Alan Furst: The Anti-Fascist Novelist

Novelist Alan Furst. (Photo by Rainer Hosch)

"… Don't tell the world, but Stalin's just as bad as Hitler."
"Why not tell the world?"
"Because they won't believe it, dear colonel."

- Alan Furst, Spies of Warsaw (2008) 

In 1984, Alan Furst, a journalist and author of four novels, travelled to the Soviet Union and it changed his life. As he noted later, he saw fear in the eyes of the people he met, and it shocked him. He decided that he would never again write a novel set in contemporary times, but that the threat posed by every expression of fascism between 1934 and 1945 would be his subject. To gain a greater grasp for the historical and geographical milieus, he and his wife relocated to Paris – the setting, at least in part, for almost all his subsequent novels. He purchased old books and maps to ensure greater verisimilitude. As a result, readers can be confident that the streets, restaurants and nightclubs are accurately depicted and that they are not likely to find anachronisms; any book or film that a character or the narrator cites could have been read or seen at the time of the novel’s setting. Influenced by espionage writers Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, the social novelist Anthony Powell, and perhaps by films such as Casablanca (1942) and the noirish, The Third Man (1947), Furst set out to create his own niche in the espionage literary domain and published the first of thirteen historical thrillers, Night Soldiers (1988), a set of novels that became known as the Night Soldiers Series.

Apart from his mastery of historical detail, the debut of Night Soldiers is an anomaly. It is the only panoramic entry which starts in Bulgaria in 1934 and ends on the West Side of Manhattan eleven years later. It, along with his next novel Dark Star (1991), is much longer than his later novels. By the time he published his fourth, The World at Night (1996), Furst had found his writing métier, a leaner style that produced tautly-written novels of just over two hundred and fifty pages that combine historical erudition with genuine humanity amidst terrifying inhumanity. He had also compressed his historical time span: his narratives covered the late 1930s before the war and ended with 1942-43 when the outcome of the war was much in doubt. Night Soldiers also does not contain the sustained erotic love interest that is prominent in the later novels where their protagonists are fortyish, male, single, and with few exceptions, civilians who are reluctantly drawn into the shadowy, gray world of espionage, not because of any natural inclination but because they feel that they have no choice given the monumental evil of Nazism. Nonetheless, the author’s signature trademarks are introduced in Night Soldiers. Some of his characters will reappear in later novels and his protagonists always manage to survive. More importantly, the author reveals his ability to deftly capture the historical ambience, a result of prodigious research that he has internalized. There is inevitably exposition, yet it rarely feels clunky because Furst’s priority is the subjective experience of individuals in the countries that were occupied, attacked or threatened by Hitler and Stalin. The global perspective that he provides is gracefully interwoven into the storylines that frequently detail the insidious effect of how war or the fear of war can disfigure, and sometimes ennoble, the lives of people who would rather pursue their quotidian activities.

Parting Clouds: Olivier Assayas's Clouds of Sils Maria

Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria.

Now that he's reached the age of sixty, French director Olivier Assayas's work thankfully hasn't settled into austerity, but instead continues to give off a youthful inquisitiveness that remains quietly passionate and quirkily insightful. Rather than becoming reserved and pedantic in his observations, Assayas continues to sparkle with a wry and active curiousity. He rejects easy irony for a more open-ended bemusement that belies the affliction of time and collapses the gap that often exists between generations. In Irma Vep (1996), Assayas presented a middle-aged film director (Jean-Pierre Léaud) who tried to capture a past classic by remaking Louis Feuillade's silent serial Les vampires (1915-16) only to discover his flailing efforts had more to say about the state of the present. In his richly meditative Summer Hours (2008), a group of siblings begin to dread the disappearance of their childhood memories, along with their summer home, after their mother dies, only to soon recognize that those memories can be transformed by the generation that follows. Something in the Air (2012), which didn't get half the audience it deserved, looks back at the political and cultural turmoil of the early Seventies and examines a young activist who can't reconcile the rigidity of fixed ideologies with the fluid sensuality of the pop culture he loves. Assayas's films are almost always about the flux of life where meanings don't get imposed but are drawn from an expansive embrace of experience.

Israel’s Cinematic Ambassador: Eran Riklis' Dancing Arabs

Director Eran Riklis.

Toronto and Canadian audiences may not know it but Canada is the only country, to date, outside of its home country Israel, that will get to see Eran Riklis’ new film under its original title of Dancing Arabs. Mildly contentious, I suppose, but it seems to be a no-no for foreign distributors, says the genial, relaxed Riklis, in Toronto for the film’s opening of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival. “I’m very happy that in Canada they kept it because the French changed it to Mon fils (My Sons), the Spanish to Mis Hijos (My Sons), the Germans changed it to My Heart Dances, the U.S. to A Borrowed Identity. I’m thinking I’m holding the world record [for film titles].” So what he does mean by the title, which chronicles the experience of Eyad (Tawfeek Barhom), an Israeli-Arab boy from a small town who is accepted into a prestigious Israeli arts academy in Jerusalem where he is the only Arab in attendance? “It’s very complex," says Riklis, “it’s a variety of things, the fact, this notion, you’re part of the minority, you kind of dance to please the majority in life, [as in] normal classic dance [which is] two steps forward, one backwards. If you want to take it really a little bit more extreme, it’s almost like being the jester in a way, [who] has to dance for the master. It’s a complex relationship.”

Neglected Gem #75: A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999)

Stanley Tucci and Rupert Everett in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999).

I’ve seen so many productions – professional and amateur – of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that, much as I love the play, for some time I’ve been fairly sure I could live my life happily without seeing another. But Michael Hoffman’s 1999 film of it is so fresh and so supremely acted that my first impulse on leaving the theatre was a desire to come back again with other friends to show it off to them. Hoffman has turned Shakespeare’s Athens (which doesn’t even try to pass for ancient Greece) into turn-of-the-century Italy (“Monte Athena”). That turns out to be an inspired choice, right from the opening sequence where the feast is being prepared for the wedding of the duke, Theseus (David Strathairn), and his bride, the stranger queen Hippolyta (Sophie Marceau, whose French accent makes a suitable division from Strathairn’s American-ness). Italians would, of course, of course, focus on the sensuality of the food; the glimpses we get of the duke’s kitchen are lush. Those aren’t the very first images. As we hear the famous Mendelssohn music drift in, we see the fairies –beams of light dancing over a violet dawn that turn into butterflies as the morning light takes over the sky. There’s a tendency (unfortunate, I think) in modern productions of Midsummer to de-emphasize the ethereal quality of the supernatural elements and make them not only carnal – which they certainly are – but earthy, even brutal. Some of the directors who have gone in that direction may have taken their cue from Jan Kott’s essay “Titania and the Ass’s Head” in Shakespeare Our Contemporary. But it would be a waste to put the play on screen and ignore the resources that enable filmmakers to make the kind of magic you can’t conjure on the stage.

