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Monday, March 18, 2024

Boulder by Eva Baltasar

This was short listed for the 2023 International Booker Prize--which is a list that I have not read in an intentional way, and that might have been a now rectified mistake. This is short, really more of a novella than a full on book, and it is very good. The author is a poet, so maybe the length seems long from that perspective! Boulder is a horny, chain-smoking cook working on a merchant ship off the coast of southern Chile when we meet her. She is rough and tumble and not ready to settle down until she comes to know and love Samsa, a woman who gives her her nickname and a reason to settle down. She abandons a life at sea for a small apartment in Reykjavik, where the couple move after Samsa accepts a job offer. While Samsa works 10 hours a day, Boulder struggles to acclimate to the routine of a daily life that conflicts with her consoling solitude. Then, after almost eight years together, and nearing 40, Samsa decides that she wants to have a child. What happens next will be all too familiar to any couple who have gone through this, especially if one of them is all in on parenthood and the other more tepid. Everyone who is not contemplating parenthood should read this.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

The Color Purple (2023)

This is a brutal story and changing it into a musical but remaining faithful to the story is a challenge that worked for me, but was not a home run. Music and The Color Purple have always had a close relationship, even before Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1982 novel became a hit Broadway musical in 2005. A blues singer is one of its main characters, a juke joint a key setting. Then there was the musicality of the novel’s literary style; Walker was already a published poet by the time she had written her first novel. The hit 1985 Steven Spielberg adaptation of her novel (the only version I am familiar with), was co-produced and scored by the legendary Quincy Jones, introduced the sensuous ragtime anthem “Miss Celie’s Blues,” which has been covered endlessly since. This musical expands on this idea, working its palette of blues, gospel, and jazz surprisingly seamlessly into a story that, at least on its surface, might initially seem too brutal for big, jubilant numbers--and that for me is the sticking point. I loved the music and the choreographed scenes--much more than I would have imagined--but it was hard to marry that feeling with the underlying story of men's brutality against women. On top of that, it is not a particularly intimate or introspective musical; its numbers are big, very much meant to be sung to a big audience, maybe even to have the audience sing them back to the stage or the screen. The story of Celie's brutalized life, and her eventual escapr is all too real, still happening to women across the country and around the world, and when all is said and done, not entertaining for me.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

North Woods by Daniel Mason

Here is the thing that I missed about this book before I read it--the author wrote a book 20 years ago, The Piano Tuner, a historical novel set in Burma, that was breathtaking for the first 3/4 of the book. The ending was disappointing, but there was so much going on in the book, the author showed so much promise. After seeing Amy Bloom talk about the act of writing and describing how difficult it is for her to end a book and how sick of the whole thing she is by the end, I forgive a weak ending pretty quickly, and yet I forgot all about this promising writer. Fast forward twenty years and he has a book the New York Times thought was one of the 5 best works of fiction published in 2023. This book has an historical eye as well. It is set in a New England cabin where we follow the place over the people and animals that inhabit it. The location is probably Maine, which at the beginning of this book was part of Massachusetts; the cabin that two escapees from a Puritan colony and goes forward from there. The non-human characters are 100% early New England, from catamounts to the apple trees, and the people demonstrate that it is in fact true that we do not heed the lessons of history, and it therefore inevitably repeats itself.

Friday, March 15, 2024

American Fiction (2023)

What I want to say first an foremost is that this movie is way way better than the synopsis of it would lead you to believe. I practically had to twist my spouse's arm to get him to agree to watch it, and we were both very pleasantly surprised that we very much enjoyed us--it makes you think, it is multi-layered, and it was well acted and well written--three of the categories it is nominated for an Academy Award in. Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is an author and college professor. He is published but not famous, struggling to sell his latest work to a publisher. Prompted by his uphill climb to publish, instigated by the media attention granted to Sintara Golden, a Black author with a middle-class upbringing whose novel centers on inner city Black women, Monk decides to build a fantasy. He writes a joke novel, My Pafology (later indignantly renamed to Fuck) under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, a faceless persona of a wanted fugitive. Thrown together without care for craft or attention to detail, and rife with Black stereotypes, Monk intends his book as more of a cathartic release of frustration and a middle finger to the publishing world. The manuscript, however, is met with exuberant attention by a publishing house’s insatiable desire to elevate this “genius" and an overzealous movie producer's desire to win acclaim. The more he gets irritable and obstreperous, which is kind of his baseline anyway, the more popular he is, up until he blows it up altogether.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

The Barbizon by Paulina Bren

This is a story of how women were able to leave home in the 20th century and not create an out and out scandal. The hotel was built during the roaring 20s and lingering until 2007, when it was inevitably converted into multimillion-dollar condos, and it was a legend in its heyday. As the most elite of New York’s women-only hotels, it provided a tony Upper East Side address and safe harbor for generations of young women newly arrived with dreams to fulfil. It was a place to call a home away from home for Grace Kelly, Liza Minnelli, Joan Didion – to name a varied few, along with Sylvia Plath, who later spilled its secrets in The Bell Jar. This is the first real history of the place, and it’s a treat, elegantly spinning a forgotten story of female liberation, ambition and self-invention. The fate of those who didn’t make it adds a note of melancholy complexity. One of the things that I did not know before I read this is that women came as teenagers often, and part of the allure of the hotel was not just that it was a safe place for unmarried white collar working women to stay but that it was also possible to parlay the connections that it provided into an upscale marriage if that is what was desired. Most women left within a few years, and on the arms of men who they would not have met otherwise. Grace Kelly was an example but she was not the exception. Another was that Mademoiselle created guest editorships that brought talented literary women to the Barbizon--it was not just a place to meet the right man, but also a place to launch a career.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Robot Dreams (2023)

