A Different Kind of Bookish Wrap-Up

I can vaguely remember myself exactly one year ago. Content, after a very eventful year, full of expectations from myself and the others, sickly caught in other people´s nightmares. I was moving on, the right foot in the front of the left but things were not right though. I had a moonshine smile and no one was around me to warn me that some things may not be completely right with me.

And life continued to go on. I was planning my trips, enjoying weekends away and writing about it, pursuing my parenting goals and getting distracting by peculiar dating. I was randomly reading about a new virus and reminded bravely that I survived SARS in Asia a couple of years back so nothing to fear about. I kept having respiratory arrest once in a while but at the end of every bout, that were becoming more and more frequent, I was congratulating myself for surviving it. I was in pain but the Ibuprofen was helping me and was grateful for the rarer moment when I was pain-free, able to fully breath and in full control of my body.

Day after day, my situation and the world´s peace of mind were rapidly deteriorating. By mid-February, I was caughing and was unable to walk more than five minutes without taking a break. News about people who were starting to die because of the COVID 19 were more and more intense. I gave up going to the office any more and started working from home, because my physical strength was almost nonexistent. I was losing weight, and I needed a very long time to reach my apartment on the third floor. 

Meanwhile, I kept reading and reading and learning a new language. My intellectual activities were keeping me distracted from the abyss I was slowly and almost willingly drowing. In the long nights when I was unable to sleep because of the pain and the constant sweating I always kept the tablet near my bed. I kept taking notes and was seriously evaluating my German writing skills that were slightly improving. 

Mid-March I was hurried to hospital, with a slim 20% chances of survival. I haven´t been informed by the prognosis but it was common sense that by delaying with almost one year a proper investigation into the cause of my sickness I was slowly killing myself probably because I was too much in love with myslelf and unable to understand and accept what was going on with me in the last four years of stress and pressure and more or less real scenarios so similar with Not Without My Daughter scenario, only that the action was taking place in a different country and I was a little bit smarter than the woman protagonist of this movie/book. 

What mattered the most in the time between March and April was how to get back to life. What kind of life was expecting me? For how long? How I was about to survive me and my son? From the hospital bed, I was chatting on WhatsApp with my beautiful friend Monica Bhide who kept sending me words of encouragement and bookish inspiration. I was not able to talk again yet, and no one knew for sure if and when my voice will return, but writing was always my second nature so I kept writing and communicating with the doctors and nurses with pen on paper. Shortly after waking up at the ER, I requested my laptop and tablet and kept in touch with the outside world. But more importantly, I was reading book after book, measuring my long days and the intervals between the early morning and early evening checkings through the books I was reading. Yeah, finally I had enough time to read and catch up with authors outside of my comfort zone and I was grateful for it.

Gratefulness was my state of mind: grateful every morning for the beautiful panorama from the 19th floor of the Charité over a Berlin whose streets were empty during the lockdown. Grateful for the generous nurses that were taking care of me and were bringing me extra expensive creams for my dried hands and were massaging my died muscles, for the short ergotherapy exercises, even for the painful waiting to get my MRT and other radioactive checkings. 

After one month, I was released for a couple of days, and was finally reunited with my little family, walking the streets, doing some shopping and finally reading from my bed. My smile ceased for a long time being a cartoonish facade hiding my feelings and disappointments. I was able to smile from the bottom of my heart, because I was on the right way, and surprisingly for everyone, I was recovering faster than anyone expected. Living in the world of the intellect distracted me from realizing how serious my problems were, indeed, but right now, by strengthening my spirit my body was slowly recovering from the trauma as well.

While in hospital, I was able to keep a limited touch with my freelancing work, while being offered a full-time contract. I was waking up around 5.30 - a habit that I keep until now - and scheduling various activities - book blogging being by far one of the most important. April was by far the most productive reading time of the year and book blogging month so far, and it coincides with the most intense recovering period. 

