The Rise/Revenge/Return of ienthuse!

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It’s been a while – what made me decide to try and start maintaining this blog again?

Could it have been all that extra lockdown free time?

Not exactly, you’ll find out soon enough what I did with that period (threat).

The news we’re getting a Fisherman’s Friends 2?

Delighted as I am for another opportunity to ogle James Purefoy in knitwear, it wasn’t that.

Maybe some thrilling new development emerging from one of Disney’s many tentacles?

Nah – enthusiasm or no, it’s somewhat embarrassing to see this blog has been languishing with my cheerful take on Endgame on the front page. I re-read that post in a state of bemusement recently – I don’t think I’ve once spent more than two seconds thinking about that film since then. I hear Wandavision is good – I’ll try to stir myself to watch it some time. But Thor: Love and Thunder is really the only forthcoming Marvel title I’m interested in, and as for Star Wars… how can the same person who wrote thousands of words justifying her enjoyment of the spectacle of The Last Jedi not have made a single post about The Rise of Skywalker? It’s not so different from my experience with the prequels, really – from enthusiastic defence of The Phantom Menace, even as I knew I didn’t believe my own arguments, to not even bothering to see Revenge of the Sith for years after its release.

Sometimes I notice how hollow the enthusiasm rings a few days/months/years after the event. Usually means I’m ready for a cultural reset and need some time off the blockbusters.

If that sounds a bit pretentious, don’t worry – I’ve barely got started.

What’s led me back here is all my overflowing thoughts about some of the films I’ve been watching recently and a curiosity to see if I can articulate what interests me in them and what patterns I’ve been seeing. This has been about as far from the Hollywood blockbuster scene as imaginable – I’m talking arthouse cinema from the Caucasus, baby.

However, I still like to keep a record still of what media I’ve been consuming – influences, interests, annoyances, whatever. It probably won’t be an exhaustive list – there’s bound to be stuff I’ve forgotten watching or reading since 2019, and some things I probably have no opinions on.

• But here’s a summary of the rest of 2019, as I remember it.
• Books that I read in 2020 (I was not a voracious pandemic reader, as you will see) [still in draft].
• Cinema and other pre-lockdown activities in 2020. [still in draft]

Or, if you prefer, there’s a list of titles, linked to the posts concerning them, see below.

As for the rest of 2020/2021 so far:
So much of what I’ve been reading, watching and listening to over the past year is a direct result of seeing one film – a film I heard of by chance from a blog that doesn’t post often these days, that I was probably only able to watch because it couldn’t get a cinema release due to the pandemic, and was available from Curzon Home Cinema. I rented it on March 30 last year and watched it every day for the three days I had it – uncertain fascination turning rapidly into the decision to let myself fall hard in love. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s astonishing given the circumstances under which it was made, and it is an important film, though easily and unfairly lumped in with other ‘gay coming of age’ cinema. It’s also a gateway drug to the Georgian language, which has been my lockdown hobby (along with the sourdough and the gardening, the hair-dying and the new dog).

Here’s my review of And Then We Danced/და ჩვენ ვიცეკვეთ, and the film features in my other posts on Georgian cinema here, here and here [still in draft]. As well as leading me to watch movies from Georgia and about Georgia, it encouraged me to watch more global cinema [still in draft] and more queer cinema [still in draft]. Though I do still, occasionally, watch less heavy or obscure stuff – that’s gathered in a post here [still in draft].

