Amélie Nothomb - Fear and Trembling

This is definitely my favourite Nothomb yet - wicked sharp and very funny ("I was right in the middle of a mental defenestration when a new drama erupted"...hah! Although the sentence probably needs to be read in context...), and the lightness of her touch is as delightful as in Loving Sabotage and The Character of Rain, if not more so.

It seems that most if not all of Nothomb's books are quasi-autobiographical, and this one features 'Amelie-san' as an adult protagonist, completing a 12-month contract with a Japanese corporation, Yumimoto (a made-up name, she drily assures us) during which she commits various transgressions (including that of being too capable in her role), falls in love with her beautiful immediate superior (the dynamic there is just too fascinatingly perverse to be summarised), and spirals ever more bizarrely lower in the unforgiving employment foodchain, philosophically dealing with daily humiliation and the mysteries of the Japanese workplace culture. I can't quite pin down what it is that I particularly like about Fear and Trembling as compared to the other two, but I think that it has a lot to do with that lightness - it's so deftly written (right up to a perfectly judged ending), so wry and so wide-eyed, its worldview so subtly distorted, and the endless misfortunes that befall Amelie met with such unlikely-yet-completely-plausible equanimity on her part, that one can't help but fall under its spell.

Guy Gavriel Kay - A Song For Arbonne

Another that I've read several times before, and returned to for the same reason as Ophiuchi. Always a surprisingly engaging read - fantasy which convincingly balances the epic and the personal, and which I enjoy even though it's concerned with the fate of nations rather than of worlds.

John Varley - The Ophiuchi Hotline

Pulled this off my shelf to help while away the night-time hours, too late to do anything more 'productive' but still too early to sleep, my sleeping patterns being what they current are (ie, a wreck). The novel has some interesting ideas and pulls together neatly, but still feels somehow slight (which may be unfair to Varley, given that the book does seem very economical in its language and structure, but that's how I respond to it nonetheless), which is probably why it's never left much of an impression on previous readings - nor on this one, though it was slightly better than I recalled it as being. Then again, I've never really been one for sci-fi.

Amélie Nothomb - The Character of Rain

...aka "Métaphysique des Tubes" - and not, as it turns out, Nothomb's latest after all. Flew through it, as I did through Loving Sabotage - like that other, it's (a) extremely fluent and a pleasure to read; (b) short; and (c) somehow not entirely satisfying. Related by another quasi-omniscient child narrator, I think that the best way for me to give a flavour of the book is by giving a chronology of its events (going against all university-instilled instincts by scattering unattributed direct quotations willy-nilly):

God is born. She looks like a normal baby, and develops physically like one, but is both immobile and mute - completely inert, affectless and unresponsive to the world. Ingestion, digestion and excretion take place vegetatively, without her being aware of them. For these reasons, she is referred to as 'the Tube' at this stage in her development. At some time around the age of two, an inscrutable mental event occurs and God begins screaming in rage. The rage is born of being shaken from her state of perfect nullity, and realising that objects (toys) are independent of her, that she is not able to exercise her divine prerogative to name all things in the universe due to being incapable of forming coherent speech, and so on.

After some six months of being constantly enraged, God tastes white chocolate. Through the experience of pleasure caused by this, she is born as an individual [here, the narrative voice switches from third to first person], gains the capacity for memory, and ceases to be enraged. She proceeds to dole out spoken words over time for the gratification of her family, seeking the most appropriate words for her first utterances (she already seemingly has a fully-formed comprehension of language, both Japanese and French, in her mind). Much philosophical musing about the nature of language follows. There is a near-drowning in the sea, but she is rescued by a friend of her brother's and reveals some of her facility with language.

In the meantime, more is revealed about her family and nannies, and we learn that in Japan (where these events take place), children are treated as gods until the age of three. Carp appear in the story, she is repulsed by them and their tube-like nature, and, through a parental misunderstanding, is given three as pets and obliged to feed them. Shortly after turning three, overwhelmed by carp-related existential revulsion, she attempts suicide (unsuccessfully).

After that, nothing more happened.