By end of May, I was treated ambulatory and as the Corona lockdown was eased, I was fully back to life: my treatment continued but I was integrating my medical schedule into my daily busy working and parenting life. My travel was supposed to be kept on hold this year, I was fully aware of it, but at least I was convinced that I will survive until the next year and able to get back on the road again. 

Reading was filling those moments when I was longing for far away countries and places. This year, more than ever, I was discovering more and more authors outside the white Western world. I was getting lost in beautiful poetry, with more favorite poets added to my list of beloved authors, like, for instance, Forugh Farrokhzad. 

Another important achievement of this year was the increased number of movies I watched: especially through MUBI and Amazon Prime, I had access to films that kept me intellectually distracted with new images and feelings, and outstanding film directors. 

For a long time, I skeptically avoided audiobooks, because I was considering myself unable to connect to book other than through the written word. My hunger for knowledge was bigger than the prejudices: listening to books - I started with nonfiction and political books, easier to watch, but right now I am able to follow literature as well - I was smartly using some dead times while doing various administrative works or organising the house. I especially insisted to listen to German-speaking books because, I will never be happy enough with my German. Meanwhile, I started learning just another language, while finally getting some extra freelancing gigs in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese - and grateful about the time my mother - of blessed memory - spent insisting to learn those languages.

Month after month, book after book, my situation was improving until people that met me first in March had to check twice if the person they have in the front of them is the same me. My voice is back - another medical surprise for many - but I prefer to think twice before saying something. It´s a decent recognition that words do have such a lethal power in our lives that sometimes can instantly kill someone. 

My recovery process meant also that I had to leave many people behind. I know they are much better without me as I am happy to be out of their story. This is how I´ve learned to appreciate those people that I let enter my life for the rare character feature of being themselves. And here is my favorite love-quote of the year: ´Loving someone just because of who they are as a person is rare, rather than mainstram media has led us to believe. Often, we´re propelled to love people because they fit, if not perfectly, comfortably, into what we need at that point in our lives´ by the author of Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier. 

I am grateful for reaching this point in my personal and professional life. All my beautiful failures I went through were just an encouragement to keep walking - and reading- in order to be ready for this beautiful moment. I am looking further to the next 12 months with no other plans than living and loving and reading. It´s enough for now.

Movie Review: A Time for Drunken Horses directed by Bahman Ghobadi

 

One more movie until 2020 is officially gone. In just a couple of days I will dearly miss those days when I am doing nothing but searching for new movies to watch, crossed which book to read first and trying to find some time for writing my reviews. Soon, way too soon, I should be back in the business and there is nothing I can do about it. Except, as usual, get the best of each and every moment of my troubled life.

A Time for Drunken Horses belongs to the realistic branch of the Iranian cinema, with a pronounced social outline. The film director, Bahman Ghobadi, worked once as an assistant for Kiarostami - that I used to love a lot because I was completely ignorant about other significant voices - is of Kurdish origin. This movie is considered the first Kurdish film ever produced in Iran and it is inspired of the life in a marginal village at the Iranian-Iraqi border.

Movies with a social topic can be done beyond any ideological bias. The focus on a given reality that the artist is describing realistically does not need any matrix. I am not a Marxist, the opposite of a socialist, but I always find inspiration in social everyday life topics, both in my writing, the books I am reading or the movies I am watching. 

In A Time for Drunken Horses, five orphaned children in a poor Kurdish village at the border are fighting to survive the everyday life. Life or death are irrelevant, survival is the daily challenge. There is so much strength and fragility in the way in which those children are coping naturally with their situation. The children actors are excellent players and bring so much depth to the movie. Their kindness and solidarity in a world of adults that is using them without regrets and second thoughts is moving. I felt both sad and morally invigorated after watching this movie, because it shows the simple human struggles that we may not expect so dramatically experienced by little children. 

I watched the movie on MUBI, which proved to be in the last weeks a precious source of quality movies featuring outstanding film directors from all over the world.