I read a review that called this a sweetly sorrowful buddy movie, and I would agree. It is a dog and a robot, and sadly the dog does not have a person, and in fact there are no people in this slightly shabby version of New York City, so the robot becomes dog’s best friend. It is also a visual movie, one without dialog, so the action speaks for itself and for me at least that added to the sweetness of it. The audience certainly could be kids with their parents—it is not snarky at all, and at least in our house, there was rapt attention for the action contained within and more than a little of our own dialog added.
The unnamed protagonist Dog, is living a solitary life in the East Village, following a fixed and not terribly exciting routine. Late one night he is inspired by an infomercial to order a build-your-own-robot kit, and the results are life changing. From the moment of assembly, the Robot is the most expressive and attentive companion, forever fixated on his canine owner with a metallic grin and permanently wide-open eyes. It goes suddenly and somewhat predictably wrong and the rest of the story is about how each of them copes.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Of Salt And Women by Gabriela Garcia

This book takes the reader through five generations and four countries, with an up front diagrams of two matrilineal family trees; these family trees feature the first names of women. Abusive men damaged these trees and deadened their branches, but matriarchs are the root of these stories, if not the only players. It all starts back to 1866 in Camagüey, Cuba, where María Isabel becomes the first woman in her cane-cutting line to graduate to rolling cigars and, soon thereafter, to read. Subjected to harassment, lesser wages and unwanted advances in a shadowy cigar factory, she becomes enraptured by books read aloud to the workers by a lector who falls in love with her. Their union, forged during a Cuban rebellion against Spanish colonial rule and slavery, ends with blood that births a new future. Liberation is not linear — not for countries nor for women. Though María Isabel wanted to endure, not all freedoms are made possible by resilience. This is the author's first book, and it is a promising start.

Monday, March 11, 2024

Zone of Interest (2023)

This is a harrowing movie. My spouse, who was reluctantly dragged to watch this with me in a theater, likened this to Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. She described Adolph Eichmann as an ordinary, rather bland bureaucrat, who, in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’ but ‘terrifyingly normal’ . She contends that he acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. This seems to fit this movie like a glove. We watch the Rudolf Hoss family go about their lives literally next door to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Their back fence is the wall around the camp, and throughout the movie, the sounds of those who meet their death there provide the backdrop against which they live. And live they do—they go to school, horseback ride, entertain guests—all with the help of what are essentially enslaved Jews who will then be killed—but not only do they thrive in this environment, they feel lucky to have elevated themselves in such a way. It is thoroughly disgusting and terrifyingly obvious that this is what white supremacy looks like, both then and now.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Blackouts by Justin Torres

I liked but did not love this book--what is great about it is the use of multiple forms of media to emphasize specific points about gay culture, censorship, and the acts of suppression that lead to misunderstanding and forgetting. There is, as one review I read pointed out, a little bit of The Kiss of the Spiderwoman about it, in the most appealing sense of storytelling that book evokes. The framework of the story is this: a nameless young man and his elderly, dying companion, Juan Gay, recount memories and stories of other people as if they were movies. Our narrator and Juan met years ago in an asylum; now the narrator is Juan’s companion through his last days in a ramshackle building called The Palace, somewhere in a western desert. The narrator spins tales of his family and his experiences as a hustler, a partner in older men’s sexual fantasies. Juan tells of his relationship with a lesbian couple, Zhenya and Jan Gay. He was a lost eight-year-old boy when Zhenya found him and used him as the model for drawings for the children’s books she and her partner created. The couple accompanied Juan on the long journey from Puerto Rico where he would live with relatives. They were so important to him that he took their name. Throughout the book, it is impossible to delineate between fact and fiction, but suffice it to say that while the book begins with a blackout following a loss of consciousness, the real backing out is every and all attempts to conceal and erase gay stories and gay culture. This won the National Book Award in 2023, do the cutting edge style was rewarded with recognition.

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Napoleon (2023)

I am going to stand out here, because I thought this was a great epic film that I really enjoyed for both it’s sumptuous production design and costumes, and how it, however briefly, covers the major events of Napoleon’s life. Bonaparte was born on the island of Corsica in 1769—he was acutely aware of his lowly birth, and from the beginning sought to erase that part of his past. He championed the French Revolution in 1789 and rising from the military ranks, he came to rule France from 1799 to 1804, then as a self-anointed emperor from 1804-1814. He was a battle-hungry brilliant military strategist who invaded and then ruled all of Europe. He made the same mistake that others before and since have made, which is that invading and conquering Russia, especially Russia in winter, is just not a winning strategy. He paid dearly for that mistake, and the film takes us all the way to his end. The battlefield is beautifully rendered, but the more intimate side of Napoleon’s life is light on details and long on judgement. I would recommend watching the 1954 film Désirée (which stars Marlon Brando as Napoleon) for a more sympathetic view. And it is perhaps easier to follow this if you have a bit of background about Napoleon. I recently read—and loved—War and Peace, which delineates the Russian side of the story, as an example. When all is said and done, Napoleon was a megastar in French history and deserves the Ridley Scott treatment.