My Afternoons with Margueritte (2010)

Gérard Depardieu plays a simple man — a man who is supposed to be something of a simpleton — who encounters an old lady (sounds so much better in Spanish, una anciana, or someone in her third life stage) on a park bench. They bond over the pigeons he names for her. She reads to him from Camus's The Plague.

Ebert had it this way:
Germain believes he cannot read. Actually, we discover later, he was taught to read but never taught to have a shred of self-confidence. She begins to read to him — The Plague by Camus — and he is an ideal listener. With her as his catalyst, he makes slow steps toward self-esteem.

Through flashbacks, his lack of self-esteem is explained. At the root of it, lies his mother. The films has all the elements of a good work, but never quite sparkles. Ebert gave it three stars. I give it two. I found it quite similar to Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, which I liked much better.


Mediocre.

The elegance of the hedgehog

Barbery, M., & Anderson, A. (2008). The Elegance of the Hedgehog. New York: Europa Editions.

Indeed an elegant tale. With its refined taste and political perspective, this is an elegant, light-spirited and very European adult fable. (Kirkus)

Funny, poignant, incisive. Renée Michel is concierge in an upper-crust building whose tenants are all wealthy, some socialists, some not, and all are oblivious to what goes on under their very noses. What they see is what they know, what they expect to see, and all else is dismissed as irrelevant before being even seen. A proletarian autodidact, she ponders Kant, enjoys Tolstoy (her cat is named Leo), and considers the films of Ozu and Wenders sublime. Paloma Josse is the overly-smart 12 year-old younger daughter of a Socialist minister (government and watching rugby and drinking beer, along with entertaining seem to be his interests; nothing can be called a passion for him) and his wife (the only things that approach being passions for her are her psychotherapy sessions and her devotion to anti-depressants). Paloma has a cold war with her parents, and a hot one with her university-aged older sister. Already aware of the vacuity of life, she has scheduled her suicide for the day of her 13th birthday.

Renée and Paloma alternate narratives. Each observes the absurdity and predictability of the other tenants, and keep her interests, intelligence and passions secret. Each delves into her interests. Paloma dissects the emptiness of schooling, both hers (uninvolved teachers, students involved in drugs and sex) and her sister's (predictable pseudo-intellectualism).

When a tenant dies, his family sells the apartment, and the buyer is a Japanese man who immediately sets to remodel the flat. Both his project and his person set tongues a-wagging, and despite their purported lack of interest, many of the tenants are aching to see what is being done inside the 4th floor flat, as well as get to meet the new tenant.

Kakuro Ozu is an elder Japanese man who exquisite manners and mysteriously sublte nature excite the interests of so many of the residents of 7, Rue de Grenelle. In a chance meeting with the concierge, he asks her if she knew the former tenants of his flat. In answering in what she hopes is a disinterested manner, she inadvertently quotes the opening line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (all happy families are alike) . Monsieur Ozu catches it, and supplies the ending of the line (Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way). Renée is aghast that she has, perhaps, given herself away. Indeed, she has, and it is the beginning of an elegant, beautiful, exquisite set of relationships between three kindred souls: Kakuro, Renée and Paloma. Add Marcella, Renée friend, and the story sparkles.

A gem.

All the king's men

Third of three films with same title that HWPL owns. This one is the original 1949 film with Broderick Crawford playing the role Sean Penn would reprise in 2006.

Based on the book by Robert Penn Warren, it is the story of a man from the back country in Louisiana who runs for political office, loses, goes to law school, and is recruited to run for governor as a way to split the "hick" vote. Alerted to the scheme, he tosses away his prepared, fact-laden speech, and speechifies from the heart. Elected, as he does the people's work he enriches himself, losing his idealism and gaining materially. He also begins an affair with the at-times sweetheart of the newspaper reporter who is the other main character of the story (played by Jude Law in the 2006 version).

Curiously, all the characters in this 1949 version speak very plain English, with no accent; Sean Penn's character had a very thick accent. Another detail: 1949 ties were worn halfway down the chest by men.

Well done. Enjoyable.

All the King's Men

Remake of the 1949 film, updated. Sean Penn plays the upcountry bumpkin who tries to expose corruption, loses an election, and is vindicated by an ensuing tragedy. He is drafted to run for governor some few years later, unaware he is being used a way to split to hick vote. Alerted to the sham, he tosses away his dry speech and let loose with appeals to the pride of the forgotten.

