Michael Kevane

I was out for a long run yesterday on San Jose’s wonderful Guadalupe Park… well maybe not so wonderful but a nice place to run very convenient to our house. Half of the run is alongside the airport, and you do wonder what you are inhaling. Anyway while running I listened to Sebastian Barry read James Joyce’s story Eveline, produced by The Guardian’s short fiction podcast.  Barry tended to “shout” the story out, so I was not so impressed.  Or maybe it was Joyce’s story itself, which seemed very humdrum.  Perhaps at the time it was very innovative in form, but it is hard to see that now.  Certainly the chains of family and place continue to bind.  But relentless storytelling on television and movies and 100 years, since Dubliners, of stories make Eveline read like a soap opera cliché rather than the profound insight that it may have been in 1914.

I’ve always thought Chocolat by Claire Denis to be a wonderfully complex film (even if the Norwegian pastor is cringe-worthy).  Since then it has been all downhill for her unfortunately (Except for Beau Travail which is, well, at least interesting), and I almost never can finish one of her films.  A kind of arrogance of the critic/réalisateur I suppose that she refuses to learn or listen.  Leslie and I tried to watch Les Salauds the other day (streaming on Netflix) and after about 40 minutes we had no trouble turning it off and since then I have no trouble not returning to it, and reading the Wikipedia summary I am very glad I did not waste another hour watching it.

I agree that this is a long way from Claire Denis’s best, and like you I think she’s one of the greats. It’s almost as if Denis decided to make a kind of anti- 35 rhums, rejecting all the warmth of that film and going flat out to portray the most awful set of family relationships conceivable (based in part on Faulkner’s Sanctuary, it seems). The result, unfortunately, is a film almost any director could have made by piling on the menace and horror right up to the end.

comment from the comments section of Bastards (Les Salauds) – review | Peter Bradshaw | Film | The Guardian.

I was running and listening to Joseph O’Neill reading Muriel Spark’s “The Ormolu Clock” in a The New Yorker fiction podcast and halfway into the story my battery died and suddenly there was silence. But why do we care about the Ormolu clock? I practically screamed.  When I finally got around to hearing the rest of the story today, well, it was in the end a small jewel like the clock itself I suppose.  Treisman and O’Neill have a nice discussion but neither mentions what I thought my own rather heavy-handed interpretation: Herr Stroh gazes intently with his binoculars at the writer (narrator is writing at the time, maybe tapping his head with his pen).  The writer will tell the story. In the story, Stroh’s reality may well be inverted, and the passive slob becomes the transcendent victim.  It isn’t time that erodes Ozymandias’ empire, but the story tellers.

I got this through my university inter-library loan and read it during a trip down to Los Angeles to visit with my mother.  I had no idea what it was going to be about.  It is a tri-cross between a cloning novel (Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro is now the reference novel, even though it came out 3-4 years after Nekropolis) and a novel about grinding life in poverty (my list of novels about poverty) and a novel about the human condition (as Lucky Dube put it, we are born to suffer).  In the end, where Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is grim, grim, grim, Nekropolis is almost unendurably sad, sad, sad.  Great reviews over at Goodreads.

Read this last night. Definitely a good story, once you get started you just keep going all the way to the end, and when you get to the end you immediately go back to sections of the story, the way a good story compels you to try to unpack it right away.   Not many stories can leave you with a sharp picture, and at the same time a feeling of ‘Wait, what just happened there?” and this one does.  A few false notes in the dialogue, I though.  But what do I know about how people in farming towns talked 150 years ago?   Mookse offers some excellent commentary, as usual.

I really liked Maureen McHugh’s “The Cost to be Wise,” and would assign to a class if I were teaching a fieldwork oriented anthropology class.  It made me think of Doomsday Book, but told from the point of view of one of the “primitives.”A nice review is here.  Apparently expanded and published as a novel called Mission Child.