Peeling Away: This is a Costume Drama at the Fleck Dance Theatre

What is revealed by what is concealed? That’s the question posed by This Is a Costume Drama, a brave new work by Toronto’s DA Hoskins that goes below the surfaces to expose some pretty uncompromising truths about the world in which we live today. It’s a strip show, both literally and figuratively, and it’s a powerful accomplishment: defiant, irreverent, hugely comedic, inventively choreographed and staged. Clothes are put on and discarded in pursuit of carnal knowledge as well as knowledge of the self. Skin becomes its own form of drama, its own form of artifice; images of nudity are permeated by sex but not shame. Morality is M.I.A. This Is a Costume Drama, a world premiere that opened at Toronto’s Fleck Dance Theatre on April 29, goes beyond the Biblical dilemma of nakedness as a loss of innocence, examining the human condition after the expulsion from Eden. Post-paradise, identity is a social and political construct, molded by individual taste and desire more than anything resembling faith or belief in a higher order. Everything of substance has been peeled away, exposing a loss of human dignity.

Bleeps and Bloops No More – 33 1/3: Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. Soundtrack

Andrew Schartmann’s extensive, thoughtful treatise on Japanese composer Koji Kondo and his work on the soundtrack to the original Super Mario Bros game is probably the most unusual entry in the 33 1/3 music chapbook series. Most commonly, a passionate critic will defend an album of their choosing, as our own Kevin Courrier has in his 33 1/3 entry on Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. But the soundtrack to a 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System game, even one so popular that it spawned an entire home console empire, can’t really be called an “album” – it’s more a collection of simple 8-bit melodies and sound effects. This also marks the first time the book series has considered video games as a medium with music worth exploring and celebrating. As Schartmann demonstrates, Kondo’s work on this seminal game – and the legacy of industry influence that followed – is much more than the primitive bleeps and bloops we all remember.

Goodspeed’s Guys and Dolls: Half a Loaf

Nancy Anderson as Miss Adelaide and Mark Price as Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls. (All photos by Cloe Poisson)

When I reviewed the Shaw Festival’s fine production of Guys and Dolls two years ago I observed that this 1950 Frank Loesser-Jo Swerling-Abe Burrows show is the rare musical in which act two is even better than act one. (Most musicals, even terrific ones, are saddled with second-act troubles.) That distinction is abundantly clear in the production currently playing at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut, where it opens the new season. For the first half, the Goodspeed Guys and Dolls – directed by Don Stephenson, with musical direction by Goodspeed veteran Michael O’Flaherty – is disappointing. The staging feels cramped, especially during the “Runyonland” opening. Tracy Christensen’s costumes are mix-and-match, with a lot of glaringly bad choices: the hot pants on the Hot Box Girls in the farmyard number “A Bushel and a Peck” don’t flatter their bodies, and what the hell is Benny Southstreet (Noah Plomgren) doing in a zoot suit? Much of the acting is overly broad, especially Mark Price’s as Nathan Detroit, and – in roles that are normally understated – John Jellison as Arvide Abernathy and Karen Murphy as General Cartwright, both on the Salvation Army side of the cast of characters. And O’Flaherty must be using the arrangements from the 1992 Broadway revival, which speed up the tempo (at least on some of the numbers). I thought that was a lousy idea then and I still think so. It seems doubtful that the audiences at the Goodspeed would get bored if “I’ve Never Been in Love Before” were played at the tempo Loesser envisioned. This is, after all, one of the great musical-theatre scores, and familiarity hasn’t worn it down.

Unsentimental History: Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall

David Ben-Gurion (left) and Golda Meir as she shakes hands with Moshe Sharett (right) after signing Israel's Declaration of Independence, in Tel Aviv, on May 14, 1948. (Photo: Frank Scherschel)

The trouble with unilateral action is that it holds out no hope of real or lasting peace because of its denial of justice to the other party.

– Avi Shlaim, Epilogue to the 2014 edition of The Iron Wall

I should begin this review with a disclaimer: I am a news junkie. I was raised by journalists, and the first thing I do in the morning is check my top three news sources. In the last decade, I’ve also begun to do a quick check of Twitter and whatever is dominating my Facebook feed (for actual news, not of the Kardashian-related variety). So I like to think that I am relatively well-informed about what is going on in the world, and fairly up-to-date on major developing stories. Nevertheless, there are moments in every news junkie's life when you open up the paper/webpage/link and have what can only be described as a “WTF moment.” I had one about a year ago when I opened up the New York Times app and saw that Russia had invaded Ukraine – that WTF moment led me down the rabbit hole of books on Russian foreign policy. This is the only appropriate response I have ever been able to formulate for my WTF moments: to recognize that my surprise and shock is largely a result of my own ignorance, and attempt to repair that particular problem. For the most part, what happens in the world – in various countries and between them – is only shocking if we don’t know the history that has led up to it. Knowing some of the history behind a place, people, or policy usually reveals that however crazy certain developments look on the surface they are in fact a reasonable (though not necessarily positive) evolution of what has come before.

Where Law Meets Reality: Daredevil

Charlie Cox and Rosario Dawson in Marvel's Daredevil on Netflix.

Matt: I can't see, not like everyone else, but I can feel. […] All of the fragments form a sort of…  impressionistic painting.
Claire: Okay, but what does that look like? Like, what do you... actually see?
Matt: A world on fire.

