Tag: 2024

Winston’s Films and Tv shows

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I did the music I liked last year just before Christmas and I have now decided to round the year off with Films and Tv series I have enjoyed over the last year. In no order

  1. Perfect Days – Wim Wenders back in Tokyo he had done a documentary years ago there and had it in the film until the end of the world but this focus on one man’s life a toilet cleaner listening to old ta-pes collecting seeds from a holy tree taking a picture on his break this is interrupt by firstly his young work mate a lad unsure of the world and then his niece. Perfect, his best film.
  2. Past Lives a young girl leaves Korea and the boy she was close too she licves in Canada then the US. So when her teen boyfriend contacts her. They spend a few days together. This is sort of the opposite of the previous series of films, a man who laments the loss of his friend and hasn’t moved on, and a girl who used to cry a lot is now a woman full of life. Poignant.
  3. Per Apsera Ad Astra, the Russian sci-film, a decisive lead role by the female lead Niya, a weird female who had to return an odd and well-made sci-fi film for the money.
  4. The Fifth Seal is A Kafka-like tale of a group of men drinking in a restaurant one evening. The world turns around when they are accused of a crime by the local fascist forces. How apt it became more available to see on the eve of Trump’s returning to Power
  5. Blitz / Hope and Glory I put these together as they tackle the Blitz Furstly. The newer film, the Blitz, has great young kids, the star, and some great cameo appearances as we follow him running off and returning home after being sent to be a refugee. Then Hope and Glory is based on John Boorman’s childhood as we see a family struggle through those years. A sister falls for a Yankee, the father go off to war, and the young boy at the heart of the story is caught as a child in the bombsites as they form gangs and relive the war through their games til they lose the house and he ends up in the idyllic upper Thames are at his grandparents. Excellent viewing together these two.
  6. Slow Horse Now on to TV Shows What say about Slow Horse? It gets better with each series. Many misfits work in a sort of dumping ground for failed mi5 agents. This time, the past returns to Haunt River Cartwrights’ grandfather and the team River works with, who are caught up in the heart of the action from France back to London.
  7. Master of The Air formed the third of a loose trilogy of tv series that started with Band of Brothers the Pacific and now this followed the 100th Bomb group from training to flying the b-17 flying fortress in the war from the book by Donal L Miller it was like the other series showed the cost of war on the men that took part and also the comradeship they have.
  8. Madness a Netflix show I think has maybe gone unnoticed, follows Mucie Daniels, an up-and-coming talking head ion CNN as he has a retreat away and, whilst there, sees a white supremacist get killed and is framed for his death, leading to a web of lies and influential figure in the tech world not hard see some of these characters being based in part on actual folks we often see talking about being right wing.
  9. Baby Reindeer this was just such a close-to-the-bone tale of obsession. A woman falls for a barman and weaves a web of lies, but who isn’t being truthful? Both the characters, for me, came off as flawed people. I felt that for the actual woman this was based on, the guy who wrote the show may need to remove it from the actual facts. But given that a well acted drama by the two lead characters.
  10. Threads I had seen this years ago. How could I not mention this horrific BBC drama following the collapse of the country after a nuclear attack focused in Sheffield, which, as many of you may know, is just a short drive from my home? Still as hard-hitting as it was when I saw it years ago. The best of a series of films like this, I know the US version, The Day After, is well acted with lots of stars but just has the grit this has.

Well, that is just a small selection of films and shows I need to get better at filling my letterbox in during the year. I will get it at some point. I was the same with the Goodreads account, but it is now a habit to do every book I read, so I hope in 2025, I can record every film I watch. But there are maybe another ten or so films and Shows that just missed the cut. I think next year, I will aim to do two lists of TV shows and films, with some great shows already on my list in January. Starting with series two of the rig, what have you enjoyed or looking forward to next year

Winstons Music 2024

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I had intended to do a joint post on the film, TV, and music I had like last year. But when I started taking pics of the vinyl I had got this year, it seemed easier to just do a post for music than film and TV together. Here are the music choices I have loved this year. In no order, really

As I am listening to this at the moment and it is a recent buy the live album of the National concert in Rome captures a band at the top of their game with a mix of guitar and keyboards and the singers intelligent lyrics they are the natural heirs of REM easy to see they mention them in a couple of their songs.

Father John Misty, or J. Tilman, was in Fleet Foxes but has now gone on his own path with songs that capture the madness of everyday life and always manage to make them sound epic.

Now, I have had this film soundtrack on cassette and CD, but when I saw the vinyl, I had to get it. One of my all-time favourite films, Wim WENDERS Flawed but genuinely epic road Trip around the World, is caught in songs by his favourite artists, which most are mine. What is this film’s four-hour-plus director’s cut if you ever get a chance?

