Reviews

Title: Encountering God

By: Diana Eck

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The Harvard scholar of religion Diana Eck has written a couple of marvellous books on aspects of Hinduism, including Darsan: Seeing The Divine Image in India (1981) and Banaras (1998). Her most compelling book, however, is Encountering God (1993), an attempt to get the world’s major religions to speak to each other in order to resolve issues of “difference, the most inescapable question of our world today”.

More than ever before, Eck argues, at the beginning of the third millennium we live in a world where we share neighbourhoods, work and public spaces, and cities and nations with people of widely varying religious beliefs, or those who do not believe – India is perhaps the paradigmatic example of this. But where, in the fields of science and technology, economics, and politics there is a great deal of discussion, cooperation and exchange, “only religions are not on speaking terms”.

Drawing on the literature and practices of Hinduism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, and avoiding the temptation to be either simplistic or fanciful, Eck beautifully draws out and illumines the experience of encountering god within and across the great religious traditions of the world. The grace and sagacity of her writing means that this is a book even nonbelievers would profit from reading.

Title: Rome

By: John Milius, William Macdonald and Bruno Heller (creators)

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HBO’s Original Series capture remarkably, and it appears, in totality, a slice of life, an environment and the people who occupy it and make it distinct. Sex and the City immortalized New York and its single women; The Sopranos did the same for New Jersey’s gangsters, and with Entourage, those obsessed with Hollywood’s celebrity culture have a show to call their own. 

With its dramatic series Rome, about to enter Season 3, HBO achieves trademark intimacy; bringing us the story of Rome at the time when it was a Republic about to metamorphose into an Empire. All the familiar figures are present, Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, as they would in any documentary, but what elevates Rome and makes it such a captivating watch above any documentary and many contemporary dramas, is its superb script, which is bitingly sharp and extremely funny, and has at its centre, neither Caesar nor Cleopatra, but two Roman soldiers and best friends, Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Polo (Ray Stevenson). The entire cast, in fact, is exceptional, and one cannot imagine them in any other role but as the masters and slaves, husbands, wives and lovers that they portray in this series. 

All this would have come to naught, however, if HBO had skimped on the sets and costume design, but the people who introduced Choos and Blahnik’s into our vocabulary, have raised the bar. The recreation of Rome and Alexandria takes you into the past, but for me, more impressive was the variety of sets—from the Forum to the Temple of Jupiter, the Senate and the backdrop to war scenes—and the attention to detail; seamy spice markets where murders can be bought, fish markets where intrigues are fed, and panoramas of the teeming populace who are but pawns in the political wars, which will determine the fate of Rome. 

Title: American Born Chinese

By: Gene Luen Yang

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There are some stories, which when you read them, feel like they were meant to be told in comic book format. Gene Luen Yang’s funny and touching coming-of-age tale about the son of Chinese immigrants is one of them.

There are three narratives in American Born Chinese.

There is a mythical Chinese fable featuring the Monkey King who struggles for acceptance in the kingdom of heaven.

Jim Wang, an introverted second generation Chinese boy, goes through school with the added trepidation borne of being a minority. Jim’s attempts to come into his own are depicted hilariously by flashes of lightening that course through his newly acquired perm – jolts of confidence that momentarily lead him to overcome his shyness and pursue his desires.

And finally Danny, an all-American teenager, is visited by his unabashedly Chinese cousin Chin-kee who promptly starts following him around school. Danny’s embarrassment – brought about by stereotypical cultural displacement anecdotes centered on Chin-kee – is punctuated by laughter lettered between panels – evoking a laugh track from a hidden audience in a sitcom.

The three narratives collide in the end. And despite being a tad heavy-handed it feels genuine and heartfelt. To keep the focus on the story and its characters, American Born Chinese is rendered in basic artwork (clean lines, no shading, head-on perspective) and coloring that evokes the delicate pastels of Chinese landscape art.