When Netflix launched Marvel's Daredevil last month, the series entered a crowded field. Superheroes are everywhere on television right now. Against the proliferating DC-televison universe (Gotham on Fox; Arrow and The Flash on The CW, with another Arrow spinoff, Legends of Tomorrow just announced today, and CBS's Supergirl currently in production), Marvel seems intent on conquering the small screen all on its own. Daredevil joins Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (which will air its second season finale this Tuesday) and Marvel's Agent Carter, whose brief run (also on ABC) will be followed by a second season next year. Moreover, Daredevil marks the first of four projected Netflix/Marvel team-ups, the next one being A.K.A. Jessica Jones (starring Krysten Ritter and David Tennant), currently in production and set to air sometime later in 2015. At some point in the future, Daredevil and Jessica Jones will team up with the stars of the as-yet-unproduced shows Iron Fist and Luke Cage for a multi-cast miniseries, The Defenders. On paper, all of this sounds overwhelmingly ambitious, and for this viewer it is, maybe dizzyingly so – but if the first step of that journey of a thousand miles is Daredevil, Marvel might just pull it off.

A Parting Glance of War: HBO’s Band of Brothers

Today marks the seventieth anniversary of V-E Day, the official surrender of the German government that brought the Second World War to a close in Europe. Such a round number of decades, bursting rather rudely into the centennial memorial of the Great War, reminds us yet again of the inextricable links that bound the two conflicts together. In their causes, personalities, strategies, and consequences, the world wars were two shoes that dropped from the same nationalistic European corpus. And they landed on the globe with catastrophic impact. Walt Whitman famously said of the American Civil War that the real war would never make it into the books. That declaration would apply even more fittingly for World War II. Over 60 million human beings died in the conflict, one person every three seconds for six years. The proportions of the war’s scope, chaos, brutality, and moral stakes seem to exceed all categories of meaningful expression.

Still, dozens of movies have taken the war as their subject, many made right in the midst of the conflagration. HBO’s miniseries Band of Brothers aired almost fourteen years ago now, and the decade and a half since has solidified its standing as one of the finest World War II films around. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks produced the show, deciding to adapt historian Steven E. Ambrose’s book of the same title after the critical and commercial success of their movie Saving Private Ryan in 1998. Ryan and Ambrose lay at the center of the nostalgic wave for the war that swept the nation in the Nineties, as the country reckoned with the rapid disappearance of the generation that served at home and abroad. Ambrose placed an emphasis on oral histories in his methodology, underscoring the experience of the common soldiers, sailors, and airmen in his writing. In Band of Brothers, he follows a small group of infantrymen, E Company of the 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, from their training at the war’s outset through their fighting in Europe until the war’s close.

One Hundred Years On...: Erik Larson's Dead Wake and Greg King and Penny Wilson’s Lusitania

RMS Lusitania coming into port (1907-13).

It may never have attained the fame of the Titanic but the Lusitania, the massive British cruise ship sunk by a German U-boat one hundred years ago today, on May 7, 1915, still had the makings of a terrible, lasting tragedy. Two new books, Erik Larson’s Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania (Crown) and Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age by Greg King and Penny Wilson (St. Martin’s Press), both delve into the sinking. But neither is a fully satisfying read.

This Freberg You Will Not Change: Stan Freberg (1926-2015)

(Photo Courtesy of Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Stan Freberg, who died last month at the age of 88, was the first American show business figure I ever saw referred to as a “satirist,” by people who clearly meant to convey that his stuff was on a sharper, smarter level than the comedy of mere funnymen. When someone like Bob Hope did a sketch about Bonanza or Batman on one of his TV specials, the subject of the sketch didn’t really matter, and there was nothing that could be called a point of view: the dumb topical jokes about politicians and other celebrities could go just as well with any backdrop, and the targets of the spoofs were probably chosen on the basis of which funny costumes Hope and his guest stars preferred to wear.

Freberg’s musical parodies and takeoffs on TV and radio shows had precision: he would zero in on something about a performer that struck him as especially inane and go to town on it. And they had bite: unlike the comedians who want to make it clear that it’s all in good fun when they crack wise about one of their esteemed colleagues, Freberg, like some of the later performers who made their names on Saturday Night Live and other post-rock generation revues, was out to draw blood. He had the smart-adolescent’s deeply personal resentment of inanity and mediocrity, as if Johnny Ray  had made a million dollars singing like that just to piss him off. All in good fun, his ass; Freberg was out for revenge.

Fighting for Fun – Avengers: Age of Ultron

Note: This review contains spoilers for Avengers: Age of Ultron.

During the climactic battle of Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America (Chris Evans) tells his team, “If you’re hurt, hurt them back. If you’re killed… walk it off.” It’s a snarky quip that encapsulates the whole film: gone is the comic energy that glowed at the heart of The Avengers (2012), but that doesn’t stop director/geek deity Joss Whedon from doing his damnedest to keep the franchise limping along, and fighting to be fun through to its last overstuffed, brooding gasp. Whether or not it’s a fight that he and his ever-inflating cast actually win… is a matter of opinion.

Something Old, Something New: The King and I & Something Rotten!

Ken Watanabe and Kelli O'Hara in The King and I, at the Lincoln Center. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

The first five or ten minutes of Bartlett Sher’s new production of The King and I are spectacular. The ship carrying Anna Leonowens (Kelli O’Hara) and her son Louis (Jake Lucas) to Siam, where she has been contracted to teach the royal children, glides across the stage of the Vivian Beaumont (at Lincoln Center), then makes a slow right-angled turn and moves toward the audience, shrouded in steam, while representatives of the court march down the aisles to meet it. The thirty-piece orchestra underneath the thrust renders the Richard Rodgers music with the robustness that can only be nostalgic for New York theatregoers who are middle-aged or older. And you feel blanketed by the sumptuousness of Michael Yeargan’s sets, Catherine Zuber’s costumes and Donald Holder’s lighting. Seeing the show at a Wednesday matinee late in previews, I thought to myself, “Is it possible that Sher is going to make me care about The King and I the way he made me care about South Pacific?” (His South Pacific, which opened at the Beaumont in 2008, is the best production of a musical I’ve ever seen.)

The Perils of Dinner in Olen Steinhauer’s All the Old Knives

The U.S. Embassy in Vienna, Austria.

