Review of 'Everyman'

Depressing but well-written book about men's ageing and mortality - specifically a man, who is an advertising executive and serial marriage cheater. He's really quite hard to like, but the story is told from his perspective most of the time, so all of his infidelities and bad behaviour seem like natural responses to his life situation rather than choices.

Because he's rich, and his loving health-filled brother even more so, none of the consequences of his failing body are financial...for most people in the US his string of conditions would be devastating and impoverishing, but he's left wondering whether to sell his condo on the Jersey Shore and move back to Manhattan.

There's one memorable speech given to his decent wife that he cheats on with his secretary and then with a Danish fashion model (who subsequently and regretfully marries) that is so good it's worth quoting at length:

"You can weather anything, even if the trust is violated, if it's owned up to. Then you become life partners in a different way, but it's still possible to remain partners. But lying - lying is cheap, and contemptible control over the other person. It's watching the other person acting on incomplete information - in other words, humiliating herself. Lying is so commonplace and yet, if you're on the receiving end, it's such an astonishing thing. The people you liars are betraying put up with a growing list of insults until you really can't help but think less of them, can you? I'm sure that liars as skillful and persistent and devious as you reach the point where it's the one you're lying to, and not you, who seems like the one with the serious limitations."

Incidentally, the 'Everyman' of the title is not because the central character is representative of every man, but the name of his father's watch shop - chosen because it didn't sound too Jewish.

Review of 'Libertarias'

A good historical film about anarchists - especially the 'Free Women' - in the Spanish Civil War. It rather plays down the conflict between the different factions on the Republican side in favour of conflicts within the anarchists - over whether the militia should be fully militarized into an army with ranks, over the role of women (whether they should be fighting on the front line or only in support roles). It's really good on the latter, and I think it handles the extent to which the revolution did and didn't address these issues well.

It's quite gory, and I think a little ambivalent on the strong anti-clerical element on the Republican side. The Spanish left really, really hated the Church, seeing it as both an exploiter in its own right and a key ideological and institutional supporter of the rich and the ruling class. During the early phase of the Civil War there was lots of burning of relics, religious art, and church property. This is well depicted in the film, but it wasn't clear to me how the film wanted us to feel about it. The fact that we see much of this through the eyes of a young nun who is sort-of rescued by anarchist militiawomen increases the ambivalence. At one point we see the summary execution of a bishop, and the nun's revulsion.

A good film and worth the two hours spent on it - some great music and crowd scenes too.

Watched in the middle floor at Springhill with the Stroud Red Band after a rehearsal - film obtained by informal distribution.

Review of 'Underground to Palestine' by I F Stone

Well, this is a book of its time if ever there was! I F Stone, a Jewish-American left-wing journalist travels to Europe to see for himself the Aliyah Bet, the illegal Jewish immigration network that stretches from the DP camps  across the Mediterranean to British-controlled Palestine.

It's interesting partly because it fits into another narrative from the one that we're used to be about Zionism and the establishment of Israel. Lots of the displaced Jews are not really Zionists but are heading for Palestine because they see no alternative, and certainly don't want to stay in their countries of origin where antisemitism is still rife. There's no anti-Communism to Stone's story either - quite a few of the displaced Jews fought with the Red Army, and in a number of places the Communists are willing and sympathetic helpers to the would-be emigrants.

The book includes a much-later essay about Stone's position as a pro-peace, pro-Palestinian supporter of Israel, which by the late 1970s he was finding increasingly uncomfortable. Again, very much a piece of its time; Stone wants to reclaim the history of 'the other Zionism', from Brit Shalom to Hashomer Hatzair. I did too, once.