2019
Mr President (book)
Embassytown (book)
Wreck-It Ralph 2 (film)
Ready or Not (cinema)
Knives Out (cinema)
Rise of Skywalker (cinema)
2020
Ipswich players panto
Gorky Park (book)
Booksmart (film)
Vikingdom (film)
Under the Pendulum Sun (book)
To Calais, In Ordinary Time (book)
The Diaries of Frannie Langton (book)
Kiki’s Delivery Service (film)
King Arthur (film)
Conversations With Friends (book)
The Reavers (book)
Kate Butch (live)
The Murder in the Red Barn (theatre)
1917 (cinema)
David Copperfield (cinema)
And Then We Danced/და ჩვენ ვიცეკვეთ (film)
Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (cinema)
Sam Lee (live)
The Lighthouse (cinema)
The Captive Prince and Prince’s Gambit (books)
Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (film)
Ek Ladhi Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (film)
Two queer Indian shorts (films)
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (film)
Anna Karenina (film)
Frozen 2 (film)
Chess of the Wind (film)
Wolkwalkers (film)
Monanieba/მონანიევბა [Repentance] (film)
Dancing in Odessa (book)
The Tradition (book)
Six Georgian Poets (book)
Tomorrow Never Dies (film)
The Literature Express (book)
Me var Beso/მე ვარ ბესო [I am Beso] (film)
Chemi Bednieri Ojakhi/ჩემი ბედნიერი ოჯახი [My Happy family] (film)
The Man Who Surprised Everyone (film)
In Bloom/გრძელი ნათელი დღეები (film)
March For Dignity (film)
No (film)
The Pear Tree (book)
Casablanca (film)
Singin’ in the Rain (film)
The Sound of Music (film)
Ghori/ღორი [Pig] (film)
Marilivit tetri/მარილივით თეთრი [Salt White] (film)
2021
Post Mortem (film)
Dasatsqisi/დასაწყისი [Beginning] (film)
Ashik Kerib (film)
The Colour of Pomegranates (film)
Udzinarta Mze/უძინართა მზე [Sun of the Sleepless] (film)
Magdana’s Donkey/მაგდანას ლურჯა (film)
I Wish Summer Would Never Come Again/ნეტავ აღარასოდეს მოვიდეს ზაფხული (film)
The Plank (film)
Natvris xe/ნატვრის ხე [The Wishing Tree] (film)
April/აპრილი (film)

April/აპრილი (1961)

I wonder if Eula Bliss has seen this near-dialogue-free Soviet-era Georgian short?  In Having and Being Had (a book I am admittedly yet to read), Bliss takes as her starting point the purchase of her house: “In 2014 she bought her first house, with her husband John. This should have made her happy; instead it made her uncomfortable in a way that she couldn’t describe.” (source) From the reviews and excerpts I have read, her concerns are given particular focus by the issue of furniture, its maintenance and longevity, its design and creation. Furniture is also at the heart of this unsubtle, cheeky little warning against the march of consumerism and, presumably, Western ideals of living.

A young couple wanders the streets of Tbilisi – they tease each other, they fall out, they make up. They search, endlessly, for a quiet place to share a kiss. Privacy is all they ask for. Meanwhile, those around them seem unconcerned with such things: the residents of an old building fling open the windows of their rooms and deliberately eschew privacy in favour of communal vivacity; playing music from their windows, watching the world while doing weights, practising ballet to the sounds of the musicians all around. This cheerful racket is only matched by the clatter of a gang of devious removal men (furniture sellers? Their actual jobs are unclear. They port furniture from place to place – loudly).

All the furniture goes out of the building and a new building appears, square and squat and regular. The locals move in and happily fling open the square, regular windows and carry on as they were. The young couple finds an empty apartment and finally they get to enjoy the privacy they sought, now with electricity, gas and running water! They have nothing else in the apartment and they are quite content with one another. Downstairs, one of the noisy furniture men moves his stock in and goes about from keyhole to keyhole, searching for customers. Having shown the young people the potential on offer – a life in old age, solemnly polishing the glassware together – and been rebuffed, he resorts to leaving a chair in their apartment. The chair sits like a dark stain in the bright, empty rooms, but its influence is immediate: item by item, the couple now buys into the life of consumerism.

Now that they have things, they must get locks on their door to protect the things. One thing begets another; outfits must change; plants in vases need water; furniture needs polishing; and why open a window when you can buy a fan? As the women in the building wave their dusters out of the windows, the musicians retreat indoors, their instruments coated in dust, the sounds of electrical equipment drowning them out. The man exercising at his window turns away from it and the ballet dancer gives up, unable to concentrate. The film’s scant dialogue bubbles up as the couple argue – earlier they spoke softly, inaudibly, when all they had to compete with was the music around them. Now all they can do is yell at one another – even the furniture man notices, and is surprised that their things have not made them happy.

Things break, and the couple struggle to connect as they move awkwardly around the crowded rooms. Happily, the usual Georgian reluctance to gather the narrative into an ending, or to articulate a clear message, is absent from this little film. With a clamour of noise, the couple fling their troublesome furniture from the window to the street. The musicians begin to play in joyful response, the ballet dancer resumes her practise and the weightlifter turns back to the window with a smile. The couple go to their window, they throw it open and beam at their happy neighbours. The furniture man and his friends shake their heads over the mess on the street, uncomprehending.

