In The Desert – Stpehen Crane

In the desert

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter — bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”

Battleborn – Clare Vaye Watkins

A good collection of short stories – three of which I really enjoyed very much: “The Past Perfect, The Past Continuous, The Simple Past” , “Man-O-War” and “The Digging”.

 

from:  http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2012/08/22/review-battleborn-claire-vaye-watkins/rCEVv1lq7qJqk5jyxdVaxO/story.html

‘Battleborn’ by Claire Vaye Watkins

By Mindy Farabee

| Globe CorrespondentAugust 22, 2012

Lily Glass

Claire Vaye Watkins.

‘Battleborn,” the absorbing debut story collection from Nevada native Claire Vaye Watkins, is mined from the vein of regional realism. In clean, sturdy prose, Watkins renders an American West of nuclear ash and dust and hot winds, ominous hills filled with coyotes and grizzlies and towns illuminated by “streetlights the color of antibacterial soap,” bathing her characters in a similarly stringent light. But its true setting is a Faulknerian desert of the heart, where the soil is cursed by its precious metals and one’s personal history can be just as toxic.

The essayistic opener “Cowboys, Ghosts” is the collection’s only piece to deal overtly with Watkins’s own back story. As a young man, her father, Paul, who died in 1990, fell in with Charles Manson, playing a significant role in staffing the Manson family, though he left before the murders. “[M]y mother . . . called my father ‘Charlie’s number one procurer of young girls,’ Watkins writes. “I couldn’t tell whether she was ashamed or proud of him.”

Many of the characters here suffer not so much from the need to get a moral fix on others as on themselves. Alongside the desolate road of “The Last Thing We Need,” a man happens upon a stranger’s bag of photographs that lead him back to the summer he first picked up a gun. In “The Past Perfect, The Past Continuous, The Simple Past,” a young Italian on holiday abandons his friend alone in the sandy nothingness outside Vegas and awaits the inevitable bad news of his fate at a brothel where he falls for a canny prostitute. The protagonist of “Rondine al Nido” enables the sexual assault of her best friend. In both “The Archivist” and “Graceland,” two different sets of sisters struggle their way into adulthood in the aftermath of a parent’s death.

Such unlucky pairs reappear throughout the book. In the longest and strongest story, “Diggings,” the year is 1849 and young Joshua Boyle is cajoled into following his older brother, Errol, overland from Ohio to the California Gold Rush, only to watch helplessly as Errol finds no gold but loses his sanity to its pursuit. “A promise unkept will take a man’s mind,” he realizes. “It does not matter whether the promise is made by a woman or a territory or a future foretold.”

Battleborn

Author:

Claire Vaye Watkins

Publisher:

Riverhead

Number of pages:

288 pp.

Book price:

$25.95

Catie, the narrator of “Graceland,” another of the book’s standouts, is struggling to contain a terrifying grief. Six months before the story begins, her mother commits suicide, and the pain has splintered her from her sister Gwen, who is newly married and several months pregnant. Gwen has been urging her to find comfort in the natural world, but Catie has lost her faith that the world is anything but dangerously inhospitable. “If you were the Stork and you were delivering little baby Dumbo and you had to maneuver his bundle between iron bars to lower him down to his mother,” she thinks, “wouldn’t you think twice about delivering him in the first place?”

When hope and redemption enter these stories, they do so gingerly, with the tenuousness that comes from contemplating the frail beauty of a sleeping child. Clear-eyed and nimble in parsing the lives of her Westerners, one of Watkins’s strengths is not dodging that the simple fact that love can be tragic, involving, as it does, humans so flawed, so often tender and yet incapable. “Sometimes a person wants a part of you that’s no good,” says the middle-aged father of “The Last Thing We Need.” “Sometimes love is a wound that opens and closes, opens and closes, all our lives.”

The Lacuna – Barbara Kingsolver

from: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-lacuna-by-barbara-kingsolver-1811038.html

The Lacuna, By Barbara Kingsolver

 

Half-truths fizz through this epic tale of a man caught up in world events when he just wants to be left alone

Reviewed by Nina Lakhani

 

Sunday 01 November 2009

Every few years, you read a book that makes everything else in life seem unimportant. The Lacuna is the first book in a long time that made me swap my bike for public transport, just so I could keep reading.

In her first novel for nine years, Barbara Kingsolver follows the epic journey of Harrison William Shepherd – a nobody who inadvertently becomes a somebody when all he wants is a safe place in which to be invisible. This is a tender, tragic, optimistic, sometimes depressing – but always compelling – story.