So much for the story. There's a fair amount of philosophical filigree, but it's too vague to be taken seriously (though possibly I just haven't taken the time to really think it through), but the other key thing about The Character of Rain is the writing itself, which has an oblique economy and a pleasing hint of the poetic that unavoidably recalls Jeanette Winterson, although it's somehow both wispier and more matter-of-fact than the prose of that latter. I really don't know why I don't love these books as much as I feel I should - perhaps the swiftness with which I read them doesn't allow them to really sink in or something, or maybe I'm just not in the right headspace at present (I wouldn't be surprised if all the grappling with Derrida had temporarily taken away my ability to appreciate literature)...

Full Metal Jacket

Well, I'm no kind of film buff, so maybe that's why I'm not entirely sold on the idea of Kubrick as a great director. À propos, I haven't seen all his films, but of those that I have seen, Strangelove was fantastic, A Clockwork Orange was unpleasant but undeniably memorable (and also, I think, quite good, though I'm in no hurry to watch it again), but 2001 put me to sleep (though I admittedly didn't watch it - or, rather, attempt to watch it - in the most conducive of states) and I found The Shining, which I'd have expected to like, rather on the turgid side. In any case, the net result of all this is that I didn't go into Full Metal Jacket particularly expecting to be blown away, and in the event it did leave me fairly underwhelmed.

It's certainly very well made, and funny in places, but I didn't find much else to like about it. The first 'act', following the training of the recruits, is well-acted and interesting but doesn't seem to have any point (though its unsettling ending, in particular, would in a different film have lent itself to a fairly programmatic reading). And the second act, in Vietnam itself, is neat but also strikes me as pointless, right up to the anti-climactic ending (could it be that this is Kubrick's point? Maybe, but I kind of doubt it). I guess that I just don't respond to Kubrick's work - sometimes, I can admire it, but I'm not wired in a way to 'feel' it, and I don't watch films in a way which allows me to enjoy them unless I feel them. So that's that for Stanley Kubrick and I, at least for now.

Interjection 4: Lengths

Just as a side note, have been amused by the way in which the average length of these entries seems to be increasing of late, just as the essay-writing end of semester looms. As means of procrastination go, tis a minor one - but it all adds up, I guess...

Erotic Ghost Story

Pretty weird. Had I known in advance that 'erotic' in this instance translated to 'unimaginative soft porn', I probably wouldn't have bothered taping this; blissfully ignorant, though, that's exactly what I did, duly to be puzzled when I sat down to watch it later. There just doesn't seem to be any point to this film, and it bogs seriously down near the middle when the vixen-sisters take it in turns to (fairly unerotically, but quite explicitly and at great length) shag the scholar (though I was proud of my powers of attention when, looking around online afterwards trying to work out what on earth I'd just watched, I discovered that what I'd thought was a rather abrupt conclusion to one of the torrid encounters was in fact the result of sbs having deemed the remainder of the scene to be too explicit and summarily cut it before showing the film...which didn't prevent Erotic Ghost Story from being easily the most pornographic thing I've ever seen on television). The pointless sex and random nudity didn't bother me in themselves, of course, but there was just no pay-off whatsoever (though the silly horror elements were vaguely enjoyable) - I don't think that there was anything to 'get' about this one except for the mindless titillation, though there's probably the makings of a cult film there.

The Man Who Cried

Back when it was first released, I happened to pick up a promotional postcard for this film and stuck it on the back of my bedroom door for reasons which presently escape me but no doubt had something to do with the moody, black and white (tinged slightly brown to give the sense of an old photo) image of Christina Ricci which was its front. That was years ago but, due to the mounting of the card in my living space (amidst all the other cultural detritus littering my walls and shelves), the film has vaguely remained somewhere in my consciousness without my ever learning anything about it beyond the rest of its major cast (Johnny Depp, Cate Blanchett, John Turturro).

Anyhow, turns out to be an arthouse historical/personal-voyage narrative, following a displaced Russian Jew (Ricci) who is uprooted aged five or sixish (circa 1927 or so, from memory), voyages with scores of others (but without anyone she knows) to England, where she is renamed 'Suzie' on arrival and forced to forsake her native Yiddish for English, and ends up in Paris as a singer just before the shadow of war falls over the city, with only a coin and a photo of her father, gone to America long ago, by which to remember her family.