Review of 'The Power' by Naomi Alderman

Well, so much for the suggestion that satire is always conservative (see earlier review of The Twelve Chairs). This is a really powerful, thought-provoking dark book. It's mainly a satire on male power, and has made me feel ashamed at just how much brutality against women that I ignore because it's 'nothing to do with me' - rape, genital mutilation, gang rape in war...all thrown in to relief by making women who are perpetrating the violence against men. In the first few pages I thought 'Oh, I get this...' and wondered how it was going to carry on for a book-length. But it keeps developing, and there are also good characters and plot elements.

There's also more, in the depiction of refugee camps, borderlands, organised crime and trafficking...lots of other cruelties that we just don't think about all that often. And the age of new media, and spin politics. Actually this turned out to be too dark to read at night, because it kept me up.

A really great book. Everyone (but especially men) should read it.

Review of 'The Twelve Chairs' by Ilf and Petrov

I saw the Mel Brooks film years ago, and remember it as quite funny - enjoyable to watch as a socialist, not horribly anti-Soviet and with some jokes that appealled to someone who knew a bit about the history. So I have meant to read the book but never got round to it until I came across a copy on someone's shelf.

It's also quite funny, and quite surprising too. It's set in the late 1920s, which I think is the period of the NEP, so the economic and political situation feels quite fluid, open and a bit unresolved. I read in the afternote that Ilf and Petrov wrote political humour and satire, and never had any trouble from the authorities, and it's not hard to see why - there's really nothing at all anti-Soviet in the book at all. The targets of the humour are a venial priest, a grasping ex-noble, a grifter...all people that the Soviet authorities would be pleased to see ridiculed, as long as it was OK to acknowledge their existence. There's a ridiculous group of anti-Communist conspirators too. I wonder if all satire ends up being small-c conservative, so that in a Communist country it's also pro-regime.

That said, it really is quite enjoyable, well-written, and funny.

Review of 'Dark Habits' (Entre tinieblas)

Another early Almodovar, and was probably quite shocking to a Spanish audience when it first came out, but now seems quite contrived and even a bit annoying. Set in a nunnery where several of the nuns are taken Class A drugs - the Mother Superior is on heroin, one of the others takes acid, and so on. Oh, and there's a tiger in the convent. There's a trashy nightclub singer who takes refuge there and eventually does an inappropriate big number before a visiting clerical dignitary (that bit is actually quite funny) but otherwise it's a bit pointless and shapeless.

Watched via laptop and projector at The Old Co-Op on Horns Road, Stroud - part of Jane's Almodovar season.

Review of Saint Judy

Film about a lawyer who moves to LA so that her divorced husband can have access to their son, becomes involved with a firm that does migration tribunals, and becomes a hero to clients that the firm has more or less abandoned in favour of procedural compliance. It's a true story and provides some insight into the cruelty of the US migration, though there are lots of quite nice people in the system that she meets on the way.

Watched via Netflix app and Chromecast.

Review of 'Catch the Wind'

French film in which a woman whose factory is closed to be relocated to Morocco decides to take up the statutorily-defined offer that she can relocate. Interesting premise, not so well done - actually, the woman has to be pretty dopey to want to turn down redundancy money and do this instead, despite the advice of the shocked HR woman and her co-workers. And she is - she seems to manage life in Morocco fairly badly, not noticing that all the other women on the workplace bus are wearing headscarfs, going off to walk on her own in dodgy parts of town where she gets robbed, and so on. She learns that people in factories in Morocco are treated quite badly, and that women have a hard time in Islamic countries, but eventually finds true friendship because...

Watched on smart TV via Netflix app.

Review of 'Same Kind of Different as Me'

Another awful liberal film about race and class in contemporary. Very wealthy couple have a troubled relationship (he's having an affair) but acheive redemption through volunteering at a downtown mission, where they gradually befriend a troubled older black man who has suffered as a result of terrible racist persecution (KKK violence, among other things). They redeem him, he redeems them, and then she gets cancer and dies but everyone is redeemed (including the husband's racist alcoholic father) through her two-dimensional saintliness. Reminded of the Brecht poem "A Bed for the Night".

Watched on Netflix via Chromecast.