Up on the pasture, where the couple used to go to kiss before they found their apartment, there is a reminder that despite this about-turn in their priorities, the damage cannot entirely be undone: the tree they used to kiss beneath is gone, chopped down to make the furniture they demanded more and more of. It may not be subtle, but აპრილი [April] is a charming little comedy in the vein of works like The Plank (forgive me, my references for this time of film are still limited), summarising a place and a time with a few deftly drawn characters and locations. It is playful and romantic – the lights are kept on and the water is kept running by the strength of the couple’s love for one another – and you won’t be able to help smiling along with the musicians when they catch their opportunities to play in the moonlit night. The use of sound, particularly the squeaky shoes of the furniture man, disturbing the peace wherever he goes, is ingenious, and it’s all very beautiful to look at. Didn’t do much for my Georgian listening practise, but it was a delight.

2019 summary

• Mister President [El Señor Presidente]

Influential proto-magical realism from Miguel Ángel Asturias, not-about-Guatemalan-dictator-Manuel Estrada Cabrera-honest! Has its moments – notably when it delves into the city’s streets and underbelly, showing the characters in the bars and in the gutters – but the central relationship between Angel Face and Camila marred my enjoyment too much. The story of the President’s closest advisor falling in love and trying to escape his old job never really achieves the depth I wanted. Angel Face remains dislikeable, neurotic and self-obsessed even as he distances himself from his former boss. His actions end up looking naive and it is hard to have any faith that he will succeed, which spoiled the drama as the end approached.

• Embassytown

Some glorious world-building, as you’d expect from China Mieville. His protagonists, I note, habitually claim to be normal and uninteresting, merely bystanders observing their far more significant colleagues. It doesn’t really ring true in Embassytown, where the protagonist Avice Benner Cho plays such a crucial role in things, and appears to hold a remarkable position in her society from all relevant perspectives. There is so much jammed in this rich, linguistically-savvy sci-fi that it’s futile to summarise it all, but what stuck with me was the casual way in which Mieville allows things to be normal and healthy that are still contentious in our society: Cho’s bisexuality and the communal upbringing of the children stand out particularly in my memory. The Ariekei are genuinely strange creations too, though the human response to them seems painfully familiar in its colonial mindset. When things descended into relationship drama and bloody, drug-addled war I did long for something like a TV series to give all the characters and the setting the depth they deserve, but the ending was very deftly balanced, demonstrating that change can be necessary for survival, and not wholly a negative thing, even if it was brought on by external forces.

• Wreck-It Ralph 2 (film)

If, standing in the customs queues at JFK airport for hours, it felt appropriate to be reading Embassytown with all its supposedly well-intentioned beaurocracy, Wreck-It Ralph 2 was more my level for the return flight. After a sweltering four hours wandering along the Highline and drinking more beer than we should have, failing to operate the subway ticket system, being unable to get wi-fi in the airport to download our boarding passes, and consequently nearly missing the plane and not knowing whether our luggage had actually made it on board…I simply absorbed whatever was on the screen in front of me. Criminal lady car racer? Cool. I mean hot. I mean…well I guess it was a pleasant surprise in the film. I don’t remember much else – it was very predictable, and less likeable than the first installment. But it killed some time on the flight and didn’t require any brain power.

• Ready or Not and Knives Out (cinema)

I didn’t see them on the same day, but they’d make an excellent double bill featuring entitled rich people getting their comeuppance. Both gleeful, funny and full of heart, true to their respective genres but still fresh and original, these two films gave us heroines worth rooting for and fantastic ensemble performances. I’ve watched Knives Out again since, and it stood up well to multiple viewings – even though a good measure of the fun on the first viewing comes from trying to work out whether or not Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc really is as oblivious as he appears so be. It’s played and paced beautifully though, so remains a delight even when you know what’s coming. The future installments will be fun, I have no doubt, but the heart of the movie is Marta, who we must root for even when it looks like she’s made a heart-breaking mistake – it would be an error to think they could repeat the formula without her. Ready or Not I only saw the once, and it’s not a genre I’d seek out as often – it’s often visceral, horror done really well, but genuinely made me cringe at some of the things Grace goes through, as, one supposes, good horror should. Yet again though, it’s funny and surprisingly earnest, cramming more characterisation in than most Hollywood ensemble pieces manage. Honestly, in an ideal world, the sequel I’d commission would involve Marta helping Grace prove herself innocent of all the stuff that happens to her new in-laws, and Grace and Marta pooling their collective inheritances to fight crime and fuck up rich people.