Enter broody resentful outsider (gypsy) Depp, glamorous, extroverted, insecure fellow emigre Blanchett, and arrogant but successful Italian opera singer Turturro...but the main event is Suzie's search for her origins, her place and her self. Thinking about it now, it's actually quite a brave move - and, I think, both truthful and apt in light of the film's logic - to portray a character engaged in such a search as so taciturn, and to give her so little dialogue.

I don't know, though. The Man Who Cried held my interest throughout and I found it quite satisfying, but it didn't really affect me (except for the pathos inherent in the figure of a lonely, bewildered, unhappy child), and overall, despite some nice images and imagery (the theme of music as a connecting thread always resonates, and the dual-character water/rebirth motif was well played), I didn't feel that it all quite came together.

Stephen King (as Richard Bachman) - The Running Man

I re-read this novella (and often another in the same volume, The Long Walk) from time to time; some of the original impact of the grimness and grime has been lost through these repeated readings but it's still a fast-paced, punchy way to kill a couple of hours.

Amélie Nothomb - Loving Sabotage

Amélie Nothomb came to my attention when I read something about her latest, Métaphysique des tubes (the title under which it was published in English translation, which was quite different, I think, escapes me just now)...if memory serves, the novel's narrated by a baby/very young child, and it sounded cute and whimsical and very French (though Nothomb's actually Belgian). I never got round to reading that one, but happened across Loving Sabotage the other day in Rowden White and thought it worth a try.

This one is related by the seven year old daughter of a diplomat, growing up in a diplomatic community in Peking in the seventies. It's delightfully solipsistic in the way she assumes herself to be the centre of the world:

Each morning, a slave arrived to do my hair.

She didn't know she was my slave. She thought she was Chinese. In truth, however, she had no nationality, since she was my slave.

Before Peking, I lived in Japan, where the best slaves were found. The quality of slaves in China left much to be desired.

imbued with a correspondingly distinctive perspective:

From the window of my new bedroom, China is hilariously ugly. I give the sky a condescending glance. I bounce up and down on the bed.

and wonderfully evokes the sort of pure imaginative world that one imagines only a child can inhabit:

A horse is that unique place where it is possible to lose all anchorage, all thought, all consciousness, all idea of tomorrow, where one is nothing more than an upward leap and a headlong charge.

A horse is access to the infinite, and riding is that moment of unity with the Mongols, the Tartars, the Saracens, the Sioux, and other mounted comrades who have lived to ride, to be.

Riding is the spirit that leaps from four hooves, and I know that my bicycle has four hooves and that it leaps and that it is a horse.

Describing one of Kate Atkinson's books, a reviewer once referred to the 'sprightly omniscience' with which it leapt from past to present and back again, and something similar is at play in Loving Sabotage - the narrator writes with the barbed innocence of childhood, but there is a subtly mediating 'grown-up' consciousness also at play, and the result (obviously) is glittering writing which just cries out to be quoted and re-cited. Nothomb's also particularly fond of a stylistic device which I tend to overuse myself (when writing elsewhere than here) - the emphatic closing single-sentence paragraph (a small sample, taken all out of context: "The unspeakable infamy of it all"; "From that moment on, I knew that the world of literature was rotten"; "For the second time I blessed Chinese Communism", and so on).

There are two major story-threads. First, the battles between the diplomats' children, in which the 'Allies' wage ongoing war on the East Germans ("[t]he average age of the combatants was approximately ten"), as regulated and absurd as 'adult warfare', replete with rules, customs, cunning strategies, shifts in power and the 'Secret Weapon', a vat filled by urine and Indian ink into which captured East Germans are lowered for purposes of torture. And second, the impossibly self-sufficient, unapproachable Elena, who, all of six years old, "lived her life as if it were perfectly sufficient to be the most beautiful little girl in the world, and to have such long hair", and with whom the narrator becomes absurdly infatuated, going to great lengths to win Elena's love, and finally, after a protracted campaign, committing a monumental act of self-sabotage. (Adults feature in all this only as more or less irrelevant phantom figures in "an advanced state of degeneration", to be vaguely pitied and patronised.) It's all rather acerbic, but it's so wide-eyed and somehow 'pure' that it also completely convinces.

