Yes,
another has passed and, as I reflect on it, I am conscious of what I can fairly
describe as the diminishing returns of age into my early 80s. This year, while we have at last come out of
the pandemic lock-downs and normal life has more or less resumed, it is not
quite the same as before, because the last three years of Covid have left their
mark and one is not quite as free as before to indulge in pursuits of the
past. More about that later, but first
here is what I have read during the year:
2022 Diary – Books
1) `Beyond Reason` by Margaret Trudeau – Paddington Press, NY and London – © 1979 MT – ISBN 0 7092 0776 X – p 256 – strange to be beginning this year`s crop with this by now so outdated memoir of a notorious figure of fun and frivolity who happened to have been married to Canada`s Prime Minister during the 1970s – her frank account of their life together, and how the marriage folded after 6-7 years, with three children born during that brief period, gives, among other things, a fascinating insight into Pierre Trudeau`s premiership and how he coped with the demands of his office – the title might as well have been `Beyond Belief`! I just picked it up out of our home collection while waiting for other books to arrive!
2) `By The Sea` by Abdulrazak Gurnah – Bloomsbury p/b – ISBN 07475 5785 3 – © AG 2001 – 245 pp –read this up again after many years, following the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature – complex, exhausting, but a necessary refresher exercise for writing my piece in the forthcoming issue of AwaaZ celebrating his works.
3) `A Rising Man` by Abir Mukherjee – Vintage p/b – ISBN 9781784701345 – © AM 2016 – 386 pp – AM grew up in Scotland as a child of immigrants from India and was introduced to Gorky Park at the age of 15 and became a fan of crime fiction. This debut novel about an ex-Scotland Yard detective posted to India in the colonial police force in the aftermath of WWI in which he had served has received massive plaudits from a wide range of top literary critics across Britain. The detective, Captain Sam Wyndham and his Indian subordinate, Sergeant `Surrender-not` (an Anglicised corruption of Surendra Nath), educated at an English public school and a graduate of Cambridge University) team up to investigate what appears to be a political murder of a high ranking Raj official at a time when the Jalianwala Bagh massacre makes history and they have to deal with its aftermath too. A really good read, though I despaired of the many minute details of the pair`s encounters with locals and other physical and cultural settings.
4) `On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey` by Paul Theroux – ISBN 978-0-241-26667-0 – h/b – Hamish Hamilton – © PT2019 – 436 pp – gave up at p 127 – bored with all the minutiae of cross (US) border migration stories, so familiar to me through other literature, tv documentaries, newspaper reports etc and my own review of a couple of academic books in the Journal of Immigration Asylum and Nationality Law – this was a first with a PT book, though I hoped to return to it at a later date.
5) `Iola (Iola Leroy)` by Frances E W Harper – first published as `Iola Leroy` in 1892, this p/b edition published by The X Press, 55 Broadway Market, London E8 4PH in 1994, under ISBN 1-874509-11-5 in its Black Classics series (p 193) – with an Introduction to this p/b version by Dotun Adebayo, a note About The Author, and a Personal Introduction by William Grant Still dated 1892; and at the end there is also a Note by the author by herself – long before all the leading 20th century black writers (Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison et al), there was this pioneering African-American author, born in 1825 to free black parents who had died early and so she received a basic education from her uncle and then self-made herself as a teacher and writer committed to the anti-slavery movement. Her portrayal of the travails and triumphs of the eponymous Iola, born free, daughter of a white father, fair-skinned and high minded caught up in the Civil War, separated from her family and sold into slavery by her uncle after her father died; from then on she skilfully navigates the tricky minefield of a racial society. `Twice in the novel, she rejects the marriage proposal of a white suitor despite the advantage such a union could offer her` (Adebayo), having chosen `the identify of a black woman first and foremost`, and further: `Iola was so successful … that it was the most read black American novel of the nineteenth century, [with] four re-prints in its first year of publication, and catapulting its author into superstardom` (Ibid). Most of the narrative is carefully crafted in what we would now regard as pedantically formal English, but interspersed with what can only be described as `plantation-speak` in words and conversations among the negro folk, which marred a smooth reading of the text, but it did convey the underlying reality of slavery and its impact on human relations across the black-white divide, with telling insights into Iola`s work as a nurse and her interactions with white doctors and other staff. (I have scanned four pages from the book and put them in a bundle for reference.)