Shepherd is the son of a Mexican mother, who chases her dreams by chasing rich men, but always picks the one on the wrong side of the political divide. She leaves her son’s American father, an unemotional, indifferent government employee, and runs off with a Mexican industrialist in search of the glamour she believes is rightfully hers. But they end up on Isla Pixol, an island off the east coast of Mexico, of which she says, “on this stupid island so far from everything, you have to yell three times before even Jesus Christ can hear you”.

As she plots another escape with another man, her young son starts to record his world in a notebook, and words become his oxygen: without them he cannot breathe.

The boy moves between the United States and Mexico amid revolution and war, fascism and communism, as both countries search for new identities in the turbulent second quarter of the 20th century. His name is changed by whoever pays the bills, but the boy himself is shaped by the people he meets while trying to survive: the kitchen servant who shows him how to mix smooth pastry dough; the classmate in a Virginia military school who awakens his sexuality; and the celebrated artist Diego Rivera, who hires him to mix plaster for the huge murals he paints on the city’s most important walls.

When school is no longer an option, Shepherd finds work and a home as a cook in the Rivera household, where he starts a lifelong friendship with the artist’s wife, Frida Kahlo. With the arrival of the exiled Lev Trotsky and his wife into the house, Shepherd finds himself working as a translator for a man who is fighting for his life.

During these formative years of the 1930s, he discovers a passion for Aztec history that helps him understand the revolutionary beliefs held by his employers. Thousands of miles from his homeland, his children killed simply for being his children, Trotsky’s unshakeable resolve makes Shepherd wonder: “Is that what makes a man a revolutionary? The belief he’s entitled to joy rather than submission?”

Kingsolver’s ability to make words dance off each page reawakened my passion for Mexico City, transporting me from the overcrowded Tube back to the vivid sights and smells of this complex city.

This is the first time Kingsolver has interwoven real lives and events into her fiction, but Shepherd’s hopes belong with the love affairs, the work and politics of Kahlo, Rivera, and Trotsky, just as his fears find a natural home with America’s post-war hatred of anything “un-American”.

The story is told through Shepherd’s diaries and letters as well as actual newspaper cuttings that reflect the selectively reported half-truths and lies used to justify hatred towards “them”: first the fascists, then the Reds. And, of course, anyone can become one of “them”.

Which Shepherd does, as his former life is used as evidence of subversion and his bestselling Aztec novels become recast as anti-American activities. The power of words to devastate means he must once again continue his journey.

The Lacuna unfolds more slowly than many of Kingsolver’s previous books, but every word and twist has earned its place in this provocative and beautifully told story. The bestselling Poisonwood Bible won Kingsolver widespread critical acclaim; this book will only add to the praise.

from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/6835082/The-Lacuna-by-Barbara-Kingsolver-review.html

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver: review

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver has a sweetness of tone but not of plot, says Jane Shilling

By Jane Shilling

5:35AM GMT 20 Dec 2009

All novels are necessarily about writing, whatever else their professed themes, but Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, her first novel for nine years, is more than usually preoccupied with the act of recording experience in words. It is a story about a Mexican-American author, Harrison Shepherd, who worked as secretary to Leon Trotsky before becoming a writer of best-selling novels.

When his work catches the attention of the McCarthyite witch hunts, Shepherd tries to outwit his accusers by destroying his journals – a lifetime’s record of friendship and artistic endeavour. But he, too, has a loyal secretary, a pithy widow, Violet Brown. When Shepherd entrusts to her the task of burning his journals, she takes the notebooks home and hides them. Years later she transcribes them, intending them as his monument.

If this multilayered confection of words and wordsmiths sounds dauntingly self-referential, there is no need for alarm. Kingsolver’s narrative is a conventional account of a colourful life. Its only other excursion into stylistic tricksiness is the inclusion of a quantity of imaginary newspaper reports and book reviews, apparently intended to emphasise that journalists and politicians are no match for proper writers when it comes to using words as instruments of truth and beauty.

Shepherd is the neglected son of a feckless Mexican beauty and a chilly American government employee. Left to amuse himself, the lonely child attaches himself first to his mother’s cook and later to the household of the artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, with whom the Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky found refuge after his expulsion from the Soviet Union.

After Trotsky’s assassination, Shepherd moves to the United States, where his novels about the Aztec empire meet with success so wild that it threatens the modest retirement in which he prefers to live. When his early association with Trotsky returns to haunt him, Shepherd decides to return to the scenes of his childhood, to a place where he knows he can vanish.

