Michael Kohlhaas (Arnaud des Pallières – France/Germany) 122 minutes
Arnaud des Pallières’ adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist’s 1811 novella is one of the most surprisingly entertaining films of the year. A muscular literary adaptation, it breathes new life into the period film, ably helped by the presence of Mads Mikkelsen in the title role (you imagine that Mikkelsen caught des Pallières’ eye in fustian in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising). Kleist’s text was itself based on the true story of the 16th-century merchant Hans Kohlhase, who went on a vengeful rampage throughout Saxony when he failed to get justice for the impounding of his horses.
Des Pallières’ film switches the location to France and largely Protestant Cévennes region in the same era but the film retains a heavily Germanic air. Mikkelsen’s French, which he learned for the role, has a cross-Rhine stiffness to it (and he does at one point speak German too) and among the cast are regulars of German and Swiss cinema, David Bennent and Bruno Ganz (both regulars in the movies of Volker Schlöndorff, who himself directed a previous version of the novel in 1969, with David Warner in the title role). The action is otherwise unchanged though, with Kohlhaas victim of an arbitrary seizure of his horses by the servants of a powerful nobleman. He is promised satisfaction but the promise is broken and then his wife, who intercedes with the nobleman’s wife, is sent back to Kohlhaas half-dead.
Kohlhaas’ revolt is an early exercise in existentialism, as he takes the law into his own hands, becoming the avatar of a post-feudal bourgeois society. Though the righteousness of his cause is acknowledged by all his methods are condemned – one great scene sees Denis Lavant as a peripatetic clergyman who tries to get Kohlhaas to turn himself in, a character based on Martin Luther, who intervened in a similar fashion with Hans Kohlhase. Though Kohlhaas is right and must get justice, he must also have justice dispensed unto him – it is no surprise to learn that Kafka was a great admirer of Kleist’s book.
Michael Kohlhaas is a bracing, wintry tale that is quick with the texture and sensations of the late Middle Ages. Des Pallières directs at a brisk pace and, unusually in this day and age, it is a film two hours long that does not seem longer. Once again, Mikkelsen is fantastic, a cerebral presence in an action role. And, most remarkably for a literary adaptation, it is a persuasive examination of a historical epoch without being overbearing and pretentious.
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Monday, September 16, 2013
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
The Great Gatsby – Baz Luhrmann
The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann – USA) 140 minutes
Baz Luhrmann adapts Fitzgerald and the result is pretty much as you might expect. There are no surprises here. You have a continual sense that you have seen this film before. That is largely because you have – if, that is, you happened to chance upon any of Luhrmann’s previous four features. Luhrmann goes for the same notes all the time, he modulates them less than a Wahhabi muezzin delivering an unwavering call to prayer. The film is all singing, all dancing, all loud, all of the time. But, you expect that, don’t you?
Luhrmann tackles the jazz age by ignoring jazz entirely in favour of executive producer Jay-Z’s sub-woofed party fuzz; but there's nothing necessarily wrong with that – the anachronistic music is one of the least jarring things about the film. His approach to the roaring twenties is to make the film roar, and boy, does it roar. Like a haemmorrhoidal lion. With sunburn. The film is a yabbering orgy of more-ishness; no sound is too much, no colour too garish, no cut too abrupt to let us know this was one swell era that just doesn’t come across in the rigidly analogue format that was a novel published in 1925.
Underneath all the slobbery excess and the over-designed munificence are the characters, who are considerably thinner than in Fitzgerald’s original, despite mouthing identical dialogue. This is largely down to poor casting and bad acting: Tobey Maguire, God bless him, is fit only for afternoon TV with his permanent look of fortunate surprise (no amount of radioactive spider bites will ever bestow a screen presence on Tobey). Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway is a cipher but he is not that empty. Carey Mulligan has never convinced me much before and she struggles badly as Daisy, she is playing an actor playing someone dressed up to resemble Daisy Buchanan. Leonardo di Caprio is, on the face of it, well cast as Gatsby, but he chews the 3D scenery up something awful. The ensemble acting is poor but you can hardly blame the actors involved; it doesn’t look like they were getting any direction worth talking about, not least from a man whose mise en scène is all over the place (and the 3D only makes it look worse).
The film captures the essence of the era, but not much of the flavour. It is also a bit annoying to see Nick’s narrative being couched in such an overt way as part of his later therapy sessions; what’s wrong with old-fashioned voiceover? Luhrmann’s Gatsby is a whirlwind of ineptitude from start to finish, and is surprisingly uninvolving. That said, it is not a travesty. If anything, it is too faithful to the book, or at least the period background to the book. It tries, as is common with any new contemporary version of a canonical novel, to show how different it is from all that have come before – it may even know the original novel better than Fitzgerald did himself. It probably would not have been a better film had it aimed a little less at the cultural history surrounding the novel, but a greater attention to the poor tenants of Fitzgerald’s novel would have at least made it slightly more watchable.
As bad as Luhrmann’s film is, it is admirable in many respects. It is like the uncouth distant cousins that show you up at weddings, all loud mouths, shirts the colour of a pack of Opal Fruits, propping up the bar. But they are still cousins and you cut them a bit of slack. Similarly, The Great Gatsby and its cheerful, blasé vulgarity is preferable to much of what passes for literary adaptations these days. Slavoj Zizek admires Ayn Rand because she betrays more readily the disingenuousness of mainstream of capitalism, rather than the more disciplined, streamlined advocates of real predatory capitalism. In the same way, Luhrmann’s film shows up all the better the predatory pedantry of literary adaptions. It even clocks in at two hours twenty minutes, twenty shorter than Jack Clayton’s 1974 version, which looked right but had all the memorability of a wedding you have been invited to at the last minute.
My heart sinks when I learn of a book I like being adapted for the cinema, not because, as per the usual gripe, the film will ruin it (any great novel’s reputation is strong enough to long outlive the three to four weeks of PR inanity that surrounds the release of a film). No, the reason my heart sinks is because there are people out there who cannot read a novel without imagining how it would look projected on a screen, its costumes, its sets, its characters painstakingly reproduced. If that is what you’re thinking of when reading a novel, you’re missing the point. It’s a little like drinking a beer and wondering what it would taste like, frozen, as an ice lolly. Sure you can do it but why bother? A novel’s inner life and its outer structure are made of words, which is a sand-like substance, notoriously difficult to replicate on screen, but still the most interesting thing about the novel.
That’s not to say that novels (or plays, or even poems) should never serve as source material for films – there have been many fine films adapted from books, and there continue to be so. It is, however, depressing that we must be visited, every fifteen years or so now at this rate, with a new Dickens, Brontë, Jane Austen or Tolstoy adaptation, when few of those in the past have been terribly memorable anyway. Some filmmakers do get it right – Andrea Arnold’s recent Wuthering Heights understood the brute social relations that underlie the intense romance of the novel. Most adaptors of literary classics though are content to wallow in the crinoline, the fine teak wainscoting and the Received Pronunciation (American actors in particular are wont to apply RP to any character, of any nationality, from before the 20th century). That is why most film adaptations of classics bring little to the table and are instantly disposable, like the covers in a fast-food restaurant.