6) `Lean Fall Stand` by Jon McGregor – ISBN 978-0-00-820494-5 – p/b – 4th Estate London – © JM 2021 – p 278 - even with excellent endorsements by literary heavy-weights and reviewers nationally I found it disappointing despite a tantalisingly promising beginning taking the reader straight into the treacherous terrain of the Antarctic as a team of onsite expeditioners struggle with a storm and its nominal leader Doc Wright gets separated from the others, injured and almost comatose. The scene then switches back home where he is repatriated and slides into recovery mode, still struggling with the memory of what had happened, the burden of caring for him having fallen on his wife – the condition being described as `aphasia` (defined as when a person has difficulty with their language or speech, usually caused by damage to the left side of the brain (for example, after a stroke, as happened to Doc Wright) and the focus then shifts to the dynamics of group therapy sessions that he has to go through, described in minute detail, which I thought changed the narrative into something of a departure –`She had only ever wanted him to come back from Antarctica in one piece. And he had come home but he was different. Your loved one may not be the same as the person they were before. Your loved one will still be. The group`s activities are designed to encourage` – maybe that is how the author wanted to give his finishing touch – I did not find it convincing, because the couple`s married life had been so fractured by long absences that to attribute `love` to the relationship prior to the last tour leading to the accident was only in the writer`s imagination; it did not engage me!
7) `The Promise` by Damon Galgut – isbn 9781529113877 –Penguin Vintage p/b – 293 pp = this was the much acclaimed Booker Prize winning novel of 2021 – found it taxing to read in order to keep track of the familial relationships and the identities and the situation of the characters as you dig into the narrative where a lot of their details are buried and have to be turned inside out, but that said the basic plotline is clear: how a white Anglo/Afrikaner family comes to terms with a post-apartheid South Africa as they pass through generational rites of passage, with all manner of angst and ups and downs – in the midst of which a `promise` is made by a patriarchal husband to a dying wife to leave an outlier property in their estate to a long serving African domestic servant, the completion of which is cast on him and their off-spring after his passing … taken on as a moral obligation by Amor the daughter who is relentless in her insistence that it be fulfilled, and how she reaches that denouement is the essence of the tale – in the process I was struck by these lines (p 255-6), which resonated with me as I read them during our unprecedented heat wave in August:
`She can feel her own perspiration sticking her [nurse`s] uniform to her skin and gets undressed ... She would like to bathe but it`s not allowed. The dams are nearly empty and water is rationed, so she shows instead, just for two minutes, saving the run-off in the tub to use later … the electricity is off again … happening all over the country … The grid is collapsing, no maintenance and no money, the President`s men have run off with the cash. No lights, no water, lean times in the land of plenty …. Weather is changing everywhere, hard not to notice, but this is huge, a whole city running out of water` and lots more – the author is describing the virtual desert that Cape Town had become when he was writing this a couple of years or so ago (he also mentions Jacob Zuma`s sudden departure from office, which was greeted with whoop-ie joy by Desiree - brother Anton`s wife, recently widowed after his suicide). Well, in short, it took me quite an effort to finish reading the book; gave me no pleasure really, though I have to agree with the Booker Judges` description of it as `A tour de force … A spectacular demonstration of how the novel can make us see and think afresh`!
8) `Love Marriage` by Monica Ali – isbn 978-0-349-01548-4 (h/b) –Virago Press – 499p – © M Ali 2022 – all the publicity, the reviews and promotional interviews etc had been full of promise but I was disappointed and slightly irritated at having to plod through some 500 pages of text about basically flawed characters struggling with an equally misbegotten underlying eponymous theme – the Indian Muslim Ghorami family of a doctor father, housewife mother, a daughter going through her initiation as a junior hospital doctor and a rebellious, practically good for nothing younger son at the start, the daughter`s romantic engagement with a fellow English doctor runs into difficulties when he confesses to sleeping around and in response she then has an unlikely affair with a colleague – their love match is supposed to mirror that of her parents` which after some 400 pages plus we discover was a sham, and her fiancé`s relationship with his mother, an eccentric but highly accomplished academic with a high public profile also comes into the equation, as do a whole cross-section of other entanglements – all of it dealt with in minute and boring detail, though descriptions of the hospital routines were realistic enough - on the whole an annoyingly lengthy narrative with no solid moral underpinning and, as far as I was concerned, not much literary merit either.
9) `The Plot` by Jean Hanff Korelitz – isbn 978-0-571-36809-9 (p/b) – Faber – 322 pp – © JHK 2021 – a budding writer dies after telling his teacher of the basic outline of the plot which then the teacher appropriates and is hounded by someone in the know with an intriguing outcome – the book was so hyped by reviewers that my library copy took ages to arrive - it made passable bed-time reading, not brilliant.
