”Everybody stared at Sally, in her canary yellow beret and shabby fur coat, like the skin of a mangy old dog.
‘I wonder,’ she was fond of remarking, ‘w”Everybody stared at Sally, in her canary yellow beret and shabby fur coat, like the skin of a mangy old dog.
‘I wonder,’ she was fond of remarking, ‘what they’d say if they knew that we two old tramps were going to be the most marvelous novelist and the greatest actress in the world.’
‘They’d probably be very much surprised.’”
I was watching the Rick Stein travel show Long Weekends, and he was in Berlin. As with most of his shows, he incorporates books that correspond with his travels and many times produces memories of his youth, travelling about Europe with a knapsack full of books. In this episode, he discussed Christopher Isherwood’s book Goodbye to Berlin and of course Sally Bowles obsession with a concoction she called Prairie Oyster. ”Dexterously, she broke the eggs into the glasses, added the Worcester sauce and stirred up the mixture with the end of a fountain-pen.” Sally practically lived on them and soon has Christopher craving them as well, or maybe he just craves them as part of the Sally mystique.
I’m sure almost everyone on the planet has seen the 1972 film Cabaret, based on this book, or the stage play. If you haven’t, you must. Sometime in the early 1990s when I was still hanging about the University of Arizona campus trying to finish up a degree in English Literature, a young woman asked me to go see the stage play Cabaret with her. My budget at the time was more in the range of $1 movies than $60 for a seat to see a play, so I readily said yes and would have said yes if she had sported a moustache and a raging case of BO, but to add to my enjoyment, the young lady was not only attractive but intelligent and a huge fan of Cabaret. We arrived, and I felt constricted in my borrowed suit and self conscious about my skinny tie, which I felt that if the embarrassment reached too high a level at least I could strangle myself with it, quietly, somewhere in the back of the theatre where I wouldn’t intrude on the events on stage.
Before things could begin, a woman came out on stage moving in that self-conscious way that people do who are uncomfortable speaking before a large audience. I thought to myself, shit, she’s going to tell us that the show has been cancelled due to unforeseen disasters, which I was prepared to yell...but the show must always go on. She tapped the mic, always a delaying tactic for the self-conscious, and said, “We have a problem ladies and gentlemen; the lead actor playing the Emcee has become ill and can’t perform.”
I looked over at the stricken face of my companion as groans emanated from the crowd around us. The woman’s voice brightened, “But, and I can’t hardly believe this, but we called Joel Grey to see if he could possibly stand in...and he said, yes!”
A pandemonium of clapping broke out, led by my ecstatic companion. You’d have thought that a Beatle had wandered on stage as Joel Grey poked his head out the curtain for a moment to soak in the applause. For those who don’t know, Grey was the actor who played the role on Broadway and in the film version, so this was a real treat indeed. At the time, it was a great experience, but of course, as time has gone by, I’ve grown in my own cultural awareness, and my memories of that experience have only become edged in more vibrant colors.
So the poignancy of this book is that it is set in the 1930s, just as the Nazis are coming to power. The gorgeous decadence and extravagant creativity that is exploding out of Germany is about to be stomped with jackboots. Isherwood and Sally Bowles are living in the last few moments of this period and are trying to discover ways to break through and have enough money to leave their hand to mouth existence behind them. They try to shake down a rich American, but discover that they aren’t quite as clever as they thought, nor is he quite as doltish as they hoped. Sleeping with ”dirty old Jewish producers” isn’t really getting Sally anywhere either. She does like to shock people, and when Christopher introduces her to his girlfriend, things do not go well.
”’Haven’t you any small-talk except adultery?’
‘People have got to take me as I am,’ retorted Sally, grandly.
‘Finger-nails and all?’ I’d noticed Natalia’s eyes returning to them again and again, in fascinated horror.
Sally laughed: ‘Today, I specially didn’t paint my toe-nails.’
‘Oh rot, Sally! Do you really?’
‘Yes, of course I do.’
‘But what on earth’s the point? I mean, nobody--’ I corrected myself, ‘very few people can see them…’
Sally gave me the most fatuous grin: ‘I know, darling...But it makes me feel so marvellously sensual….’”
There is this great moment in the book, one of many great moments, when Christopher is talking to a friend about belonging to a place and how Berlin has become that place for him that he can feel most like himself. I think most of us seek such a place our whole lives and have to settle for finding a place that at least allows us an opportunity to mostly be ourselves, but actually finding the Shangri-La, the place that best speaks to our soul, is an elusive discovery. If you have found such a place, don’t let wild horses pull you away from it, but then sometimes, like in the case of Berlin, something happens that changes the place from what you need it to be. The magic is crushed beneath the marching feet of a coming tide of faux-moralistic, bombastic rhetoric.
The rise of Hitler is starting to intrude on their lives, and one of Christopher’s friends makes an observation that could apply to politics today.”The political moral is certainly depressing: these people could be made to believe in anybody or anything.”
There is lots to enjoy in this novel, but I must confess that when Sally Bowles is off stage, I pine for her return. What is most appealing about her is her freedom to really be herself, and if you must love her, it will be because you know everything there is to know about her. Shame is a foreign concept to her. Impulses are to be embraced, and life must be squeezed until the last drop of joy or pain can be extracted.
”On the crest of the dunes behind them, in sharp silhouette against the deep cobalt of the sky, they beheld a tall, lean figure scrupulously dressed i”On the crest of the dunes behind them, in sharp silhouette against the deep cobalt of the sky, they beheld a tall, lean figure scrupulously dressed in black with silver lace, a crimson plume curled about the broad brim of his hat affording the only touch of colour. Under that hat was the tawny face of Captain Blood.”