It is not only classics that are subject to this either; the film rights on practically every contemporary novel that makes a splash are instantly snapped up. It’s not too surprising – it is a relatively easy way for studios to make money, provided the production is not delayed for too long, and few writers can afford to say no. A strong contemporary novel will likewise survive the brief ignominy of being associated with an idiotic film adaptation, and will only gain in reputation from a good film treatment. But this industrial reproduction of hit novels rarely leads to good cinema – one need only look at the work of Stephen Daldry, who, it seems, cannot behold a Waterstone’s 3-for-2 table without thinking of getting into the cinematic pants of every book on it. This is why we should welcome more adaptations like Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, no matter how vulgar, how misplaced, how tin-eared they might be. Such violence done to the po-faced edifice of ‘literary’ cinema might sensitise people to the pedantry of the slavish adaptation and might lead people to enjoy the source text without wasting time ruminating over whether Keira Knightly or Carey Mulligan might make a better Maggie Tulliver.
Baz Luhrmann adapts Fitzgerald and the result is pretty much as you might expect. There are no surprises here. You have a continual sense that you have seen this film before. That is largely because you have – if, that is, you happened to chance upon any of Luhrmann’s previous four features. Luhrmann goes for the same notes all the time, he modulates them less than a Wahhabi muezzin delivering an unwavering call to prayer. The film is all singing, all dancing, all loud, all of the time. But, you expect that, don’t you?
Luhrmann tackles the jazz age by ignoring jazz entirely in favour of executive producer Jay-Z’s sub-woofed party fuzz; but there's nothing necessarily wrong with that – the anachronistic music is one of the least jarring things about the film. His approach to the roaring twenties is to make the film roar, and boy, does it roar. Like a haemmorrhoidal lion. With sunburn. The film is a yabbering orgy of more-ishness; no sound is too much, no colour too garish, no cut too abrupt to let us know this was one swell era that just doesn’t come across in the rigidly analogue format that was a novel published in 1925.
Underneath all the slobbery excess and the over-designed munificence are the characters, who are considerably thinner than in Fitzgerald’s original, despite mouthing identical dialogue. This is largely down to poor casting and bad acting: Tobey Maguire, God bless him, is fit only for afternoon TV with his permanent look of fortunate surprise (no amount of radioactive spider bites will ever bestow a screen presence on Tobey). Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway is a cipher but he is not that empty. Carey Mulligan has never convinced me much before and she struggles badly as Daisy, she is playing an actor playing someone dressed up to resemble Daisy Buchanan. Leonardo di Caprio is, on the face of it, well cast as Gatsby, but he chews the 3D scenery up something awful. The ensemble acting is poor but you can hardly blame the actors involved; it doesn’t look like they were getting any direction worth talking about, not least from a man whose mise en scène is all over the place (and the 3D only makes it look worse).
The film captures the essence of the era, but not much of the flavour. It is also a bit annoying to see Nick’s narrative being couched in such an overt way as part of his later therapy sessions; what’s wrong with old-fashioned voiceover? Luhrmann’s Gatsby is a whirlwind of ineptitude from start to finish, and is surprisingly uninvolving. That said, it is not a travesty. If anything, it is too faithful to the book, or at least the period background to the book. It tries, as is common with any new contemporary version of a canonical novel, to show how different it is from all that have come before – it may even know the original novel better than Fitzgerald did himself. It probably would not have been a better film had it aimed a little less at the cultural history surrounding the novel, but a greater attention to the poor tenants of Fitzgerald’s novel would have at least made it slightly more watchable.
As bad as Luhrmann’s film is, it is admirable in many respects. It is like the uncouth distant cousins that show you up at weddings, all loud mouths, shirts the colour of a pack of Opal Fruits, propping up the bar. But they are still cousins and you cut them a bit of slack. Similarly, The Great Gatsby and its cheerful, blasé vulgarity is preferable to much of what passes for literary adaptations these days. Slavoj Zizek admires Ayn Rand because she betrays more readily the disingenuousness of mainstream of capitalism, rather than the more disciplined, streamlined advocates of real predatory capitalism. In the same way, Luhrmann’s film shows up all the better the predatory pedantry of literary adaptions. It even clocks in at two hours twenty minutes, twenty shorter than Jack Clayton’s 1974 version, which looked right but had all the memorability of a wedding you have been invited to at the last minute.
My heart sinks when I learn of a book I like being adapted for the cinema, not because, as per the usual gripe, the film will ruin it (any great novel’s reputation is strong enough to long outlive the three to four weeks of PR inanity that surrounds the release of a film). No, the reason my heart sinks is because there are people out there who cannot read a novel without imagining how it would look projected on a screen, its costumes, its sets, its characters painstakingly reproduced. If that is what you’re thinking of when reading a novel, you’re missing the point. It’s a little like drinking a beer and wondering what it would taste like, frozen, as an ice lolly. Sure you can do it but why bother? A novel’s inner life and its outer structure are made of words, which is a sand-like substance, notoriously difficult to replicate on screen, but still the most interesting thing about the novel.
That’s not to say that novels (or plays, or even poems) should never serve as source material for films – there have been many fine films adapted from books, and there continue to be so. It is, however, depressing that we must be visited, every fifteen years or so now at this rate, with a new Dickens, Brontë, Jane Austen or Tolstoy adaptation, when few of those in the past have been terribly memorable anyway. Some filmmakers do get it right – Andrea Arnold’s recent Wuthering Heights understood the brute social relations that underlie the intense romance of the novel. Most adaptors of literary classics though are content to wallow in the crinoline, the fine teak wainscoting and the Received Pronunciation (American actors in particular are wont to apply RP to any character, of any nationality, from before the 20th century). That is why most film adaptations of classics bring little to the table and are instantly disposable, like the covers in a fast-food restaurant.
It is not only classics that are subject to this either; the film rights on practically every contemporary novel that makes a splash are instantly snapped up. It’s not too surprising – it is a relatively easy way for studios to make money, provided the production is not delayed for too long, and few writers can afford to say no. A strong contemporary novel will likewise survive the brief ignominy of being associated with an idiotic film adaptation, and will only gain in reputation from a good film treatment. But this industrial reproduction of hit novels rarely leads to good cinema – one need only look at the work of Stephen Daldry, who, it seems, cannot behold a Waterstone’s 3-for-2 table without thinking of getting into the cinematic pants of every book on it. This is why we should welcome more adaptations like Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, no matter how vulgar, how misplaced, how tin-eared they might be. Such violence done to the po-faced edifice of ‘literary’ cinema might sensitise people to the pedantry of the slavish adaptation and might lead people to enjoy the source text without wasting time ruminating over whether Keira Knightly or Carey Mulligan might make a better Maggie Tulliver.
Monday, February 11, 2013
Blancanieves
Blancanieves (Pablo Berger - Spain/France) 90 minutes
The craze for silent cinema continues. Following the Oscar-winning The Artist and Miguel Gomes’s half-silent Tabu, the latest offering is from Spain, by director Pablo Berger. Blancanieves, an adaptation of Snow White, is closer to the The Artist in appearance but its sensibility is more similar to Gomes’s. It is not simply a fine silent film that is largely free of gimmicks (unlike Michel Hazanavicius’s Oscar winner) but a first-rate, at times ingenious, literary adaptation.
The action begins in the bullrings of Seville in the early 20th century, with maestro toreador António Villalta at his peak, only to be horrendously gored by the bull when he is momentarily blinded by a photographer’s flash. His pregnant wife witnesses it and goes into labour from the distress. The two are taken to hospital, where Villalta’s life is saved but the wife dies during childbirth. Villalta then marries his scheming nurse Encarna (a brilliantly icy Maribel Verdú, from Y Tu Mama También and Pan’s Labyrinth) and the young daughter, Carmencita, is packed off to live with her maternal grandmother.