• The Rise of Skywalker (cinema)

Unlike the case of the Star Wars prequels, this time I did drag myself to the cinema for the third installment, and, much like Endgame, I just sort of…decided to try and enjoy it for what it was. Which was still a bit of a mess – JJ Abrams trying to reassert his take on a story he couldn’t be bothered to plot out in the first place, picking up strands from The Force Awakens in a half-hearted and rushed manner, and throwing in contradictory and unnecessary characters and bits of backstory, cherry-picking the least interesting bits of the Legendary EU to keep (why, of all the things to re-make as canon, are we doing Dathomir, Kyp Durron and cloned emperors???). When it was revealed that the Force could be used to bring the dead back to life in present Star Wars canon, I just sort of…threw my hands up, went “That’s not how the Force works!” and decided to enjoy the very gay adventures of Poe, Finn and 3PO (Poe’s absurd new backstory and ex aside). The highlight for me was, undoubtedly, the single shot of Wedge Antilles they managed to persuade Denis Lawson to return for – followed by the raising of the x-wing on Ach To, a call-back to Empire I had sort of longed for in TLJ. I decided to believe that when Kylo Ren died and Leia did whatever she did, that Leia was actually just puppetting Ren’s body around – yeah, kiss with Rey and all. I enjoyed the fact that those alien beasts were definitely just horses in wigs. I loved every minute of Lando’s presence. I thought the whole thing was a hot mess, and a waste of potential for the two wonderful new characters Abrams gave us in Rey and Finn. I am, still, interested in rewatching it some time – but these sequels are the real ‘legends’ in the Star Wars canon of my heart. They haven’t come near to replacing the EU novels for me.

Playing catch up…

Still clinging on here, still reading, still intending to keep writing! I was just too busy reading to write the reviews up, sorry guv. Also travelling, working, the usual.

It probably is time to admit that I’m not going to try to review everything here any more (not that I ever bothered for TV anyway, I needed to keep something for just switching off…). I’ve not been to the cinema so much this year, now I’m not a member of the local one and I work longer hours. I guess there’s also been less that I’ve really wanted to see. Anyway, from now on the reviews I write for films here will be of the same selective nature as those I write for albums, so that I know I have something to say. At the bottom of this post, for uh, the completists I guess, there is a list of things I watched since my last post and a brief note of my feelings. None of them really inspired me to say anything more, so the subject of this blog is henceforth largely sticking to books and live music/theatre.

Inspiration more recently has been coming from satisfying TV (I’ve been enjoying The Good Place, Bojack Horseman, The Americans, The Terror and Utopia), but I’m still not tempted to start doing recaps or reviews for that. Life is too short (and we already spend so much time waiting for things to be over).

So I present a small collection of belated reviews of the books I’ve been reading. I hope someone enjoys them. If you do, then thanks very much for taking the time to read them.

• Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Sadaawi (July)
• Glæsir by Ármann Jakobsson (August)
• The Bloody Chamber and other stories by Angela Carter (September)
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (October)
• The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher (November)

Wow it doesn’t normally take me a whole month to read a book I promise… I managed to get through all of last Christmas’ acquisitions this year, and have a few new and recent purchases I’d like to get to before the end of 2018 (some Ursula K. Le Guin for one, and possibly Svetlana Alexeivitch). I’m currently on Goldman’s The Princess Bride, as it seemed a fitting time to finally pick it up, and a reread of my favourite, Wuthering Heights, is long overdue. I’ve also got a few live events in the diary which should be varied and fun to write up.

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Ghostbusters (2016)
Fun, but a bit thin. I’m sick of the ramped up stakes in the action movie ending: a smaller villainy would have left it more time to be braver about its gender politics.

Ant-man and the Wasp (cinema)
This ending was great though! Hand-wavy magic science and everyone staying alive (ignoring Infinity War for now)! Huw from Detectorists and his truth serum! Functional divorced parenting! I love this bit of the MCU, even if Hope got a bit squeezed out of her own film and sometimes the tone was trying a bit too hard to recreate Edgar Wright’s energy.

This is Spinal Tap (1984)
I don’t know how it took me so long to finally see this! Of course, I knew pretty much all of the iconic lines already, but it was great to see them in context at last. I couldn’t stop thinking about the tiny bread as I went from holiday breakfast buffet to holiday breakfast buffet afterwards.