[image]
Errol Flynn plays Captain Blood in the 1935 movie version of this book.
Doctor Peter Blood has settled down in Bridgewater to a quiet life of contemplation while tending to his geraniums when he is summoned to help the wounded rebels who have been fighting against the forces of James II. This conflict is called The Glorious Revolution of 1688, which might indicate to you who eventually wins. Peter Blood can’t care one whit about this civil war. He has had his fill of war when he served in France and would find war a frivolous pursuit if it weren’t so deadly.
While helping the rebel wounded, he is captured. Though Blood makes the case that he takes the Hippocratic Oath very seriously, the judge finds that by providing aid and comfort to the enemy much more seriously. He is sentenced to hang. His sentence, along with his fellow “conspirators,” is commuted to transportation to the crown’s plantations in the Caribbean. This isn’t leniency, but purely for financial gain. Why waste so much free labor at the end of a hangman’s rope?
Once in Barbados, Blood proves his worth as a doctor, which gives him more freedom of motion than his fellow slaves. The overseer's daughter, Arabella Bishop, learns of his plight and develops sympathetic feelings towards Blood. He and some of his friends escape the island and fall in with pirates. Blood is an intelligent man, and it doesn’t take long for his pirate brethren to discover his value as a tactician and learn to respect his courage. He is soon elevated to the captaincy, and thus begins the bloody reign of Captain Blood, held only in check by his own adherence to a conscience.
There are battles in this book described so vividly by Rafael Sabatini that they give me chills, but the moment where I felt that thrill in my stomach that sent a harpoon from my current self back to my ten year old reading self was this one.
”Levasseur, his hand on his sword, his face a white mask of rage, was confronting Captain Blood to hinder his departure.
‘You do not take her while I live!’ he cried.
‘Then I’ll take her when you’re dead,’ said Captain Blood, and his own blade flashed in the sunlight.”
Isn’t Levasseur a great name? There is also Cahusac, Hagthorpe, Wolverstone, Pitt, and one of Blood’s most ruthless enemies, Don Miguel de Espinosa. I love this line to describe Wolverstone: ”There was a great historian lost in Wolverstone. He had the right imagination that knows just how far it is safe to stray from the truth and just how far to colour it so as to change its shape for his own purposes.” Wolverstone is a storyteller, and Sabatini with that line also alludes to one of his own best qualities as a writer. He knows how to tell a story.
There is this great conversation at the beginning of the book The Club Dumas when two booksellers are discussing their favorite Sabatini book, and Lucas Corso declares his preference for Captain Blood. These are seemingly throwaway pieces of dialogue that probably don’t resonate with most readers, but it is the author speaking to a certain type of reader. Perez-Reverte is reassuring me that I am going to enjoy this book. The movie Ninth Gate is based on that book. If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, you really should.
This book is probably most famous for inspiring the 1935 movie starring Errol Flynn and directed by the Casablanca director, Michael Curtiz. Sabatini helped with the screenplay. I’ve not seen the movie in decades, but now that I’ve read the book, I certainly want to watch it again.
There is romance in this book as Peter Blood tries to win his way back to respectability so he could dare to hope to one day win the hand of Arabella Bishop. There ”’I do not number thieves and pirates among my acquaintance, Captain Blood’, said she.” It’s a dagger through the heart and I want to yell, Should he have stayed a slave? There are so many missed opportunities for them to reconcile as each misinterprets the other’s true intentions. The plot device of win the girl, lose the girl, and hopefully win her back is definitely in play. There are several moments when it feels all is lost, but the hardest moment is when Blood himself begins to believe that he can’t win. We’ve seen him overcome so much that we can’t hardly stand to see him so low.
I recently read Michael Dirda’s book Browsings, and he reminded me of how much I enjoy reading the books from the age of storytelling that spanned from the late 19th century and into the early 20th century. One of the many books he mentions in Captain Blood (1922), and I’m nearly tearing my hair out at the thought that I’ve never read it. How is this possible? Treasure Island, a book filled with pirates, was the book that made me a lifelong reader. I would have snapped up a copy of this book as a preteen and would have probably read it twice back to back, as I tended to do in those days with a book I really enjoyed. All's right with the world: I’ve finally read Captain Blood, and I fully intend to read other Sabatini books as well.
So there is some purple prose, with the best example being the use of the word empurpled. I found myself smiling as it continued to show up in the text. Sabatini didn’t have a computer program to tell him how often he used or overused a word. Another is irradiate, which had my modern brain thinking of nuclear exposure, but, of course, in those days the word was used differently. "Sunlight streamed down through stained glass, irradiating the faces of family and friends." I must say, though, that I now have a hankering to use empurpled in something I’m writing. Of course, it is one of those words that gives an editor a chubby as they slash it from your text. The audacity of this Keeten fellow to use a word like that!
This book stirred up a lot of memories for me of those many wonderful moments in my childhood when a book, like a tornado, swept me up and gave me dreams of an expansive, exciting life.
It’s been a while since I saw the movie Get Carter (1971) with Michael Caine, but it’s a movie that leaves an indelible impression on the watcher. The grit, the steel girders breaking up the skyline into geometric shapes, and the hardboiled, clipped dialogue had me feeling like I needed a pint just to stir the rust from my throat. This book was published in 1970 and was optioned for film when it was still in manuscript. I don’t know exactly how this happens given the number of great books that wait decades to be optioned for films. The book was originally titled Jack’s Return Home, but after the cult fame of the movie, publishers quickly changed subsequent editions of the book to the title Get Carter.
