Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men
[warning: spoilers]
Watched No Country for Old Men over the weekend – Joel and Ethan Coen’s impressive but ultimately unsuccessful adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name to the big screen.
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Books 9:53 pm
Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost
For surely now our household hearths are cold,
Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange:
And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.- Tennyson, ‘The Lotos Eaters‘
Why is it that a ghost returns? Is it really in order to seek justice for the wrongs done to him, or in the hope of contact with a loved one, or to protect those he loves from harm? Or is it just that, by meddling among the living, the ghost hopes to reclaim for himself some vestige of past excitements, some inkling of what it meant to be alive? Does the torment of the grave lie not in anguish, but in the slow suffocation of the self, the knowledge that all we once were is lost forever?
This is the idea at the heart of Philip Roth’s intriguing new novel Exit Ghost. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s familiar alter-ego, has spent the last 11 years of his life living in almost complete isolation in the New England countryside – a period in which he has become both impotent and incontinent. Returning to New York after his long absence, ostensibly for a medical procedure that promises to restore his bladder control, he finds himself suddenly thrown into the world of the living, and proceeds to seize upon it through a series of spontaneous and unbalanced decisions that he recognizes as madness even as he makes them. Why then does he perpetuate such foolishness? Because he wants to be, in his own words, “back in the drama, back in the moment, back into the turmoil of events! When I heard my voice rising, I did not rein it in. There is the pain of being in the world, but there is also the robustness.” It is this doomed attempt to hold on to one’s slipping existence, this rage against the dying of the light, that Exit Ghost gloriously celebrates.
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Movies 11:02 am
Bela Tarr’s The Man from London
To describe Bela Tarr’s starkly ravishing new film The Man from London as film noir is, I think, to miss the point substantially. It’s like describing Hamlet as a murder investigation. Tarr’s film is so much more – a celebration of aesthetic possibility, a testament to the unflinching power of the camera’s gaze, an uncompromising vision of what film, as a medium, is capable of. Every shot, every frame in this film is put together with the skill and patience of a master craftsman – producing an effect that I can only compare to the best work of Bergman and Tarkovsky. Whether it’s a wizened old man crumbling bread into his soup; the same old man balancing a billiard ball on his nose while an accordion plays in the background and a man dances around him with a chair; the abstract image of a ship’s prow, the central line dividing the screen into two parts, light and shadow, life and death; the clockwork of figures descending a ship’s gangway and stepping into a waiting train, like the souls of the damned arriving in Hell; or just the image of a man standing alone in the gleaming glass cage of a railway switchbooth that becomes a metaphor for man’s fundamental isolation – every scene in this film is pure poetry, every scene combines the bleak realism of a Hopper painting with the immaculate lighting of a Cartier-Bresson photograph. And Tarr’s shots of the human face reveal a nakedness so severe, so absolute, that you almost feel like his film should be rated NC-17. Bergman, in an interview about Nykvist, says that the greatest achievement of cinematography is that is has conquered the human face. Watch The Man from London and you will see exactly what he means.
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Movies 5:17 pm
Perhaps the most challenging thing about watching Ang Lee’s new film Lust, Caution is managing to remember that it’s not In the Mood for Love. It’s not just the presence of Tony Leung that brings the parallel to mind – it’s the costumes, the lush interiors, the slow, nuanced unfolding of an impossible relationship.
Normally, this would be high praise. Except that the plot of Lust, Caution is so at odds with the quiet mellowness of Kar Wai’s masterpiece, that the end result is an awkward, patchy piece of work that tries to be both frenzied espionage thriller and unlikely love story and is convincing as neither.
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Books 7:23 pm
Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach
Early in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, there is a scene where a pair of newly-weds sit glumly working their way through an unappetizing English supper, keen to get on with their evening but feeling that certain proprieties must be met. It’s a feeling of being trapped by an unacknowledged rule that readers of McEwan’s new novel will find familiar, as they ask themselves why they’re bothering to go on reading this thing when they could be out enjoying the last of the Fall sunlight.
To put it mildly, On Chesil Beach is not McEwan’s most successful novel. In fact, it’s barely a novel at all, more like an insecure short story blustering its way into novel status by adding a lot of padding and pretending to be a lot more grown up and serious than it really is. (more…)
Books 11:47 pm
Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip
There is a scene in Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip where Matilda, the novel’s (then) 13-year old protagonist, is caught writing the name of Pip (from Dickens’ Great Expectations) next to the names of her ancestors, which she’s been asked to memorize. Scolded by her mother for sticking the name of a make-believe person next to those of her kin, Matilda replies that though Pip isn’t a relative, she still feels closer to him than to all the strangers whose names she’s been made to write in the sand.
I know exactly how she feels. Pip, or rather the specter of Pip that hangs over Jones’ novel, is about the only warm or believable character in the whole book – the only one I can bring myself to feel anything for, and that mostly for Dickens’ sake. Everyone else in this book is so two-dimensional, so much a stock character, that it’s a wonder that they manage to stay upright when a wind blows across the island.