Persuasion (1995)
Ah, the Jane Austen story where Nothing Happens. Great cast, but wow is it ever stagey, right down the bizarre carnival pageant behind the happy couple as they walk home. I’m afraid that even with its cast I prefer the more recent adaptation from ITV.

The Death of Stalin (rewatch)
I enjoyed this even more the second time by only half paying attention, so that I could just enjoy the funny lines without overthinking the bleakness of the historical context…

Disney’s Robin Hood (rewatch)
Still the best music, though let’s not look too closely at the class politics and the accents (advice that applies to all Robin Hood adaptations). Feels a bit baggy in the middle, but it holds up well.

Lilo and Stitch (rewatch)
Still great. That is all.

Big Hero 6 (2014)
Predictable but fun. It looked good but I never really got invested in the characters.

Zootopia (2016)
I’d looked forward to this for a while, but it wasn’t quite as bold as I’d hoped. I did prefer it to BH6, but it didn’t stay with me afterwards like the classics do.

Review: The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro)

Image source. I struggled to find out any more about the sculpture, I’d love to know more if you have any info.

Oh. Oh my heart. This was gorgeous, a confection of fantasy and historical fiction with a sly undercurrent of postmodern self-awareness. The mock-historical setting is perfect for a tale of trauma, forgetting, love, loss and anger. This is the only Ishiguro I’ve read, and I’d been meaning to get to it since it came out, primarily because of the appeal of the setting: a dreamy, fantastic, folkloric version of post-Roman Britain, where fictions, anachronisms and ogres roam the land. The way people have thought of this period for so long makes it perfectly apt for a story about why we choose to remember and to forget: in post-Roman Britain, didn’t everyone fall into the ‘dark ages’ overnight? Choosing to live in mud huts rather than lovely villas, forgetting civilisation and culture and Christianity in favour of ignorant savagery? Well no, but it’s what some still think, so Ishiguro playfully sprinkles elements of the exaggerated and fantastic into this stereotype, where the Britons live in burrows in the earth’s rock, an aged Sir Gawain roams the land in full armour, tall and gaunt like Sir Nicketty Nox, bringing to mind the persistent medieval idea that the ancestors were greater and far taller. Most appropriately of all, a mist of forgetfulness lies on the land: people do not remember what life was like before, or what led them to the lives they live now, or how to live in the splendour the Romans lived in. So families have been divided by this forgetting, and communities risk forgetting members who go missing. Still, it’s a time of peace for the people of this land, where their only fear comes from the ogres, pixies and superstitions the country is steeped in.

The plot centres on an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, who realise gradually that they once had a son, and they decide to travel to where they suppose him to be. This devoted pair allows the theme of collective forgetfulness to mingle with moments that evoke the frustrations of dementia: although Axl and Beatrice seem to be able to break through the mist more than younger generations of adults, their flashes of insight do not always coincide, and sometimes contradict each others’ memories, or, worse, the idea the other wants to have of their past. Acrimony and hurt can come from the way we remember differently, or do not remember at all. But what keeps Axl and Beatrice going is the conviction that it will be worth remembering all the bad, in order to recall all that was good. They are willing to have their painful memories returned if it means they can once again trace the trajectories of their love through the years. Gradually, this determination to recover their memories takes over from the primary mission of finding their son, and the revelations about the mist come thick and fast as they encounter others who struggle against its hold.

The sense of foreboding throughout the novel is strong: a wariness instilled by the knowledge that people forget things when they have suffered a great and rending trauma. In many ways, therefore, this is not a subtle story. We meet a boatman early on, a tall figure in black who is followed by death: the old woman who torments him with dead rabbits seems to twist our ideas of the animals sacrificed in ancient burials. Her rabbits are not offerings to appease death or its representative, and they do not help her husband in the afterlife. Rather she sacrifices as an act of vengeance, reminding the boatman that when he brought her a rabbit to eat instead of passage to the island where her husband went, his offering to her fell short. She is one of many ragged cronies who pepper Ishiguro’s landscape, sad and always somehow threatening, a reminder of something that others would rather forget. Anyway, we’ve all come across enough tales of ferryman to see what’s going on here: this woman’s husband has died and passed over to a place where his wife cannot go. She was told that sometimes, when a bond between a couple is strong enough, both may travel together, but their relationship failed that test. We know then, that Axl and Beatrice, who is ailing from the outset, will face a similar test eventually. But they are polite to the boatman, and he is kind to them, and we see how devoted they are to each other, again and again, don’t we?