Mike Hodges wrote the introduction, and there was one section from it that really stuck with me. He quotes Steve Chibnall, who wrote the definitive book on the movie. ”’If Shakespeare could have written a gangster film, Get Carter would be the one.’ If that’s the case just remember that Ted Lewis wrote it; I only adapted it.” This is high praise for what many people would think of as a B British movie, but he is right. The Bard would have loved Jack Carter and certainly would have loved writing a play with him as his lead character, leaving a bloody trail of revenge in his wake.
As I read the dialogue, of course I hear Michael Caine’s voice, and much of the dialogue was lifted almost directly from the book for use in the movie. Hodges, ruefully, admits that he may have kept the movie script too faithful to the book, but frankly I can’t imagine why he would be second guessing himself. Maybe he feels the movie is too much Lewis and not enough Hodges. It was his first movie, so looking back maybe he thought he was too careful. He knows all too well if you fuck up in the movie biz your first film might be your last. Fortunately the film was a financial success and now enjoys a robust cult following.
Jack Carter gave his brother Frank several really good reasons to hate him. He was banished from their hometown, which was fine with Jack. He quickly makes a name for himself in the rackets as a brutal man. Frank didn’t believe in fighting, and that was one of the many reasons why Jack had some misplaced contempt for his brother. As we get older, we start to realize it takes a bigger man to walk away than the man who plants the fist in the center of some mouthy asshole’s face. Frank walked. Jack hit. A difference in philosophy that was one reason for the parting of the ways.
There were other reasons, too, unforgivable reasons. They say blood is thicker than water, but the water can sure seem way more important when you have a brother like Jack.
So Frank was about the last person that Jack would ever expect to meet with a misadventure. Something went really wrong, and as Jack starts shaking the rusty girders of his home town, he realizes that everything leads back to his niece Doreen. There’s always something that will make any man ball up his fist, even a peace loving man like Frank, and. Jack is determined to find out the truth. He might be booted out of the rackets forever, and he might have to look over his shoulder for the rest of his life...if he lives...but he is going to finish this one way or another.
If you love hardboiled novels, you are going to be asking yourself, just like I have, why has it taken you so long to read this? Considering how memorable the movie was, you would think a guy like me would have wanted to explore the origins of the plot. The book has certainly been buried by the popularity of the movie. I should have done my best a long time ago to put it back on the radar for those readers who would really appreciate the atmospheric smokestacks, flash talking hardcases, dark rust, and volcanic heat of the book that launched a genre of British hardboiled crime in the 1970s.
”I had lost everything: novel, publisher, wife, lover; the admiration of my best student; all of the fruit of the last decade of my life. I had no fam”I had lost everything: novel, publisher, wife, lover; the admiration of my best student; all of the fruit of the last decade of my life. I had no family, no friends, no car, and probably, after this weekend, no job. I sat back in my chair, and as I did so I heard the unmistakable crinkle of a plastic bag. I reached into my torn hip pocket of my jacket and passed my hand through the hole, into the lining, where I found my little piece of Humboldt County, warm from the heat of my body.”
At the very beginning of this novel, Grady Tripp has lost or been on the verge of losing all of the important things he has listed above, but it takes the length of this novel for denial to be replaced by the cold, hard face of reality.
He has a certain level of charm, a certain level of intelligence, but truth be known, his days of being one of the wonder boys of writing are long past. He is like a high school quarterback who still talks about his days on the playing field long after his football cleats have molded and turned to rust. He keeps hope alive by continuing to work on an epic novel, his grand masterpiece, a bloated, indulgent, horse-choking size manuscript that he...never...wants...to...finish. He doesn’t want anyone to read it for fear that his illusions about the novel will be shattered and the last vestiges of hope of ever publishing another novel will be dashed. At the same time, he wants someone to read it so he can feel vindicated.
The fear outweighs the desire for exoneration.
So how does a tuba, a dead dog, and three quarters of a boa constrictor end up in the trunk of Grady’s “stolen” 1966 maroon Ford Galaxie?
Ahh yes, the Devil is in the details.
Grady’s wife has left him because she found out he was sleeping with his boss’s wife. ”I intended to get involved with Sara Gaskell from the moment I saw her, to get involved with her articulate fingers, with the severe engineering of combs and barrettes that prevented her russet hair from falling to her hips, with her conversation that flowed in unnavigable oxbows between opposing shores of tenderness and ironical invective, with the smoke of her interminable cigarettes.” Sara is also one of those people who has a book with her all the time. She reads while waiting for a movie to start. She reads while her food is microwaving. She reads during any spare minute that life will give her.
As I’m sitting here rereading this quote, I keep thinking about the words involved in that sentence and how nice it was to read a book by an author using a higher level of vocabulary. I’ve been very disappointed in recent years with most new adult books reading like they’ve been put through a young adult word strainer. Michael Chabon is a gifted writer, and his love of the language is on constant display throughout the novel.
To make matters worse, Sara is pregnant. We only get to spend a few days with Grady Tripp, but the thing that is readily apparent is that Grady is an all-star at cratering his life.
As if a pregnant mistress and an AWOL wife are not big enough issues for him to deal with, he also has several other chaotic walking disasters waiting to explode in his face.
His favorite student, Hannah Green, is in love with him, and she is just too damn pretty to be resisted. His most gifted student, James Leer, is suicidal. His best friend and agent, Terry Crabtree, has come to town, dragging along a transvestite with him, to inform Tripp that his career is in jeopardy and his best hope is that Tripp has written the great American novel that will salvage his career and put Grady back among the pantheon of Wonder Boys, or should we say Wonder Elderly?
Grady is also smoking WAY too much herb.
