Reviews

Title: The Dead

By: John Huston

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I have never been so moved by a film as I was when I first saw The Dead, John Huston’s adaptation of James Joyce’s famous short story. It was Huston’s last film, directed from his wheelchair after he turned 80, released after he was dead. What a frighteningly difficult story to adapt, just two scenes to work with, and yet Huston created a powerful, resonant masterpiece out of it.

The Dead is centred around a party held on the Feast of Epiphany by two maiden aunts, whose family and friends gather around them, chatting and bickering with affection and affectation, so much like people we all know. It seems purposeless, but we are soon drawn into their lives as if they are ours, and are sitting there among them.

The second scene is the famous one between a middle-aged couple, the Conroys, in their bedroom, when she reveals to him the power of a song and a memory. It is an epiphanic moment for him, as he looks out at the snow falling softly over Ireland and realises that love and life hold meanings he hadn’t considered before. I was a young boy when I saw that film and wept at the end, and it taught me a useful lesson: that the stuff of great art comes from the lives of ordinary people.

More links about the film: The New York Times; the Guardian.

Title: Larousse Gastronomique

By: Prosper Montagne (original editor)

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When a good friend bought me Larousse Gastronomique, the world’s most famous culinary reference book, my first thought, even as I hugged it tight with joy, was, “Now, what have you gone and done?” For surely, such a magnificent gift presented apropos nothing could only mean he was trying to assuage his guilt for wrongs committed.

Two years hence, as I pickle, braise, baste, and sauté (or something that resembles these processes) exotic recipes in my humble kitchen, the question remains unanswered, but the book, all 1,350 pages of it, and as heavy as my puppy, is dog-eared, fragrant with splashes of sauce, and certainly as vital to the cooking process as the gas stove itself. The latest edition of this tome, which was conceived by French chef Proper Montagne in Paris in 1938, is a dictionary starting with Abaisse (rolled out pastry) and ending with Zuppa Inglese (Neapolitan pastry); with recipes for every imaginable ingredient (“Baked Fennel” with “Chicken Liver Omelet” anyone?); an engrossing history of food traditions; cooking techniques, photographs—one of which is of a cheese large as a child—and maps, should you want to visit the place of origin of your favourite foreign wine. If you don’t cook, you will want to after acquiring Larousse. If still not, it looks great on the bookshelf, and its weight lends itself to use as a weapon or a hard pillow.

Friend, all is forgiven.

Title: 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87

By: Dmitri Shostakovich

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Isn’t it strange how, just when you think you know someone, they turn around and surprise you?

I used to think I knew Shostakovich. Hadn’t I exulted in the tortured magnificence of those fifteen symphonies? Thrilled to the raw energy of those string quartets? Listened open-mouthed to the almost pornographic flamboyance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk?

Then, three days ago, I discovered Opus 87.

Inspired by J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues Op. 87 showcases the Russian genius as I’d never heard him before. Tender and precise, passionate and formal, these 48 short pieces combine the delicate lyricism of Chopin with the mathematical drive of Bach, adding a hint of neurotic inventiveness that is pure Shostakovich. Shostakovich’s mastery of the piano is evident in every note – as he adds voice after voice to the keyboard, creating fugues of dazzling complexity; or composes preludes that are by turns soulful and dramatic. Who knew that Shostakovich could work in miniature this way? Together, these 24 Preludes and Fugues a formidable masterwork from one of the 20th Century’s greatest composers, one that deserves to be part of the collection of piano music aficionados everywhere. 

Title: Dressed to Kill

By: Brian De Palma

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With deference to Altman and Scorsese, my favourite American director from that great decade, the 1970s, is Brian De Palma. De Palma’s visual sense, his understanding of how the camera can be used as a tool of manipulation, is masterful – his films have a kinetic, visceral energy that’s analysis-defying and that transcends their often-pulpish subject matter. Watching them, I get a sense of cinema as a medium in its own right, rather than an extension of literature.

Much of De Palma’s work is built on templates created by Alfred Hitchcock, and Dressed to Kill uses Psycho as its model. In this case, the attractive protagonist who is unexpectedly murdered early in the film (in an elevator, not a shower) is a middle-aged lady cheating on her husband. Her science-nerd son teams up with a prostitute and a psychiatrist (!) to find the killer, who turns out to have a split personality. This premise affords De Palma plenty of scope for his visual flourishes, beginning with a superb, dizzying (and entirely wordless) scene set in a museum, which creates the sort of tension and ambivalence Hitchcock would have been proud of. And don’t miss the trademark split-screens and tracking shots.

Title: Flowers for Algernon

By: Daniel Keyes

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“progris riport 1 martch 3: Dr Strauss says I should rite down what I think and remember and every thing that happins to me from now on. I dont no why but he says its importint so they will see if they can use me. I hope they use me becaus Miss Kinnian says maybe they can make me smart. I want to be smart.”

When was the last time you read SF that made you cry your heart out? Daniel Keyes wrote Flowers for Algernon as a novella in 1959. Since then generations of readers have followed Charlie Gordon’s journey from floor sweeper with an IQ of 68 to intellectual genius and back again, and wept into their hankies as they went.

It’s even more unsettling reading Flowers for Algernon today than in the 1960s, when neurologists are mapping the brain and discovering how much of what we think of as the self or as personality is dependent on what’s actually encoded in those little grey cells. Keyes was prescient, not just about the science, but in his recognition of how fluid our sense of our selves really is, and how tragic it would be to create a brand-new shining you, only to lose it all over again.