Rating: 4 stars

Movie Review: Farewell Amor directed by Ekwa Msangi

Farewell Amor, the debut by Tanzanian-American Ekwa Msangi who is also a writer and a producer, is top on the list of the best movies I´ve watched this year. 

Reunited after 17 years, separated by the Angolan war and the immigration of the father to America, the family of three is together again. The long years of separation changed everyone, but love unites them. The accomodation doesn´t go always smoothly, but they are trying to write a new story of life and love, starting with what unites them: dancing. 

It´s a relatively easy story, but it concentrates enough human tension, love and longing to keep you interested during the whole duration of the movie. Each and every one of the characters are challenged to cope with their own shortcomings and small or big betrayals, to reponder their relationship and validate what keeps them together. Do the roots planted in this relationship that resisted 17 years without a direct physical contact keep them together once reunited in America? Are values stronger than the disparate feelings?

Farewell Amor is a beautiful story of human resilience and fragility, played simply yet genuinely by the actors. One may not (always) need big events and dramatic encounters to raise the interest. Often, everyday life stories are more than enough to beg a return to the intensity of human life. 

The movie was released this year at the Sundance Film Festival. The movie is available on MUBI, I have access to for free via my scribd subscription. 

Rating: 4.5 stars

Listening to Arabic Poetry in French

 

Maybe this year I was not very successful in more than half of my endeavours, but at least I succeeded in reaching one goal: reading more poetry, both in original and in translation. For the end of the year, I offered myself another gift of poetry, while listening to the Anthology of Arab Poetry, as audiobook, in the French reading of the French-Moroccan baritone of Jewish origin David Serero.

The book is relatively short to listen to - around 30 minutes - and covers an impressive time amount - ambitiously, it promises from the origins until the current times. It´s an ambitious aim limited by time and definitely subjective as a personal choice. I was particularly pleased by listening to a translated poem by the Iraqi poetess Nazik al-Malaika whose works are not easy to find for the non-Arabic reader (an edition of a bilingual Arabic/English translation of her poems was recently published and will be happy to get my eyes and the soul on it soon). 

Traditionally, France has a good amount of literate Arabic-speakers therefore biased or not for cultural reasons, I may embrace faster a French translation instead of translations from non-Natives to other languages. 

This collection may be just a grain of sand but it does good to a late winter evening of a year like no other. I´ve listened to the audiobook more than once and would probably do so again and again a couple of times. 

Rating: 4.5 stars

Book Review: The Door by Magda Szabó

How estranged may I be from my Central and Eastern European origins for not reviewing and writing too many authors from this intellectually rewarding part of the world? I hope that next year will help me to return to a realm that I used to love and hate so much many springs ago, because sometimes too cruel to be true...

I was familiar with Magda Szabó for a long time as a literary name, but haven´t been able to return to a predictable geopolitical-literary setting for a long time. I do speak Hungarian well and I have a healthy connection to my Hungarian heritage, particularly from the intellectual point of view, through writings of Pétér Esterházy (who even autographed a translated version of his monumental Celestial Harmonies), Pétér Nádas, György Konrád or Imre Kertész and even the complicated László Krasznakorkai. Somehow, I´ve ignored Hungarian women writers and I am still trying to figure out whose fault it is/was. Every time I was back to some Hungarian literary figure, it was always a man´s world. And me, I´ve stop way too early from exploring it in its all small and big details anyway.

The Door is my first direct encounter with her work, and hopefully not the last (I´ve seen many of her books were translated into German as well so it may help to improve my language skills as well). I had access to the book in the English-translation, as an audiobook read by the British actress Sian Thomas whose voice was an excellent choice. 30% of the reason I keep up with the book - whose completion took me a couple of weeks - was because of the affectionate voice of the reader, which suits so well the story itself.