“It’s always hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.” Chabon scatters sentences like that throughout the novel that had me thinking about what is hope? Is denial really the worst thing? Isn’t denial sometimes the only way we can have any hope? Whenever I take a hard, critical look at my life, the easiest thing to do is crush all the hope out of the equation. Hope is most of the time ethereal and untethered to logic, but without hope how does the magic happen? Those magical moments when something goes unexpectedly well, or a major issue in our lives reaches a resolution without our intercession, or a friend, an acquaintance, a stranger out of the blue does something that makes us believe in the basic goodness of humanity again.
Needless to say, the misadventures of Grady Tripp snowball to the point that I did wonder if he needed to just hop in the Galaxie and drive to New Mexico to let the desert sun melt away his indiscretions, his blunders, his failures. Can Grady grab a branch large enough to hold him as he free falls to the bottom of the deepening crater of his life?
Oh, and let’s not forget about the dead dog, the three quarters of a boa constrictor, and the tuba in the trunk. These are mere nuances in the greater scheme of his disastrous life, but they must be dealt with as well.
There is also a movie from 2000 with Michael Douglas as Grady, Robert Downey Jr. as Crabtree, and Tobey Maguire as James Leer. The movie isn’t as good as the book, but it is an enjoyable romp that captures the campus humor of the book.
This is the best book I’ve read in a long time. I’ve got a copy of Chabon’s first book The Mysteries of Pittsburgh on the way. I have a feeling it will prove to be an impressive writing debut.
”I put my mouth to the page and kissed the ‘O.’ Kissed it and kissed it. Then, impulsively, with the tip of my tongue I began to lick the ink of the s”I put my mouth to the page and kissed the ‘O.’ Kissed it and kissed it. Then, impulsively, with the tip of my tongue I began to lick the ink of the signature, patiently as a cat at his milk bowl I licked away until there no longer the ‘O,’ the ‘l,’ the ‘i,’ the ‘v,’ the second ‘i,’ the ‘a’--licked until the upswept tail was completely gone. I had drunk her writing. I had eaten her name. I had all I could do not to eat the whole thing.”
After reaching the threshold of his frustration with his father, Marcus Messner heads west to attend the very conservative Winesburg College in Ohio. Given his obsession with the writings of Bertrand Russell and his own personal disregard for organized religion, he probably should have found a college that better fits his temperament. Desperation tends to lead to rash decisions, and Marcus would have done anything to get away from New Jersey, his father’s cloying obsession over every moment of his day, and the family kosher butcher shop.
He is a young man of grand passions and explosive opinions. He soon finds himself at odds with the requirements of the school, specifically the 40 times he has to attend chapel a year, but he also keeps moving from roommate to roommate, unable to get along with anyone, and finally moves into an attic room that no one wants so he can live by himself. Is he intolerable of differences of opinions, or is everyone else too intolerable to live with? His father has become angry at everyone and finds the world to be a very unsafe place, and though he would deny it vigorously, Marcus is exactly like his father. The difference is that his father took several decades longer to become that angry.
There is a girl. There is always a girl, or at least there always should be. Olivia Hutton is the odd, but pretty, girl in history class. A doe, a fragile beauty, who remarkably seems to like him. He is a virgin, and he soon discovers that she is not. When they park on their first date, he is expecting or hoping for some heavy petting, but he gets more than he could ever hope for or is even ready for.
She has a scar, a long, white scar across her wrist. ”You would have thought the whole of Olivia lay in her laughter, when in fact it lay in her scar.” Olivia finds him to be odd, serious, and mysterious. When Marcus’s mother meets her, she insists that he needs to stop seeing Olivia because... ”This is a girl full of tears.”
This astute observation made me sad. I thought to myself, here is a girl where the tragedy of her life is splashed across her face for all to see. Why is it no one can help her?
Marcus fucks everything up with Olivia. Is this the classic boy-wins-girl, boy-loses-girl, and boy-wins-girl-back plot? Hmmm, if only his life would prove to be that simple.
As she avoids him, his obsession with her grows. They exchange letters, jockeying for understanding. He realizes that he must get her back. He is working, trying to become valedictorian of his class, and trying to find the right words that will win back Olivia. He has no time for the rules and regulations of this very conservative school and soon finds himself in conflict with the dean.
Why can’t everyone just leave him alone? Why can’t Olivia see that his love/lust for her is real? Isn’t he doing enough?
This is 1951, and the Korean War is raging. Young men are dying in the snow and mud, trying to keep the Chinese from overrunning South Korea. The fear of being drafted is a looming dread hanging over him. As long as he can stay in school, he will be deferred, but can he make the compromises that will keep him out of conflict with the dean and also keep him out of the conflict overseas?
Marcus has a lot of can’ts in his vocabulary. Indignation surrounds him in a cloud of dissent.
The big decisions we make that we think will unalterably change the course of our lives are sometimes sabotaged by a series of small decisions that lead us down the most unexpected paths. It is ”incomprehensible the way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.”
This is a slender volume that is exploring themes that go deeper than what the overarching plot would indicate. The writing flows quickly, like a rain swollen stream, and sometimes I found myself being pushed along too fast. I had to occasionally reach out and grab a passing branch so I could let the water flow past me for a while to ponder the subconscious rumblings of the machinery beneath the stage.
There is a movie from 2016, directed by James Schamus, that I fully intend to watch as well. Will Schamus capture the nuances? We shall see.
”On March 1, 2020, after returning from a conference in Portugal, Luis Sepúlveda was confirmed as the first man in the Asturias region of Spain to be ”On March 1, 2020, after returning from a conference in Portugal, Luis Sepúlveda was confirmed as the first man in the Asturias region of Spain to be infected by COVID-19. By March 11, it was reported that Sepúlveda was in critical condition, that he was in an induced coma with assisted breathing due to multiple organ failure in an Oviedo hospital.He died on April 16 due to the virus.”--Wikipedia
This novel won the Tigre Juan Award in 1988. It was his first novel.