After the grandmother’s death, the child goes to live with Encarna, where she is barred from seeing her father, wheelchair-bound and kept captive in his upstairs bedroom, but finds a way nonetheless. All this time she is subjected to the familiar cruelty and life of drudgery in the house’s lower quarters. After finally escaping the house, she meets up with a travelling circus troupe - seven dwarves, naturally. She is unable to remember her name so they baptise her Blancanieves ("like in the fairy tale", a wryly self-reflexive take on the source material). She finds she has inherited her father’s talent in the corrida and becomes a sensation in Andalusia, knocking Encarna off the front pages of the society magazines, provoking her stepmother’s ire.
What makes Blancanieves particularly fresh is it doesn’t slavishly follow all the available tropes of silent cinema; though it is clearly a homage to European films of the silent era, it lets its story breathe and mines other arts and later cinema too for its references. Kiko de la Rica’s hight-contrast black-and-white photography is a delight and both he and Berger excel at capturing the very photogenic charms of Seville. It is a slice of sun-drenched Latin Gothic that stands as an innovative film in its own right while also giving new life to an old fairytale (while simultaneously drawing elements from one or two others). Blancanieves’s success at the box-office in Spain, where it has been hailed as the best film of 2012 by none other than Pedro Almódovar, suggests that silent cinema may have an audience that will sustain it beyond being a simple fad. With the availability of silent films online now, it may well be that more people are receptive to films without sound than there have been since the advent of the talkies. That may or may not be the case but Blancanieves is likely to be a film that will last (certainly more so than The Artist).
The craze for silent cinema continues. Following the Oscar-winning The Artist and Miguel Gomes’s half-silent Tabu, the latest offering is from Spain, by director Pablo Berger. Blancanieves, an adaptation of Snow White, is closer to the The Artist in appearance but its sensibility is more similar to Gomes’s. It is not simply a fine silent film that is largely free of gimmicks (unlike Michel Hazanavicius’s Oscar winner) but a first-rate, at times ingenious, literary adaptation.
The action begins in the bullrings of Seville in the early 20th century, with maestro toreador António Villalta at his peak, only to be horrendously gored by the bull when he is momentarily blinded by a photographer’s flash. His pregnant wife witnesses it and goes into labour from the distress. The two are taken to hospital, where Villalta’s life is saved but the wife dies during childbirth. Villalta then marries his scheming nurse Encarna (a brilliantly icy Maribel Verdú, from Y Tu Mama También and Pan’s Labyrinth) and the young daughter, Carmencita, is packed off to live with her maternal grandmother.
After the grandmother’s death, the child goes to live with Encarna, where she is barred from seeing her father, wheelchair-bound and kept captive in his upstairs bedroom, but finds a way nonetheless. All this time she is subjected to the familiar cruelty and life of drudgery in the house’s lower quarters. After finally escaping the house, she meets up with a travelling circus troupe - seven dwarves, naturally. She is unable to remember her name so they baptise her Blancanieves ("like in the fairy tale", a wryly self-reflexive take on the source material). She finds she has inherited her father’s talent in the corrida and becomes a sensation in Andalusia, knocking Encarna off the front pages of the society magazines, provoking her stepmother’s ire.
What makes Blancanieves particularly fresh is it doesn’t slavishly follow all the available tropes of silent cinema; though it is clearly a homage to European films of the silent era, it lets its story breathe and mines other arts and later cinema too for its references. Kiko de la Rica’s hight-contrast black-and-white photography is a delight and both he and Berger excel at capturing the very photogenic charms of Seville. It is a slice of sun-drenched Latin Gothic that stands as an innovative film in its own right while also giving new life to an old fairytale (while simultaneously drawing elements from one or two others). Blancanieves’s success at the box-office in Spain, where it has been hailed as the best film of 2012 by none other than Pedro Almódovar, suggests that silent cinema may have an audience that will sustain it beyond being a simple fad. With the availability of silent films online now, it may well be that more people are receptive to films without sound than there have been since the advent of the talkies. That may or may not be the case but Blancanieves is likely to be a film that will last (certainly more so than The Artist).
Monday, February 04, 2013
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (Laurent Cantet - France/Canada) 143 minutes
I’m not sure why Laurent Cantet felt a second film adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s 1993 novel about a teenage girl gang in 1950s upstate New York was needed. The first version, a low-budget American production from 1996 barely registered other than for starring a young Angelina Jolie as Margaret 'Legs' Sadowsky, the gang’s mercurial leader. I’m not really sure why novels must perforce be transferred to the screen anyway, even if they are by as distinguished a writer as Joyce Carol Oates, but Cantet clearly saw something in Oates’ tale of proletarian revolt that aligned with his own leftish social concerns.
Unlike the original version, which vitiated Oates’s vision — and much of her point — by changing the era, the geographical location and the protagonist’s social class, Cantet’s Foxfire is largely faithful. But that’s not to say it’s really any more effective. Filmed in Canada, with mostly non-professional Canadian actors, the film looks the part and gets off to a decent start. A small cohort of teenage girls, some of them bullied by the boys in their school and humiliated by their teachers, form a secret society to avenge their ordeals. The opening half-hour is set up well and the atmospheric surf score by Canadian band Timber Timbre marries well with the action. But you soon begin to question Cantet’s decision to load the cast with inexperienced non-professionals, especially given the girls he casts all look a few years too old for their roles anyway.
Cantet got great performances out of non-professional teenagers for his last film, the Palme d’Or-winning The Class/Entre les murs, but those youngsters were, crucially playing characters very close to themselves. He was also aided by having François Bégaudeau, a former teacher, play himself in an adaptation of his own brilliantly supple novel. With Foxfire, the demands on an inexperienced ensemble cast for a period film are at times onerous and the results not always convincing. Some of the cast are also disappointingly inexpressive, such as Katie Coseni as Maddy, who is entrusted with the narration. It’s a bit unfair to single out a young actress like this but hearing her read Oates' prose is akin to listening to an unmotivated classmate read from a book at a teacher’s insistence.
Another of Foxfire’s failings is its at times slipshod depiction of the era. We see few adults in the film and no parents other than Legs’ errant drunkard of a father. All this is highly improbable for 1955 when American teenagers were still being closely policed by their elders and gives the girls little of substance to rebel against. Similarly, the relationship between a wealthy businessman’s do-gooder daughter and the girls is only partially sketched and remains unpersuasive. And the film is long — 143 minutes — and after its opening half-hour soon loses momentum. All in all, a rather worthy film that irritates more than it inspires.
I’m not sure why Laurent Cantet felt a second film adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s 1993 novel about a teenage girl gang in 1950s upstate New York was needed. The first version, a low-budget American production from 1996 barely registered other than for starring a young Angelina Jolie as Margaret 'Legs' Sadowsky, the gang’s mercurial leader. I’m not really sure why novels must perforce be transferred to the screen anyway, even if they are by as distinguished a writer as Joyce Carol Oates, but Cantet clearly saw something in Oates’ tale of proletarian revolt that aligned with his own leftish social concerns.
Unlike the original version, which vitiated Oates’s vision — and much of her point — by changing the era, the geographical location and the protagonist’s social class, Cantet’s Foxfire is largely faithful. But that’s not to say it’s really any more effective. Filmed in Canada, with mostly non-professional Canadian actors, the film looks the part and gets off to a decent start. A small cohort of teenage girls, some of them bullied by the boys in their school and humiliated by their teachers, form a secret society to avenge their ordeals. The opening half-hour is set up well and the atmospheric surf score by Canadian band Timber Timbre marries well with the action. But you soon begin to question Cantet’s decision to load the cast with inexperienced non-professionals, especially given the girls he casts all look a few years too old for their roles anyway.