Review of 'Seventeen'

Well-made Spanish film about a disturbed young man and his relationships - with his peers (awful), his grandmother (in a home, near-vegetative), his older brother (troubled), and a dog to which the staff at the juvenile facility introduce him (redemptive). Really thoughtful, some unexpected plot twists, and beautiful to look at too.

Watched on Netflix via Chromecast.

Review of 'My Days of Mercy'

Wanted to watch a feel-good cheerful film, and ended up watching this - about the children of a man on death row who attend anti-death penalty execution vigils while hoping that the case against their dad (convicted of stabbing their mum to death) will somehow be overturned by new evidence. Not feel-good at all, despite the Lesbian sex scenes, because the younger of the two daughters strikes up a relationship with a young woman who is a pro-death-penalty campaigner and also attends the vigils to support the executions.

It's a good well-made film, with good acting and a straightforward but well-told story. My overwhelming impression was how awful America is.

How did I end up watching this? The Netflix trailer abstracted a tiny unrepresentative segment of dialogue that implied this was a snappy small-town comedy of manners, and the trailer itself was inserted into a load of others for comedies. Ho hum.

Review of 'Professor Marston and the Wonder Women'

A slow start but a good film about academic psychology, sexual relationships and jealousy, and bondage. Lots of bondage. Professor Marston is a Harvard academic and his wife is a much cleverer but less celebrated Radcliffe academic who can't be given a PhD because she's a woman. They do good work together, including inventing the polygraph, but they lose their jobs because of a scandal involving a threesome with a young woman student.

The prof then explores the nature of dominance and submission in sexual relationships, first in theory and then in practice. He discovers the bondage scene, and then starts to write a comic book that eventually becomes the celebrated Wonder Woman series - I had no idea that there was so much bondage in the original comic. I'd been dimly aware of what I thought was a pornographic parody called 'Blunder Broad' by the filthy comic artist Eric Stanton - I didn't realise that the 'parody' was so close in spirit to the original.

Review of 'Unsheltered' by Barbara Kingsolver

I don't think Barbara Kingsolver has written any bad books - this certainly isn't one. It's a sometimes gruelling story about a family of professional Americans tipped into poverty by entirely normal economic circumstances. The father loses his tenured faculty position when the university he works for shuts down, and ends up at the bottom of the ladder in another, worse-paying college. The mother loses her full-time journalist job on a magazine and has to make do on crumbs of badly-paid freelance work. And suddenly they are living in New Jersey in a crappy old house that is literally falling down, and impossible to heat. The man's old racist Greek-immigrant father lives with them, and is dying slowly and very expensively from a constellation of conditions, and the woman who doesn't like him at all has to manage his illnesses and his treatments, and spend huge amounts of time and energy negotiating with American healthcare.

It's a split narrative novel, so there's a parallel story set in the same neighborhood (with similar crumbling houses) in the mid-nineteenth century, which features a progressive teacher trying to engage his pupils with science despite the opposition of the principal and the town's gangster-boss patron.

And it's all the more poignant in that none of the modern families woes come from the familiar 'villains' of the economic apocalypse. There jobs haven't been offshored, they haven't been replaced by robots or immigrants - they are just the victims of middle-class precariousness. It could happen to anybody, and it does.

There's lots of family dynamics, including the golden-prince son who is a Harvard Business School graduate but has no job and heaps of debt, and the less celebrated 'spiky' daughter who has been living in Cuba, and whose smarts from their and from living at the bottom of society have actually prepared her much better for the world that is coming.

No more without the risk of spoilers, but this is really great - just get it and read it.

Review of Julieta

One of Almodovar's more recent films, and really good - very poignant, almost painful to watch, about the relationship between a mother and daughter, its deterioration, and the effect on the mother of the daughter's disappearance. Unlike many of Almodovar's films this is totally devoid of camp or quirkiness, just great acting and directing. Amazing how well actors Emma Suárez and Adriana Ugarte managed to look like older and younger versions of the same person - I actually thought it was done with make-up!