In fiction, film and drama, dinner often becomes a cauldron for seething tensions and revelations of buried secrets. In the espionage thrillers of Olen Steinhauer, the author doubles down the possibility for something horrific to occur. In The Cairo Affair (Minotaur Books, 2014), one of the most dramatic scenes occurs early in the novel when, during the course of a dinner in Budapest, a diplomat husband confronts his wife about an affair that she had during their previous posting in Cairo. She confesses her infidelity and is about to explain when a professional hitman kills her husband, a death that drives her back to Cairo and into the murky world of intelligence as she searches for answers about why and who is responsible for the death of her husband. In Steinhauer’s subsequent and most recent novel, All the Old Knives (Minotaur Books, 2015), again a dinner, this time between two ex-lovers, one currently still a CIA agent and the other a former operative, sets up the possibility that could have fatal consequences for one or both of them.

Critic's Notes and Frames Vol. XIV

Brett Morgen's new picture, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (which showed at the Toronto Hot Docs Festival and premieres in a few days on American HBO), isn't about taming the inherent violence in rock, it's about what happens when that rebellion becomes inverted and artistic danger ultimately claims the artist. In telling the story of Kurt Cobain, the boyish looking co-founder of Nirvana, Morgen uses an assortment of material from the personal archives of the Cobain family – including Cobain's scrapbook drawings, diary entries, tape compilations and memoirs – to provide an in-depth portrait of his life and work. While Morgen strips away the romantic myths of the suffering artist, he gets at the deeper wounds of a great artist who lives out the suffering in his life until he can't sustain it anymore in his work. Even if, in life, Cobain parodies the Fifties image of the bland suburban American family, his home movies with partner Courtney Love, where they frolic and nod out on heroin, are a horror show Sid-and-Nancy sit-com. Critic Howard Hampton once called Kurt Cobain "a self-assassinating pop star," Mark David Chapman and John Lennon rolled into one, and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck provides us with the clues to that paradoxical dilemma. If the pop stars of the past once sought and desired fame and success, Cobain grew up in an age of skepticism where fame and success were not to be trusted. Morgen's picture gives us a troubling view of an artist whose deeper need to slash his canvases doesn't come from a simple desire to destroy himself, but from a more primal terror of finding no model to build that canvas on.

Talking Out of Turn #37: Louis Malle (1985)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the Eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was radically starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions who were only concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone) which made it look as if they hadn't bothered to read the outline. Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be simply a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was attempting to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the participants. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. When uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews a number of years ago, however, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

Tom Fulton, the host of On the Arts at CJRT-FM.

One chapter, titled The Ghosts of Vietnam, featured interviews with a variety of authors (Robert Stone, Brian Fawcett) and filmmakers (Oliver Stone, Robert Altman) who dealt in their work with various aspects of the legacy of the Vietnam War and how it was felt in the Eighties. The American obsession with Latin and South America during the Reagan years seemed to be an ill-advised attempt to exorcise the ghosts of the earlier conflict. In the case of French film director Louis Malle, though, his country had been involved in a colonial war with Vietnam earlier in the Fifties, but it didn't have the impact on the psyche of France as the later conflict in Algeria would. So Malle, whose work was as diversified as it was probing, whether it was film noir (Elevator to the Gallows), dealing with the Second World War (Lacombe Lucien), autobiographical (Au revoir, les enfants) about the family romance (Murmer of the Heart), the romantic crime drama (Atlantic City), documentary (Phantom India), slapstick comedy (Zazie dans le métro) and theatrical (My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street), decided to tackle the experience of Vietnamese immigrants in the 1985 melodrama, Alamo Bay. Alamo Bay is about a Vietnam War veteran (Ed Harris) who clashes with Vietnamese immigrants who begin a fishing trade in his Texas bay hometown. Sadly, the picture lacked the fine detail for dramatic nuance and keen observation in Malle's greatest films, but it did provide an opportunity for me to talk to him about what was compelling about the theme of the story.

Underappreciated Performances from 2014: A Selection

Philip Seymour Hoffman in A Most Wanted Man.

It’s in the nature of movie awards to underscore the work that’s already receiving a glut of (often unmerited) attention and neglect the worthier achievements that slipped by unnoticed. And these days, when there’s so little difference between the movies that get nominated for Academy Awards and the ones that are recognized by critics’ groups, there are fewer chances than ever to bring fine neglected work into the limelight. Since more than any other element in movies, it’s the acting that excites me – and since no movie year, however dim in other respects, is without its long list of impressive performances – the sidelining of deserving actors during awards season always puts me in a funk. Of course, some of the actors who win praise deserve it, like the Oscar-nominated actors from The Imitation Game, Wild, Boyhood and The Theory of Everything. The ones showcased below deserve it too, however, and weren’t so lucky. Since I reviewed some of the performances I liked best on Critics at Large in the course of the year, I won’t recycle my impressions of Al Pacino in The Humbling, Timothy Spall in Mr. Turner, Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis in Get On Up, Keira Knightley in Begin Again, Jessica Lange in In Secret, Mia Wasichowska in Tracks, Agata Kulesza in Ida, Kenneth Branagh in his own film, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Annette Bening in The Face of Love, and the three stars of The Last of Robin Hood (Kevin Kline, Susan Sarandon and Dakota Fanning).

Between the Covers: Joakim Zander’s The Swimmer, Nele Neuhaus’s The Ice Queen and Laura Lippman’s Hush Hush

The Swimmer (HarperCollins), Swedish author Joakim Zander’s first novel, is a lightning-quick page-turner with sparse, evocative language (courtesy of translator Elizabeth Clark Wessel) and a terrific cast of characters. The novel opens in Damascus, in the summer of 1980. It’s blisteringly hot. An unnamed CIA agent is holed up with the woman he loves and their infant daughter. He is waiting for the right moment to tell her that he must leave Syria, and her and their child. But the baby is feverish, and before he can leave, the woman takes his keys and heads out to find medicine. His car – the car in which he was about to escape, containing money and his next identity – explodes. The explosion is “awful, majestic. It’s a whole battle compressed into one moment.” UA spends the rest of his life trying to find out exactly who placed the bomb, and why. We next meet Klara Waldéen, the young Swedish aide to a European Union parliamentarian in Brussels, and George Lööw, an ambitious and unscrupulous lobbyist working with a giant PR firm, also in Brussels. At the behest of his über-powerful boss, George is about to take on a mysterious new client. It’s gratifying to be sought-after, George thinks, but he’s uneasy because he can’t find out anything about that client. Meanwhile, Mahmoud Shammosh, an Uppsala-based academic and an old friend of Klara’s, is in Brussels taking part in a seminar on Middle East affairs. When he comes into possession of information about bad U.S. behaviour in Iraq and Afghanistan, he also runs into an American hit-team determined to recover that information. He and Klara are pursued in Brussels and Paris, and eventually to a Christmas Eve shootout on a tiny island in the Swedish Archipelago. This book – all crisp dialogue and fast action – is outstanding. Stieg Larsson may be dead, and Henning Mankell has retired Kurt Wallander, but the Swedish thriller is in good hands.