The main storyteller is a writer - probably an alter ego of the writer herself, whose name is mentioned only in the last part of the book, in its diminutive form, Magdushka). Shortly before the story starts she was allowed to write again - we are talking about a Hungary under communism - and she is living together to her writer husband in a village. As her intellectual and social assignments diversifies, she needs a househelper. Then, she meets Emerence, with whom a 20-year complex relationship develops. Emerence is more than a household help, she turns into a practical, mundane alter ego fo the writer, challenging her and creating a variety of situations outside the writer´s intellectual comfort zone. It is a complex relationship that goes far beyond the usual categorization of two women belonging to two different mental lanes and upbringing. For me, it has to do with the very role of the writer and the intellectual in a society, the denials and the deceits. Translated into a very specific historical and political context - which unfolds permanently cinema-like in the background: the Horthy years, the Stalinist years, the censorship, the 1956 ´Revolution´ (with quotes because personally I think that unfortunatelly those events did not change anything revolutionary, except the wave of persecutions against intellectuals and the number of Hungarians who had to leave the country) - it defines the very condition of the Hungarian writer and intellectual at the given historical time.  

I´ve finished the book a couple of days already, and keep thinking about it. Although it belongs to a specific context, The Door is more than a Hungarian story. It belongs to the register of books dedicated to intellectual struggles and stories and the subtle art of the writer make it valuable beyond its time. I can only hope that in the next weeks and months will be able to share more stories authored by writers from this geographical realm that the more I am isolated from - due to the current travel restrictions, among others - the more I long to connect.

Rating: 4 stars 

Book Review: Before the Coffee Gets Cold. Tales from the Café

Some topics and genres simply cannot get tolerated by my writing stomach, no matter how much I try, and I try, and I try...One is the science-fiction genre which I approach highly cautious. Once in a while it may happen to like some books written in this vein, but I don´t remember exactly which one was the last that I really enjoyed. The other one has to do with time travel that my very mathematical and practical mind simply cannot cope with easily.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold. Tales from the Café by Toshikazu Kawaguchi is a sequel of a previous book featuring a café where one can visit under specific conditions in order to turn back in time to meet for a limited amount of time the loved ones who died. One of the condition is that those loved ones have visited the place previously. Another is that the visit is short, just ´before the coffee gets cold´. As in the case of many nostalgic time travel books, one cannot do anything in the past in order to change the course of events.

The book - which I had access to in audiobook format - includes three stories of longing for beloved relatives that disappeared in tragic, sometimes brutal conditions. At the beginning of each a short round up of the Café´s infolvement with time travel is repeated which does not make too much sense. Also, the writing is relatively easy and simple, and this is not a compliment, but I can only perhaps blame the translator.

As for the topic, the way in which the stories were written did not appeal to me at all. There are a couple of moral dilemma of the characters, especially when it comes to sharing aspects of the daily life and the decisions took - and some lies surrounding the circumstances of the people who died. But, otherwise, everything there is anything really impressive or literary significant about the stories and the topic.

As someone who lost a couple of very significant people in my life starting with an early age, I never had the feeling, urge or need to want to meet them again though. Life is short, try to humbly appreciate the presence of other humans in your life but why things are happening and how and why those we love are disappearing out of our lives is not a reversible process. Thinking this way is a very good protection against despair and helps to move further on with my/yours too/ life. I don´t want to change anything from my past, just want to live every moment of the present in its genuine uniqueness. 

Rating: 2 stars (The evaluation covers both the writing, as convened through the translation) and the topic
 

Matchmaking, Indian Style

´Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match...´

Long, but not so long time ago, I wasn´t aware that matchmaking - through a traditional knowledgeable matchmaker - may be a way of getting married in other communities than mine. Me, I´ve been there: preparing a CV with stronger credentials than a job application - who cares in a job application how learned are your family members four or five generations before? -, getting a list of features I want to see in my future husband, how many childrens (´Gd´s will´ is not the right answer in this context, no matter how religious you are, you have to say at least 6), if you are willing to support his religious studies or...well, there are so many other details to figure out. And then, the moment when from the huge mountain of CVs - who decreases with age - you pick up a couple of them, and you proceed to the next step: meeting him, together or separately from his/her family. And there are also those hours or days or even weeks after the first meeting with that one that decides to not proceed further to another date. Traditional dating can be heartbreaking and very emotional and some pray more and some cease to pray at all, but there are happy matches and unhappy couples that may divorce but also children - 6 or more or less - whose birth is the result of that meeting that was the result of the careful work of a matchmaker.