”He could read!
It was the most important discovery of his whole life. He could read. He possessed the antidote to the deadly poison of old age. He could read. But he had nothing to read.”
Antonio Jose Bolivar Proano has lived in the jungle of Ecuador for nearly forty years. He once lived with the Shuar natives, but tragic circumstances required him to leave his adopted tribe and settle with his fellow whites in the small village of El Idilio. He was once a great hunter, but now he has become old and enjoys nothing more than losing himself in the pain and anguish of doomed love stories. A dentist who shows up twice a year to extract teeth from the villagers brings him two new books. The dentist knows a hooker who has the exact same taste in books as Bolivar.
Bolivar would be quite content to lead his simple life and while away the hours of his days enthralled by the passions of fictional people, but a man is killed by a female ocelot after he killed her cubs and wounded her mate. Bolivar is forced to join the hunt for the female by the fat, wife-beating mayor, whom everyone calls the Slimy Toad behind his back. ”His wife will kill him. She’s piling up hatred but hasn’t got enough yet. These things take time.”
These things take time. I wonder how many wives right now are contemplating creative ways to murder their husbands after being quarantined with them for several weeks. :-) Let’s hope these are only fantasies and that the piling up of unhappiness merely leads to divorce, not murder most foul.
Bolivar finds what is left of a settler and a dead American, killed by the grief-stricken ocelot. The jungle is rather tidy with debris. ”The American was lying a few yards further on. The ants had done a magnificent job, leaving their bones as smooth as plaster. The American’s skeleton was receiving the last attention of the ants. They were carrying away his straw-colored hair strand by strand, like tiny women woodcutters felling coppery trees, to strengthen the entrance tunnel to their anthill.”
The ocelot has a taste for blood now, the blood of man, and she won’t stop killing them until her last breath.
Bolivar doesn’t want to be the one, but he knows he has to be the one. He soon finds himself in a desperate struggle to kill an animal he sympathizes with before she manages to kill him. I keep thinking about The Old Man and the Sea, as one man battles the forces of nature. This is considered an ecological novel and certainly shines a light on the negative impact of the West on those regions of the world that were existing in balanced harmony before the trudge of their big feet, the jangle of their equipment, their loud voices, their arrogance, their pathological need to hunt, and their fascination in gazing upon primitive cultures (reminding me of those who search out poverty porn) turn a jungle into chaos.
I really love the sweet, subtle power of this novel. The resistance of a culture to technology and the metal monsters of guns and machines. The respect that the Shuar people show the jungle and the wonder they feel as they encounter mystical elements that seemingly defy science. I love thinking about this leather-skinned, old man pondering the mysteries of love as he listens to the river and turns the pages of a book.
There is a movie based on the book, starring Richard Dreyfuss, that was released in 2001. I’ve not been able to track down a copy to watch, but certainly intend to when I finally find a way.
Sepulveda’s life reads like a novel, not a love story, but one fraught with constant danger. He was arrested twice in his home country of Chile and tortured by the General Augusto Pinochet regime. He was an ardent supporter of the rights of people. He eventually was released after pressure by Amnesty International and chose to live in Germany because of his great love for the literature of that country. If you get a chance, do read about his life on Wikipedia. He was certainly a man who used the power of his pen to try and expose the abuses of those in power. It is unfortunate that it took a news story about his death appearing on my cell phone for me to be motivated to finally read one of his books.
This is a slender, but powerful book. You won’t regret spending an afternoon with Bolivar and his struggle with his conscience as he tracks down a cat who has every right to be vengeful.
”Nice person, bad person--that’s not the level this girl is at. I can see you’re crazy about her and probably won’t be able to hear this, Ao-chan, but”Nice person, bad person--that’s not the level this girl is at. I can see you’re crazy about her and probably won’t be able to hear this, Ao-chan, but I think you’d be better off staying away from someone like her. I can’t read her exactly, but I can tell you she’s either a saint or a monster. Maybe both extremes at once, but not somewhere in between.”
Aoyama never remarried after losing his wife to illness. He decided to raise his son by himself, but now seven years later, his son Shige is encouraging his Dad to remarry. Aoyama isn’t opposed to the idea, and when his friend, a movie producer, suggests having a casting call to find the perfect woman for him, he goes along with the unorthodox idea.
An essay, accompanying an application written by one of the hopeful actresses, especially catches his eye. ”It so happens that I studied ballet for many years but had to stop when, at eighteen, I injured my hip. I don’t suppose I really had what it takes to become a ‘prima’ in any case. But the injury occurred just as I was making preparations to enroll at a ballet school in London, and it felt like the end of the world. It took me years to recover from this disappointment. At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, it was a process not unlike learning to accept death.”So before they even start the tedious process of interviewing all the potential applicants, Aoyama has already decided that Yamasaki Asami is the one for him.
She is young and beautiful, but has been tempered by pain and loss which lends an air of melancholy and maturity to her that makes her more attractive to an older man seeking a true companion rather than an adornment. As he begins to take her out for “dates,” he sees those creative attributes that he loved about his wife inherently displayed in Yamasaki Asami.
There are niggling concerns. Her stories about herself are vague and do not stand up to even casual scrutiny. She is evasive, a ghost of her past, whenever Aoyama asks personal questions. Not that he needs to know much more about her. He has already made her the heroine of his future life.