Title: Five Dedicated to Ozu

By: Abbas Kiarostami

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At a time when multiplexes are deafening us with special effects movies and sequels with apocalyptic battles between Good and Evil, it helps to take refuge in the sanity of a Kiarostami film. Five Dedicated to Ozu is at once a tribute to the Japanese master of the long take and a meditation on the radical possibilities of cinema. Kiarostami has called it “a work that approaches poetry, painting. It lets me escape from the obligation of narration and of the slavery of mise en scène.”

The film consists of five shots lasting about fifteen minutes each, of the seashore. In the first segment, a piece of driftwood floats on the waves, with once piece breaking off; in the second, people walk on a promenade, sometime stopping to exchange a word; some dogs sit on the beach; a flock of ducks cross and re-cross the frame; and finally, in an almost black screen, night sounds are heard, a storm breaks and passes.

People frequently fall asleep while watching the film and Kiarostami finds that a very encouraging response. There is, after all, something hypnotic in the movement of the waves, something soothing in the random way people move or stop to watch the sea. If the film escapes a comparison with reality television or security tapes, it is because the shots are very carefully constructed; and for the observant viewer, the gentle way in which the image is manipulated or the shot framed to create small moments of drama is nothing less than exhilarating. 

Title: Caché

By: Michael Haneke

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I’m too timid to enjoy the gory slapdash of slasher flicks. I see too many shapes in the shadows to consider Japanese horror. I even closed my eyes during Scary Movie 3. Yet, I couldn’t stop watching Michael Haneke’s 2005 french thriller Caché – although it’s scary enough to chill the blood in your veins.

Caché opens with a continuous shot of a house taken from a static camera. We shortly learn that this tape was delivered anonymously to the owners of the house who are now watching it – rewinding, pausing and trying to make sense of it. The unsettled couple – Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne Laurent (Juliette Binoche) – are then increasingly terrorized by more tapes, delivered with threatening line drawings made in a child’s hand.

Director Haneke stages almost every shot in Caché with painstaking attention to detail. He probes our fears and stokes our sense of dread.  He plants wonderful little scenes in the movie which nudge us towards the subtext of the plot.

Auteuil plays his character with a stunned disbelief – he’s dazed by the turn of events. But the beauty of Caché is in its story – ordinary people reacting to extraordinary circumstances in devastating ways. Even Haneke’s sucker punch – a four minute medium range closing shot again from a static camera that contains buried clues to his mystery – doesn’t feel gimmicky.

Title: All the Sad Young Men

By: F Scott Fitzgerald

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“Infinite passion, and the pain
of finite hearts that yearn”
–  Robert Browning

There’s more to Fitzgerald than Gatsby. Besides being one of his century’s finest novelists, F. Scott Fitzgerald was also an extraordinarily talented short story writer, and Cambridge University Press’s new edition of All the Sad Young Men is a fitting introduction to Fitzgerald’s short work. Fitzgerald’s prose has an exact yet translucent quality that combines acuteness of observation with pure lyricism of words. Language, in his hands, becomes something aching and direct, a kind of jazz, by turns elegiac and shimmering. Sadness haunts these stories like a benign ghost, a nostalgia of despair, regret as a medium.

Yet what is it that makes these young men (and Fitzgerald’s protagonists are invariably young men, even when they are old) sad? They are not, by any conventional standards, failures. They attend Ivy Leagues schools, are prosperous, successful. Why then are they consumed by a sense of inadequacy? Fitzgerald’s stories are about the ruin of promise, about the fading of youth’s great dream. Growing beyond convention, the soul has nothing to measure against but an overblown idea of the self; and the heart, taking all it possesses for granted, mourns only what is left unachieved. Failure, in Fitzgerald, is not a social fact but a state of mind, and it is in exploring that state – through stories like ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, ‘The Rich Boy’, ‘The Bowl’ – that Fitzgerald reveals to us what he himself knew only too well: the addictiveness of sadness, our capacity for being unhappy.