Kingsolver is a vivid, engaging writer with an evocative turn of phrase. Her publisher boasts that her previous novel, The Poisonwood Bible, was ‘Britain’s favourite reading group book’, and no doubt The Lacuna will prove just as popular, thanks to a certain sweetness that makes the complicated Kahlo/Rivera ménage sound quite jolly and renders even the assassination of Trotsky picturesque. Only a critic would complain that a book isn’t ugly enough. Readers will love it.

The Lacuna

By Barbara Kingsolver

FABER, £18.99, 527pp

Moon On A Rainbow Shawl – Cottesloe Theatre, National Theatre, South Bank, London

from:  http://londonist.com/2012/03/theatre-review-moon-on-a-rainbow-shawl-national-theatre.php

Theatre Review: Moon On A Rainbow Shawl @ National Theatre

By BelindaL · March 18, 2012 at 10:00 am · 0 Comments · Arts and Events · Report an error ·

Martina Laird is yard battleaxe with a heart of gold, Sophia Adams – Photographer Jonathan Keenan

Moon on a Rainbow Shawl presents a troubled Trinidad in the years before independence. A post war era when hope and prosperity seemed as far off as the moon of the play.

Action revolves around six characters and their lives in the yard, the latter presented in exquisite detail by Olivier award winning designer Soutra Gilmour. There are rusty bins, specific tiny enamel pots which saltfish is peeled into and a real yard tap and gas stove. All this detail – we swear it even felt humid – contributes to the rawness of acting and direction. Short of time travelling, you’re never going to find a better face to face experience with Trinidad in 1947.

Reality is also important because it’s the main villain of the play in the guise of poverty which threatens to ruin the six lives. Carefree schoolgirl Esther has won a scholarship, but her future is threatened by father Charlie who squanders precious money on booze. Then Rosa, the lithe limbed and sweet natured young girl is in love with Ephraim, but he’s ashamed of his poor life as trolley driver and wants to leave her to seek his fortune in England. We watch closely, like neighbours of the yard ourselves –- some audience peer over the set walls like nosy neighbours –- as these individual dramas unfold.

Humour and the light hearted touch of the Caribbean is never far away though. Mavis (Jenny Jules), the yard hoe, stalks and sashays, luring men back like rats trapped in her lipstick jaws. Sophia (Martina Laird) is utterly convincing and funny as no nonsense ruler of the roost. Prince, with his gold tooth and terrible suits, is puffed up with pride at marrying Mavis and totally under her thumb. There’s also poetry and delight in every Trinidadian turn of phrase and expression – this accent has to be one of the world’s most lovely.

Bittersweet and absorbing, this yard and its tragically fated characters leave their indelible mark in your head way after leaving the Cottesloe. Surely the sign of a good night out at the theatre.

Moon on a Rainbow Shawl is at the Cottesloe Theatre, National Theatre until 9 June. Tickets from £5 (for 16-25 year olds)

from:  http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/68377/productions/moon-on-a-rainbow-shawl.html

Moon on a Rainbow Shawl

by Errol John

4 STARS
Daily Mail, Evening Standard, Financial Times Guardian, The Times, Time Out, Sunday Times

‘I was spellbound… one of the 20th century’s great neglected plays. Just go.’ The Times

‘A timeless tale of love and longing.’ Daily Telegraph

‘Don’t miss this… revivals of Moon on a Rainbow Shawl are rare and Errol John’s seminal Caribbean drama deserves to be recognised as a 20th century classic.’ Independent on Sunday

‘Errol John’s 1953 play, set in his native Trinidad, is heart-wrenchingly reclaimed.’ Sunday Times

‘This play seems as fresh as the day it was written.’ Observer

‘Justice has at last been done to an important postwar play… A vivid portrait of life in a Trinidadian backyard.’ Guardian

‘Absorbingly atmospheric… one of the most significant plays in the canon of black theatre.’ Daily Telegraph

‘All life is crammed into a tiny, Trinidadian back yard in Errol John’s bruising, brilliantly witty 1953 play.’ Time Out

‘An array of vivid performances.’ Evening Standard 

‘A Caribbean classic the drama pulses with colourful life but is also steeped in a suffocating atmosphere which brings to mind Tennessee Williams.’ Daily Express

For the teeming populace of Old Mack’s cacophonous yard in Port of Spain, Trinidad, it’s a cheek by jowl existence lived out on a sweltering public stage. Snatches of calypso compete with hymn tunes, drums and street cries as neighbours drink, brawl, pass judgment, make love, look out for each other and crave a better life. But Ephraim is no dreamer and nothing, not even the seductive Rosa, is going to stop him escaping his dead-end job for a fresh start in England.

Esther – if yer have yer head screw on right – No matter where yer go – One night – some time – Yer reach up – yer touch that moon. 

