As another year comes to an end, I would like to bring to the attention of my readers and fellow bloggers the books, films, music and dance pieces that made me go "Wow!" in the last twelve months. Difficult task it is, though, as I was exposed to so much quality in 2011. I hope you enjoy my selections. Happy New Year everybody!
Books:
Andrea Levy's The Long Song is one of those novels that manages to be both entertaining and clever, rooting the story it tells on so many facts that at times it feels like a documentary. Whether as part of your (expanding) bookshelf, or as a gift for your literature-loving friends, this is a must-read.
Virgilio Piñera's Complete Plays took me down memory lane to a place where I came across my adolescent self face to face once again. What made me fall at that young age for this (supposedly) snobbish, no-nonsense, Cuban intellectual who did not suffer fools gladly, and yet always had a kind word for up-and-coming authors? I don't know but, his love for language, his fearlessness when writing, his endless creativity and the fact that he exuded Cubanness whenever he put pen to paper, are elements that must have contributed to that.
A lot has been said about James Joyce's Ulysses. It's the novel that everyone talks about but whose plot people rarely discuss. That's because there's no plot per se. The book centres on one day in the life of both Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. Above all, for me Ulysses is a very sensorial novel. We not only watch the main characters eating, brawling and (in Bloom's case) engaging in sexual acts, but we feel them, too. In a previous post I questioned Joyce's pole-high position as the pinnacle of modernism. At the time I had not read Ulysses, but now that I have I can tell you all that the hype is justified.
Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine is the type of book I wish it'd been fiction. But no, it's a very real piece of non-fiction. Which makes it the scariest piece I've read for a long time. Naomi carries out a thorough analysis of the economic ideas sponsored by the Chicago School under Milton Friedman's tutelage and traces their links with oppressive regimes across the globe.
Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness was the second book of short stories I bought by the Canadian writer and it like Open Secrets, it didn't disappoint me. She has a way of making the quotidian lives of citizens in and around Ontario extraordinary. But be careful, her fiction is brutal and takes no prisoners.
Music:
This was the year when I managed to have a proper taste of Anoushka Shankar's music. And what a treat it was! The two albums I bought, Breathing Under Water and Traveller have been playing on a loop at home, in the car and on my mp3. Breathing Under Water, where the star sitar-player teams up with percussionist Karsh Kale, is highly lyrical and rooted in Indian classical heritage.
Traveller brings the flamenco tradition back home (it has been widely acknowledged that flamenco has its origins in India) in an organic and fluent way.
The 1956 collaboration between the saxophonist Ben Webster and the piano prodigy Art Tatum, supported by Red Callender on bass and Bill Douglass on drums, was called simply The Legendary: the Album. Such a grandstanding title might attract accusations of hubris, yet each and every single note on the record is pitch perfect. If you like jazz, you must buy this album.
Three records later I consider myself a Concha Buika fan. Her voice should carry a health warning: "Quality on board! Consume carefully". This time around was "La Niña de Fuego" that got me. Concha possesses the type of vocal range that can soar or soothe, depending on its owner's will. Fabulous.
Calima Flamenca was my little surprise this year. They were the wild card about whom I knew very little, mainly through last.fm, and who ended up providing me with two of my favourite tunes of the year from their album Al Calor de la Noche.
Films:
I first saw Missing many years ago and watched it again recently with my wife, courtesy of Lovefilm. Against the backdrop of what's happened in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last ten years with British citizens being arrested and tortured abroad, the movie has a prescient feel. Jack Lemmon is mesmerising as the American, law-abiding, conservative father whose son is "disappeared" in an unnamed country in South America (but we all know it's Chile) and who is forced to acknowledge (with a little help from his daughter-in-law Sissy Spacek) the ugly truth about the US involvement in the dictatorships that sprung up in the 60s, 70s and 80s in the region.
There's not much beauty in Biutiful, by the acclaimed Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu. What there is, though, is a hell of a powerful script and a terrific performance by Javier Bardem as the heartless criminal who at the same time is concerned about the wellbeing of the illegal Chinese immigrants he himself exploits. Impartial and raw.