God Complex: Ex Machina

Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina.

So-called “cerebral sci-fi” films are often like superhero origin stories, in that they can succumb to the third-act pitfall of not knowing what to do after their big revelations have landed. The burgeoning superhero finally dons a cape, the intelligent machine finally achieves self-awareness, and everything goes to shit. It’s a disappointing trend that debut director Alex Garland nimbly dodges by marrying the plot for his film, Ex Machina, with its underlying thematic structure – consciousness, manipulation, deceit, purpose, self-interest – in a way that feels both wholly natural and refreshingly unique. As an established screenwriter and novelist (Garland cut his teeth as a Danny Boyle mainstay, penning 28 Days Later and its sequel, as well as 2012’s undervalued Dredd), he’s well-equipped to do it. Strange, though, that one of the genre’s premiere examples of this narrative stumbling block was his own script for Boyle’s Sunshine (2007). Many critics are lambasting Ex Machina for its similarities to that promising-yet-disappointing interstellar excursion, but I don’t think they’re looking closely enough at what it does differently – and what it does better.

Oh, The Poor Bird: Daniel Handler's We Are Pirates

Daniel Handler's novel We Are Pirates was published in February. (Photo by Christopher Seufert)

We have left the land and have gone aboard ship! We have broken down the bridge behind us, nay, more, the land behind us! Well, little ship! look out! Beside thee is the ocean; it is true it does not always roar, and sometimes it spreads out like silk and gold and a gentle reverie. But times will come when you wilt feel that it is infinite, and that there is nothing more frightful than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt itself free, and now strikes against the walls of this cage! Alas, if home sickness for the land should attack thee, as if there had been more freedom there, and there is no "land" any longer!

– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Aphorism 124) 

There is little I look forward to more than a new book by Daniel Handler. Handler remains most famous, and rightly so, for his Lemony Snicket books (the gothic-themed 13-volume A Series of Unfortunate Events, and most recently his noirish, not yet completed, 4-volume prequel series All the Wrong Questions). The highest compliment I believe can be paid to a contemporary children's book is that deep and warm-hearted regret that you are too old to have read it as a child – and the Snicket books generate that for me with every page. Handler's voice as Snicket is uniquely clever, passionate, and intimate. As explosively unique as Unfortunate Events were, the new series – told from the point-of-view of a 13-year-old Lemony Snicket – are perhaps even stronger: as morally complex, starker in their themes, and even more often laugh-out-loud funnier. When the final volume of ATWQ is published by Little, Brown and Company this fall, I will return here and say more. But for now, let me say this: Handler knows how to tell a story, and his books – perhaps like the best of literature, children's and otherwise – are lessons on how to hear one.

In February, Bloomsbury Press published We Are Pirates, Daniel Handler's first straight up "adult" book since 2006's Adverbs. Adverbs is a difficult book to describe but an easy book to love. It was hands down my favourite book of that year, and rather than try to explain why, it was much simpler just to tell my friends to read it themselves. (I gifted more than a half-dozen copies of Adverbs over the next two years.) We Are Pirates shares a lot with his earlier book, and though it isn't likely to displace Adverbs either in my heart or my bookshelf, I nonetheless relished every page.

A Peace Built on Buried Bones: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant is his first new novel since 2005. (Photo by Francesco Guidicini)

Even so, sir, isn’t it a strange then when a man calls another brother who only yesterday slaughtered his children?

–  Master Wistan, in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

There was a time when I used to dream about becoming a professional book reviewer – I like to think I had no illusions that it would be easy, but to make a career of reading books and helping other people decide what to read seemed very attractive. But the more that I have come to write about fiction, the more I have come to appreciate the fact that I am not a book reviewer by profession along the real privileges that come with my amateur status. I was recently made aware of those privileges when I encountered Kazuo Ishiguro’s recently published novel, The Buried Giant (Knopf, 2015).

Fake it So Real: The Mountain Goats’ Beat the Champ

Roland Barthes famously adjudged professional wrestling to be the “great spectacle of suffering, defeat and justice.” One of the many delights of the Mountain Goats’ new album Beat the Champ is that how it collapses the intellectual gap between the author of Mythologies and a ten-year old kid in central California watching lucha libre with his face pressed up against the screen. “The telecast’s in Spanish, I can understand some/I need justice in my life – here it comes” sings John Darnielle on lead single “The Legend of Chavo Guerrero,” casting himself back once again to the unhappy childhood he’s been mining for material over twenty-five years as the Mountain Goats’ songwriter and principal musician. But the tone is less petulant or melancholy than exuberant. It’s the sound of a boy in happy thrall to a hero whom he believes can right the world’s wrongs simply by dropping a well-placed elbow off the top rope.

Issues of autobiography aside, Darnielle specializes in characters like the narrator of “the Legend of Chavo Guerrero:” marginalized young men living vicariously through macho role models. These include the wannabe metal gods of “The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton,” and the disfigured, Robert E. Howard-worshipping protagonist of Darnielle’s eerie and justly acclaimed 2014 novel Wolf in White Van – a psychologically astute portrait of a potentially dangerous lone wolf. The personalities are dark, but Darnielle’s approach to them is illuminating. In both his lyrics and his prose, he has the ability to plunge the listener inside a character’s headspace – so deeply that you can feel the residue when you exit a few minutes later.