Jones’ Mister Pip is a feather-weight of a book whose chief merit is that it’s really, really short. In fact, even calling it a novel feels like an exaggeration – it’s more like a collection of crumbs and odd tit-bits left behind from the great feast of the Dickensian novel.
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Books 10:19 pm
Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People
Serre, fourmillant, comme un million d’helminthes,
Dans nos cervaux ribote un pueple de Demons,
Et, quand nous respirons, la Mort dans nos poumons
Descend, fleuve invisible, avec de sourdes plaintes. [1]
- Baudelaire
[plot spoilers]
In the opening poem of Les Fleurs du Mal, from which the quote above is taken, Baudelaire gives us a litany of nightmarish images, then concludes by speaking of one “more damned than all” – l’Ennui. Yet boredom is the one monster you’re unlikely to encounter in Indra Sinha’s magnificent if somewhat overwrought novel Animal’s People, a book that more than makes up in ambition what it lacks in finesse.
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Books 12:22 pm
Peter Ho Davies’ The Welsh Girl
[some spoilers]
Given the hype and prestige surrounding the Booker Prize, I suppose it’s only inevitable that we should see the advent of the Booker Prize Book. Not a book that wins the prize, you understand, but a book that seems to have been written for the prize, just as some movies seem made for the Oscars. You know the type – usually set in or around World War II and featuring a bleak countryside, a family (often missing at least one parent) scratching out a barren existence on a farm, a general air of sexual frustration, a main protagonist dreaming of escape from his / her small town existence, a colorful cast of villagers, some form of sexual assault or entanglement, guilt, shame, nationalism and / or faith, an unlikely friendship / love affair, partial redemption, epiphany, a sense of loss.
Don’t get me wrong. Some of the finest novels of the last fifty years have been written around precisely these themes. Peter Ho Davies’ The Welsh Girl, however, reads like nothing so much as a haphazard amalgam of these stock elements, welded together with considerable skill but very little inspiration, to create a novel that is not so much bad as plain dull. It feels unfair to use the word formulaic for a book so painstakingly written, so rich in prose, but it’s the word that, reading the novel, comes most often to mind. (more…)
Books 12:59 am
Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost
When I was nine years old a couple of friends and I formed our own detective agency and set out to solve crime. The fact that we didn’t actually have a crime to solve didn’t deter us; the way we saw it, there were thousands of crimes that went undetected everyday, so all we had to do was find one. That way, not only would we get the glory from actually solving the mystery, we would also get the credit for discovering the crime in the first place.
Armed with this philosophy and nurtured on a steady diet of Enid Blyton’s and Three Investigators, we proceeded to scour our neighborhood for ‘clues’. We searched systematically through the local rubbish dump, and were genuinely surprised to find no severed body parts. We spent hours tailing unsuspecting strangers, right up to the point when they turned suspicious. We climbed over a neighbor’s wall into the one vacant house on the street, convinced that it was a den for drug-runners and / or smugglers, and proceeded to dust the windows with talcum powder in search of fingerprints. Our adventures lasted three months – by the end of which time our locality’s obstinate law-abidingness coupled with growing parental concerns about what we were up to put an end to our sleuthing. In the years since, I’ve lost touch with my fellow detectives (to the point where I don’t even remember their names) and had almost forgotten about the whole project.
Until, that is, I was reminded of it by Catherine O’Flynn’s marvellous debut novel What Was Lost. Here at last is the kind of book that makes reading through the Booker long list worth it – a novel that is at once heartbreaking and hilarious, a scathing critique of our consumer society married to a bittersweet meditation on loss and regret. Part Office Space, part To Kill a Mockingbird, What Was Lost is a delicious treat of a book; one that suggests that O’Flynn is someone we’re going to be reading for a long time to come.
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Books 9:25 pm
Anne Enright’s The Gathering
“This is what shame does. This is the anatomy and mechanism of a family – a whole fucking country – drowning in shame.”
- Anne Enright, The Gathering
Another day, another Booker prize long list book, another novel about a family mourning for the loss of a loved one. Sigh.
This time around the deceased is one Liam Hegarty, and the person mourning him, or at least the person whose mourning we are witness to, is his younger sister Veronica. Liam, a long time alcoholic and quintessential black sheep, has drowned himself in the sea off Brighton, and his death shatters his younger sister, who has always been close to him (they are less than a year apart in age). What follows is 250 pages of fractured, hysterical narrative as Veronica tries to make sense of Liam’s death and the life that preceded it. There are many things to confront here: a murky secret from their childhood together, from a time when, abandoned by their parents, they lived for a while in their grandmother’s house; the myriad jealousies and rivalries of a family of twelve children; Veronica’s growing recognition that her own life, though perfectly pleasant and successful by every conventional standard, has somehow turned out to be unsatisfying and false. (more…)
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