If there is a theme to most of my buys this year, it is old friends returning, and this is a perfect example. Out of the blue, the Cure returned with an album that reminded me of their earlier darker albums, which are the ones I loved. My best friend at college styled herself on Robert Smith down to the make-up on special days. I, as many a young chap, then styled myself on the sad singer of the smiths, regrettably given the vile nature of his politics these days.

A band and singer I wish I had paid more attention to is Jason Molina. Sadly, he died a few years ago, but he was between Neil Young and Country, and this is his best album. I also love the cover. Maybe this inspired the Kim character  in the recent Star Wars skeleton crew episode.

Another old friend, Paul Heaton, is one of the few artists Amanda and I like. We saw him a while ago and have booked to see him again next year. Again, no one captures Britishness so well as he does in his lyrics.

It’s one of those bands I have loved for years, but no one ever really got The Wolfgang Press. They were on 4ad, even this cover is a nod to that, just a band that couldn’t be pigeonholed, a mix of new wave and many other influences. Seeing them return with a new album after 20-plus years is excellent.

Nick Cave, what more to say? I am slowly replacing my CDs of his works with vinyl, a return to form for me; it has echoes of earlier songs and records.

One can never get enough of the Waterboys, and this collection of all the stuff they did for the album This is the Sea shows how the record evolved. It’s a collection of CDs, though.

I think, especially the way the world is at the moment, we all need a little angry punk to jump around and get mad, too, and no one does it better than this bunch from Bristol.

Another old friend is the Tinderstick, soulful songs about loss and life, another band that I have been into for many years. Worth watching the fun videos for a couple of the tracks on this album.

An orchestra of disabled musicians, with Brett Anderson and others singing songs around death, sees Brett tackling some of his Suede songs with a new feeling alongside songs like The Killing Moon and Nightporter, both favourite songs.

One of the bands the last few years I have like is Black Midi a band that throws lots of style together well, they split, and the lead singer brought this album out imaging Tom Waits, Steely Dan a Mexican band and Mark E. Smith of the Fall forced to make an album this would be near it the lead single Holy Holy is a story of a man hiring a prostitute told in Geordie greep unique vocal style was one of those songs I just listen and listened too

Another band that returned was THE THE as Maria in my local record shop was the cover art meant to look a little like Nigel Farage! A band needed for now, Matt Johnson had struggled for years to capture new music, but when he finally has, it is just as good as anything from the 80s he did. It is worth watching The Inertia Variations, the film made about his struggle to move on musically.

Finally, one mention of an audio essay or drama by Robin Mackay, is a weird mix of ambient music story and fact about the lost village town of Dulwich of the east coast of England a tale that inspire HP Lovecraft to write about it

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Winstonsdads dozen for 24

~ winstonsdad ~ 13 Comments

I’ve decided to draw a line under the year review-wise and do a round-up of my favourite books and then one of the other things I  like: Film, TV shows and Music. Then, a post looking forward to 2025 and a year of classics; although I will have a few from this year to review or am not yet not quite sure what to do, just leave them unreviewed and do all classics from pre-1972 next year. So, I managed 103 books that were reviewed in 24 countries. I need keep a better track of starts like that next year. Anyway, I am picking 12 favourites from the year, in no particular order, just 12 books I have loved over the last 12 months. I am not swayed by anyone else view on these books or tastes. So as ever, I hope to bring a fresh list of 12 books

1, Ædnan an Epic by Linea Axelsson

First up is a verse epic of the Sami community, I was just thinking of this earlier today as I watched someone ride the Inlandsbanan an old rail line through Sami lands to the south of Sweden

2 Star 111 by Lutz Seiler

This epic book should have had a wider readership for me as it captured those post-war years in Germany when we followed the path of Carl and his parents!  A wild ride of a book from one of the great German writers.

3. What is Mine by Jose Henrique Bortoluci

A son recalls his father’s years as a truck driver around Brazil in those turbulent years of the 80s. It reminds me of how great nonfiction in translation can be.

4. A Terrace in Rome by Pascal Quingard

The story of one man’s life, Geoffrey Meaume, an engraver, is scarred early on in the book when acid is thrown at him. We see the effect of that on him and his art. A writer I have been meaning to get to for many a year.

5.Engagement by Ciler Ilhan

I read two excellent novels with similar themes from Turkey this year, but this, although less well-known, captures the brutal aftermath of a falling out between two villages as well, if not better than the other Turkish book I read this year.

6.Out of Mind by J Bernlef

A book lost to time, which is a shame. It captures his descent into Dementia so well as we see him struggling with a clever recurring thread around a book by Graham Greene, considered one of the best Dutch books of all time.

7.Götz and Meyer by Daivd Albahari

One, I have the Mookse and gripes podcast as they mentioned it in an episode a while ago, and since then, it was just a matter of finding a copy, which I did this year and then read straight away and wasn’t disappointed a man connects to the lose of his family in the world war in the holocaust by the name of two drivers that drove his family to their deaths.