Title: Salaam Brick Lane

By: Tarquin Hall

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Long before he wrote a book dissing V.S. Naipaul, his one-time mentor, Paul Theroux wrote The Great Railway Bazaar in which he remarked that though he went in search of trains, he discovered passengers instead. Much the same spirit animates Tarquin Hall’s Salaam Brick Lane, a memoir of the year he spent in London’s East End, well worth reading for the many memorable characters Hall introduces us to—quirks and patois intact.

There’s Ali, the harassed and loquacious slum landlord; Naziz, ex-street crook and self-taught pedant hoping for a better life; the irascible yet affectionate Sadie, plagued by memories of her Jewish upbringing; Aktar, the brooding Bengali anthropologist; and many more. Of course, the two central characters are Hall himself, and his fiancée Anu, attempting to create a future for themselves in London.

Behind these human stories is the well-researched and highly-readable saga of how Brick Lane has played host to waves of immigrants over the centuries, from Irish to Jewish to Bangladeshi – and how this has redefined notions of ‘Englishness’. 

The only thing one didn’t like about the book? The title. ( Bit too Monica Ali, innit?)

(The author and his wife are currently in India; they blog at Sacred Cows.)

Title: My Darling Clementine

By: John Ford

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It’s easy to see why the gunfight at the O K Corral in 1881 has acquired such mythic significance in American history. A young country lacking a mythology (or an ancient body of instructive literature) of its own found equivalents in the legends of the Old West, and the story of Wyatt Earp – a steadfast lawman who helped end the anarchic rule of the Clanton gang and brought order to the wilderness – became a perfect allegory for the growth of civilisation. The story has been dramatised many times on film, but my favourite by far is John Ford’s quasi-realistic My Darling Clementine.

The great director claimed this movie was virtually a documentary since he had heard the full story from an ageing Wyatt Earp himself, and filmed it accordingly – but this claim needn’t be taken too seriously. My Darling Clementine certainly is more austere than the typical Hollywood western (no small thanks to Henry Fonda’s superbly understated performance as Earp, and Ford’s refusal to strike up the drum-beats at the crucial moments). But it is a Hollywoodisation alright, and in the best sense of that word: it has a solid script, characterisations (notably Victor Mature as Doc Holliday, the gunman with a poet’s heart) and just the right amount of dramatic tension, even though a romantic subplot is slightly jarring. Thank heavens Ford didn’t really make a documentary!

Title: Let It Be

By: The Replacements

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There is no feeling quite as delicious as angst, as every teenager knows. And angst needs a soundtrack. A decade-and-a-half ago, in my days of disaffection and torn jeans, mine would have seemed complete with all of one song: “Unsatisfied” by The Replacements.

“Unsatisfied” was part of the album Let It Be, a classic of alternative rock studded with little beauties. Without Bob Stinson’s gorgeous guitar, and Paul Westerberg’s powerful vocals, the lyrics almost seem banal: “Look me in the eyes and tell me/ that I’m satisfied/ I’m so/ I’m so/ Unsatisfied.”  Anwhere else, it would have seemed precious and full of self pity, but Westerberg sung it not as a cry of help but an assertion of self, a statement of how things just happen to be.

If you’ve ever been confused about the world and your place in it, struggling to form a sense of identity, desperately insecure or lonely, the rest of the album will also speak to you. “Sixteen Blue” is about, well, being sixteen. (“Your age is the hardest age/ Everything drags and drags.”) And can anything sum up the ache of unrequited love better than the line from “Answering Machine”: “How do you say good night to an answering machine?”

Twenty-three years after it was first released, maybe sixteen years after I first heard it, Let It Be still sounds fresh, and “Unsatisfied” still sends a chill up my spine.

She’ll make you do sit-ups.

Also on Mid Day, the most bizarre headline ever.