I didn't actually like this book quite as much as the slightly breathless words above might suggest, but I do think that it's very, very good. Would be v. interested to read more of Nothomb's books.

Ghost World

Hey, wow - Ghost World is pretty near perfect. Funny and bittersweet and wistful and barbed, the film made me smile nearly the whole way through, but it also touched me, and I sighed at its ending. It's carried off with the lightest of touches, all vibrant colours and well-lit spaces, off-the-wall music and too-cool decor, caustic one-liners and sudden whimsy, but it's unsparingly clear-sighted and absolutely note-perfect in its evocation of that something which may as well be everything - the experience of subtle loneliness and quiet sadness which comes with being fundamentally at odds with the world, and more than that, the way we attempt to get by regardless. Tis a bit of a fantasy, and an open-ended, impossible-to-pin-down one at that, but it rings true, and somehow, at least tonight, this film really spoke to me. Wrestle though I may with these words, I can't express how wonderful Ghost World is - I simply adore it.

Cold Mountain

Hired this accidentally - video store about to close, not thinking straight, thought it was The Missing - but wasn't too disappointed when I realised my error. Didn't really know anything about this one, but the presence of Jude Law, Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellweger promised something at least watchable; turned out to be an old-fashioned romantic epic (set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, no less!), and rather a good one, though it didn't have quite the sweep and emotional punch to which it aspired (that said, it went pretty darn near).

Normally, these sorts of films live or die by their success on two scores - the performance of the leads, and the quality of the cinematography...Cold Mountain gets full points for that latter (it's absolutely sumptuous-looking), but Kidman and Law were, while convincing, not particularly scintillating (which didn't stop me from getting that emotional reflex-response shiver when the two were reunited in the snow - but of course I'm an easy mark for that kind of thing, studied/actual cynicism notwithstanding). Zellweger's performance, though, was a tonic and a treat, and there was a whole cavalcade of other familiar faces: Donald Sutherland; Jack White (who I thought looked familiar but couldn't place); Natalie Portman (who I thought was pretty but completely didn't recognise); and assorted other familiar character actors. More generally, the film as whole is both evocative and believable - and quite historical-feeling, as it ought to. Plus, liked the Appalachian-folk soundtrack (complete with a version of "Wayfaring Stranger") and now intend to check out some Alison Krauss.

Al Spicer - Rock: 100 Essential CDs: The Rough Guide

For the most part, this book is made up of really obvious, canonical selections (Pet Sounds, Psychocandy, Daydream Nation, Stone Roses, Forever Changes, London Calling, Remain in Light, Nevermind, etc, etc), not all of which I necessarily agree with, but I certainly can't dispute their widely-accepted status as classics - I reckon that a solid 70-odd of the 100 discs listed fall into that category. So, while it's fun to read about them, the limitations of space imposed by this pocket-sized book ensure that the text doesn't have much new to tell me.

Still, that same limitation of space seems to have inspired the compiler to restrict his selections to one album per artist, and there are some interesting ones there - in some cases, it's just a matter of picking one out of several recognised classics (Ziggy Stardust for Bowie, Revolver for the Beatles, Murmur for R.E.M. ...), but others selected from notable artists' back catalogues are pretty eccentric, most notably from my perspective the inclusion of the Cure's Mixed Up (which I admittedly haven't listened to, but I can't begin to fathom how it could've been selected over all of the proper Cure albums - there's no way that a record whose apparent high point is a Paul Oakenfold remix can be better than Disintegration, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, Pornography or any number of others) and the substitution of The Velvet Underground for the banana album. Also interested to see Hatful of Hollow get up for the Smiths - that's one a bit out of the box.