Set as returning troops from the Second World War fill the town with their raucous celebrations, Errol John’s Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, written in 1953, depicts a vibrant, cosmopolitan world that is as harsh as it is filled with colour and warmth.

Run allyer! Run boys! Run! Sometimes I wish I could do a little runnin’ myself.

Tickets: directed by Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach and Ermanno Olmi

Tickets (2005)

109 min  -  Comedy | Drama  -   2 December 2005 (UK)

from: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418239/

A train travels across Italy toward Rome. On board is a professor who daydreams a conversation with a love that never was, a family of Albanian refugees who switch trains and steal a ticket, three brash Scottish soccer fans en route to a match, and a complaining widow traveling to a memorial service for her late husband who’s accompanied by a community-service volunteer who’s assisting her. Interactions among these Europeans turn on class and nationalism, courtesy and rudeness, and opportunities for kindness. Written by <jhailey@hotmail.com>  

 

 

from: http://www.combustiblecelluloid.com/classic/tickets.shtml

Tickets (2005)

Rating: 3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Citizen Train

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Buy Tickets on DVD

Compilation films rarely work out as a cohesive whole; the best we can hope for is that one of the segments will stand on its own, as is the case with Wong Kar-wai’s The Hand (from Eros) and Martin Scorsese’s Life Lessons (from New York Stories). But the new film Tickets holds up well from beginning to end, mainly because the three directors attempted to work together in a seamless fashion, blending one sequence into the next. The entire film takes place on board a train; Italian director Ermanno Olmi (The Tree of Wooden Clogs) begins with a heartbreaking tale of a grandfatherly Italian professor (Carlo Delle Piane) mooning over the beautiful assistant (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) who took care of his needs during a business trip. Sitting in the first class dining car, he eventually turns his sights toward more immediate matters. Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us) takes the reins for another story about an ex-soldier (Filippo Trojano) who now fulfils the whims of a bossy general’s widow (Silvana De Santis). His dissatisfaction peaks when he meets a couple of teenage girls from his hometown. Finally, Ken Loach (My Name Is Joe, Sweet Sixteen) directs a trio of Glasgow football (soccer) fans (Martin Compston, William Ruane and Gary Maitland) headed for a big game, when they encounter a troubled Albanian family (also featured in the first episode). Each plays like a short story ought to play, but their moods and tones are all linked. Ironically, my favorite director of the three, Kiarostami, turns in the weakest link; it does not connect as well as the other two, and it has troublesome continuity issues concerning the girls spending too much time in the bathroom. These are minor quibbles, however, and the bulk of his segment — as well as the rest of the film — is worth cherishing.

DVD Details: Facets’ excellent 2006 DVD release comes with an above average making-of documentary, actually filmed on the set (without the usual clips-n-talking heads). There’s also a booklet with biographies and filmographies of the three directors.

Starring: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Blerta Cahani, Martin Compston, Sanije Dedja, Carlo Delle Piane, Silvana De Santis, Gary Maitland, William Ruane, Filippo Trojano
Written by: Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami, Paul Laverty
Directed by: Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach
MPAA Rating: Unrated
Language: English, Albanian, Italian, with English subtitles
Running Time: 115 minutes
Date: October 24, 2006

 

Road Show

from: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/road-show-menier-chocolate-factory-london-2308091.html

Road Show, Menier Chocolate Factory, London

(Rated 4/ 5 )

Reviewed by Paul Taylor

Thursday, 7 July 2011

In Assassins, Stephen Sondheim put an ironic spin on traditional American musical forms (“Hail to the Chief”, the cakewalk) to suggest that the crazies who take pot-shots at Presidents are the product of a philosophy that proclaims, “In the USA/ You can work your way/ To the head of the line”. In Road Show the composer similarly deploys the razzmattazz of vaudeville to highlight how, at the heart of the Land of Opportunity, lurks a venal, get-rich-quick opportunism.

Road Show is here receiving its European premiere in a slimmed-down, radically revised version, brilliantly staged by John Doyle. It follows the picaresque fortunes of two brothers, based on Addison and Wilson Mizner, respectively an architect responsible for the boom development of Palm Beach, Florida, and an attractive chancer whose scams dogged, corrupted and ruined his brother. At the start, their stern frock-coated father hails the new century and enjoins his sons to “make of it what you will but make me proud”. An early episode, though, in the Klondike gold rush establishes the pattern: Addison left hacking the rock, while Wilson blows their claim on a gambling saloon.