So this is definitely a slow burn, which seems like a funny thing to say about a book that barely edges 200 pages. I have read several of Ryu Murakami’s books, and so I kept thinking to myself, when is his odd, sometimes demented, mind going to show itself? I felt the same way when I was watching The Hateful Eight... okay, when is Quentin Tarantino’s lust to shock going to take over the movie? Needless to say, just as Tarantino shows up in the final part of The Hateful Eight, Murakami also shows up in the final pages of Audition.
The true horror of the situation is that Aoyama has been miscast in his role as the villian. He may not be perfect, but he is far from the insidious man that Yamasaki Asami must believe him to be. If she sees him clearly for who he is and weighs his intentions as they truly are, she would have to see herself in a different light. At one critical moment, she says: ”I’m not that sort of person.” The reader is put in the position of madness overshadowing sympathy.
There is a 1999 movie version of the same name, directed by Takeshi Miike, and those who are familiar with his work will understand why the movie is more disturbing to me than the book. The acting by Eihi Shiina, playing Yamasaki Asami, is terrific, especially in the final scenes. Her mannerisms and her gorgeous voice turning sinister are especially unsettling. The changes Miike makes to the storyline actually add layers of anxiety to an already disturbing plot. This is another one of those times where I really enjoyed reading the book and then watching the movie.
”I thought of Fonny’s touch, of Fonny, in my arms, his breath, his touch, his odor, his weight, that terrible and beautiful presence riding into me an”I thought of Fonny’s touch, of Fonny, in my arms, his breath, his touch, his odor, his weight, that terrible and beautiful presence riding into me and his breath being snarled, as if by a golden thread, deeper and deeper in his throat as he rode--as he rode deeper and deeper not so much into me as into a kingdom which lay just behind his eyes. He worked on wood that way. He worked on stone that way. If I had never seen him work, I might never have known he loved me.
It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.”
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Stephen James and Kiki Layne star in the 2018 film that was released on December 25th.
Fonny and Tish have known each other nearly their entire lives. Sometimes relationships like this evolve into being friends or at least acquaintances for life. Sometimes they become lovers, and when lightning strikes the same place twice, they become lovers and best friends.
Lightning struck twice.
This is a tale of two families. Tish’s family is not only supportive of the relationship but go so far as to consider Fonny part of their family. As Tish and Fonny are caught up in the whirlwind of 1970s racist New York, the support of Tish’s family is the only thing standing between Fonny spending a good part of his life in jail and Tish having to work the streets to make enough money to afford a lawyer for his defense.
Fonny’s family is a different story. His mother has never thought highly of him or his prospects. She is a religious nut who, in her fervor for her God, has lifted herself up above the rest of humanity. From this perch, she can cast judgments down on those around her, especially those not heeding the call of the church. She would be a better Christian if she were casting bread instead of casting aspersions. Fonny’s two older sisters, taking their cues from their mother, are dismissive of their little brother as well and find it embarrassing, rather than tragic, that he has been arrested. They are sure he is guilty because they have found him guilty his whole life.
Fonny’s father is an interesting character. He is a man who loves his family, but he knows that Fonny needs his love more than the rest. Tish’s father, Joseph, is always bucking Frank up, giving him hope.
”’Look. I know what you’re saying. You’re saying they got us by the balls. Okay. But that’s our flesh and blood, baby: our flesh and blood. I don’t know how we going to do it. I just know we have to do it. I know you ain’t scared for you., and God knows I ain’t scared for me. That boy is got to come out of there. That’s all. And we got to get him out. That’s all. And the first thing we got to do, man, is just not to lose our nerve. We can’t let those cunt-faced, white-assed motherfuckers get away with this shit any longer.’ He subsides, he sips his beer. ‘They been killing our children long enough.’”
James Baldwin was proclaiming that #blacklivesmatter from the beginning of his existence as a writer.
Being a young, virile, prideful, black man in the 1970s was a dangerous thing to be. Fonny, by breathing the same air and walking the same streets as the predominantly white police force, has committed a crime. Yes, he has committed a crime by existing. When he comes to the attention of one particular cop, it is only a matter of time before he is put in the frame for something. This cop has an interest in Fonny that is akin to sexual desire. He pursues him like a spurned lover pursues the person of their affection. He is the head of the hammer of white fear.
”He walked the way John Wayne walks, striding out to clean up the universe, and he believed all that shit: a wicked, stupid, infantile motherfucker. Like his heroes, he was kind of a pinheaded, heavy gutted, big assed, and his eyes were as blank as George Washington’s eyes. But I was beginning to learn something about the blankness of eyes. What I was learning was beginning to frighten me to death. If you look steadily into that unblinking blue, into that pinpoint at the center of the eye, you discover a bottomless cruelty, a viciousness cold and icy. In that eye, you do not exist: if you are lucky”
The problem is that Fonny is at the pinpoint of that blue eye.
This is a book about injustice, about family sticking together, about community, and it is about love, real love, soul trembling love. It is the type of love that, when your lover walks in the room, you feel your insides turn to Champagne with frenzied bubbles and a cork in your throat trembling to hold it all in.
One thing I’ve learned about life is those that have the least to give, give the most.
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Two Bards hanging out together. The conversation they would have had over a bottle of wine.
James Baldwin moved to Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France in 1970. This book was published in 1974. Even though he was an American in exile, America came to him. Miles Davis, Josephine Baker, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Ray Charles, and many more made pilgrimages to see him. He spent most of his days writing and responding to correspondence from all over the world. He changed lives with his gift of hope and his honesty about what was really happening to Black America. Every time I read one of his books, I am struck by the power of his prose and the passion of his anger. He was determined to drag America, kicking and screaming, under a soul revealing, bright light so the demons of inequality, racism, and hatred have a chance to be exorcised.
”Murder may have been his occupation, but poetry was his delight.”