And there is Indian Matchmaking, a series of movies on Netflix I just finished to watch (this is how I am spending the end of the year vacation time so expect many more movie reviews soon). It features the resilient and diligent Sima Taparia from Mumbai who is crossing the Ocean to help young people find their right match. Her clients are well educated, with a very stable income, successful, young and beautiful and looking to start their next chapter of their life. 

Matchmaking is a tough job and Sima uses once in a while the help of a face-reader and a horoscope reader and prays a lot for a successful outcome for her clients. Sometimes she sends her clients to see a life coach or therapist or she is using the help of other matchmakers, with a different, more diversified database of customers. In the Indian culture, there is the concept of Nimit, a mediator, a person who is destined to bring two persons together and Sima is dutifully belonging to this category. She is realistic, keeps a sense of humour no matter what but equally mean enough when some of her clients are just too much. But 

The movie is in fact a reality show, with Sima´s clients and their parents - oh, especially their mothers with a clear plan to see their children, particularly boys, married - followed in real-life situations. I love to watch the deeply human part of the individual stories shared, the pain of previous failed relationships, the excitement of looking for something new, or the awkwarness of meeting someone completely out of your game.  

Even not necessarily interested in the dating game, there is so much to learn from this movie about society shifts and generational expectations, the truth and dare about real love and relationships, that are not necessarily born out of pure, wild, genuine love. My favorite part is the short snapshots with people married for over 30 years or even 50, old Indian couples who married for completely other reasons than love - mostly because those were the society expectations and their parents wanted it so, but still are gently together sharing a life of love. Despite the awkwarness of the traditional dating process, there is always hope for love and sometimes, there is a destiny that brings to human beings together. Full of hope for my own love life, from the bottom of my broken heart, I trully hope so.

 

Book Review: Tree of Life by JF Penn

´It´s time to end the Anthropocene, the age of humans´.

I rarely follow book series because in my bookish experience, they are rarely equal. It may take a couple of mediocre installment until the real geam of the book is revealed and I don´t have that much time anyway.

The Arkane series by J.F.Penn is my exception. I can´t wait for the next book as from a volume to another, there are always extraordinary adventures in the world of religious fanaticism taking place. It explores the worlds beyond our everyeday life, where religion truths are split into thousands of thruths, offered as take-aways for the daily apocalypse. With every book, there are old secrets and rituals revealed and the race against the machine of the Arkane Institute representatives to stop the world from collapse. 

In Tree of Life, the 11th book from the series, Morgan Sierra and Jack Timber are tracing an attempt to recreate/localize the Garden of Eden. The daughter of a mining industrialist who wants to restore the Earth meets a fanatic Christian order who owns a seed that can recreate the Garden in different parts of the world. 

The story has complex layers and the plot is spreading in different directions, creating suspense while creating a space for the intellectual and philosophical discussions. ´While Morgan certainly understood the devastation that humans did on the face of the Earth, they also achieved wonderful things in conjunction with nature´. The Garden of Eden is a dream and searching for it on Earth, beyond the simple biblical meaning, was a current concern among the religious orders of the Middle Ages (J.F.Penn offers at the end of the book a vast bibliography of sources she consulted in writing this book, among which Jean Delumeau´s History of Paradise, an excellent reference in this respect). But it might be that the dream is not always replicating a reality, any kind of reality. 

In the book, the Garden, which is found this time on the highest peak of Sahand Mountain, in Iran, close to the borders with Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan ´was no manicured lawn with pruned trees and tamed flower beds as depicted in every artistic rendering of Adam and Eve in Paradise. This was an underground rainforest, an abundance of color and growth, teeming with life. This was Nature unbound´. 