Cantet got great performances out of non-professional teenagers for his last film, the Palme d’Or-winning The Class/Entre les murs, but those youngsters were, crucially playing characters very close to themselves. He was also aided by having François Bégaudeau, a former teacher, play himself in an adaptation of his own brilliantly supple novel. With Foxfire, the demands on an inexperienced ensemble cast for a period film are at times onerous and the results not always convincing. Some of the cast are also disappointingly inexpressive, such as Katie Coseni as Maddy, who is entrusted with the narration. It’s a bit unfair to single out a young actress like this but hearing her read Oates' prose is akin to listening to an unmotivated classmate read from a book at a teacher’s insistence.
Another of Foxfire’s failings is its at times slipshod depiction of the era. We see few adults in the film and no parents other than Legs’ errant drunkard of a father. All this is highly improbable for 1955 when American teenagers were still being closely policed by their elders and gives the girls little of substance to rebel against. Similarly, the relationship between a wealthy businessman’s do-gooder daughter and the girls is only partially sketched and remains unpersuasive. And the film is long — 143 minutes — and after its opening half-hour soon loses momentum. All in all, a rather worthy film that irritates more than it inspires.
Monday, December 19, 2011
Some books of the year
A far from definitive list, but rather a selection of the better stuff I read this year, minus the more canonical works (I could regale you with my Panglossian enthusiasm for some guy called Shakespeare but maybe I shouldn't). Eagle-eyed readers will notice most the books here were not published this year - not to worry, there's plenty of time to get round to 2011's batch of publications.
Long Time, No See - Dermot Healy, Faber, £12.99
Healy’s first novel in over a decade confirms him as the unlikely experimental stylist first glimpsed in Sudden Times. The novel is narrated by one Mr Psyche (not exactly a Sligo name, but anyway) who has recently left school and who spends much of his time administering to his older neighbours Uncle JoeJoe and the Blackbird in a small coastal village in the north-west of Ireland. There is a hint of McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun in the gentle pace of the rural setting but Healy divulges most of the tale through dialogue, much of it phatic and repetitive. It can hamper the mechanics of the plot at times but there’s a justness to the flow of niceties, making it almost a lexicon of small-town etiquette; its social interactions are convincingly spare but endowed with the sometimes ruinous reticence of the rural Irishman.
The drama is provided by the older gentlemen, eccentric Malibu-drinkers armed with tales of surprising social exuberance from the prehistory of Celtic Tiger Ireland. Mr Psyche is a sage anchor for the proceedings, a sensible foil for an entertaining, generous novel that goes about its business with everyday grace and quiet confidence. Irish writers are notoriously non-prolific, knocking out novels at their own pace and on their own terms. You can’t begrudge Dermot Healy that if the result is as pleasing as Long Time, No See. Still, you hope there won’t be as long a wait for the next one.
If it is your life - James Kelman, Penguin £8.99 (2010)
Cantankerous old Jimmy Kelman is one of the few genuine originals in British fiction and one who, his 1994 Booker for How Late It Was, How Late notwithstanding, is rarely afforded the respect he deserves. He is also a rare novelist whose short stories are every bit as vital as his longer work and his eighth collection, published last year, is as sparky and belligerently eloquent as ever.
The collection opens with ‘Tricky times ahead pal’, a tale of an unexpected amputation and the task of tailoring a pair of trousers to cope with it, delivered in a comically matter-of-fact way. Kelman shifts tone and voice effortlessly, encompassing wounded pride (‘talking about my wife’), genial solicitude (‘The Gate’, the story of a man trying to carry a second-hand children’s bike home after buying it) and paternal indignation (‘The Third Man, or else the Fourth’). Long pieces are interspersed with micro-stories, only a page or two long, as gnomic as they are evocative. The long title story is a painfully poignant account of a young working-class Glaswegian negotiating his own gentrification at college with a mixture of industrious pride and guilt at what he is leaving behind. It is a beautiful, magnanimous piece, the crowning achievement of a diverse, absurdist and bleakly funny book.
I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan - Alan Partridge, with Rob Gibbons, Neil Gibbons, Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan, Harper Collins, £9.99
I normally steer clear of audio books, partly because I consider books to be sacred objects but also because far too often you are at the mercy of the person entrusted with reading them and the risk of an annoyingly-voiced narrator is too high to part with cash. (Last I looked, printed books are also cheaper). But there are times when recourse to the spoken word is warranted and the much awaited 'second' autobiography of Norfolk’s favourite light entertainer is one of them. It is, as Partridge himself might say, textbook narration.
I, Partridge takes us from Alan’s birth (‘my father held me aloft like a fleshy World Cup’), through his miserable childhood and schooldays, to his meteoric rise to - and fall from - fame, and his uneasy reconciliation with provincial obscurity. Partridge is already one of the finest comic creations of the last thirty years, a precisely calibrated avatar of Middle English rightness and petit-bourgeois indignation. What is surprising is how the gag rarely flags over 300 pages - or almost seven hours, if you are listening. It’s a catalogue of cringe, a bathysphere of bathos, a symphony of squaredom. It’s also one of the finest badly-written books of this or any year (it is useful to listen to it periodically as a negative yardstick while writing) and one whose author would be only too proud to accept a Bad Sex award for.
The Music Instinct - Philip Ball, Vintage £8.99 (2010)
Philip Ball’s book won’t teach you how to read music because its premise is that you already know how. The title suggests a lineage from Steven Pinker but the inspiration is not the one you’d think, but rather a passage in How the Mind Works, where Pinker dismissed music as ‘auditory cheesecake’, and which provoked a minor kerfuffle in musicological circles. A science writer by trade who also has an impressively broad knowledge of music, Ball promptly takes Pinker to task before positing that we are all innately endowed with an ability to parse and interpret the sonic, tonal and rhythmic properties of the music we hear. Music leads the book but it is always underpinned by recourse to scientific studies - that might prove too technical for some it does make you look at and listen to the music afresh.
Ball is also an enlightened listener, he refuses blanket dismissals on grounds of taste of even the most wretched popular music and he is impatient with musical absolutes, allowing himself to admire and decry Schoenberg in equal measure. And neither is it all Western music that informs his theory - Indian, African, Native American music are all considered, while Javanese and Balinese gamelan is a crucial counterpoint to Western tonality. An online repository of recordings (albeit pretty insipid computer-generated ones) accompanies the book, which demystifies much of the heavier technical stuff. The author would no doubt be uncomfortable with suggestions The Music Instinct should have an ameliorative purpose but the book does make you a better listener. And it’s enjoyable in the process too.
Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien - Georges Perec, Christian Bourgois (1975) €5
(Available in English as An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, translated by Marc Lowenthal, Wakefield Press $12.95)
Perec had a Joycean impatience with form, rarely attempting anything more than once. If he ran out of literary archetypes, he would invent more. Among those inventions were tracts on how to ask your boss for a raise, a list of everything he ate and drank throughout 1974 and, in this short piece, a description of everything he saw over three days sitting in Café de la Mairie on Paris’ Place Saint-Sulpice in October of that year.
The title of the piece suggests Perec wanted to bleed the place of life, to record it for posterity, much as one might pin a butterfly lifeless to a display-case mount. It’s an idea that seems remarkably prescient today in the age of Google’s omnivorous thirst for documentation. And Perec was himself an able archivist, in both a professional and literary sense (he worked as a scientific archivist). One of his posthumous works was a collection of short essays entitled Penser/Classer (Think/Classify) but, like the lexicographer in Life - A User’s Manual whose job is to retire obviated words from the dictionary, Perec also knew that classification demanded selectiveness.