I had some misgivings about watching The King's Speech because of the buzz surrounding it. Plus, 2011 was the year when the monarchy got its mojo back. I, for one, neither Republican nor pro-Crown, didn't want to be a part of it. But The King's Speech is cinema at its best. No gimmicks, or CGI, just a plain, simple story, beautifully acted by Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush (Helena Bonham Carter gets a look-in, but hers is a minor role) and capable of awakening feelings of mirth and commiseration.
The Secret in Their Eyes was the type of movie that reminded me of how good Argentinian cinema was. Ricardo Darín plays Benjamín Esposito, a retired legal counsellor, who wants to write a novel in an attempt to close a chapter of his life that remains unsolved. Throw in a psychopath, a dictatorship, a corrupt government official and an unfinished love affair and you have one of the better Latin American movies in recent times.
London River tells the story of Elisabeth (played by Brenda Blethyn) and Ousmane (played by Sotigui Kouyaté) whose offspring are killed in the terrorist attack on 7th July, 2005 in London. What starts as hatred, ignorance and racism is eventually transformed into understanding and sympathy. A movie I would watch again.
Dance:
If with Into the Hoods, Katie Prince and ZooNation conquered the West End of London, with Some Like It Hip Hop she has elevated the urban dance form to new levels. Based loosely on Some Like Hot and Shakespeare's Twelth Night, Some Like It Hip Hop deals with mistaken identity, lost daughters and rulers in crisis. The acting is good, the story believable but the dancing, oh, my, oh, my! The dancing is out of this world. Enough to become my dance highlight of 2011.
What will 2012 have in store for me artistically speaking? I don't know but what I can assure is that the quality will be the same or higher. See you next year!
The lights are down, the auditorium is in semi-darkness, nervous coughs can be heard here and there, the expectation mounts, anxiety kicks in. Someone rushes out of their seat, onto the aisle and up the corridor. A last-minute trip to the lavatory perhaps? Two presenters walk to the front of the stage carrying an envelope with them. They're both world-famous celebrities. They take turns in reading out the nominees' names. After some slight banter, they then proceed to open the envelope. The male presenter looks at the camera and out of his mouth the following words come out: "And the Oscar goes to..." The female presenter picks up from where he leaves off and finishes the sentence: "Hillary Mantel". Or is it Jonathan Franzen? Or how about Jacqueline Wilson? Maya Angelou? Margaret Atwood? Salman Rushdie?
The odds are that you won't hear any of those names this coming Sunday 27th February at the 83rd Academy Awards. And why should you, anyway? After all Rushdie et al are not actors, they didn't learn their craft in drama school but in front of a typewriter/keyboard. Leave acting to actors, I hear you say. Yet could there be something else to it? Should we not acknowledge writers' contribution to arts not just as fine écrivains but also as purveyors of drama, suspense and, above all, well-researched characters?
That an author's knack lies in his or her power of luring us into the thick forest of their narrative without caring one jot what dangerous creatures and plants we'll encounter in it, is beyond dispute. And I make no distinction between a novel, a short story or a poem. Whenever you come across well-written fiction, you are exposing yourself to somebody else's world. The writer will use his or her power of make-believe to unveil secrets that he or she might not even be aware of, and should they realise that they're sharing too much, they will be in a position to claim that all was done under the auspice of fiction. Meanwhile their work will - hopefully - affect you both consciously and unconsciously.
And yet, we would never think of labelling that kind of writing as acting. Maybe it's to do with the lack of physicality. Reading is - mostly - a passive activity, whereas acting, even when a performer is merely sitting on a chair, suggests movement. But to me there's no much difference between Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction' with its fragmented storyline and a novel like 'Small Island' by the British writer Andrea Levy with its divided monologues.
'Small Island' tells the story of Queenie, Hortense, Gilbert and Bernard in the aftermath of the Second World War. Queenie is married to Bernard who is sent away to fight in the conflict. She has all but given up any hope of seeing him come back and decides to let out the rooms in her house to Gilbert and Hortense, a married couple who have just arrived from Jamaica. Through flashbacks we learn of the leading characters' previous circumstances.