Michael Jibson, with his careworn baby face and subtle vocal artistry, superbly conveys Addison’s love-hate emotional dependency on his brother. They’re like a vaudeville double-act in which only David Bedella’s dazzling Wilson, all dark good looks and amoral pearly grin, gets to tap-dance in spangly shoes through multiple ruses (fight promotion, movie-writing etc), all presented like a spoof showbiz spectacular. The recurring visual motifs are wads of greenbacks flung into the air and a death-bed whirled around like a stage-within-a-stage. The latter eventually becomes the site for a touching gay love song, “The Best Thing That Ever Has Happened” between Addison and a handsome poor little rich kid (a spot-on Jon Robyns) who will eventually be horrified by Wilson’s cocaine-fuelled megalomania.

With the audience seated on either side of the stage, the sibling rivalry is wittily italicised. With the black-garbed tribunal-like chorus erupting into everything from Hawaiian dancers to pom-pom-waving real eastate fraud dupes, the production has terrific drive, bite and buoyancy. Road Show has had a long and troubled gestation (popping up in the US in various guises since 1999). Its European baptism in new, improved form at the Menier offers cause for ample festivity round the font.

To 17 September (020 7378 1713)

from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/8623702/Road-Show-Menier-Chocolate-Factory-review.html

Road Show, Menier Chocolate Factory, review

In Stephen Sondheim’s archly upbeat Road Show you get a palpable and poignant sense of how lives can pan out.

4

By Dominic Cavendish

5:26PM BST 07 Jul 2011

 

Comment

 

“Sooner or later, we’re bound to get it right!” So runs the wryly fatalistic, archly upbeat final line of Road Show, by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, receiving its European premiere at the coup-chasing Menier Chocolate Factory.

Boy, does that sentiment apply as much to this musical itself as it does to its protagonists, the rivalrous Mizner brothers, Addison (1872-1933) and Wilson (1876-1933), archetypal go-getters in America’s land of boundless opportunity.

Sondheim’s probable swansong has undergone a tortuous creative journey since it first trialled in New York in 1999 in a Theatre Workshop production steered by Sam Mendes. Thanks to the radical interventions of another British director, John Doyle – who signed up for a 2008 off-Broadway run – it looks as though finally, phew, and better late than never (Sondheim is now 81), all that slog has paid off: Road Show has come good.

Just how good is still up for debate, but, newly downsized to fit the Menier’s space and reconfigured so the audience sits on either side of the action, the show now has a focus and flair that commands admiration even if it doesn’t inspire complete devotion.

We expect Sondheim to be clever, and so he proves in the spry score, the droll, fiddle-fast patter of his lyrics, and his wider artistic scheme. The brothers’ fluctuating fortunes help trace the changing face of modern capitalism.

 

Leo Africanus – by Amin Maalouf

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Africanus_%28novel%29

Leo Africanus is a 1986 novel written in french by Amin Maalouf, depicting the life of a historical Renaissance-era traveler, Leo Africanus. Since very little is actually known about his life, the book fills in the historical episodes, placing Leo in the company of many of the key historical figures of his time, including three popes, (Leo X, Adrian VI, and Pope Clement VII), two Ottoman emperors (Selim I and Suleiman the Magnificent), with appearances by Boabdil (the last Moorish king of Granada), Askia Mohammad I of the Songhai Empire, Ferdinand of Spain, and Francis I of France, as well as the artist Raphael and other key political and cultural figures of the period.

Leo Africanus was Maalouf’s first novel. It is written in the form of a memoir.

Plot introduction

The book is divided into four sections, each organized year by year to describe a key period of Leo Africanus’s life, and each named after the city that played the major role in his life at the time: Granada, Fez, Cairo, and Rome. While filled with biographical hypotheses and historical unlikelihoods, the book offers a vivid description of the Renaissance world, with the decline of the traditional Muslim kingdoms and the hope inspired by the Ottoman Empire, as it grew to threaten Europe and restore Muslim unity.

The book is based on true life experiences which took Leo Africanus almost everywhere in the Islamic Mediterranean, from southern Morocco to Arabia, and across the Sahara.

Major themes

This novel explores confrontations between Islam and Christianity as well as the mutual influence that the two religions had on each other and on the people they governed.

Amin Maalouf

 

from: http://www.theroadtothehorizon.org/2008/12/recommended-leo-african.html

Recommended: Leo the African

 

In the need of a good reading book for this dark period of the year? Leo the African by Amin Maalouf is without any doubt one of the best books I have read since a long time.

Put onto a background of the 15th-16th century East-West or Christian-Muslim conflicts, the reader follows Hasan al-Wazzan, a merchant, traveller and writer on his travellers after being chased from Granada to Fez, in a caravan through North Africa and during his years in Cairo and Rome. From place to place, from woman to woman, he learns to drop and pick up his life and fortunes.