10) `The Letter` by Kathryn Hughes – isbn 978 1 4722 2995 3 – Headline Pb Group London – (p/b) 396 pp – © KH 2013 - a WWII time love letter, found in the lining of a coat for sale in a charity shop by a volunteer worker there leads her to dig deep into its origin and trajectory, and what she finds is a really stunning piece of history that takes her on a real and metaphorical journey from her home in Manchester to Ireland and to Vermont in the USA over a considerable span of time, stretching back to WWI, involving multiple characters and generations, in the course of which she becomes conscious of the parallel with her own life and her search for lineage and identity leads her to a convent in Ireland where the strict authoritarian order of the nuns was to be summed up in these two passages:
`Your mother had a baby out of wedlock, and in the eyes of the Lord that`s a sin but through hard work she endured at the laundry, the stain on her soul has been cleansed and her passage to heaven assured` (at p 291); and
`[She] left St Bridget`s after three years. That`s the rule, you see. You look after your baby for three years and then you`re free to go. But alone, of course. No girl is ever allowed to take her little one with her` (at p 295).
In a nutshell, the storyline resonated with the scandal of the Irish Catholic nunnery`s treatment of the `fallen` single mothers who had been made to go through humiliating ordeals after the birth of their illegitimate offspring. A simplistically told tale; I kept going because of the sheer moral force of the plot and its underlying message, and it also reminded me of the film `Phlomena` starring Judy Dench which had so graphically captured the whole sorrowful saga of the mother and child separated by holy intervention.
11) `On The Road: American Adventures from Nixon to Trump` by James Naughtie – p/b isbn 978-1-4711-7744-6 – Simon & Schuster – © JN 2020 – 332 pp – the author is a veteran broadcaster, journalist and writer, a past and current presenter of BBC Radio 4`s `Today` and `Bookclub` programme, as well as many ad hoc appearances and contributions, especially on US politics, history and current affairs. This book is thus a record of his many years of travel, study, longer stays, professional engagements, and friendships in North America as the subtitle tells us, interspersed with informed and extremely detailed analysis and incisive insights into the American polity, its diversity and divisions. As the book`s back-cover blurb puts it: `he tells an enthralling story that takes readers from the era of Watergate and the end of the Cold Wear, through the transformational elections of Obama and Trump, and right up to Biden`s victory. This is a compelling journey across America [in time and space] … brought vividly to life thanks to the great characters that leap from every page.` I lived and breathed through all that history as it was being made and so the book made it all come back.
((Four of the above books, Beyond Reason, By The Sea, Lola and The Letter, came out of our vast home library shelves lining the walls all over the house … just shows how much we tend to accumulate that often remains untouched or hidden after an initial reading, but it became handy during the pandemic years. This year`s crop (only 11) has been eclectic; that is the regular pattern. I have already begun to read William Boyd`s `The Romantic` and that will be the first to be completed in 2023.))
2022 Diary - Films, Plays, Concerts etc
1) Wed 20 Apr – QEH – South Bank - `Kaash (Revival) by Akram Khan Company` - brilliant, captivating, a 55 minute extravaganza of dance and music, a `Revival for 5 dancers` choreographed by the old maestro himself, with music by Nitin Sawhney and set design by Anish Kapoor as in the original production – my first live gig since the pandemic – very enjoyable.
2) Thu 28 Apr – RFH – South Bank – Chineke Orchestra – Conductor Andrew Grams - Paul Philbert timpani; Sacha Johnson percussion – Ellington: The Nutcracker Suite (after Tchaikovsky); A Panufnik: Concertino for timpani, percussion & strings; Tchaikovsky: Symphony No.4 – absolutely brilliant, thoroughly enjoyed it, sitting right on the front row A, immediately across the orchestra and so could see it play at close quarters.
3) Thu 26 May – Odeon Epsom – NT Live on screen - `Straight Line Crazy` - absolutely brilliant, superb powerful performance by Ralph Fiennes of the principal role of Robert Moses, the charismatic engineer/entrepreneur who almost literally bulldozed fast motorways through New York to connect the city with outlying parks and beaches of Long Island during the mid-20th century decades of the 1920s through to the 1950s, stringing governors and politicians along, willy-nilly, to achieve his ambitious projects, running against opposition and setbacks – the production, the play by the veteran David Hare adapted from/based on Robert A Caro`s 1974 biography of the man aptly titled `The Power Broker`, neatly describing Moses who brooked no opposition to his plans. The production by the NT`s Nicholas Hytner, another veteran, was an enthralling experience, with an equally impressive supportive cast - a memorable outing.