Title: King of the World

By: David Remnick

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We all know of Muhammad Ali, intimate details about his work and life and present condition, and for this one needs to read no books, for living idols exist not stifled between pages, but in conversations and myths and stories that waft around and just always seem to be there. So although I have seen Ali in the Academy-award winning documentary When we Were Kings (1997), and seen Ali in Ali (2001), the music-videoesque film version of his life starring Will Smith, and read of him in parts of Maya Angelou’s work and The Autobiography of Malcolm X I never felt the need to delve further. After all, boxing isn’t exactly my Friday night sport.

This weekend, however, I simply couldn’t let go of King of the World, David Remnick’s classic profile of Ali’s rise to fame, and as importantly, the canvas of politics and race which encouraged this rise. Along with Ali, Remnick’s writes in beautiful detail of Sonny Liston (“the bad black heavyweight”), whom Ali dethroned as heavyweight champion of the world, and of Floyd Patterson (“the good black heavyweight”), from whom Liston won the title and who Ali would later defeat as well. Perhaps the greatest compliment that Remnick’s writing could receive was a comparison to Ali himself. Toni Morrison called the book, “astute, double-hearted, irresistible.” The Mail on Sunday added greater clarity to the comparison describing it as “nimble, graceful and unexpectedly hard hitting.”

I was riveted.

Title: The Silmarillion

By: JRR Tolkien

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Tolkien fans who think his achievement is summed up by The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have a treasure trove awaiting them – but the path is a demanding one, beset not by dragons (or should I say Urulóki) but by some of the densest writing you’ll find in the fantasy genre. And it’s not for all tastes. The Silmarillion is the mythological epic he worked on (continually revising and re-revising it) all his life – including before, during and after the publication of the more famous books. It could only be published posthumously, for its author never had the heart to say of it “It is done!”

This is an account of Middle-Earth (more properly, Arda) from the Beginning of Days to the end of the First Age. Drawing heavily on Norse mythology, it begins with an account of the creation – and corruption – of the world, and details the struggles of the Gods, demi-Gods, Elves and Men against the reign of the original Dark Lord Melkor. If you’ve wondered about the many tantalizing glimpses of a distant back-story in LOTR, you’ll find all the details filled in here. In fact, though “The Silmarillion” refers here to a specific published work by that name, at a wider level I think of it as encompassing everything Tolkien ever wrote about his imagined universe.

Title: Good Bye Lenin! (original soundtrack)

By: Yann Tiersen

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Almost all feature films make use of a background score to direct, or even nakedly manipulate, the viewer’s emotions. In fact, the easiest way to invest a scene with drama is to throw a drum-and-synthesiser behind it. But Yann Tiersen’s piano-based score for Wolfgang Becker’s comedy Good Bye Lenin (2003) seems, to my ear, a high point of film music.

The plot of Becker’s movie is that of a zany comedy. A woman in communist East Germany in the 1980s falls into a coma; as she lies in hospital, the Berlin Wall falls, and a united Germany says goodbye to communism. When she recovers the doctors emphasise to her children the necessity of avoiding any unpleasant shocks. But the woman was a diehard party worker, and so her teenaged son, through whose eyes the film is told, tries his best to manufacture around her the old communist universe, with its state-made products, sententious television programming, and chronic shortages.

Tiersen’s gentle, ruminative score, full of bittersweet cascading notes, turns a good film into a great one, managing, from this story of a quest to resuscitate a disappearing world, to evoke the universal human nostalgia for things past – our search, to use Proust’s phrase, for lost time.

Title: We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live

By: Joan Didion

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Somewhere in the no-man’s land between Journalism and Literature lies the country of the topical essay, and Joan Didion is its queen. In her non-fiction Didion combines a journalist’s eye for detail, the insight of a true intellectual and a novelist’s skill with language. Always politic but never polemical, always personal but never self-mythologising, Didion’s essays have a fascinating ability to capture the spirit of the time and place that she describes. Whether she’s writing about the system of dams in California, or the progress of feminism, or Joan Baez, Didion is always engaging, always insightful; her arguments are lucid, her perspectives authentic and compelling. She is a profound and thoughtful observer of the world we live in, and reports on it in a style that combines honesty with intellectual curiosity.

And then there’s the writing. Didion’s ear for prose is unmatched – every phrase, every sentence she writes cries out to be read aloud. Her arguments are concise and eloquent, her paragraphs flow with natural ease. So crisp and energetic is Didion’s writing that reading it sharpens your own appetite for language, leaves you hungry for words, aching to hit that keyboard and write for the pure physical thrill of it. If you want to know what really, really good writing looks and sounds like, this is the book to read.

Title: Lolita

By: Vladimir Nabokov

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The reviewers have spoken. And they assert that Ram Gopal Varma’s Nishabd isn’t, in fact, based on Nabokov’s Lolita. Not having seen the film, I have no idea if this is indeed the case. But to re-read the book is to once again realise the impossibility of filming it successfully. It’s not the debated theme and characters; it’s not the hidden plots and meanings; it’s not the doublings and doppelgangers: it’s the shimmering sea of words on which they float that bewitches and beguiles. You can’t capture that on celluloid.

Recall Humbert’s rapturous opening address: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” Gorgeous. Open the book at any page and you’ll find prose that’s playful, allusive, sardonic, ironic – sometimes all in the same sentence.

Nabokov himself attempted a wordy screenplay for Stanley Kubrick in 1960, from which the director used only odds and ends. The author revised it for publication in 1973, calling it a “vivacious variant” of Lolita – an expression that fits Adrian Lyne’s bravura 1997 remake. The best way to savour the tragic, transgressive tryst between Humbert and his eponymous nymphet is to simply read the book.