Amin Maalouf writes in a witty, eloquent style, becoming for a 15th century traveller. Through his words, one has no trouble fantasizing about the Souk in Fez or the river ports of Cairo. Here is the first page of his book.

I, Hasan the son of Muhammad the weigh-master, I, Jean-Leon de Medici, circumcised at the hand of a barber and baptized at the hand of a pope, I am now called the African, but I am not from Africa, nor from Europe, nor from Arabia. I am also called the Granadan, the Fassi, the Zayyati, but I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road, my country is the caravan, my life the most unexpected of voyages. My wrists have experienced in turn the caresses of silk, the abuses of wool, the gold of princes and the chain of slaves. My fingers have parted a thousand veils, my lips have made a thousand virgins blush, and my eyes have seen cities die and empires perish. From my mouth you will hear Arabic, Turkish, Castilian, Berber, Hebrew, Latin and vulgar Italian, because all tongues and all prayers belong to me. But I belong to none of them. I belong only to God and to the Earth, and it is to them that I will one day soon return. But you will remain after me, my son. And you will carry the memory of me with you. And you will read my books. And this scene will come back to you: your father, dressed in the Neapolitan style, aboard this galley which is conveying him towards the African coast, scribbling to himself, like a merchant working out his accounts at the end of a long journey.

Mitt Liv som Hund (My Life as a Dog)

from: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/my-life-as-a-dog/

Movie Info

In 1959 Sweden, young Ingemar (Anton Glanzelius) lives with his dying mother and his nasty older brother. He survives all of life’s knocks by comparing himself to those who are worse off–such as Laika, the little Russian space dog who was rocketed to his death and had nothing to say in the matter. Ingemar begins to identify with Laika more and more as his mother’s health deteriorates, at times dropping to all fours and baying at the moon. When his mother is advised to get some peace and quiet away from her children, Ingemar is sent to live with his loveable uncle and aunt. For the first time, the boy is surrounded by relatives and classmates who pose no threat and who genuinely like him. He even has a sexual awakening. When his mother dies, he no longer rationalizes his misfortunes by comparing himself to those less fortunate; from now on, he can conjure up pleasant memories of his summer away from home to sustain him through the hard times. My Life as a Dog (Mitt Liv Som Hund) is based on the autobiographical novel by Reidar Jonsson. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

PG-13, 1 hr. 45 min.

Drama, Art House & International, Comedy

Directed By: Lasse Hallström

Written By: Lasse Hallström, Reidar Jonsson, Per Berglund

On DVD: Jun 6, 2005

Skouras Pictures

from:http://worldfilm.about.com/library/weekly/aafpr040103.htm

DVD Review

My Life As a Dog by Marcy Dermansky  Guide Rating –   I loved “My Life As A Dog” way back when I was in college. It was a movie I wanted to see again. I could always count on it making me cry, but in a good way. Because I loved young Ingmar with his profound sensitivity, his love for his dog, his need to make his dying mother laugh, his two pretty female friends. I loved him for making illicit French toast in the girl’s class at school, for his desperate attempts to rouse his miserable mother with the purchase of a toaster. For the way he looked up at the stars for answers to the hard questions. “My Life As A Dog” felt like a perfect movie to me, a simple and moving story. And then Swedish filmmaker Lasse Hallström came to America. He started with the well-done, if a bit cute, “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” and from there went on to become the king of the sentimental movie. He made overbearing, artsy films like “Chocolat” and “The Cider House Rules,” where small communities were always crowded with eccentrics and the theme music swelled. Hallström turned everything that was unique about “My Life As a Dog” into a cliché and made vapid fare disguised as art movies. I feared that “My Life As A Dog” was sentimental tripe and I knew nothing when I was eighteen. Thank goodness, the film lives up to my memory. I can continue to embrace “My Life As A Dog.” In an interview on the Criterion DVD release, Hallström acknowledges that the film is his best work, the one he compares all his other films to. Young Ingmar is a smart and wonderful sad child who invokes famous tragedies to make his own life more livable. The theme music is just right. The kooks in the small Swedish town are interesting and entertaining without turning my stomach as they did in “Chocolat,” and yes, watching Ingmar cry for his dog can still make me teary-eyed. In addition to the interview with Halmström, the Criterion DVD features a 52-minute film by the director and essays by Kurt Vonnegut and Michael Atkinson. from: http://www.flicks.com/movie/review/M/My_Life_As_A_Dog_%281987%29.asp My Life As A Dog   Also known as: Mitt liv som Hund, Mit Liv som Hund 13 Reviews total. Release date: 1987 Run length: 101 mins. Categories: Art/Foreign , Drama , Comedy Summary: Twelve-year-old Ingemar (Anton Glanzlius) has a life far too complex for a kid his age. His beloved mother (Anki Liden), once soft and loving, is now an angry invalid. His older brother (Manfred Serner) torments him daily. But there must be worse things in life, and Ingemar does not hesitate to obsess over them: people meeting freak accidents, for one, and Laika, the doomed Soviet space dog, for another. There is also his own pet dog, whose fate, it turns out, is as uncertain as Ingemar’s. But when Ingemar is sent away for the summer to stay with his lighthearted Uncle Gunnar (Tomas von Bromssen) and Aunt Ulla (Kicki Rundgren), his world begins to open in a way he could never have imagined. In their little village, Ingemar meets a menage of eccentric, good-hearted people and their interactions with him give him the strength he’ll need when things at home get even worse. MY LIFE AS A DOG, the critically acclaimed film from director Lasse Hallstrom, is sensitive, tragic, and funny. It’s a unique, offbeat but realistic coming-of-age story with rich and engaging characters and some truly unforgettable scenes.