Tentative d’épuisement… purports to describe everything that passes into his view as he sits looking out into the square but Perec is chopping and excluding just as any other narrator would. And he is constantly questioning his observations, wondering if a tour bus is full of Germans or Japanese; if the plat du jour, which he can no longer see listed from a different table, has changed since yesterday. The only constants in his observations are the buses, the 63, the 70, the 86, the 87, the 96, which punctuate his text with familiar irregularity. What Perec seems to rather be doing is trying to exhaust the possibilities of non-literary description. That his Place Saint-Sulpice springs to life so readily from his seemingly obsessive list is testimony to an abject but brilliant failure on the part of the laureate of literary taxonomy.
X’ed Out - Charles Burns, Pantheon $19.95 (2010)
Burns’ first new comic book series since the hugely successful Black Hole is an intriguing account of a nightmare experienced by a patient recovering after what seems to be a traumatic accident or assault. In this first installment of a projected six, there’s no clear indication as to how art student Doug got into such a state, nor is it clear what his dreams, in which he appears as a Tintin surrogate, might mean. Burns’ gradual and discrete unfolding of the narrative is irresistible though and his use of darkened intertitles and blank panels impart an eery Lynchian menace. The book, with its bedridden hero trying to muster up clues from his past to elucidate his dreams, reads like a grotesque Proust, articulated in a clean, almost academic style that throws the disturbing vision into sharp relief.
Seeing - José Saramago (translated by Margaret Jull-Costa) Vintage £8.99 (2006)
The late Saramago’s 2004 novel is a parable on the tolerable limits of democratic mandates, which gained added resonance with events in the past year. A majority of voters in a general election return blank ballots, prompting the government to rerun the election a week later. An even bigger number of blanks - 85% - is returned and the government declares a state of emergency and vows to crush the unseen forces that threaten the fabric of democracy.
Seeing is written with Saramago’s characteristic faux-naive laconic drollness, and reintroduces - though not entirely convincingly - characters from Blindness, the novel of his most people are familiar with. And the scenario - where a plurality of political opinion is considered incommensurate with the totem of the ballot box - is one that is borne out with all too frequent familiarity these days. The blackmailing of the Irish electorate in the two Lisbon referendums and the similar stance taken by the Euro elites at the time of the earlier plebiscites in France and the Netherlands indicate exercising one’s suffrage a bit too seriously is not be encouraged. Now we see the Hobson’s Choice faced by voters in Spain and Portugal - and not even that in Italy and Greece - in response to the mismanagement of the economy. There is also the assumption in western countries that the chief goal of the Arab revolutions is to win the right to vote - a partial aim that becomes increasingly questionable when the ‘wrong’, ie. Islamist, parties are the beneficiaries of the polls.
Saramago deftly crafts a bleakly funny - but ultimately bleak - narrative that so precisely delineates the infantilising rhetoric of the political class, it is probably the finest fictional paradigm of a political reality since Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, and one that will likely gain further currency in years to come.
Knowledge of Hell - António Lobo Antunes (translated by Clifford E. Landers) Dalkey Archive $13.95 (2008)
There was a ‘new’ Antunes published in English this year - a new translation of his 1979 novel Os Cus de Judas, previously available as South of Nowhere and now as The Land at the End of the World - but the novel that followed that in 1980, Knowledge of Hell, is a fuller, more even work. Like the earlier novel, it draws on Antunes’ own experience as a medic for three years at the end of Portugal’s bloody colonial war in Angola. A veteran of the war, now practising as a psychiatrist at a mental institution in Lisbon (as Antunes was early in his literary career) recounts his experiences in an imaginary conversation with his daughter.
Knowledge of Hell is very much an apprentice novelist’s work, with self-doubt and bravado at turns bubbling below the surface of the text. But it is nonetheless hugely impressive. Antunes’ stunningly acute eye for visual metaphor is here already highly developed and his dense Faulknerian prose is the right vehicle for the confused nightmarish morass of memory conjured by wartime service. If, as Tom McCarthy remarked last year, prose is the chassis of fiction but poetry the engine, Antunes’ novels are seriously high-performance. Antunes has written a further sixteen novels, almost all of which document the at times harrowing reflux of Portuguese decolonisation, but only about half are available in English. Even more puzzling is how relatively unknown he remains. Though he has his high-profile champions - George Steiner, James Wood and Harold Bloom are fans - he has yet to be published in the UK. Maybe his novels are considered a bit prohibitively ‘difficult’ by a publishing industry that increasingly lauds the ‘readability’ of literary works, but you can help but think many people are missing out on one of the finest writers alive, writing in any language.
New Finnish Grammar - Diego Marani (translated by Judith Landry), Dedalus £9.99
Italian linguist Diego Marani’s 2000 novel, celebrated across Europe, finally gets an English-language publication. New Finnish Grammar charts the anatomy of language-learning, through the device of an amnesiac soldier in the Second World War who is convinced by his Finnish doctor that he too is Finnish. Repatriated to Helsinki, in the throes of war with the Soviet Union, the patient sets to learning the notoriously difficult language and tries to piece together his memories of the city that is supposedly his own.
He gathers his impressions in a diary and correspondence with a nurse who takes a shine to him before she rushes back off to the doomed front in Keralia. The novel perfectly captures the twists and turns of learning a foreign language, the dead ends, the frustrations, the breakthroughs, the wounded impatience with the target culture and the occasional quixotic identification with it. It is also a touching tribute to a unique country and culture, which seldom attracts the attention of anyone abroad. The success of New Finnish Grammar makes one hopeful translations of Marani’s five other novels will soon follow.
The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov, Allen Lane £14.99
The fact that Morozov’s book, published just after the New Year, was very quickly dated by the Arab revolutions, only underlines its timeliness. The Net Delusion, developed from Morozov’s Net Effect blog for Foreign Policy, takes aim at those ‘cyber utopians’ and ‘internet centrists’, who believe in the unfailing potential of the internet and technology to enable a passage to democracy and to defeat totalitarian regimes and old-school dictatorships. The popular belief that access to knowledge online was the exposure that would consign such regimes to history took a battering during the clampdown on the so-called Green revolution in Iran in 2009, in which protestors were easily picked off thanks to the online trail they had left. Morozov shows how every benefit of technology conceals a danger and these dangers are posed, not simply by the usual bogeymen in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran but also by governments in western democracies.
It soon emerged that there was a troubling interaction between some of the high priests of cyber-utopianism and unsavoury regimes - Clay Shirky had visited Libya in an IT consultant capacity back in 2007. And while people in the west enthusiastically added twibbons to their profiles for revolutions in the Middle East and decried the hounding of bloggers and activists there, later in the year we were being encouraged to post pictures on Facebook of rioters in Vancouver and London to name and shame them. It never seemed to cross anyone’s mind that such a habit quickly acquired might later be applied to political protestors. Morozov knows better than most the dangers that lurk in online activism for citizens of certain countries, having grown up in Belarus. A new foreword came with a paperback edition towards the end of the year; he does not deny that social media played an important role in the Arab revolutions, and continues to do so, but his warning that technology is a double-edged sword should be heeded by anyone with a blind faith in its progressive properties.
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Saturday, September 19, 2009
"They are just writers, no matter how great."