Come Back, Little Sheba at the Huntington: An Elusive Balance

Adrianne Krstansky and Derek Hasenstab in Come Back, Little Sheba. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Come Back, Little Sheba is the drama that put playwright William Inge on the map when it was produced on Broadway in 1950. Shirley Booth created the role of Lola, the slovenly, nostalgic wife of Doc Delaney, a chiropractor in a small Midwestern college town. (Her legendary performance is preserved in the 1952 movie version.) The play, which David Cromer has staged for Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company in its South End space at the Calderwood Pavilion, is about two people who have, in different ways, failed to accept the passing of their youth. Doc impregnated Lola when he was a medical student; he dropped out to marry her, they lost the baby, and he’s lived in regret for the sexual indiscretion that resulted in the loss of the life he’d planned for himself. Alcohol fueled that regret and disappointment; it also ate up his inheritance. When the play begins he’s been sober for a year, attending AA meetings regularly. Lola, lonely at home while Doc is seeing his patients, luxuriates in her memories of the youthful amorousness he’s trying to forget. (Her lost puppy, Little Sheba, is a rather obvious symbol of her vanished youth.) Their distinctive attitudes toward the past are illuminated by their reaction to their boarder, Marie, a coed with a serious boyfriend back home in Cincinnati who is carrying on a casual affair with a football player named Turk. Lola is touched by their lovemaking; it reminds her of her own romance with Doc, when she was young and pretty. Doc prefers to think of Marie as pure; he doesn’t like Turk, who he thinks isn’t good enough for her. The truth is that Turk’s sexuality recalls his own twenty years ago. The incontrovertible evidence that Turk and Marie are sleeping together forces a confrontation with his own past that knocks him for a loop – and right off the wagon.

Varieties of Romance: Spring, The Duke of Burgundy, and Accidental Love

Lou Taylor Pucci and Nadia Hilker star in Spring.

We’re almost a quarter of the way into what has so far been a pretty quiet year for movies, with signs of life visible mostly in some small, out-of-the-way places. One of the most distinctive (and least-heralded) of recent small movies is the appropriately titled Spring, which at first seems to follow a familiar template for horror movies: a sweet-natured, emotionally volatile young American played by Lou Taylor Pucci who’s at the end of his rope takes off for Italy to try to get his head together in unfamiliar surroundings. He winds up courting a beautiful, mysterious woman (Nadia Hilker) who may just be entrancingly, frustratingly hard to read, or who harbor some dark secret that makes emotional intimacy impossible and physical intimacy even scarier than usual.

Record Store Day: Yea or Nay?

We just celebrated Record Store Day 2015, and for a couple weeks on both sides there have been arguments about whether the concept is serving or hurting the people it’s designed for. The local independent record store and smaller labels. The question from the labels side is whether or not they can get vinyl records produced in time, because the pressing plants are so bogged down pressing bigger orders for the major labels. One might also wonder who actually needs a vinyl copy of the soundtrack for The Darjeerling Limited? For the record stores across the world (yes…Record Store Day is celebrated in other countries too, with appropriate product) the problem is how much stock to bring in, and what to do with whatever you get. The stores can order specific titles but may not receive what they order, due to limited quantities, and arbitrary decisions.

Off The Shelf: Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994)

Johnny Depp in Ed Wood (1994).

At the Star Wars Celebration press event this past weekend in Anaheim, a preteen kid stepped up to the mic to ask J.J. Abrams how to become a filmmaker. Abrams (doubtless sensing the same starry-eyed wonder in this kid that he must have felt while channeling his own idol, Spielberg, for his 2011 film Super 8) told him gently that he and his peers have access to technology and distribution platforms that never existed when he was that age, and that if you have a smartphone in your pocket then you already have far greater tools for moviemaking than he ever did. His advice was to use those tools, as often as possible, and to get your hands dirty making movies, no matter the result. Abrams’ apparent love for the art of spectacle – it’s what earned him a job directing a new Star Wars film, after all – would have made him right at home in cinema’s golden age, where he might have kept council with directors like Ed Wood. His advice certainly sounds like something straight from the famous cult filmmaker himself.

Best known for his 1959 disaster Plan 9 From Outer Space, Wood was a miserable failure as a Hollywood filmmaker, earning neither critical acclaim nor significant box office returns. His legacy as one of the worst directors of all time has led to a posthumous cult following, thanks to film buffs coming together to celebrate the indomitable spirit that kept Wood in the movie business despite bomb after insufferable bomb. Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic, named for the man himself, is celebratory too: a joyous examination of the passion for spectacle and wonder that endures behind the money-grubbing cynicism of the Hollywood we know. Ed Wood never had a smartphone, but that sure didn’t stop him from making movies.

An American in Paris, Sans Alan Jay Lerner

Robert Fairchild, Brandon Uranowitz and Max Von Essen in An American in Paris (All photos by Angela Sterling)

Vincente Minnelli’s 1951 movie musical An American in Paris is simultaneously breezy and lush. With its smart, sometimes cheeky Alan Jay Lerner script, its Gershwin score and the ebullient choreography by its star, Gene Kelly, it’s one of the highlights of the golden age of M-G-M musicals. Kelly plays Jerry Mulligan, an American G.I. who sticks around Paris after the war to paint. He finds a patron, a wealthy émigré American socialite, Milo (Nina Foch), who wants to add him to her roster of bohemian lovers, but he falls in love with a shopgirl named Lise (Leslie Caron) whom he spots at a café. He courts her and wins her love, but just as he’s hampered by his attachment to Milo (he doesn’t reciprocate her sexual interest in him: these are still the days of the Hays Code), Lise also has other claims. She’s engaged to the affable music hall performer Henri Baurel (Georges Guétary), whom she doesn’t love but to whom she feels beholden, since he took care of her during the war when her parents, Resistance fighters, were captured by the Nazis. (Here Lerner reworks a plot strand from Casablanca.) To complicate matters further, Henri and Jerry have just become friends, through their mutual pal Adam (Oscar Levant), a struggling composer.