Mixed into this is a Saxon warrior with a chip on his shoulder and a young boy in search of his place in the world. Admittedly, in his eagerness to deepen the setting beyond how it affects Axl and Beatrice, Ishiguro adds perhaps a few too many elements. The boy’s perspective does not add much — an inevitable sense of responsibility for his missing mother and appropriate admiration for the heroic Saxon warrior — and elements of Gawain’s history with Axl were maybe over-convenient. There are meanderings that might have dragged more if I hadn’t had a long train journey on which to plough through them. But the ending is exquisite, and the tension of what is unknown builds gradually and steadily until all is resolved in an inevitable, bittersweet sigh of catharsis — for some, at least. The ending shows the way in which we tell tales and lies to ourselves to make the idea of hardship easier. They can be helpful up until that point, but if you believe in then too strongly you will only make the moment of pain more difficult, because life and death do not conform to the story we have told ourselves. By remembering the bad as well as the good we are more honest with ourselves.

Review: Santa Evita (Tomás Eloy Martínez)

(Photo by Robin Minchum, at Perón Perón [x])

I accumulated floods of file cards and stories so as to be able to fill in all the unexpected blank spaces of what, later on, was going to be my novel. But I left them where they were, leaving the story, because I am fond of unexplained blank spaces.

In this, I am of one mind with the author. And it is more for the ‘unexplained blank spaces’ and for the swampy, indefinable territory between history and fiction that I came to Santa Evita, than out of any knowledge or particular interest in Argentine history.

It’s a long, meandering novel, and it feels appropriate to begin by discussing the ending, not least as the ending concerns the work’s beginning. By its close, I felt more than anything the strength of its similarities with Javier Cercas’ far more compact Soldiers of Salamis (2001; Santa Evita was first published in 1995). Whether there was direct influence I won’t speculate, but the same slightly neurotic, ambivalent narrator is pulled inexorably, reluctantly into both stories. Both are stories mired in a violent, vivid memory of history, and both thus encourage ambivalence: the accidental moment where a leading fascist was spared death, and the strange indignities to which the body of Eva Perón was subjected after her husband’s first deposition in 1952. Soldiers of Salamis discovers an ending full of internationalism and hope, however, where Santa Evita finds the author finally able to return to Argentina after years of exile, unable, or unwilling, to fully describe the hold that Evita’s story has on him — and on the other subjects of his story — though perhaps it is indescribable, recognised and understood only by the Argentines who lived through the politics of the twentieth century.

It is an interesting story, though not, perhaps a satisfying one. Santa Evita weaves an imagined account of Evita’s last days with the author’s interpretations of newsreel footage and his interviews with figures such as her hairdresser. It also wanders into her past, via the recollections of her mother and fellow actresses, and the lascivious speculations of her political enemies, but its focus is largely on the reception of her corpse by Perónists and by the military following Juan Perón’s flight from Argentina later in the year that she died.

The author retains a sympathy for all the characters who appear in his text, though he describes himself as a distant, unemotive and on occasions cruel researcher, as in the encounter with ‘Irene’. He is perhaps keen to emphasise the journalistic intent that originally prompted his investigations; or perhaps mired in the depression that he claims lifted miraculously upon his decision to write the story down. The sympathetic approach to all the individuals involved, from his depiction of Eva Perón’s last days, to the struggles of the man initially tasked with concealing the embalmed corpse, means that this is not a novel with a particularly strident political message. It explores madnesses and insecurities on all sides, teasing out the human doubts of its subjects, and the inappropriateness of their equally human lack of doubt. Some of Martínez’s ‘revelations’ are shocking — such as all that is inflicted upon the corpse — and others are less so — the proposed reason for the young actress Evita’s mysterious absence from the historical record for a period of eleven months or so will probably surprise no female reader, at least.

A sense of personal dislocation and unease permeates the novel, where description is at its finest in instances such as when a source’s brief flashes of emotion are accompanied by his need to look away from the author, who describes this expression as one in which the subject’s experienced emotion is thought to be the mislaid emotion of some other person, whom he then looks for. The involuntary nature of our feelings and the actions that they induce us to take is a constant here: never investigated directly, nor questioned, but implicitly underlying the inexorable descent into obsession that so many characters in the novel experience.