You may call her Elizabeth, Lambeth Marsh Lizzie, or just plain Lizzie. With the dea”Murder may have been his occupation, but poetry was his delight.”
You may call her Elizabeth, Lambeth Marsh Lizzie, or just plain Lizzie. With the death of her abusive mother, she is cut loose from a life of degrading poverty and, by a quirk of fate, finds herself thrust into the world of the stage. Dan Leno is at the top of his game, and he is the first person to see Lizzie as someone more than just a bit of fluff or a go for it girl. She is a natural entertainer, quick witted, and has the singing voice of a angel. She has finally found her place in the world.
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Olivia Cooke plays Lizzie in the 2017 movie.
This is Victorian London, and the city has seen its share of vice, exploitation, debauchery, and oh yes, even murder. Thomas de Quincey’s collection of essays titled On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts has scandalized the town. The Ratcliffe Murders, a dastardly family homicide that happened seventy years ago, he considers to be one of the finest examples of murder as a fine art on par with artists’ renditions of beauty, fine literature, and exalting music.
There is one burgeoning murderer who reads De Quincey’s account with great interest, one might say with reverence. ”And what a marvelous touch by De Quincey, to suggest that Williams’ bright yellow hair, ‘something between an orange and lemon colour’, had been dyed to create a deliberate contrast to the ‘bloodless ghostly pallor’ of his face. I hugged myself in delight when I first read how he had dressed for each murder as if he were going upon the stage.”
Details such of that may have been induced by De Quincey’s own feverish opium influenced mind, but they do put the reader right there in the bloody room, looking the murderer in the face.
The murderer dubbed the Limehouse Golem, an understudy at this point, gains experience by killing the most easy prey. The same, least protected members of society whom Jack the Ripper made quite a mess with at a later date. Like any skill, practice makes perfect, and the goal is to elevate murder to a level at which those who see the tableau will gasp, not only at the grotesqueness of the scene before them but also for the artistry of the composition.
When the bookish, Jewish scholar Solomon Weil is murdered, the Limehouse Golem starts to see the nuances of the art of murder. ”The body is truly a mappamundi with its territories and continents, its rivers of fibre and its oceans of flesh, and in the lineaments of this scholar I could see the spiritual harmony of the body when it is touched by thought and prayer. He lived yet, and sighed as I cut him--sighed, I think, with pleasure as the spirit rose out of the open form.”
This murder brings The Reading Room in which Weil spent so much time under scrutiny and a whole host of potential suspects. It is becoming readily apparent that the Limehouse Golem is something more than just a crazed killer. Leaving bloody messages on the wall in Latin would lead one to believe that this murderer has been inspired by literature. There is the writer George Gissing in the Reading Room, hanging on as best he can to a shabby gentility. He is saddled with a whore for a wife, who will lie with anyone for a chamber pot of gin. Could he possibly be murdering whores in lue of murdering his wife? There is Karl Marx, a man of grand passions. Could he have finally snapped and be expressing his ideas in blood? Inspector Kildare has been given the case because he is expendable. If he succeeds, wonderful, but if he fails, he will be shuffled off into disgraced retirement. The political elements of the force simply do not want to risk one of their golden boys on the rise.
Dan Leno is also a suspect due to some circumstantial evidence. Could his madness on stage have finally spilled out into nights of grand artistic expression?
The other man at The Reading Library on the proper occasions to potentially be a suspect is the journalist/failed playwright John Cree. He has married Lizzie and taken her away from the stage or, in his opinion, has saved her from a life of destitution and sin. When he dies under suspicious circumstances, Lizzie is in the frame. The only way that Kildare can save her is to find out the identity of the Limehouse Golem.
This is a wonderful, evocative, Victorian era murder mystery that has recently been made into a spectacular film titled Limehouse Golem(2017), starring Bill Nighy who lends gravitas to every role he decides to play. The plot is a twisty one that will lead the reader down many a dark alley, chasing a red herring. I decided that I would just hang with Peter Ackroyd and let him tell me the story. I didn’t worry about the subterfuge or even trying to figure out the mystery. I wanted to enjoy the ambiance of Victorian London and found myself laughing at Dan Leno’s bawdy jokes along with the rest of the motley, gin swilling crowd. There is a murderer on the loose, but isn’t that just the spice that London after dark craves?
***Spoiler alert. If you have read this book, please proceed. If you are never going to read this novel (be honest with yourself), then please proceed***Spoiler alert. If you have read this book, please proceed. If you are never going to read this novel (be honest with yourself), then please proceed. If you may read this novel, but it may be decades in the future, then please proceed. Trust me, you are not going to remember, no matter how compelling a review I have written. If you need Tolstoy talking points for your next cocktail party or soiree with those literary, black wearing, pseudo intellectual friends of yours, then this review will come in handy. If they pin you to the board like a bug over some major plot twist, that will be because I have not shared any of those. If this happens, do not despair; refer them to my review. I’ll take the heat for you. If they don’t know who I am, then they are, frankly, not worth knowing. Exchange them for other more enlightened intellectual friends.***
“He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.”
Anna Arkadyevna married Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, a man twenty years her senior. She dutifully produced a son for him and settled into a life of social events and extravagant clothes and enjoyed a freedom from financial worries. Maybe this life would have continued for her if she had never met Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky, but more than likely, her midlife crisis, her awareness of the passage of time, would have compelled her to seek something more.
”They say he’s a religious, moral, honest, intelligent man; but they don’t see what I’ve seen. They don’t know how he has been stifling my life for eight years, stifling everything that was alive in me, but he never once even thought that I was a living woman who needed love. They don’t know how he insulted me at every step and remained pleased with himself. Didn’t I try as hard as I could to find a justification for my life? Didn’t I try to love him… But the time has come, I’ve realized that I can no longer deceive myself, that I am alive, that I am not to blame if God has made me so that I must love and live. And what now? If he killed me, if he killed him, I could bear it all, I could forgive it all, but no, he….”
