Perhaps to love is to learn
The young reader is likely to doggedly finish a book, no matter how bad. The older reader simply abandons the book if it is going nowhere. After several months of starting books only to put them aside half way through, I found myself unable to put down Dinaw Mengestu’s Children of the Revolution (though I quite prefer its alternative title The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears). Set in Washington, the novel’s narrator, Sepha Stephanos, is an immigrant who fled Ethiopia’s Red Terror for the US and is now content to mind his store, read his books and while away the days. His friends, Kenneth and Joseph are immigrants too and much of the novel follows their numerous meetings and discussions. Sepha’s world – one of limbo between the past and the present – is changed by the arrival of Judith, a white woman and her daughter Naomi as Sepha’s corner of the earth gentrifies. Mengestu’s novel is simple and elegant and barely freighted down by the many issues that lie beneath. For the novel touches on the history of Africa (e.g. by way of a game the friends play where you guess the African dictator, his country and the year of his ascent), family, the immigrant experience, the changing nature of Washington, race relations in the US and the like. But its characters are so believable and so true and Sepha himself such a wholly sympathetic narrator that Mengestu is successful in making individual histories representative of the larger changes they live through. And Judith herself is not a caricature, as in many immigrant novels, but wholly believable, you can see why Sepha would be attracted to her. Further, Mengestu provides a tender portrait of the relationship between Naomi, who has an absent father and Sepha. In fact, Mengestu is compassionate towards all his characters, all of them seem flesh and blood people even when, as for e.g. with the friends, they represent different African experiences. At the end of the book, I was ready to go back and start reading it all over again.
It’s kind of hard to describe their aesthetic without sounding over the top so I feel some hyperbole coming on. It’s sort of a frayed Neo-Victorian/Dickensian/fairy tale/Gothic world and therefore perhaps a derelict, romantic Tim Burtonian world. It makes the every day world theatrical. It is decidedly fey and the name itself conjures up the enchantment of the light of the night. So...I am more than a little in love with it.
More mundanely, I guess I like the way the scraps of clothes are carefully chosen to come together to form something so vivid and distinctive. And the sense that the evolution of the garments is organic and doesn't stem from a pattern.
Last words from the daily poetics blog which used a Robert Browning quote for the Gibbous post:
I would have rummaged, ransacked at the word; Those old odd corners of an empty heart; For remnants of dim love the long disused, And dusty crumbling of romance!
It rained pretty much through the weekend. When it let up a bit on Sunday, I walked to my cousin’s place, coat fastened (it was also cold) and umbrella in hand. Autumn has passed so the streets were sodden, full of bedraggled leaves. On the aspens lone catkins, on the sycamores browning fruits. A few autumnal leaves held on here and there. One tree resolutely held out, still a rich yellow, its leaves intact. The flowers of kerbside weeds had long died but the grasses soldiered on, their stalks touched pink. As did the vines, brilliantly green with the rain. In the gardens of the suburb, ubiquitous orange trees in fruit. Many a garden full of jonquils, calendula and roses. The faint perfume of the jonquils and roses. For a minute here and there the wet evening, the darkening landscape, the walkers seemed to belong to another century. Particularly when you pass elegant old houses called Inverness, Esperanza and Pevensey. At my cousin’s place, my niece is a warm, sweet bundle of joy. And my cousin herself is elegant in black and white wool, a tiny domestic goddess serving tea and freshly baked banana cake.
I have been wanting to see Claire Denis’ work for ages and was pleasantly surprised to find that 35 Rhums, Denis’ homage to Ozu, was screening at the Sydney Film Festival. Of course, given that Late Summer is one of my favourite films, it was more than likely that 35 Rhums would leave me a little disappointed but it was still a chance to see the director’s work. As in Late Summer, 35 Rhums deals with the strong bond between a daughter and father. There are two outsiders as in Late Summer though the potential erotic bonds between the four is made more explicit. The ending of 35 Rhums is a little different in that the daughter does leave her father but for someone she loves. Still, as the ending scenes make clear, the husband may well remain an outsider. I think the weakness of Denis’s film is that the father-daughter bond is affectionate but never makes you believe that it is the primary bond. There is an undercurrent of sensuousness to Denis’s film – this is not wholly absent in Ozu’s film either but it is subsumed by the filial bond. In 35 Rhums it simply seems to exist alongside. Perhaps one is prejudiced by the French setting but the characters all look like they are more than ready to explore any erotic impulses. And Denis’ has a misstep with an insertion of race politics (the characters in 35 Rhums are almost all French-African) by way of the daughter’s classroom lecture as well as a visit to the dead mother's family - both have little place in the film. Yet the film has a warm and sweet feel if not the poignancy of Ozu's film. Also the look and feel of the film is impeccable -the trains, the tracks, the night time scenes, the apartments, the bars are an integrated world (Denis’s cinematographer is Agnes Godard).
The Festival also screened Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7. Varda’s film follows a young singer awaiting the results of a biopsy over (quite nearly) a period of two hours. Above the fear of the results is the routine of everyday life – a visit from a lover, the impulsive buying of a hat, a song session (very sweet), a walk, the sudden decision to visit a friend. Through all this Cleo is alone with her fear. Till she meets a solider in a park on his last day of leave from Algeria – as one does. By the end Cleo is liberated from her fear and her persona. The movie was shot in the early 60s and Varda throws in plenty of references to the Algerian war – in fact the war and the impending illness are implicitly compared and contrasted. Does it work? It is woven into the narrative so its not a jarring set piece as in 35 Rhums (or even much of Ken Loach’s work). But Varda also lets her impish and curious side predominate so that the movie is not really a political statement. I like anything by Varda and whilst this is not her best, it was still an interesting little film.
I wanted to see a couple of other films (Goodbye Solo, Treeless Mountain, Everlasting Moments) but eventually only got to see Eccentricities of a Blond Haired Girl. Of course the most interesting nugget about the film is that its director, Manoel de Oliveira is 100 years old. Judging by the film, he is still sharp as a tack. The film intercuts a story being told to a fellow traveller on a train with the actual story. Briefly it’s the story of an accountant (who at one point states that commerce could never tolerate a sentimental accountant) who is infatuated with the golden haired girl of the title. It helps that she has a fetching fan which she uses to great effect (it should have featured in the credits). The film follows the courtship and the travails the accountant undergoes including a stint of poverty before getting the girl. Or does he? Or is he undone by bourgeois morality? The twist in the tale and the abrupt ending possibly arise from the 19th century short story the film is based on – in fact this is a film where you can imagine the way the story itself would have been written. It’s a curious, formal film (Lisbon almost looks timeless – apart from the train, the references to euros etc) and yet enjoyable and also a little enchanting.