Tree of Life is skillfully balancing the ideas with the thriller action and there is so many discussions and ideas to think about, from the natural longing of humanity for perfection and peace in the middle of the nature, to the eco-terrorism and religious fanaticism based on obscures references which obliterate, willingly or not, the specific contexts and nuances. 

For me this is probably one of the favorite from the series, but I cannot be sure to settle too soon, at least until the next book is coming out.

Rating: 4.5 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered by the author in exchange for an honest review

Book Review: Muslim by Zahia Rahmani

´When guns, war, beards, verbs, deaths, bombs, meat, words, shouts, women, children, tears, theft, hate, lying, stupidity, vulgarity, ignorance, rape, skin, soliders, crying out, snapping of the jaws, disdain, abjection, infamy, destruction, and ignorance invaded, I was scared´. 

´Are you one of us?´

Zahia Rahmani, one of France´s leading art historians and fiction writer, accounts in Muslim, the second book of an autobiographically inspired trilogy about the intricacies of her faith and language. I´ve read it in the English translation as I didn´t want to wait until will get my French language copy from the French Institute. I felt the pressure of reading it - and I did in one short installment, as the book is relatively short - as every time when I am brought back to thinking about French, my language of a country. 

She grew up speaking Tamazight, a language of the Berbers. ´I was born into the world in a minor language. A language that was passed on orally, a language that was never read. We called it Tamazight. A Berber language that throughout the incursions of history was guarded tightly by its people for what it knew. For the people of the Atlas mountains, in the regiony of Kabylie, in the Areos mountains, where the Mozabites and Tuareg lived, it was in their language and in their traditions that islam was introduced´. In France, it was the French language, that took her over, a jealous possessive kind of language that does not accept equals or betrayals, even if she is not the first choice. ´She takes you, guides upon her, seduces you, then, if she thinks you´re unfaithful, she insults you in every way possible. It´s narcissistic, but it´s her capriciousness that gives you power. That´s no chance of irreverence with her. Above all else, don´t doubt her benevolence and her intentions. No other language is allowed. She´s very jealous´.

In Zahia Rahmani´s world, languages are competing for taking over the human soul. The human soul longs for its home built up on words. When the words escape and the languages are hit, there is no home. The human soul longs for a home. Language has a life and desire of its own and it may return when it wants to, as a haunting ghost. ´Why did I stop talking my language several months after I left Algeria, and why then did it come back to me ten years later´? You cannot cut a language out of your life, divorce it, obliterate it completely. Following a language and renouncing another is more than a cultural choice, is a life-and-death choice, both for the soul. ´I was born into a minor language and escaped from a distant nowhere where that didn´t want me´. 

But there is more to the identity than the words, that are taken away anyway. ´I don´t know what the word ´nationality´ means. It filled me with anxiety´. 

There is the assigned religion too. A religion that is at home no. 1 distorted through foreign influences - ´The rigor of Saudi Arabia was the new law of the land´ - and whose belonging is negatively attributed at home no. 2. There is the general assumption of what a religion, any religion should be, and how it´s assigned followers must behave in both private and public circumstances. ´For me, I think of God as a protocol, an agreement among people. But the rowdy crowd barred the road in front of me. So, ´my´ God? They simply brought him down from heaven for me´.

Zahia Rahmani writes so simple tragic truth. It´s an empathic prose, decently desillusioned, but decided to share the truth and the pains. This is the safe space where public intellectuals meet.

Rating: 4 stars

Book Review: The Fox by Sólveig Pálsdóttir

´Don´t go too far from the house and don´t spend too long outside. People can lose their lives and there are lot of foreigners who have died of exposure in Iceland. They get lost in the dark and simply freeze to death, and it´s a dreadful way to go. Yes, and watch out for foxes. They can attqacl people. Once there was a man who feel and broke his leg outside in storm, and a fox chewed his foot right off´.