A quote, unsourced alas, from the great Liam O'Flaherty I read last night:
I'm sure O'Flaherty, a progressive fellow, would have intended women writers to be included in that equation too. That oversight aside, it's as good an observation on the whole writing thing as one could wish.
There are some writers whom one immediately recognises, bookish fellows whose drawing-room civilisation obtrudes unpleasantly on the senses. They are just writers, no matter how great. But there are others who are great men, because they are men and who write because chance turns their energies towards writing as a means of creation. These are the men I love. Out of their speech, out of their eyes, out of the movements of their bodies, joyousness and exuberance flow and they make you feel it is good to be alive.
I'm sure O'Flaherty, a progressive fellow, would have intended women writers to be included in that equation too. That oversight aside, it's as good an observation on the whole writing thing as one could wish.
Saturday, September 05, 2009
My Afternoon Viewing
I went to see Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl today, the latest film by the 100-year-old veteran Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira (and his third film in as many years). It's an adaptation of a short story by Eça de Queiroz, updated to the present day but Oliveira doesn't change much in the way of the social relations of 19th-century Lisbon. The etiquette of introductions, marriage requests and bourgeois townhouse gatherings are still there as is the unthinking cruelty of intransigent relations (in this case the uncle who sacks and disowns his accountant nephew because of his intention to marry the blonde of the title). It's ever so anachronistic but its ancient, retrograde elegance works, it even reminds one of Lisbon and its curious airs of the past, its creaking electricós and elevadors, its rent-controlled maze of small city-centre haberdashers, locksmiths and bookshops and its sleepy sense of dignified torpor. Though based on a story written by Quieroz its doomed clerk reminds one more of the work of Fernando Pessoa - both writers are referenced in the film - and there's one line uttered that is pure Pessoa: 'Businesses don't like sentimental accountants'. Manoel de Oliveira will be 101 in December and he's already got his next film, The Strange Case of Angelica in pre-production. There must be something in the water in Portugal.
Thursday, September 03, 2009
At Sink or Swim...
An indication of the parallel universe I inhabit is the fact that today's big news was the word from Venice of Brendan Gleeson's directorial debut. Old Ginger Chops is no shrinking violet given that his choice of material is going to be none other than At Swim-Two-Birds, a choice one would like to admire for its audacity but instead one imagines a car-crash of embarrassing extent. We are told that Gabriel Byrne, Colin Farrell and Cillian Murphy are being lined up to star, which should pay for the posters at least (and it also reminds us that the Irish film-acting world is as curiously male-dominated as Flann O'Brien's novels themselves). The budget will be $11million, a fair whack for an Irish film, if not much by Hollywood standards.
Much as I admire Brendan Gleeson as an actor, I really can't get motivated about this one (and I won't pretend to be apprehensive - At Swim... is such a sturdy work of genius it will long outlast any film version, no matter how brilliant or inept). I've already seen one adaptation of the novel, over ten years ago, by the Austrian director Kurt Palm (as unknown internationally then as he is now but who surfed a brief wave of fame for long enough to stage a production of Die Flädermaus in Dublin shortly after the film's release). Palm's adaptation had the unique attribute of looking thoroughly Irish (and cheap) while everyone sounded lugubriously Germanic. It was a plodding trip through the novel's Russian-doll structure, reeling off the gags and situations in a cursory fashion devoid of any (non-Germanic) humour. I remember watching it on its brief run in the IFI and turning round to an over-enthusiastic Flannophile behind me who was polluting the half-empty cinema with his chortles at inconsequent jokes, I said to him 'it's not that funny'.
Well at least there's something for Gleeson to better. But the problem with the adaptation is not the towering influence of Flann - it's a select group indeed that have any real attachment to him - but the fact that the book is a thing of words, not of images. It's nigh impossible to render visually in a substantial way. While the meta-textual nature of the narrative - and the novel's surrealism - has been co-opted in a certain strand of cinema, such as Buñuel, Fellini, early Woody Allen, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman - none of these started from a base as ineffably literary as Flann's work was. Palm's film just looked like a cheap charting of the book's narrative and it will be a big challenge for Gleeson, as director and screenwriter to avoid this pitfall. A good start might be to update the novel's setting, and thus avoid the distraction of period details of the early Free State, and a similarly liberal approach to the sub-tales of Sweeney and the Pooka McPhellimy would be no harm either. Recovering Toasted Heretic Julian Gough put it best in his exceptionally active Twitter feed this afternoon:
Buying film rights to a Flann O'Brien must be like buying a sports car made of diamond-encrusted meringue. "OK! Now what?"
I can imagine Flann stirring momentarily from his stout-sodden slumber in the Palace to nod his appreciation at that.
Monday, August 31, 2009
James Kelman Being Snotty About Genre Fiction
James Kelman, one of my favourite writers, and one of the greatest living British writers, is a chippy fellow. And sometimes with reason, given the reception to his work at the Booker Prize ceremonies of 1989 (when he was nominated for A Disaffection) and 1994 (when he won for How Late It Was, How Late). His 1994 win horrified some of the snootier elements of the London literati, with one of the judges Julia Neuberger famously threatening to resign, claiming it was 'crap'. Kelman's work and themes are resolutely Glaswegian working-class and they resonate with the smokey, beery smells and grimy detail of pool halls, betting shops, pub backrooms, two-up-two-downs and football terraces. And more often than not his work has been dismissed by a metropolitan literary élite more on the lowly subject matter than on his own considerable merits. But Jimmy can let his anger cloud his judgment at times too: as Theo Tait remarked last year, 'he makes modern Glasgow sound as if it's under occupation. In his essays, he makes English literature sound as if was written entirely by
John Buchan and Jilly Cooper.'
Kelman upset the literary apple cart in Scotland last week by taking on some of his country's bestselling authors at the Edinburgh international book festival saying that if the country were in charge of awarding the Nobel prize instead of Sweden, it would go to "a writer of fucking detective fiction" or a book about "some upper middle-class young magician". Now one doesn't need to be possessed of a terribly literary bent to figure out who he's got in the crosshairs there, and that is largely Kelman's point. Kelman claims 'contemporary literature has been derided and sneered by the Scottish literary establishment' which he also accuses of Anglocentrism. I'm not terribly bothered that this wee spat, which really is little more than an old-fashioned Weegie v Auld Reekie snipe, attacks Ian Rankin, a crime writer who has enjoyed an enormous commercial success (though it took a long time to come) and whose work I admire greatly (I have no opinion, negative or otherwise, on J.K. Rowling and her wee speccie sorcerer). Rankin is no pretentious writer and he can hardly be blamed for the Rebus tours that draw tourists to Edinburgh these days. A blog piece by Alan Bissett at the Guardian places Kelman's outburst in the context of a 'gentrification' of Scottish literature while a lively point-counterpoint at the Glasgow Sunday Herald ponders the 'bastardisation' of a literary tradition; it's a measure of the curious creativity of the Scottish working-class that art and literature could be bemoaned as being co-opted by the bourgeoisie, in much the same way as football or dog racing. It's also bizarre and amusing to see genre writers, who for decades strove for respectability among the largely bourgeois literary élite, now being repudiated as trash by writers from grubbier backgrounds.
All this reminds me I haven't read much by Kelman in the past few years and a copy of Translated Accounts sitting on my shelf is crying out to be read. I'll get on to that promptly. And there are one or two by Rankin there too.
The whole affair also, naturally, reminds me a bit of this old beauty:
James Kelman launches broadside against Scotland's literary culture | Books | guardian.co.uk
Thursday, August 27, 2009
The Unluckiest Writer of the Twentieth Century?