However, the most significant element in the novel is the use of monologues to signal different points of view. To this one must add the use of various norms of spoken English, from Queenie's medley of Received Pronunciation and the vernacular to Gilbert's Jamaican patois.
Levy's chief achievement is to provide an individual platform for each of her four characters to develop. Except for Bernard, whose contribution is shorter (not strange given that he is more talked about than doing the actual talking), the other three are used deftly by Andrea to depict an important period in British history as accurately as possible. Like a thespian who is well-versed in the art of imbuing his or her characters with their own peculiar traits and quirks, Levy performs a similar trick by making the reader see the world through the eyes of just the one personage in each chapter.
Easy as it might sound, the perils of writing in different voices are various, but one stands out: credibility. The writer owes it to the readers to make his characters' points of view believable, nuanced and distinct, otherwise the charge of implausibility will rear its ugly head. Under normal circumstances in most works of fiction there are usually one or two weak characters that we, as readers, think could do with some tweaking here and there. When the point of view shifts to the first person singular, we feel that our responsibility has increased tenfold. Same with actors. A performer doing rep will probaly take part in a matinée production of 'Much Ado About Nothing' and later on will play Iago in a very different setting. It's not just the lines he will have to learn, but the gestures and mannerisms that set both characters apart.
This is the feat that Andrea Levy pulled off with 'Small Island'. In order to write as accurately as she did about an era that preceded her (she was born in 1956) she had to inhabit the role of each and every member of her dramatis personae. The result is an amazing novel whose views on class, gender and race are precious material for people like me, interested in the UK's rich history, even if this information arrives in the form of ficton. It's also further evidence that the drama techniques pioneered by the likes of Stanislavski, Brecht and Artaud have escaped the narrow confines of theatre and affected the literary landscape, albeit unconsciously. I seriously doubt that Levy sat in front of her keyboard and thought of disturbing the reader's subconscious mind through a mix of light, sound and visual images which would take precedence over the written word. And yet in 'Small Island', I found myself sometimes focusing more on the visual stimulus than the accompanying text, as in this passage when Hortense arrives at Queenie's house for the first time:
"But when I pressed this doorbell I did not hear a ring. No ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling. I pressed once more in case the doorbell was not operational. The house, I could see, was shabby. Mark you, shabby in a grand sort of a way. I was sure this house could once have been home to a doctor or a lawyer or perhaps a friend of a friend of the king's. Only the house of someone high-class would have pillars at the doorway. Ornate pillars that twisted with elaborate design. The glass stained with coloured pictures as a church would have. It was true that some were missing, replaced by cardboard and strips of white tape. But who knows what devilish deeds Mr Hitler's bombs carried out during the war?"
Of course, authors' natural shy disposition (the majority, that is, some others are unashamed publicity-seekers. Stop hiding, Rushdie! I'm talking to you!) makes them unlikely performing material. And they do get their just reward for occasionally researching and becoming their characters. The Bookers, Whitbreads and Oranges attest to that. However, with the amalgamation of many art forms (sculpture with dance, poetry with video) it's not too far-fetched to believe that at some point in the near future we'll see a world-famous celebrity saying: 'And the Oscar goes to... the author'.
Andrea Levy's The Long Song is one of those novels that manages to be both entertaining and clever, rooting the story it tells on so many facts that at times it feels like a documentary. Whether as part of your (expanding) bookshelf, or as a gift for your literature-loving friends, this is a must-read.
Virgilio Piñera's Complete Plays took me down memory lane to a place where I came across my adolescent self face to face once again. What made me fall at that young age for this (supposedly) snobbish, no-nonsense, Cuban intellectual who did not suffer fools gladly, and yet always had a kind word for up-and-coming authors? I don't know but, his love for language, his fearlessness when writing, his endless creativity and the fact that he exuded Cubanness whenever he put pen to paper, are elements that must have contributed to that.