Conflict in Context: War on the Silver Screen

Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964) is one of the many films profiled in War on the Silver Screen

Anyone looking for a history of film will find a plethora on the market. Among them are Norman Cousins’s compendium of world films Story of Film (published by Pavillion books in 2004, with a new edition in 2013), followed by his fifteen-hour mega-documentary of the same name, and The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) by film scholar and author of twenty books, David Thomson. Both volumes demonstrate the vast knowledge of their authors about films and filmmaking. Yet there is relatively little about the larger historical context within which the films were made. For example, in Thomson’s chapter on war, he does write a few insightful sentences on context but they are dwarfed by the dizzying array of films he mentions and only briefly comments upon. Looking for that context narrows the options. What I have found most valuable is Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (Henry Holt & Co, 1995), edited by Mark C. Carnes, that consists of sixty reviews of historical films by historians and other authorities in the field. I liked these reviews because most of them do not, in the words of one reviewer, “quibble about inaccuracies, simplifications, invented characters, imagined dialogue, anachronisms” but focus on whether the film is true to the spirit of the character or historical issue. The reviewer of the film, Malcolm X (1992) criticized director Spike Lee for underplaying the political evolution of the eponymous character, and the reviewer of All the President’s Men (1976) acknowledged that although the film was accurate, it was untrue because it misleads the audience into thinking that the revelations of two reporters were responsible for the downfall of Nixon even though the film ends with the re-election of Nixon. The actual history behind these films is largely confined to a sidebar on each page. Of the sixty entries, seven of them are on the subject of twentieth-century war films. More recently, Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (Penguin Press, 2014) by Mark Harris is very good on how that war shaped the career of five Hollywood directors, but there hasn't been a book that provides an overview of how war films have shaped their audiences’ consciousness – until now. 

War on the Silver Screen: Shaping America’s Perception of History (Potomac Books, 2014), a crisply and accessibly written monograph by historian Glen Jeansonne and film critic David Luhrssen, is a welcome corrective. The authors combine their talents to argue that war films have done more than books or history lessons to influence people’s perception of war. Their thesis is bracing, perhaps even self-evident, but it is difficult to prove with empirical evidence. The book’s greatest strength is that it gives almost equal space to the historical context as it does to the films themselves. I do have some reservations about their treatment of the films they have chosen for major analysis and with certain key omissions.

“Beyond Endurance” and BBC's Drama of the Week Podcast

Dominic West plays Ernest Shackleton in Meredith Hooper's radio play "Beyond Endurance" on BBC's Drama of the Week

I'm writing this from Toronto, Canada. Many years ago, our national broadcaster (CBC) pulled the plug on spending for the production of radio drama. It was, in retrospect, the exact worst time to do so. Given the media landscape and the rising popularity of podcasting and archived content, interesting, relevant and new audio drama could have been a popular and important part of the CBC's content mix. This, however, is not a lament about the (mis)management of the CBC. It's a look at another national broadcaster's continued commitment to audio drama: namely, the BBC. And more specifically, since I'm writing this from the other side of the pond, I want to talk about the free BBC podcast Drama of the Week, which can be found in iTunes. 

Indelible Voices: José James, Laura Marling and Angelique Kidjo

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Billie Holiday, one of the most influential jazz vocalists in music. On April 7, Cassandra Wilson released her interpretations of the Holiday songbook on Coming Forth By Day. Last year Canadian vocalist Molly Johnson released the personal but slightly uneven tribute to Lady Day called, Because of Billie. And while José James isn't a household name I think his tribute to Holiday may actually nudge the male vocalists in the jazz world to cover the famous torch singer's most popular songs. Yesterday I Had The Blues (Blue Note) has all the makings of an arranged marriage between singer and song, but producer Don Was goes a step further by creating a real blues record that is thoughtful and well paced. James’s soulful renditions are backed by some of the most articulate and seasoned musicians today. Jason Moran, piano, John Patitucci, acoustic bass and Eric Harland, drums, is a trio that pushes and pulls the music while maintaining a solid foundation on which James can feel the lyrics. His first rate version of “Strange Fruit” uses multi-tracking in way that completely re-invents the song. What was once a call to the injustice of black Americans in 1939 when the song was first heard, now becomes a work song fresh from the cotton fields of the 1800s. For James, the music of Billie Holiday has deep roots going much further back in time.

Digging the Roots: Jayme Stone’s Lomax Project & Ken Whiteley’s Beulah Band

Alan Lomax (1915-2002) was one of the great field collectors of American (and international) music. Together with his father John he traveled the countryside in an old car, lugging a 300 lb. recorder to track down the authentic musicians, and capture their songs and performances. Woody Guthrie, Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, Leadbelly, and many more in the USA and across the sea Elizabeth Cronin, Hamish Hamilton, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger are among the hundreds of names with whom he worked gathering songs and stories recordings of which now reside in the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. His biography is entitled Alan Lomax: the Man Who Recorded the World and that’s no exaggeration.

Jayme Stone is a Canadian banjo player. He won a Juno Award in 2008 for his instrumental album The Utmost, and another Juno the following year for Africa to Appalachia (with Mansa Sissoko). His records dig into the history of the banjo, its roots in Africa, and the variety of sounds it makes. Now he combines his interest in the sound of the banjo, with a collection of songs from the Lomax bag to “renew this material [nineteen…songs…collected by…Lomax].” The result is startling. These songs were captured on the road with an acetate disc-cutter and cactus needle stylus. Wherever Lomax found a player he stopped, the sounds on his records were full of the surrounding lifestyle of his subjects. Wind, rain, ocean roar, kitchen noise, neighbourly chitchat and intricate finger-style guitar, rough-hewn vocals, tin whistles, whatever. These sounds influenced Stone to bring together some like-minded friends to update this homemade music. It all remains handmade and homemade, (in the studios of Canterbury Music, Toronto and eTown Hall in Boulder Colorado) by friends and collaborators like Tim O’Brien, Eli West and Julian Lage (guitar), Brittany Haas and Bruce Molsky (fiddle), Joe Phillips and Greg Garrison (bass) and a handful of other singers and instrumentalists including Stone’s own banjo.

For Your Ears Only – Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island (1979)

What album would you take with you if you were isolated on a desert island? It's always been a tempting question, or a popular party staple in which you get to display your cultural credentials without giving away too much about yourself. For critics, especially those always armed with their lists of favourites, it offers a casual forum to defend your tastes, test the wits of others, plus flex some muscle by bragging about rare records that nobody else could give a fuck about. In the literal sense, the idea of the desert island has always been a bit ridiculous. (What critic would ever want to be isolated on a desert island with no access to concerts, free music, or even an outlet to express his or her persuasive views?) After all, isn't music, even in the current age of solitary streaming, best enjoyed in a communal environment. Maybe now, as music is perpetually pigeonholed by genre, we don't even need a desert island because you can retreat to one anytime you like. But the desert island seems to negate the whole purpose of music. It denies music an audience, save for that one lone fan, to test its true value. Yet this question became the subject of a 1979 book called Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, in which twenty prominent American rock critics were asked by fellow scribe Greil Marcus to contribute an essay in response to this hypothetical request.