The story is also one of male possession. Evita’s voice opens its narrative, her dreamy self-reflections as she lies weakening, dying of cancer, but after her death her wishes are denied, she is talked of and talked over and constantly redefined as an object of want by so many others. The way in which her requests are ignored upon her death; the way that her mother gradually loses influence over what is to happen to her daughter’s remains; the fearful helplessness of Colonel Koenig’s wife; of Arancibia’s sister-in-law; the unaffected horror of Irene when informed that she had not had a doll as her childhood companion, but a real, human body; all cry out pitifully from the margins of the novel. As Perón claimed to have made her, so each man who encounters her body after death remakes her in his own imagination, turning the hatred of slurs — Mare — and attempts at distance — Person — into a fierce struggle to ‘tame’ bones and formaldehyde, and the dangerous ideas that live on with her preserved corpse.

Eva Perón died at 33, the same age that Christ was supposed to have died, the same age that medieval representations of the dead aimed to show their subjects. Like all good saints, she must have a martyrdom, only in Santa Evita the deprivations and misunderstandings that martyrs are subjected to occur after her death, to her impassive body. Flowers and candles apparently planted by her supporters, and the scent of lavender from the embalmer’s ointments, are the standard attributes of a saintly corpse. But the removal of a finger, a nick of her ear, a star-shaped incision, and the endless longing hands of a stream of fascinated men are Evita’s trials after death; she is as passive in her ‘sufferings’ as the tortured women of medieval saints’ lives.

The novel offers neither historical fact, nor closure to the reader. Like Soldiers of Salamis, I am most fond of it when the author’s voice is clearest, musing on the nature of truth and fiction and watching, listening to his sources, drawing sad and lonely people with an effective line or two of description, or by recounting a night of conversation between them and the author. Martínez somehow needed to tell this story, but he does not offer a full explanation of why. Prompted to ‘join the cult’ by Rodolfo Walsh, who stayed, and died, for his publications, he does not say whether following the story that he found himself investigating to its end(s) brought him any closure for himself. But he doesn’t really need to say; the loose ends, the blank spaces, are true to both life and to the form of the novel. They leave us space to think in, and they leave the story space to just be, without imposing any trite, moralising conclusions or explanations for the events within it.

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I read the translation by Helen Lane from 1996.

Review: Fingers in the Sparkle Jar (Chris Packham)

Behold, one of my earliest TV memories: Chris Packham, Terry Nutkins and Michaela Strachan, and a very ’90s introduction to the animal world. It began broadcasting about 11 months before I was born, and despite the fact that Wikipedia claims no crossover between Terry and Michaela on the show, this is the only line-up I remember watching. Combined with a very rural childhood, it had me nose-deep in Collins Gem guides, tramping the woods on dawn-chorus walks with my Dad, and picking through owl pellets and feather collections. None of that’s really comparable with Chris Packham’s animal-entrenched life, but that’s why he’s one of the best naturalists, nature presenters and wildlife activists around and I’m not (also because I can’t hold onto my obsessions for that long, they dissipate and form anew too quickly).

Also, you should know that because of this being such a long-standing connection, and because he worked an insane number of Smiths song-titles into his Springwatch presenting, and because Tory twats who hate the BBC like to pick on him at any opportunity, I will judge you on your attitude to Chris Packham. If you don’t like Chris Packham, I don’t much like you. That’s even more true having finally got my hands on the paperback of his sensuous, often brutally frank childhood memoir.

The memoir never once uses the term ‘Asperger’s syndrome’, which the author was only diagnosed with relatively recently. It just asks you to come along, to see things through his eyes, and to feel what he felt through some of the defining moments of his childhood: moments of intense emotion, of loss, fear, puzzlement, and most of all, of love. His love for animals is as absolute, as unconditional as he sees their love being in return. He knows that others will think it’s strange that he can celebrate this love by taking, piercing and blowing bird’s eggs, by shooting sparrows to feed his pet Kestrel, by collecting dead things to dissect their wings and workings, but he makes no apology for it; he just presents you with his single-minded fascination and with the way he revels in discovery and experience. Words flow across the page, synaesthetic and winding sentences that describe the light and the English countryside in a way that puts you right there. No matter whose perspective he writes from, they all see the countryside as he does: they all experience the living world in the same way, though they may not be able to recognise it.