Iceland is associated - more than my beloved Switzerland - with pristine landscapes and sky reflecting lagoons, an invitation to self reflection and serenity. But too much isolation in the middle of the nature - which is way different than the human projection of it - is a pressure the human fragility can hardly cope with.

The Fox by Sólveig Pálsdóttir, translated by Quentin Bates himself a writer of crime fiction based in Iceland, was recently published by the courageous new edition house Corylus Books offering also a fine selection of Romanian Noir in English translation. Bringing talented authors of crime stories to the English audiences is a remarkable project and I will keep this edition house under the radar for the time being, both for the literary and the geographical selection. 

The book is like no other I´ve read recently. The tension and suspense are insinuating surreptitiously while describing serene landscapes. The inevitability of the evil nested here and his further extension may be surprising at the first sight. In fact, the erratic human emotions mirror the uncontrollable force of natural phenomenon.  

A Sri Lankan-born resident of Reykjavik arrives in a remote part of Iceland following a job offer at a beauty parlor. Once landed here and convinced that she was duped, she is trying to find some temporar work. An offer to clean at a farm owned by a weird mother-son duo comes with the perks of free lodging. But there is nothing like a free lunch as the two, plus the owner of a hostel with a shady past that actually brought her there, are part of a complex operation which involves drug dealing as well as bizarre belief into ´elf women´ and ´hidden people´. 

25% into the book one may not be sure where everything is heading, although this isolated farm calls for ´noir´ - a bit cliché, I know. The mixture between imagination and reality is so well stirred up that far into the reading, the sipping may be lethal. The suspense is built up skilfully and only the introduction of new characters - such as the policeman on a leave, again a bit cliché - create a bit of diversion, enough until the next story threshold. 

The tension and suspense do not always correspond to an equal development of the tensionate and suspenseful story as such, and the additional episodes created around the main plot are distracting and not always matching. The end is too precipitate and ordinary compared to the rest of the story.

However, The Fox - that has an outstanding book cover - was worth the reading ride and made me curious about the literary life in Iceland.

Rating: 3.5 stars

 

Movie Review: The Whistlers directed by Corneliu Porumboiu

The last time I watched a Romanian movie it was about the endemic corruption in the country. The everyday life struggle to survive amidst the pressure of various authorities and small bureaucrats for their share. 5 here, 5 there, and your meagre monthly salary is gone paying for what you naturally deserve - like being released an official document or, the worse nightmare, for a normal medical service. Hence, the movies with a big success on the outside markets treating this topic. Personally I think it is about time - for 20 years already - to make movies about something else like love, heartbreak, death and love again. But actually, some of those movies threating about corruption are so good...

It happen to know more about Corneliu Porumboiu than he being a successful film director of international fame and I was always impressed by the personality of this young Romanian artist. La Gomera - The Whistlers - is Porumboiu´s fifth movie, produced the last year both in Romania and France. I watched the movie on MUBI part of my scribd monthly subscription. 

Half-black comedy, half-drama, La Gomera is a mafia story: about policemen and other law&order authorities playing hard with those they are supposed to catch, for the price of thousand of dollars even millions. The policeman Cristi even travels to Canary Islands to learn a secret whistling system in order to organise a spectacular escape of a mafia person in Romania. There are no regrets and things are prepared in cold blood. The policeman comes relatively from a place of wealth, lives alone, relatively modestly, so why does he needs the money for? Hilariously, everyone is watching and being watched however the perversity of the system is so that everyone escapes because they know how to oil it. 

Porumboiu turned this everyday drama into a tragi-comical movie, with various intertextual references to local and American movies. It´s a movie packed of action, absurd change of situations and an overall good play of the actors, although I may not be able to single out one or another of the actors. None plays bad, actually. The eclectic musical background deserves an extra mention as it amplifies the despair and put into perspective the ridiculous fate of the characters.