I meant to post a couple of weeks back on a review by Fintan O'Toole on Flann O'Brien's Collected Novels (Everyman edition) that appeared in the New York Review of Books recently but I was stymied by the NYRB's limited online access (even to those of us that fork out for a print subscription). Now I seem to have mislaid the copy amid the piles of books, magazines, periodicals and manuscript papers with the words 'red rum' scrawled all over them that litter my flat. It was an interesting piece (if untimely, as the Everyman edition, to the best of my knowledge has been out for a long time), and on first reading I was most interested in the parallels O'Toole makes between Flanno and Beckett, a pair rarely thought of in the same moment yet who shared a similar knack for stepping outside the constraints of language (and their own language) and they also both shared a significant love for Ivan Gonchurov's Oblomov. The NYRB has now posted a podcast interview with O'Toole where he summarises his arguments in the essay. It's well worth a listen.
O'Toole comments on Flanno/Myles' writing in English as if he were writing it as a dead language, or one translated from another. It's a part fanciful, part persuasive idea but I was definitely taken by O'Toole's diagnosis of sexual repression in Flann's work, where he sees writing as taking the place of sex, scored out of the literature of official Ireland; I had never noticed before that much of the writing in At Swim-Two-Birds take place in bed (though that might have something to do with the fact that I read it as a student). I think that O'Toole (and others) are a little hard on the Ireland of O'Brien's time; while it was, of course a grey, priest-ridden, poverty-stricken place, it nonetheless managed to provide some unlikely cultural resistance. I also think that O'Brien, rather than being frustrated at being stuck in Ireland, stayed in the country out of a clear love for the newly-independent nation, you have to remember he was only 11 - and a fluent Irish speaker - at the establishment of the Free State. No matter how maddening he found the place, he was not necessarily given to flee it, especially as an (initially) idealistic and brilliant member of its fledgling Civil Service.
O'Toole is correct in saying that Flann was one of the unluckiest writers in 20th-century history, seeing At Swim-Two-Birds sink into obscurity shortly after its publication on the eve of World War II and then, of course, The Third Policeman was inexplicably rejected by his publisher. Even today Flann is criminally neglected with few people knowing his much funnier journalistic work (most of which is still in print) and even his name itself is little known outside cult literary circles, even within Ireland. Do yourself a favour this week and go out and read some Flann O'Brien, especially if you haven't already.
There's also a fine review of Flann's Collected Novels by Joseph O'Neill here.
Dear Reader...
Joe Queenan is, as a friend of mine and a fellow fan put it a few years back, a very facile man. Queenan is also consistently funny, as anyone who has read his masterpieces of snide humour will attest. These perfectly-formed volumes of snark include Imperial Caddy (about Dan Quayle's expected impending run for the 1996 Presidential election) and Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon (an account of his year slumming it amid American middle-of-the-road pop culture - retitled simply America for benighted Europeans).
In a piece in the Wall Street Journal Queenan turns his hand to a short study of readers' reviews on Amazon.com, because someone must, just as many imagine someone must pen those reviews in the first place. Queenan imagines a world in which the Amazon readers' review - that great leveller of canonical rankings and literary esteem - has been with us from the dawn of writing (and reading, of course). Below are a selection of his reviews. No fish in this barrel escapes Queenan's fire, nor does this detract from his greatness.
• "King Lear"—Average reader rating: Two stars. The author tells us: "As like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport." Oh, right, like I didn't know that? Like I didn't know that to be or not to be is the question? Like I didn't know that the fault lies not in us but in the stars? Tell me something I don't know, Mr. Bard of Whatever.
• "The 120 Days of Sodom"—Average Reader's Rating: Five stars. OK, so I like totally pre-ordered this book based on the author's name, which just happens to be the same as my maiden name—Marquis de. Yeah, a sketchy reason to buy a book, but I was pumped. But when it got here I didn't understand it at all. It just didn't go anywhere. It just kept repeating itself. I went through it a few times more, searching for some deeper, awesome meaning, but just ended up totally bummed. Actually, some parts of it were kind of gross.
• "Mein Kampf"—Average reader's rating: One star. Lively writing, but just too, too depressing. Why does he keep using big words that normal people can't understand, like lebensraum and oberkommandant? Hey! I own a thesaurus, too! And what's up with the Jewish thing?
Next week Joe Queenan turns his attention to YouTube commenters.
Joe Queenan: Amazon Reviewers Take On the Classics - WSJ.com
Thursday, June 05, 2008
The Excluded Youth of France's Angelique Guardian
Dear me, the Guardian, like a dear but cantankerous old friend, continues to exasperate much as one loves it. It remains, along with the FT, the best of the English newspapers (my relative unfamiliarity with Scottish and Welsh papers prevents me from saying 'British') but it can also madden with its one-note, one-dimensional coverage of certain things, France in particular. The latest shoddy missive from Paris comes today from the paper's Paris correspondent Angelique Chrisafis in an interview with the young French novelist Faïza Guène, which rails with savage indignation against the Parisian literary scene's shunting out of a reportedly talented young novelist from an immigrant background - I say 'reportedly' because I haven't read Ms Guène's work, though I look forward to doing so.
What bothers me about the piece is not Guène's bitterness about her marginalisation in both literature and society - the former of which is believable and the latter the reality for many Africans and Arabs in France - nor her analysis of Sarkozy's appointing the ethnic minority trio of women Rachida Dati, Fadela Rama and Rama Yade as tokenism, which I agree with. No, what riles me is the plain stupidity of the piece, which, being the cover feature in the G2 section and of a good length, can hardly be explained away as a piece of serviceable hackwork conceived to beat a deadline. Chrisafis invokes injustice after injustice while all the time compounding those very injustices for an English-speaking audience; there is also her recourse to lazy journalese to propel her story forward, not to mention a dubiously close identification with the opinions of the interviewee.
First up, in the opening paragraph, Chrisafis treats of the publication of Guène's first novel Kiffe kiffe demain, which came out when she was only 19:
One doesn't have to wonder too hard where a lazy journalist found the epithet "Françoise Sagan of the high-rises" nor the standard-issue Anglo-Saxon anti-intellectual "navel-gazing French novel" though you do wonder how many of those Chrisafis has read. I imagine that, writing for the Grauniad from Paris she has at least a smattering of French. As for the French novel being 'in crisis', well it must be if word has trickled all the way down to the G2 section of the Guardian.
Then we are told:
Well where does she appear in the papers in the far more receptive English-speaking world? Certainly not in the literary Review section on Saturday, where the interview would most likely have been conducted by somebody with literary expertise. Indeed a previous interview with Guène in the Guardian was covered in, guess what, the Society pages. There is no assessment of either Guène's work or its reception in France; surely Chrisafis has at least read her books and surely she could have phoned around for someone to say something, positive or negative, about them? Instead Chrisafis blindly accepts Guène's grievances and endorses them by implying that she is on the writer's side:
Again, I am not gainsaying Guène's experience, but is Angelique Chrisafis herself spending that much more time than the French literary élite seeing how the other half live in the Paris banlieues?
Of course, the real, implicit theme of the article is finally laid bare in the next paragraph:
If only those Frenchies were like us English! A typically fatuous example of the smugness of many British and American commentators on the social problems of France (and yes, I know that the French media can often be as infuriating when analysing the US and the UK). France and Britain both have their problems with the integration and marginalisation of immigrant communities and I don't deny that Britain is largely better in this respect but to claim that Britain is a world of unlimited opportunity for immigrants is downright silly.