Based on three stories by Alice Munro, which I must now read.

Watched on BBC4 in real time, as it was broadcast - can't remember the last time I did that!

Review of 'The Black Jacobins' by C L R James

One of those book that I'm amazed that I hadn't already read - it's been around me for years and years, and somehow I'd begun to imagine that I'd read it. But I hadn't, though I had read a novelisation of the life of Henri Christophe, which covered some of the same material.

It's absolutely brilliant history, with a great understanding of the balance between individual heroes (and villains) and social forces. James also has a really good grasp of the limitations of the heroes too, especially Toussaint L'Overture, who is the central character of the Haitian revolution. The writing is beautiful - even the production of the book, with detailed numbered footnotes at the foot of each page (not in some unfindable section at the back) is a pleasure.

I must admit that there were some parts where I got a bit confused. Suddenly there seemed to be too many characters on stage, and I rather lost track of who was who - some character cards would have helped here, I think. And the twists and turns of the wars and battles, especially during the revolutionary period, are really confusing - the role of the British, and the Americans, is well set out but even so it's hard to follow.

But the narrative takes off again during the final round, when Napoleon sends a French army to reconquer the island and reimpose slavery. I must say that I hadn't appreciated what a nasty, reactionary, racist Bonaparte was. The atrocities committed by the planters and the French soldiers, often with the express intention of creating terror and despair in the revolting ex-slaves, were appalling. I know comparisons with the Nazis are always invidious, but I couldn't help thinking that German civilians didn't ever turn up to watch mass executions as a form of entertainment.

Anyway, this is a great book, and I'm sorry it took me so long to get round to it. I understand it was also turned into a play, which would be interesting to see.

Review of Pepi Luci Bom

Almodovar's first film, and obviously intended to be shocking and obscene. It's a bit shapeless, with some scenes and characters that appear to have been spliced in without any connection to the main plot or the rest of the characters. The story is about three women, one (Pepi) youngish and sort of glamorous, one (Luci) middle-aged, petite bourgeois and repressed (her husband is a sleazy policeman), and one (Bom) a 15-year old singer in a punk band.

The middle-aged one is a sexual masochist and longs for her husband to beat and abuse her, but he treats her with respect 'like I'm his mother' - though he's happy to rape Pepi when he finds that she has marijuana plants in her apartment. The rape is treated very lightly in the film, as are the various degradation to which the other two women eventually come to subject Luci - of course, she wants to be degraded, so it's all right. Early on Bom pisses on Luci, and later she beats her. Eventually Luci is reconciled to her husband, after he subjects her to a savage beating when he finds that she's been living with the other two.

See what I mean?

It rather reminded me of Jubilee, though the S&M sex in that was much sexier. Olvido Gara as Bom even looks like a bit like Toyah Wilcox as Mad.

Watched via laptop, projector and informal distribution at Jane's front room in The Old Co-op on Horns Road, Stroud.

Review of 'In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History'

I've had this knocking around for years, but never quite got round to actually reading. But lately I've been thinking a lot about slavery and the anti-slavery movement - there are resonances with climate change, and also with Brexit (I've never quite got round to putting my thoughts down about that...must do so soon).

Well, not reading it wasn't such a bad idea. There's not all that much Marxian exploration. There is a lot of polemical stuff against opponents who are surely now dead, or defunct, or forgotten - student radicals who want to take over the universities (which Genovese defends as disinterested communities of scholars), Black separatists who wanted an autonomous region of four Black-ruled states in the USA, dogmatic CP-USA Marxists who weren't as good at Marxist history as their English counterparts, and people who had the wrong criticism of pro-Confederate southern historians.

