtown

Another overlong and somewhat shapeless comedy. It felt like the plot was made up of bits left over from other films...a young man who is a shoe designer for a fictionalised version of Nike has a spectacular (and implausible) failure with one of his projects, decides to kill himself in an implausible and horrible way, but is interrupted by the news that his father has died. He must go back to his father's Kentucky small town hometown, and on the way he meets heartwarming people including the quirky but attractive air stewardess on his otherwise-empty flight, and they fall in love, and...get the idea?

Too long, not funny enough, kept feeling like it should have ended.

Watched on Netflix.