Hopefully, one day will come when there will be sucessful Romanian movies about love, heartbreak and love again. By the way, just found out they have parliamentary elections today, but at a first sight, I rarely see some hopes for a change.

Rating: 4 stars

Everyday Life Magic

 ´Give the people what they want, yes, but why not give them something truly amazing´.

Graham Swift writes with a medical precision. The words is at their place and together they create a world that cannot fail the rules of magic design. When I´ve seen his name on the cover, I couldn´t resist the temptation to grab the book, Here We Are, as I knew that no matter the topic, there will be some beautiful wording to enjoy.

Set in a timeline that covers the WWII years in the UK, but also the performing arts scene at the end of the 1950s until 2009, this short book is a story about a three magicians, Jack and Ronnie and Evie, their assistant. It´s an everyday life story of their shows, interactions, disappearances and tricks. Evie, now in her mid 70s, reminds it, but what exactly does she remember? How can she cover facts that were not lived by her, just shared parsimoniously and anyway, subjective interpretations?

It is an elegant game of memory sharing and memories telling in this book that supersedes any clear plot which is almost non-existent. The story goes on, although unsure where it goes and why it is told. It is a matter of writer´s choice who wants to bring to life specific characters and their timelines.

This is one of the reasons why it took me so long to read the book who is less than 200 pages. I didn´t feel involved in the story at all, although definitely appreciative of the writing. I didn´t feel that I really matter, as a reader and I didn´t want it necessarily but the little everyday life is so self-centered and the ´we´ from the title misleading. Which make my reading experience mixed, although worth the effort.

Rating: 3 stars

Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran

I rarely read a book and watch the movie one after the other, but in this case, it was a very interesting experience, as both the book and the movie maginifies the ideas and meanings.

THE BOOK

Women without Men. A Novel of Modern Iran by Shahrnush Parsipur is a cruel read. That world, of a modern Iran, is not safe for women. Men are temperamental, demanding, mean, cheaters, abusers, absent. The women from the book try to escape or face them. There are times of change, as the events are taking place with the 1953 coup against the prime minister Mossadegh in the background. In the book, this is just the context, but women´s fate is not necessarily influenced by the events. Out of time, they are the victims.

´Unfortunately, it is still not a time for a woman to travel by herself. She must either become invisible, or stay cooped up in a house. My problem is that I can no longer remain housebound, but I have to, because I am a woman´. The women before being without men are deeply sad and overwhelmed by an emptiness that has no clear cause. They cannot be emancipated because there is no word for what they want. Not yet. One of them turns into a tree that should grow up when watered with breast milk. 

´A sane person does not turn into a tree´, said the man, the green thumb gardener. At least a tree can breath free.

´They embraced the morning glory. The morning glory wrapped its foliage around them and they all rose to the sky in a puff of smoke´. The sanest way to disappear by necessity. No need to read through a miraculous alphabet here. There is a loveless world here.

For writing this book, Shahrnush Parsipur spent 4 years and seven months in prison. Since 1994, she lives in USA. The book is banned in the Islamic Republic since the mid-1980s.

THE MOVIE

Creating a movie after the book lasted 6 years and was done by the USA-based Iran-born visual artist Shirin Neshat together with the author. The movie lasts 1h36 and is available on Amazon Prime, part of the monthly membership. For obvious reasons mentioned above, the movie could not be filmed in Iran, but in Casablanca. 

What the book is lacking in terms of visual appeal, the movie made justice. The silent, word-free nature inuendo is speaking straight the language of sadness and overwhelming emotions. Words are not needed any more.

The movie is also more political than the book, with a stronger echo and a clearer contextualisation, but also with grotesque situations that are not obvious in the book. 

I cannot tell which one is the best, but I am glad I took the chance of following one after the other, as there are details in the movie which are not clear unless one´s read the book. 

I do have another book by Shahrnush Parsipur on my TBR but I would prefer to wait a little bit until I digest all the strong impressions from Women Without Men.