Much of this can only be of interest to scholars of...historiography? The sectarian left? (He's rather soft on Maoism, and even has a jarringly nice thing to say about Stalin at one point: "...as Comrade Stalin, who remains dear to some of us for the genuine accomplishments that accompanied his crimes, clearly understood..." (p371). Perhaps this is ironic, though there isn't much humour anywhere else in the book.

He's really down on what Marx and Engels said about the US Civil War (which he insists on calling the War for Southern Independence), describing it as polemical and based on poor analysis. Yeah, maybe, but working out what he really thinks about slavery, or the Civil War, is really hard - unlike Marx, he doesn't seem to me to be unequivocally on the side of the North.

The book does end with a rather nice potted version of what Gramsci says and why it's important, reminding me that it's about time I had another look at that. Curiously he seems to express Gramsci's ideas rather better than Gramsci did himself...though it's spoilt a bit by the way that he doesn't really address the issue of class - he gets it that 'the working class' isn't a useful analytical or political term, but he offers only not very useful add-ins like 'ghetto dwellers' and 'the New Middle Class'. Oh well, can't blame him for that, who else does any better?

Review of 'Ridley Walker' by Russell Hoban

Blimey this was a remarkable book - an indication is that I really hated it for the first 80 pages but persevered with it. I hated it because it's written in a weird dialect/orthography with idiosyncratic spelling and grammar, which makes it very hard to read - often you have to read the words out loud to work out what they are.

It's a post-apocalyptic dystopian fantasy, set in Kent thousands of years after some sort of catastrophe, and part of the point is trying to understand what memory of that event has remained in culture. The civilisation has retained puppet shows as a means of communication and transmission of ideas, and a garbled version of the story of St Eustace from a commentary on a wall painting.

It made me think a lot, about imminent catastrophe but also about how much of our culture, and our technological civilisation is both inter-dependent and cumulative. The eponymous hero at one point learns how many years have passed since the disaster (several thousand) and is struck by how little his civilisation seems to have advanced compared to the knowledge that the ancients had before. Is it because they are just stupider, that their brains don't work so well, as a result of the disaster? He isn't sure, but it seems to me that the people described - even though they have some metal-working skills - for the most part are living like palaeolithic people. They are just inventing settled agriculture, although they elsewhere the author says they are an Iron Age civilisation. On the other hand they seem to have remained literate and can even read such documents as they have (the St Eustace story) from before the disaster.

Well, not everything has to make sense. But I am very glad I did carry on, and almost want to read it again.

Review of 'Some Remarks' by Neal Stephenson

This is so not 'a definitive collection of Stephenson's writing' - it's a rag-bag of old journalism and short fiction, some of it really good, some of it almost embarrassing. I love Stephenson's work, especially the Baroque Cycle, but some of the essays here make me wonder whether I've projected a deeper understanding into it than is there in his head - a sort of fictional ink-blot thing. A lot of his unexamined political assumptions about America, and Capitalism, seem not all that clever and insightful to me, and that does come out in some of his contemporary-set books like The Cobweb.

I bought this for £1 at a remainder shop - it had been marked down from £9.99 to £4, then marked down again. I'm glad I didn't pay either of the higher prices. Still, he's a great, clever, elegant writer, and the insights into his process of writing make this worth reading.

Review of 'Popco' by Scarlett Thomas

An intriguing mystery book set in the world of multinational toy corporations, with lots of clever insights into marketing and demographics. Nicely written, with a good central character who's a bit on the spectrum but no less interesting or sympathetic for that. There are a number of nested narratives, including a rather good C17th bit, and - for me the best part - a portrait of the awkwardness and misery of secondary school life. As is often the case the denoument of the mystery is less interesting than the mystery itself; I actually wrote my first ever fan letter to the author before I was finished with the book, on the understanding that MI might not feel like doing it when I'd got to the end. But still a very enjoyable read, slightly enhanced by the somewhat odd physical characteristics of the paperback.

I actually picked this up from one of those 'little free libraries' in someone's front garden, which feels entirely appropriate - almost as if the book found its way to me.