Her husband was enamored with her, but then so was everyone who met her, male or female. Maybe he was too contented with their life together and, therefore, took their relationship for granted. He was two decades older, so the passions of romance didn’t burn with as hot a flame. She wanted passion from him even if it was to murder her lover and herself. Even if it was something tragic, she wanted something to happen, something that would make her feel... something.
I couldn’t help thinking early on that the problem wasn’t with her husband, certainly nothing that a new lover could fix for very long. The same face was always going to greet her in the mirror. The same thoughts were always going to swim their way back to the surface. We can not mask the problems within ourselves by changing lovers. The mask will eventually slip, and all will be revealed.
Ugly can be very pretty.
Is there such a thing as being too beautiful? Can being so beautiful make someone cold, disdainful, and unable to really feel empathy or even connected to those around them? Her type of beauty is a shield that insulates her even as her insecurities swing the sword that stabs the hearts of those who despise her and those who love her.
”She was enchanting in her simple black dress, enchanting were her full arms with the bracelets on them, enchanting her firm neck with its string of pearls, enchanting her curly hair in disarray, enchanting the graceful, light movements of her small feet and hands, enchanting that beautiful face in its animation; but there was something terrible and cruel in her enchantment.”
My favorite character in this epic was Konstantin (Kostya) Dmitrich Levin. He was a well meaning, wealthy landowner who, unusually for the times, went out and worked the land himself. He got his hands dirty enough that one could actually call him a farmer. He was led to believe by his friends and even the Shcherbatsky family that their youngest daughter, Kitty, would be an affable match for him. Kitty’s older sister Dolly was married to Stepan (Stiva) Arkadyich Oblonsky, who was the brother to Anna Karenina.
Stiva was recently caught and forgiven for having a dalliance with a household staff, but no sooner was he out of that boiling water of that affair before he was having liaisons with a ballerina. This did lead me to believe that life would never be satisfying for either Stiva or his sister Anna because there was always going to be pretty butterflies to chase as the attractiveness of the one they had began to fade.
Before Vronsky became gobsmacked by Anna, he was leisurely chasing after Kitty and leading her on just long enough for Kitty to turn Levin’s marriage proposal down flat. That was like catching a molotok (hammer) right between the eyes as a serp (sickle) swept Kostya off his feet. Interestingly enough, later in the book Levin met Anna Karenina, after he has married Kitty (you’ll have to read the book to discover how this comes about), and he was captivated by Anna.
It was almost enough for me start chain smoking Turkish cigarettes or biting my nails down to the quick while I waited for the outcome. Substitute Anna for Jolene, and you’ll know what I was humming.
”She had unconsciously done everything she could to arouse a feeling of love for her in Levin, and though she knew that she had succeeded in it, as far as one could with regard to an honest, married man in one evening, and though she liked him very much, as soon as he left the room, she stopped thinking about him.”
If she was irritated with Vronsky, one day maybe she would just seduce Levin for entertainment... because she could.
I must say that I didn’t think much of Vronsky at the beginning of the novel, but as the plot progressed I started to sympathize with him. Tolstoy was brilliant at rounding out characters so our preconceived notions or the projections of ourselves that we place upon them are forced to be modified as we discover more about them.
Levin had his own problems. He had been reading the great philosophers, looking for answers. He found more questions than answers in religion. He abandoned every lifeboat he climbed into and swam for the next one. ”Without knowing what I am and why I’m here, it is impossible for me to live. And I cannot know that, therefore I cannot live.”
The problem that every reasonably intelligent person wrestles with is that no matter how successful we are, no matter how wonderful a life we build, or how well we take care of ourselves, we are going to die. It is irrefutable. Cemeteries don’t lie. Well, there is a lot of eternal lying down going on, but no duplicity. None of us are going to escape the reaper. No one is ascending on a cloud or going to the crossroads to make a deal with the Devil. We all have to come face to face with death, and we can’t take any of our bobbles, accolades, or power with us. So the question that Levin ended up asking himself, the Biggest question even beyond, why am I here? is:
Why do anything?
Without immortality, everything we attempt to do can seem futile. Some would make the case that we live on in our kids and grandkids. I say bugger to that. I want more time!
Well, there are ways to be immortal, and one of them is to write a masterpiece like Anna Karenina that will live forever.
By the end, I am ready to throttle Anna until her pretty eyes bug out of her head and her cheeks turn a vibrant pink, but at the same time, she seemed to be suffering from a host of mental disorders. She was so cut off from everyone and so disdainful of everyone. ”It was impossible not to hate such pathetically ugly people.” The “friends” she had had been ostracized from her by her own actions. I had to believe her loathing of people was a projection of how she felt about herself. She needed some time on Carl Jung’s couch, but he was a wee tot when this book was published. She needed to find some satisfaction in the ordinary and quit believing that a change in geography or in lovers was ever going to fix what was wrong with herself.
She had such a destructive personality. One man tried to kill himself from her actions and another contemplated the act. She was maliciously vengeful when someone didn’t do something she wanted them to do; and yet, I couldn’t quite condemn her completely. Her feelings of being stifled were perfectly natural. We all feel that way at points in our lives. We feel trapped by the circumstances of our life. Her attempt to break free in the 1870s in Russian society was brave/foolish. She sacrificed everything to chase a dream.
The dream ate her.
This book is a masterpiece, not just a Russian masterpiece but a true gift to the world of literature.
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