Chrisafis, continuing in her amateur-litterateur vein, notes approvingly that immigrant fiction in Britain is long established and accepted, citing Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith and Monica Ali as examples. But literary marginalisation is alive and well in Britain, one need only return to the horrors experienced by the London literary establishment when the great James Kelman won the Booker Prize in 1994 for How Late it Was, How Late. Kelman is a writer whose one-page short story 'Acid' alone outweighs the entire careers of literary blowhards such as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and John Banville but this didn't prevent bluenose cretins such as Julia Neuberger and Simon Jenkins calling his work 'a disgrace' and 'the rambling thoughts of a blind Glaswegian drunk' respectively. He is also considerably chippy, understandable given the savage reception of his work, but sometimes exaggeratedly so as this interview with Theo Tait illustrates. It's also quite possible that Faïza Guène's bitterness at her literary exclusion is an over-reaction and maybe her work is not actually that good. I don't know but the fact that the literary establishment is not falling over itself for the novels of a 22-year-old does not necessarily mean she is being wilfully excluded.
To be sure, the French resistance to linguistic innovation such as Verlan is as absurd as it is exquisitely vulgar and François Bégaudeau's novel Entre les murs, which I wrote on last week, makes much of this absurdity. But I would like to see the issue treated with more intelligence and more expertise than Angelique Chrisafis is capable of bringing to it; not knowing anything about literature or film has in the past not been a barrier to the Guardian's Paris correspondent writing, as the French say, n'importe quoi on the subjects. It is sad to see that, once again, even left-wing Europhile British newspapers only seem to interested in reinforcing lazy preconceptions about France. Compare this approach with this excellent review of Elfriede Jelinek's novel Greed in the London Review of Books; Jelinek is another writer who has been ill treated by the literary establishment in both Austria and Germany and Nicholas Spice's piece is a brilliant, learned defence of her life and work. I plan to read Faïza Guène's novels soon and I sincerely hope that the Guardian will afford her work more respect than the French literarati has, or it itself has on this occasion.
Technorati Tags: France, literature, Guardian, books
What bothers me about the piece is not Guène's bitterness about her marginalisation in both literature and society - the former of which is believable and the latter the reality for many Africans and Arabs in France - nor her analysis of Sarkozy's appointing the ethnic minority trio of women Rachida Dati, Fadela Rama and Rama Yade as tokenism, which I agree with. No, what riles me is the plain stupidity of the piece, which, being the cover feature in the G2 section and of a good length, can hardly be explained away as a piece of serviceable hackwork conceived to beat a deadline. Chrisafis invokes injustice after injustice while all the time compounding those very injustices for an English-speaking audience; there is also her recourse to lazy journalese to propel her story forward, not to mention a dubiously close identification with the opinions of the interviewee.
First up, in the opening paragraph, Chrisafis treats of the publication of Guène's first novel Kiffe kiffe demain, which came out when she was only 19:
When the book came out in 2004, Guène was hailed as the "Françoise Sagan of the high-rises", the antidote to the navel-gazing French novel in crisis.
One doesn't have to wonder too hard where a lazy journalist found the epithet "Françoise Sagan of the high-rises" nor the standard-issue Anglo-Saxon anti-intellectual "navel-gazing French novel" though you do wonder how many of those Chrisafis has read. I imagine that, writing for the Grauniad from Paris she has at least a smattering of French. As for the French novel being 'in crisis', well it must be if word has trickled all the way down to the G2 section of the Guardian.
Then we are told:
One thing Guène notices as she tours the world, attends book fairs in Britain and lectures on the evolution of slang in the US, is that back in France, she tends to take up more space on the "society" rather than the "literary" pages of the papers.
Well where does she appear in the papers in the far more receptive English-speaking world? Certainly not in the literary Review section on Saturday, where the interview would most likely have been conducted by somebody with literary expertise. Indeed a previous interview with Guène in the Guardian was covered in, guess what, the Society pages. There is no assessment of either Guène's work or its reception in France; surely Chrisafis has at least read her books and surely she could have phoned around for someone to say something, positive or negative, about them? Instead Chrisafis blindly accepts Guène's grievances and endorses them by implying that she is on the writer's side:
But in France, despite her huge readership, the élite still see fiction set in the suburbs as something exotic and alien. Society is so polarised that the world Guène writes about is not something the establishment has ever seen close up; they are not streets they might ever have walked down, even by accident. She is still asked with wide-eyed fascination about the forbidden lands. "I feel ridiculous explaining things like people there love each other too, that they decide to have babies out of love and not just to claim benefits."
Again, I am not gainsaying Guène's experience, but is Angelique Chrisafis herself spending that much more time than the French literary élite seeing how the other half live in the Paris banlieues?
Of course, the real, implicit theme of the article is finally laid bare in the next paragraph:
She says every time she lands in London she finds herself marvelling at women going about their lives in headscarves, without the state deciding where they can or can't wear them. She meets people in London from the estates of "93", Seine-Saint-Denis, hoping to find a job without their race, name or postcode putting a brake on them. She thinks nothing has improved on French estates since the riots. "If that hasn't changed things, what will? Apart from civil war or revolution?"
If only those Frenchies were like us English! A typically fatuous example of the smugness of many British and American commentators on the social problems of France (and yes, I know that the French media can often be as infuriating when analysing the US and the UK). France and Britain both have their problems with the integration and marginalisation of immigrant communities and I don't deny that Britain is largely better in this respect but to claim that Britain is a world of unlimited opportunity for immigrants is downright silly.
Chrisafis, continuing in her amateur-litterateur vein, notes approvingly that immigrant fiction in Britain is long established and accepted, citing Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith and Monica Ali as examples. But literary marginalisation is alive and well in Britain, one need only return to the horrors experienced by the London literary establishment when the great James Kelman won the Booker Prize in 1994 for How Late it Was, How Late. Kelman is a writer whose one-page short story 'Acid' alone outweighs the entire careers of literary blowhards such as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and John Banville but this didn't prevent bluenose cretins such as Julia Neuberger and Simon Jenkins calling his work 'a disgrace' and 'the rambling thoughts of a blind Glaswegian drunk' respectively. He is also considerably chippy, understandable given the savage reception of his work, but sometimes exaggeratedly so as this interview with Theo Tait illustrates. It's also quite possible that Faïza Guène's bitterness at her literary exclusion is an over-reaction and maybe her work is not actually that good. I don't know but the fact that the literary establishment is not falling over itself for the novels of a 22-year-old does not necessarily mean she is being wilfully excluded.
To be sure, the French resistance to linguistic innovation such as Verlan is as absurd as it is exquisitely vulgar and François Bégaudeau's novel Entre les murs, which I wrote on last week, makes much of this absurdity. But I would like to see the issue treated with more intelligence and more expertise than Angelique Chrisafis is capable of bringing to it; not knowing anything about literature or film has in the past not been a barrier to the Guardian's Paris correspondent writing, as the French say, n'importe quoi on the subjects. It is sad to see that, once again, even left-wing Europhile British newspapers only seem to interested in reinforcing lazy preconceptions about France. Compare this approach with this excellent review of Elfriede Jelinek's novel Greed in the London Review of Books; Jelinek is another writer who has been ill treated by the literary establishment in both Austria and Germany and Nicholas Spice's piece is a brilliant, learned defence of her life and work. I plan to read Faïza Guène's novels soon and I sincerely hope that the Guardian will afford her work more respect than the French literarati has, or it itself has on this occasion.
Technorati Tags: France, literature, Guardian, books
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