Desert song

Film: The Band’s Visit by Eran Kolirin
Rating: 9/10 … Egyptian treasure

This is the most amazing film about loneliness. Without much explanation we follow a morose group of policemen from Alexandria as they are stood up by their driver in a remote airport in Israel and attempt to make their way to an even more remote town to play a concert. Tewfiq, the leader, is a sad little man whose personal history emerges over the course of the film. All the others are deferential and obedient except Khaled, the jazz loving trumpet player. Under the prompting of sexually charged and equally lonely waitress Dina, the locals show an awkward hospitality until the band can be put back on track. That’s all folks!

This little party of Israeli and Palestinian actors have produced a film I hardly expect to be bettered in 2008. The situation, laughs and all, is totally true to life and the ending much more believable than the one we hope for.

There wasn’t a dry seat in the house

Book: Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
Rating: 4/10 … more sentimental than chick lit

This book should win Auster new admirers wrote the Sunday Telegraph on the jacket of my paperback copy. Faint praise indeed from the anonymous author, but more than this travesty deserves. I discovered Auster when his New York Trilogy was first published about twenty years ago and delighted in a new and interesting voice in world literature. Since then, sadly, the quality of his works has been very mixed, with none scaling the heady summits of The City of Glass. The recent Travels in the Scriptorium was a decent if imperfect effort. Not so this folly.

This one is told in the first person by Nathan Glass, a retired insurance salesman. The quality of the writing is about what I’d expect from an insurance salesman. Auster often packs his books with stories and this one is no exception. However, these tales are implausible, sentimental twaddle for the most part. The characters are among the cheesiest I’ve met. I shouldn’t have persevered to the end but I felt I owed it to Auster for his better work. Who knows? Maybe it was a big joke and the punchline would be revealed on the last page. Wrooong!! Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, the last page arrived:

It was eight o’clock when I stepped out onto the street, eight o’clock on the morning of September 11, 2001 – just forty six minutes before the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre.

There wasn’t a dry seat in the house! Sorry Paul, I’ve been loyal and I’ve been patient, but when a publisher is screaming for the next book, don’t let him have it unless it’s really ready.

A place to die

Film: The Savages by Tamara Jenkins
Rating: 8/10

What do you do when a parent retreats into the condition of a child, becomes helpless, needs nappies. You find a crèche for adults, a retirement home, with lots of facilities they can no longer avail of because, actually, they’re bedridden, but it makes you feel better.

That’s the message in this sensitive examination of two siblings called to sort out the final months of their dad’s life. The director has a little fun at the expense of retirement villages, but the basic message is a serious one: looking after mum/dad is not as rewarding as looking after junior; there’s too much history there and we’re busy managing our own hectic lives. This dad was not a very loving one but his dutiful offspring conduct his final days with affection and dignity; I’m not sure I can do it so well. The film is a beautifully observed portrait more in the European tradition of nuance substituting for plot. Its genuine intimacy reminded me of The Squid and the Whale. No doubt it was the academic context.

Hear all about it

Book: Herzog by Saul Bellow
Rating: 8/10

Never throw out your unread books. You’ll come back to them! I remember an unsuccessful attempt on this book about twenty five years ago, but a recent recommendation put it back in my mind. I completed it last September and found it a truly excellent read. Perhaps it’s my age and I was ready for it. The author of this autobiographical fiction was three years younger than me when he wrote it and picked up the Nobel Prize for Literature for his efforts.

A very modern novel, with little or no plot, the narrative takes place in the mind of Herzog, who I understand is a fairly fair depiction of Bellow and a rather pathetic fellow really. I decided I had nothing to say about this complicated and interesting novel until I had the good fortune to hear, this week, a 90-minute podcast by Robert Adams concerning the book. This is such a really fine testament to the book that I decided I’d write it up just to link to it.

Read the book and, only then, listen to the lecture. Thank heavens for really fine writers.

Grotesque canvas

Book: Clara et la Pénombre (The Art of Murder) by José Carlos Samoza
Translated from: Spanish (Cuba)
Rating: 4/10

I’ve enjoyed a number of Samoza’s works and threw myself enthusiastically into this one. In a short time I began to be quite horrified by the theme but a certain morbid curiosity kept me struggling onward and the more time I invested, the harder it was to pull away from what is finally, a sinister and ugly story. It describes a world where art has descended to a new low. The canvases are now people who, horror of horrors, wish to be enslaved in this exploitative profession for which they are highly paid. The unsuccessful become household furnishings, lamps, tables, ash-trays, worthless trinkets. You’ve seen elaborate tables with marble nudes supporting them. Somoza imagined them real and his terrific imagination was able to conceive that they’d covet and enjoy their work.

As always, I admire the sheer scope of his imagination, but he’s begun to strike me, deep down, as a dirty old man. As in much art, his models pass much of their time naked and he revels in describing them and humiliating them. I’m appalled that I made it to the end. The plot involves the hunt for a vicious killer who is destroying valuable works (which happen to be human, but it is their value that provokes the hunt). Lucas Bosch (named perhaps for Hieronymus Bosch, a painter of grotesque works which look cheerful beside the depraved oeuvre described in this book) eventually saves model Clara who depicts a living version of Rembrandt’s Susanna (shown right).