4) Wed 09 June – ICA - `Bergman Island` - dir. Mia Hansen-Løve, France / Belgium / Sweden / Germany 2021, 112 min., English. Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve (All Is Forgiven, Things to Come) pays characteristically singular homage to Ingmar Bergman in this elusive meta-romance, a searching examination of a relationship on the rocks (as extracted from the ICA website).
Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth), an American filmmaking couple, decide to take a summer-long retreat on the mythical Swedish island of Fårö – where Bergman, Tony’s cinematic hero, lived, died and shot such films as Through a Glass Darkly and Scenes from a Marriage. The pair are there to seek inspiration for their future films, but when Chris finds memories of a previous lover surfacing in the screenplay she’s writing, the couple’s already-fractured relationship begins to break. Supported by the likes of Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lie, Krieps and Roth are convincing in this unexpectedly poignant portrait of a love entering its third act.
The opening sequences as the couple arrive and a lot of what follows on the Island give you the feel of a holiday, with guided tours to the Bergman hotspots and interactions with local Bergman Foundation pundits and guides – all that was charming and pleasant, but the voyeuristic elements of the narrative made uncomfortable viewing.
5) Thu 21 July – Epsom Odeon - NT Live on screen –`Prima Facie` - a truly gripping solo performance by Jodie Comer as a female criminal barrister used to defending men accused of sexual crimes and largely getting them off who herself is allegedly raped by a work colleague, a fellow barrister of senior rank who is also an expert in the field, and so she becomes the accuser – she is superb in acting out all the elements of both her professional role and her victimhood – she makes a point about her working class Liverpool background who had struggled to get acceptance and recognition as a practising lawyer – what is amazing is her deftness in simulating all the actions and movements, including rapid changes of attire and courtroom sequences – she is both narrator and actor of the tale - but all that said, I found it oppressive to watch and listen to her totally subjective account of the rape scene; she paid no regard to the fact that once a complaint of any sexual offence is made the law has to take its course, which would involve severe cross examination of the complainant; this was not so much a play as a propaganda piece, with an impassioned plea, at the end, to the audience, and the world at large, to take a woman`s version of what she claims to have happened as the gospel truth (as opposed to `legal truth`) uncritically – rather like what lawyers call their `evidence in chief` taking at its face value, without being subjected to cross-examination. Even in her own one-sided testimony she frankly admits that she was confused about the events of the evening: when the couple had set out for a dinner out, with her having slipped into a slinky dress, where a lot of drink was consumed, then retired to her flat where they, by her own admission, had consensual sex at first, but afterwards when she was feeling sick and vomiting in the bathroom, he had barged in and forced himself upon her, though at this stage the facts, in own words, become blurred – she couldn`t say how he had penetrated her or give other details – then she runs out of the apartment, into the street, manages to get a taxi-driver to take her to the nearest police station, where she is put through the detective`s searching questioning, eventually however leading to the court hearing a little over 2 years later, where she confronts a totally male-dominated environment and sees her case collapse and a not guilty verdict handed down – oh, this is just a bare summary. The whole 90+ minute tirade was too much for me; I wanted to leave but stayed on, finally to see her humiliation. I make no apology for my take on the theme and the contrived message of the play – but her acting was absolutely brilliant. Unlike my previous NT Live show – Straight Line Crazy – this was torture, but I endured it.
6) Wed 31 Aug – ICA - `Official Competition` dir. Gastón Duprat & Mariano Cohn, Spain 2021, 115 min., Spanish with English subtitles, 15 – extracted from the ICA website:
`Penélope Cruz stars as a crazed director whose
methods drive all around her to madness in Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn’s
film industry satire – a sharp-edged yet warm-hearted portrait of vanity, ego
and art.
Humberto Suarez, a pharmaceutical tycoon nearing the end of his life, decides to burnish his legacy by financing a major movie. After buying the rights to a novel by Nobel laureate, he hires, as his director, the indomitable Lola Cuevas. And then Cuevas chooses revered stage actor Iván Torres and monstrous blockbuster hero Félix Rivero as her leading men – an acting marriage made in hell. A sharp script and tremendous performances help to make this a satire that really sings” but also stings in its denouement, when the rivalry between the two protagonist actors ends in a morally flawed triumphant overkill by Felix Rivero! Still, it was worth seeing`.