Also, the book claims that "Just" is 'a harrowing story of home invasion and rape on the fifteenth floor' - not a meaning I've ever gotten out of the song! And I was amused by the number of album descriptions in which the Velvet Underground were checked (conservatively, half a dozen, I'd say) - I guess that the number of ways in which a rock song can be described really is quite limited.

So, in other words, a bit of fluff, but an enjoyable one.

Intolerable Cruelty

A quality movie. Slick and sleek and often very funny (gotta love the way Wheezy Joe goes out); Clooney and Zeta Jones perfect (as is my wont these days, I liked the combination of opacity and attractiveness - which in this case was reflected in the set design, decor and aesthetic of the whole film...nicely done by the Coen brothers). Extremely, amusingly catty and rather cynical in a 'comedy of manners' kind of way, but the happy ending is still more satisfying than any other could have been.

Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts

Thinking that it might be nice to revisit this one before the movie hits screens, I started reading it in the gaps between doing other things and, as is ever the case with these old favourites, ended up zipping through it quite quickly. Good grief - startling how high a proportion of my reading is, in fact, re-reading (unless that's just a 'this year' thing...).

Resident Evil

This may seem an unlikely movie for me to have sought out, but in fact I've been intending to watch it for quite a while. It gained a hold over my mind because it seemed to represent the ultimate in mindless, flashy entertainment - and I use that description in a positive rather than pejorative sense. Alas, though, it wasn't particularly good, even when judged purely in those terms - sure, it's based on a video game (an important part of its appeal for me, given what I was looking for from it), but it didn't seem to gel at even a basic level...the action sequences - the raison d'etre of the film (at least on an 'artistic', as opposed to commercial, level) - just weren't all that exciting, the actors didn't make their characters breathe (paper-thin characterisation I expected, but this doesn't have to imply boring acting), and the sets weren't as cool as they ought to've been. Ah well, quel surprise, I suppose...

Garth Ennis/Steve Dillon - Preacher: Proud Americans

The next instalment - heavy on the retrospective 'background' stuff (John Custer and Cassidy both get parts of their backstories filled in) and not as engaging as the first two collections. By now, though, I've committed enough to this series that I know I'm going to finish it, particularly given how easy these are to read.

Juanillo de Alba - Spanish Classical Guitar

This came into my possession more randomly than most. trang had made me a gift of some vinyl which she'd picked up at an op shop, one of the pieces of which appeared to be Talking Heads' More Songs About Buildings And Food. Unfortunately, however, the record itself turned out not to correspond to the sleeve, and so I'm now the owner of a record of Spanish classical guitar (circa 1973) - uncharted waters for me. Still, it's music nonetheless, and the peculiar way in which it came to me tickled my fancy, so I gave the unexpected record a spin; 'classical' in this connexion basically seems to mean 'acoustic (solo)', and it's nice enough but I don't find it particularly interesting.

Gillian Welch - Revival

Simply gorgeous. It may just be the initial flush of enthusiasm talking, but I think that this is probably my favourite of Welch's (uniformly fantastic) albums. A lot of the words that I habitually overuse come to mind in describing Revival - gentle, ruminative, wistful, yearning...really, though, I can't put into words why I love this so much - I just do.

The Smiths - Hatful of Hollow

This was a pleasant surprise. I hadn't realised that the non-album compilations of Smiths material (singles and allsorts, released during their lifetime rather than retrospectively) contained different versions of the album tracks (this one, at least, houses Peel session recordings of several cuts from the band's self-titled debut as well as a couple of others). So, when I put Hatful of Hollow on, I listened through "William, It Was Really Nothing" (which was in the version I was familiar with through Singles) and was then first startled, then delighted to hear a much lighter, more bubbling version of "What Difference Does It Make?" than I was accustomed to, with more where that came from.

Indeed, the Peel recordings do tend to give fresh life to some of those early songs - I never really liked "Still Ill" or "Reel Around The Fountain" until I heard the versions on this record, but they now make much more sense to me. The wholly new songs are good, too, and it's nice to have the mournful grace of "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" on record, available to be listened to whenever I get in the mood (hopefully not too often in this my graceful age!); also, have had the swirling magnificence of "How Soon Is Now?" recalled to me by its presence on the disc.