Palace of Lies: HBO’s Going Clear

Scientology is markedly different from most other religions, not only in its practices but in how it’s perceived by the public. Has there ever been such a universally disparaged belief system? It’s easy for scoffing cynics to dismiss the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard as pure nonsense – and they’re unequivocally right to do so – but to level the same cynicism at the people who willingly choose to ally themselves with his hated institution is to fundamentally misunderstand, or at least disregard, what keeps them there. For the most part, these aren’t suckers and rubes being conned into participating in something against their will: these are intelligent, thoughtful skeptics, who will defend the benefits of Scientology even when faced with overwhelming evidence of its corruption and malpractice. And so the casual question of how anyone in their right minds could jibe with this stuff becomes a very important one: a question of how belief itself can be dangerous.

Documentarian Alex Gibney shoulders the burden of this question, and of the vicious wrath that his exposé would come to invite from the famously litigious Church. Gibney has established himself as a filmmaker unafraid to venture into the dark corners of society and, of course, tell a good story in the process. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, based on a book of (almost) the same name by Lawrence Wright, achieves both as a fearless examination of Scientology’s inner workings. Gibney conducts interviews with eight former members of the Church, including Hollywood screenwriter/producer Paul Haggis (a Scientologist for nearly three decades) and several former high-ranking members of the organization like Mark Rathbun (the Church’s second-in-command) and Mike Rinder (former head of the Church’s Office of Special Affairs), whose shockingly damning testimony has earned them accolades from film critics and vitriol from current Church members in equal measure. But what is it, I can hear you asking, that’s so shocking? What could they possibly reveal about this laughable dog-and-pony show that you wouldn’t already know – or, more troublingly, that the Church is desperate to deny? The Church of Scientology’s policy of loudly and ruthlessly denouncing its critics and apostates is well-known, so this may not seem like unusual behaviour. But Gibney’s interview subjects speak candidly about common practices of systemic verbal and physical abuse and behaviour control which borders on brainwashing. Their claims of unchecked corruption at the Church’s higher levels and of the attacks inflicted on its willing members are just cause for retaliation, which makes the effect of Going Clear incredibly potent. These people sat down to speak with Gibney knowing full well that doing so was dangerous to their personal and financial futures, because if leaving the Church wasn’t enough to provoke its wrath, defaming it so publicly certainly is.

Getting High: Robert Lepage’s Needles and Opium

Wellesley Robertson III and Marc Lebrèche in Robert Lepage's Needles and Opium. (Photo by Nicola-Frank Vachon)

Carl Fillion’s set for Needles and Opium, written and directed by the Québecois auteur Robert Lepage and produced by his company Ex Machina – which Boston’s ArtsEmerson series brought to the Cutler Majestic Theatre last week for a four-day run – is an open four-sided figure, like a section of a dollhouse, that hovers and spins above the stage. Most of the time it stands in for a room in the Hotel Louisiane or a recording studio, both in Paris, but depending on how Bruno Matte lights it or how the images designed by Lionel Arnould are projected onto it – and depending, of course, on how it turns – it can become an alleyway outside a nightclub, the interior of an airplane or the backdrop for a nocturnal walk through New York City. And often it emulates the disoriented state of one of its three characters, the French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau (Marc Labrèche), who took opium, the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis (Wellesley Robertson III), who took heroin, and the play’s protagonist, a Québecois actor named Robert (also Labrèche). Robert finds himself in Paris recording the voice-over for a documentary about Davis’s lover Juliette Gréco while trying to deal with a break-up the anguish of which has swallowed him alive, demolishing sleep and leaving him so vulnerable to sentimental triggers that an allusion to Davis and Gréco’s romance in the voice-over script makes him break down in the middle of the recording session. (He’s chosen to stay in Room 9 of the Hotel Louisiane because that’s where Davis and Gréco stayed when he first came to Paris in 1949 – which was also the year Cocteau wrote A Letter to Americans on the flight back to Paris from New York. The Cocteau sections of the piece are derived from that work and from Opium, the Diary of a Cure.) Needles and Opium suggests that Robert’s unmoored mental condition and his romantic addiction is like the drug habits of his heroes. But in Lepage’s brilliantly conceived text, their stories also intersect with Robert’s in terms of love and loss: Cocteau writes about the death, from typhoid fever, of his twenty-year-old protégé, the prodigious writer Raymond Radiguet (the author of the tender romantic novel Devil in the Flesh, published in 1923, the year Radiguet died).

Unexpected Joys: Honoré de Balzac’s The Vendetta

Very few book-lovers actually disdain the classics – your Victor Hugos, your Dostoyevskys, your Henry Jameses – but they can be difficult to pick up and really enjoy. This is not because of any fault in their writing, but because there is nothing quite so capable of sucking the joy out of a new book like being told over and over again what an ‘important’ book it is. Almost anything from the canon of classic fiction authors is going to be important – we all know that. But the joy of a new book is also the joy of uncovering something new and unexpected, however famous the author might be. For several years in my teens one of my favorite books was Anna Karenina, and I would ascribe the great love I had for that book to the fact that I picked it up almost entirely blind, without knowing the first thing about Tolstoy, Russian literature, or really anything at all. If I remember correctly I was about to go on a trip and could only take one book… so I decided to find a nice long one.

Honoré de Balzac is an author that I was never really attracted to – I’m guessing my disinclination can be partially explained by the fact that I was assigned selections from his magnum opus, The Human Comedy (La Comédie humaine), in my high-school French classes. (Books assigned in high school never get the love they deserve. My recent advice to a 15-year-old book lover about to be assigned To Kill a Mockingbird in English class was to read the book beforehand so she could actually enjoy it.) The Human Comedy is a massive compendium of almost all of Balzac’s works, broken down into sections and subsections, containing in the final analysis over 2,000 individual characters. As epic and challenging as such a work is, there is a problem with approaching Balzac through such a tome: it is just too damn much. In the flurry of narratives and characters (though they are almost uniformly wonderfully written and remarkable stories) the individual tales get lost. Such is the case with The Vendetta, written and first published in 1830 and included in Scenes from Private Life in 1833 before being final subsumed into its eponymous section of The Human Comedy. It’s re-release in 2008 by Herperus Press, with a new translation by Howard Curtis, gives us the opportunity to appreciate this novella on its own.