Mornings in Jenin, By Susan Abulhawa

from: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/mornings-in-jenin-by-susan-abulhawa-1917728.html

BLOOMSBURY, £11.99 Order for £10.89 (free p&p) from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030

At the heart of a bitter struggle

Reviewed by Anjali Joseph

Monday, 8 March 2010

It’s almost 62 years since the “nakba” or cataclysm that saw the invasion of Palestine or, to put it another way, the founding of the state of Israel.

That makes post-occupation Palestine almost as old as India or Pakistan: both countries that have produced copious quantities of fiction since achieving independence. If it surprises that Mornings in Jenin is the first mainstream novel in English to explore life in post-1948 Palestine, it’s worth remembering that the stability and distance literature often needs have been in short supply for Palestinians.

Susan Abulhawa’s novel, first published in the US in 2006 but since reworked, follows the Abulheja family, Yehya and Basima and their two sons, in Ein Hod, a village in Palestine. The pastoral opening crams into 40 pages a cross-faith friendship, a love story (both brothers fall for Dalia, who marries the elder son, Hasan), a death, the Zionist invasion of the village, and the theft of one of Hasan and Dalia’s sons, the infant Ismael, by an Israeli soldier. He gives the child to his wife, a Polish Holocaust survivor. Usefully for narrative purposes, the baby, renamed David, has a scar on his face “that would eventually lead him to his truth”.

From these beginnings, which promise a Middle Eastern Catherine Cookson story, a fine novel emerges. Most of Mornings in Jenin is about Amal, Hasan’s daughter, who grows up in the Palestinian refugee camp at Jenin, moves to boarding school in Jerusalem, and then goes to America on a scholarship. The everyday life of cramped conditions, poverty, restriction, and the fear of soldiers, guns, checkpoints and beatings, would have been enough to make the novel unforgettable, but Abulhawa’s writing also shines, at best assured and unsentimental. Young Amal and her best friend, Huda, shelter in a cellar during the Six Day War, clutching the corpse of a baby cousin, but it’s the loss of a doll and their secret playhouse in the bombing that hurts more. Friendship, adolescence, love: ordinary events, offset against extraordinary circumstances, make the story live.

 

 

from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/26/mornings-jenin-susan-abulhawa-review

Mornings in Jenin, by Susan Abulhawa – review

By Nicola Barr

1. Mornings in Jenin
2. by Susan Abulhawa
3. 

In the 1948 nakba, the “catastrophe” that was the invasion of Palestine leading to the founding of Israel, a baby boy is snatched from his Palestinian mother by an Israeli soldier and delivered to his wife, to be brought up hating Palestinians. Then he meets his twin brother. It’s a simple and artful conceit to humanise the cruelty of the Palestinian plight. And interestingly, Abulhawa chooses not to make it the centre of her novel. Rather, Mornings in Jenin is the story of Amal, the twin boys’ sister. Orphaned and injured in the 1967 war, she leaves the Jenin refugee camp in which she has grown up for a Jerusalem orphanage, and then faces her early adult years alone in Pennsylvania. She becomes Amy (“Amal without the hope”), and on her return to Lebanon falls in love, only to meet with further tragedy and heartbreak. This is a brave, sad book that tells the story of a nation and a people through tales of ordinary lives lived in extraordinary circumstances. Unsensational, at times even artless, it has a documentary feel that allows events to speak for themselves, and is all the more moving for it.