The narrative swoops from perspective to perspective, first introducing us to the reticent little boy collecting insects through the eyes of the ice-cream seller. It’s such a self-conscious technique, inserting himself into others, imagining how others imagined him, fleshing out their moments in the narrative limelight with details to fit their lives, their position in space and time. But it’s done sensitively, with a careful regard for each person; although most of those whose heads he imagines peering out from are people who showed him sympathy or empathy themselves. The only exception I can think of currently is the school bully, Bazza, and in that instance, Packham’s not so much seeing himself through Barry’s eyes, as imagining Barry hoping to cop a feel of the same pair of tits young Chris himself was interested in. When Barry comes to beat him up, he views Chris from a distance, sees only the lack of reaction. The rawness of feeling that Packham admits to his therapist in between chapters — no, he doesn’t forgive people like Barry. He can’t — is revealed more subtly through the use of these other perspectives. Outsiders like the shell-shocked ‘Tramp’ and the divorcé next-door see the introspective little boy far more clearly than other, equally well-meaning strangers.

The memoir flits back and forth between the sixties and seventies, tied largely together by the story of his time as the trainer of a young Kestrel and by interludes based on the therapy he sought after an attempted suicide. He’s unflinchingly honest throughout, letting the reader in on the necessity of everything he does, whether it’s the absolute, impossible-to-deny-it need he has to take a Kestrel chick, legal permit or not, best interests of the bird or not, or the incident with the fox in the snare, that turns from foolhardy, shockingly brave rescue, to a reluctant, miserable euthanasia.  He’s never knowingly or deliberately cruel, and he’s pragmatic about nature, but humans often are cruel, and when confronted with the preventable cruelty of the two boys smashing tadpoles with a hammer, he’s furious, white-hot with anger and sadness, and it’s palpable in the prose that even the memory stirs echoes of that strength of feeling.

Packham also turns a critical eye on the War generation’s buttoned-up attitudes to emotions, to pain and to sex. Much is not explained; much more is not discussed; and the things that go untalked about weigh heavy throughout his childhood. The disastrous response (lack of response) to the death of his Kestrel (a far more prosaic, lingering death than that suffered by Kes‘ bird) actually sends the boy into a spell of muteness: post-traumatic stress disorder repeatedly ignored by his parents. But again, his empathy wins through, self-taught though it may be; despite this, and despite their blazing rows and eventual separation, he’s in awe of both of his parents and all they did for him. But the childish bewilderment, the search for guidance through the most deeply-felt hurt he’d ever experienced, remains heartbreaking.

The more recent loss, the one that drove him to take far too many pills — and, thankfully, not enough pills — is never named. His eloquent rebuttal to his therapist’s question (“what about your family?”) is magnificent, and I hope that those inclined to ask questions like that of suicide survivors (and of those who don’t survive) read this passage and take a long hard look at themselves:

Everyone says that suicide is selfish. How fucking stupid. Selfishness would only be apparent if you could be conscious of your actions’ effect on others. But there are no fucking others, they are not there. There is nothing there … but you and a fucking, great, hopeless vacuum.

If that resonates please get in touch with the Samaritans.

Just as the loss of an animal affects him greatly, so he then describes the impossibility of contemplating the same thing when his other animals are in the house: the devoted, uncomplicated love of his dogs means that he can’t make a second attempt.

For all the fact that ‘if not fully constructed his ability to empathise has been learned’, it’s Packham who displays the most empathy in this memoir. He notes that

Back then I thought they were too cowardly to think deeply about themselves, that they chose to protect themselves by loving themselves and their world, but now I know they had no more choice than I did, we’re just wired differently, different parts of our brain are a bit more developed than the others. They’re out, I’m in … it’s the way it is.

But by constantly looking inwards, pouring the depth of his feelings onto the page, he reveals a desire to understand others that lingers, and that is rooted in the curiosity and observation that drives his engagement with nature. It’s often more wry, aloof, but it’s a knowing take on humankind nonetheless. Shades of that Munch quote here again.

Despite his fears (‘pure love, immaculate, perfect love, is the thing that is there waiting to destroy you. Because it becomes all of you and when it’s gone there is absolutely nothing left…’), there is so much love, and so much of his vivid, poetic view of the world in this book, that all I can think of at the end is Philip Larkin’s An Arundel Tomb:

Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone finality
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.