Had gone to see the movie only to add to my sparse list of outings into Central London but it all worked out exactly according to plan in terms of train timings etc.
·
7) Thu 13 Oct – NFT2 – (LFF) - `The Cloud Messenger` - Dir: Rahat Mahajan – Producer: Sanjay Singh
– with Ritvik Tyagi; Ahalya Shetty, Raj Zutshi – India 2022 – 152 minutes – an
absolutely brilliant film; the director and the lead actor Ritvik Tyagi were at
the NFT for brief introductions – a more considered review will follow sometime,
maybe, but for now it is best summed up in the profile of the film as extracted
from the LFF (London Film Festival 2022) site:
Rahat Mahajan takes an audacious and imaginative approach to the notion of reincarnation – a popular theme in Indian mythology, arts and cinema – with this bold fusion of dance, photography and classical storytelling. Jaivardhana and Tarini are two boarding-school students inexplicably drawn to each other. Their blossoming relationship unfolds in the present, but parallels the narratives woven into ancient myth, as evinced by four performers who enact a similar outline through the Indian dance forms of Kathakali, Theyyam and Kuttiyattam. By blending timelines and artistic disciplines, the contemporary and the ancient, Mahajan has created a bold, resonant and visually dazzling cinema whose play with form only adds to the film’s richly satisfying emotional tone.
(elsewhere I found the reference to his school – The Lawrence School Sanawar – and his excellent academic trajectory- followed by an arts degree from St Xavier`s College, Mumbai, and an MFA from the Art Centre College of Design at LA.)
· 8) Sat 22 Oct – NFT2 – (post-LFF) - `Decision to Leave` - Director-Producer: Park Chan-Wook (starring Tang Wei, Park Hae-il; South Korea 2022 – 138 min – Korean, Chinese + Eng subtl) extracted from the NFT site:
· Busan Detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) is happily married, although work means spending too much time apart from his wife. When a climber’s body is found, suspicious photos on his phone lead to a murder investigation, and Hae-joon to the man’s young wife, Seo-rae (an entrancing Teng Wei) and a stakeout of her home. But even as her alibi clears her, Hae-joon finds himself unable to end his surveillance. Is this his detective’s instinct, or something more? His questioning of Seo-rae at the police station reveals an evident chemistry between them, but it’s unclear whether she is genuine in her behaviour or cleverly manipulating the detective. Director Park has crafted a mystery plotted with virtuoso aplomb …
But I couldn`t stomach the grisly details so I decided to leave after 2 hours (with another 40 minutes to go.)
8) Fri 04 Nov – RFH Concert – LPO – Conductor: Alpesh Chauhan; Violinist: Randall Goosby – works: Chen Yi (Momentum); Bruch (Violin Concerto No. 1); Brahms (Symphony No. 3) – an absolutely brilliant performance of all three works, superbly conducted by Chauhan whose name and fame I had come to know and whose orchestral concerts I had often listened to on radio and so I was really thrilled to see him in action, especially from a centre seat in the Choir section, facing him full on, with all his conducting movements and sheer dominating presence – the first piece was a magnificent introduction, followed by the virtuoso rendering of Bruch`s violin concerto and then after the interval Brahms` 3rd symphony, again one that I was familiar with (it had featured in the movie `Goodbye Again` which I had first seen in 1961 as a romantic outing with my student girl-friend in London) – so these were my favourite works and I thoroughly enjoyed the concert (note: Randall Goosby is a celebrated African American soloist and performer).
2022 Diary - Lectures, Talks, Events etc
Nothing to report!
2022 Diary – Miscellany
So much for my cultural highlights, but again this
year also I can more or less repeat what I had written at the end of 2021. I have indeed slowed down - the fact that
during the year I did not post anything else on this blog is one sure
indication of that, but I am not quite done yet. I continue to write my regular
columns in the AwaaZ magazine and
other stuff elsewhere, my exercise routine is going splendidly, and social life
goes on, albeit on a reduced level. The current state of the economy has no
direct bearing on our lifestyle (though repeated train strikes are hampering
travel into Central London and that is a limiting factor for any outings) but
what I still miss most is not being able to travel abroad yet, now not so much because
of Covid related restrictions as because of my wife`s health. Even so, I am hopeful of taking a cruise or a
short break sometime in the coming year.
With compliments of the season and best wishes to
you all for 2023.
RAMNIK SHAH
© 2022
Surrey, England