Jude Law is superb as the hard-bitten reporter who joins forces with the reformist politician. Jack Burden also has a romantic link that has never been brought to resolution; that role is played by Kate Winslet, and I thought little of the role or her acting.

Anthony Hopkins plays the thorn in Willie Stark's side. He doesn't quite airmail it in, but his acting seems at least in part done by rote. He's good, sure. Penn is excellent, but it is Law that really shines.

First Circle

Excerpt: 'In the First Circle'











I well remember reading this book, and others, by Solzhenitsyn. I greatly liked this and Cancer Ward.

It has taken a half-century for English-language readers to receive the definitive text of "In the First Circle," the best novel by one of the greatest authors of our time. Such is the fate of art created under a totalitarian regime. But now it is finally available in the West as the author envisioned it. The English translator is Harry T. Willetts, renowned for combining fidelity to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's rich, complex Russian with supple equivalents in English prose and the only person Solzhenitsyn fully trusted to render his fiction into English.

Solzhenitsyn wrote the book under exceptionally difficult circumstances. In 1953, as he was about to emerge from eight years in the gulag, the Soviet prison-camp system, he was diagnosed with cancer. Consigned to internal exile in Kazakhstan, he found work as a schoolteacher but devoted every spare moment to writing. In 1958, he completed the first draft of "In the First Circle," a novel, set during Stalin's rule, about the effects of incarceration and forced labor on the minds and souls of innocent and intelligent men. He immediately put it through two revisions.

"In the First Circle" is the first work by Solzhenitsyn to go to press in English since he died last year at age 89. A major writer's death fosters reflection on his overall achievement, so this is the perfect time to reconsider the novel now that it is finally available to us as the author intended. A literary classic is defined as a book still read a century after appearing. On that basis one might say that the book has already had a 40-year head start on fulfilling that definition, given the acclaim with which the bowdlerized text has been received since its appearance in the West in 1968.

An intriguing intimation of the prospects for this version comes from the Russian experience with the canonical text. In 2006 a Russian television network presented serializations of classic Russian novels by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Pasternak, Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn. Fifteen million viewers tuned in to each installment of "In the First Circle."

The Curse of Promise Unfulfilled

Isaac Rosenfeld: The highs not so high, the lows not so low





In "Enemies Of Promise," the British literary critic Cyril Connolly famously tried to account for his failure to live up to his own expectations of literary greatness and those of others. It was a merciless self-portrait, but it was meant to describe more than a single author's plight: There is a special precinct of literature reserved for those who never became the major writers that everyone expected them to be.

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Isaac Rosenfeld (1918-56) is surely one of this number. His 1946 novel, "Passage From Home," earned him accolades from the New York intellectuals, a crowd not given to accolades. It was written when Rosenfeld was 28, and it seemed to mark the coming-of-age of a writer who would sweep all before him. Certainly, at that moment, Rosenfeld had outstripped his friend Saul Bellow, whose "Dangling Man" seemed partly caught in the constricting embrace of its European models.
But Mr. Zipperstein's account suggests, perhaps unintentionally, that the real story of Isaac Rosenfeld is less a matter of extremes: Yes, he was gifted, but he was never destined for greatness -- nor did he entirely fail. The highs were lower, and the lows higher, than the myth would have it. As for the highs, Mr. Zipperstein notes that the critic Irving Howe faulted (not unfairly) "Passage From Home" for relying, weakly, more on rumination than on description. As for the lows, the Rosenfeld reviews and stories routinely collected under the rubric of a sorry falling-off from early promise are in fact "a marvel of output," as Mark Schechner has written. A 20th-century Jewish Hazlitt, Rosenfeld turned every subject to his own purpose, so that the judgments in nearly every review became an implicit manifesto, pointing to what writing should be. He was often more acute than the professional critics who would later lament his "failure."

Why not unfairly, rather than, simply, fairly?

Mr. Zipperstein does a splendid job of sifting through the details of Rosenfeld's life, reminding us of his importance and acquainting us with his work. He does not, thank goodness, impose his reading of Rosenfeld's place in literary history too insistently, perhaps recognizing that, in a first full biography, the life must take precedence over the work. What he offers instead is the kind of attention for which Rosenfeld should not have had to wait, after his death, half again as long as he lived.

A cultural and literary historian

The Great War and modern memory. (1975). Fussell, Paul. New York: Oxford University Press.




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