History of a Pleasure Seeker by Richard Mason

from:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/22/history-of-a-pleasure-seeker-review

History of a Pleasure Seeker by Richard Mason – review

Richard Mason is, with this fifth novel, repaying the faith his publishers placed in him nearly a decade ago

History of a Pleasure Seeker by Richard Mason – review

Richard Mason is, with this fifth novel, repaying the faith his publishers placed in him nearly a decade ago

• Alex Preston
• The Observer, Sunday 22 May 2011
• Article history

Richard Mason: ‘It was always clear that he knew how to write a beautiful sentence.’ Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Robert McCrum, in a 2002 article in this newspaper, used the vast advance paid to Richard Mason for his first two books – The Drowning People and Us – as a stick with which to chastise the profligate publishing industry. While The Drowning People – written when Mason was just 18 – has a dedicated following, subsequent novels failed to wow. His latest feels like a make-or-break moment. It was always clear that he knew how to write a beautiful sentence, but one feared that Mason’s literary legacy might be defined by the numbers on his advance cheque rather than the letters on his pages.

The History of a Pleasure Seeker by Richard Mason

1. 

Piet Barol, the titular pleasure seeker, is a priapic, ambitious young man come to seek his fortune in belle époqueL’Éducation sentimentale (to which this book owes no meagre debt), Piet is magnificently gifted, not only “extremely attractive to most women and to many men”, but also a fine pianist, draughtsman and lover. We first meet him interviewing for the role of tutor to the son of the wealthy hotelier, Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts. All is not well in his gilded household. Egbert, the son, is agoraphobic. The matriarch, Jacobina, hasn’t been touched by her husband in almost a decade. Into this highly strung atmosphere comes Piet, charged with the task of freeing Egbert from his paralysing fear of the outside world. We soon realise, however, that Egbert isn’t the only one in need of help. Piet sets about liberating the libidos of the repressed family through music – championing bawdy Bizet over abstract Bach – and oral sex. While the setting is Dutch, the influences are French – think Bel-Ami, Les Liaisons dangereuses and Gide’s L’immoraliste. Amsterdam. Unlike Frédéric Moreau in Flaubert’s

The Bad Sex awards are something more than just a very British chortle at willies and bums. In describing sex, authors must use language to convey experience which lies in a realm far removed from it: a test which many of the best fail. Sex is everywhere in History of a Pleasure Seeker, and it is both well described and very funny. Piet brings Jacobina to a climax that “unfurled and billowed, hurtled her into the air: only to catch her again…” Men and women alike pounce upon Piet, sending Mason towards ever wilder flourishes of extravagant prose. Piet’s downfall comes in the form of a semen-stained dress, a fitting metaphor for the career of this sexy rake.

A “miniature silver model of a man on a tightrope, balancing precariously” appears repeatedly, representing both Maarten’s risky business enterprises and the perils of Piet’s position within the household. It’s also a symbol of Mason’s writing. History of a Pleasure Seeker could have been disastrous; instead it’s an enthralling, perfectly paced romp that breathes new life into the picaresque genre. The story ends with Piet and his new bride in South Africa and the Great War on the horizon – “To Be Continued…” Piet Borel, like a highly cultivated, bisexual Flashman, looks set to become the star of a whole series of books. And as for Richard Mason, we can finally stop talking about that advance cheque.

 from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-1386290/Richard-Mason-HISTORY-OF-A-PLEASURE-SEEKER.html

HISTORY OF A PLEASURE SEEKER

BY RICHARD MASON (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £12.99) By Eithne Farry

Handsome and charismatic Piet Barol is determined to carve out a fortune for himself in the gilded world of Amsterdam’s glittering Belle Époque.

Abandoning the provinces and his dour father, and confidently aware of his own attractions, Barol finds a job as tutor in the home of one of Europe’s wealthiest hoteliers and sets about charming the moneyed but troubled Vermeulen-Sickerts.

Young Egbert is tormented by obsessive tendencies, his sister Louisa’s independent ambitions are thwarted by the stultifying luxury of her life, whilst their mother, Jacobina, is a sexually neglected wife, whose repressed desires entices her into a dangerous liaison with her irresistible employee.

Disaster and discovery are the inevitable outcome, but with envious luck, Barol turns catastrophe into a career opportunity, en route to Cape Town, and embarks on a fresh challenge in his role as sensual adventurer, (which will be explored by Mason in future volumes).

While rich in period detail and with requisite glittering trappings, it’s the sex that is most carefully observed in Mason’s lusty romp; a series of reckless encounters with Jacobina are described in breathless detail, while Barol’s dalliance with a business man has a more muscular quality. Not for the bashful.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-1386290/Richard-Mason-HISTORY-OF-A-PLEASURE-SEEKER.html#ixzz1TXSN8oZR