8.Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou

One of the greatest discoveries of the year was Foundry Editions, with this first book that had a history of Cyprus tied into the characters of a hotel and the drinks they all drink. It was a very clever little book that made me want to make some of the drinks mentioned.

9.My favourite by Sarah Jollien-Fardel

This powerful book follows a daughter from a small village ith an abusive father and how all in the village turned a blind eye to what he did a compelling book

10.Dendrites by Kallia Papdaki

A Greek novel sent in the US follows the collapse of industrial America through the Greek families that moved to New Jersey to work in the factories. If Springsteen had been Greek, this would be his family’s story !!

11.Beloved by Empar Moliner

Another favourite press three-time rebel and sadly the last of their iconic cover art as the artist who did them passed away to cancer. All monies from this book went to charity. A woman sees a flicker between her husband and a violinist in the orchestra he is in, and before he knows it she knows he will leave her.

12. Your Little Matter by Maria Grazia Calandrone

A second book from Foundry Press is probably my book of the year. It blew me away a heart-wrenching story of a woman looking into her own past as an abandoned baby and the mother she never knew who abandoned her as a baby. It is just a look at how hard it would be for a woman in a small village to escape a broken marriage and find love.

Honourable mentions

Night of the Crow by Abel Tomé

The Fire by Daniela Krien

Caesaria by Hanna Nordenhök

In the last few years, I have been drawn more to great female writers in translation. Seven of the twelve are females, and eight are from small presses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Three Rimbauds by Dominioue Noguez

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The Three Rimbauds by Dominique Noguez

French Literary criticism

Original title – Les TROIS rIMBAUDS

Translator – Seth Whidden

Source – Personal copy

I looked when Seagull Books had a recent sale, and of the many great books they have, I couldn’t get them all, which, believe me, if I had the chance, I would. This title grabbed me as I was like many young men a Fan of Rimbaud when I was younger. The guy people like Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan said they loved to read. Of course, in a rock and roll way, he died at 39. He had just returned from Africa. The French Lit Critic and film Professor Dominique used this as a launch pad for the book. He had read a piece by Paul Claudel in. the 1912 edition of Rimabud’s complete works. We missed so much of what Rimbaud could have written had he lived.

When Arthur Rimbaud was inducted into the Académie française on 16 January 1930, no one seemed to remember the ‘man with the soles of wind’, the diabolical cherub from ‘Nina’s Replies’ and ‘The Seated Man’, or the Seer thug who had dominated the headlines in the little world of French poetry in 1872. Curiously enough, Paul Valéry, whose speech officially welcomed the new academician and who was known for being more meticulous (in his foreword to La Fontaine or Mallarmé, for example), made quick work of Rimbaud’s early works and dispatched them in three quick sentences:

The opning paragrapgh about the imagined 1930 academy speech

The book centres on another event that happened but was set a year earlier. We imagine Rimbaud has been given a seat in the French Academy. The speech Paul Valery gives teeth to the years we missed of what could have been Rimbaud’s life in 1930.(He gave an actual speech the year after when Marshal Pétain got seat 18 in the Academy). As I say, the speech follows his Life, which Rimbaud had written as solo novel on his return to France and wrote a story called African Nights. This book, and that very French idea, seems to be a piece of Autofiction of his time in Africa. It is imagined that he also married the sister of Paul Claudel. Claudel was a Catholic, and this saw Rimbaud become a Catholic. We see bits of letters to the like of Breton Cocteau, the great writers in France, in the years that followed his death, weaving his imagined life around actual events and people that show a poet that calmed and in the end, his verse became more serious and straightforward. One quote hit me, and this is so true. What would have happened if Gide had died after The Fruits of the Earth or James Joyce after Dubliners ? The question is, what if, like so many other poets, died to you ng, would Wilfred Owen be so well known or loved had he died young?

(It makes for a small literary game, not without interest and worth practicing on others: How would we view Gide if he had died after The Fruits of the Earth; Aragon after the Treatise on Style or Joyce after Dubliners?.. ). No. We will agree, how-ever, that this way of rewriting history has the advantage of revealing, in an ingeniously metaphorical way, that one Rimbaud dies in 1891 to give birth to another.

The thought of what if other writers had diedat a young age like Rimbaud

This is a short book of 60 pages, a homage to a great poet, a little play on what might have been. I was struck by the question of how far we are from the AI works of an Older Rimbaud or Kurt Kobain’s imagined works in this age of AI, an album of what might have been Tracks. I like this idea of what might have been for Rimbaud. He is one of those writers who died on the cusp of his wave. He could have been even more significant, or could he have been? We will never know. I like how he patched the Claudel quote to the speech many years later from someone Rimbaud knew for an Academy seat. The footnotes show how Noguez weaved his web around these and other events to make the imagined latter years of Rimbaud. Of course, this moves into an area that someone like Borges used to write about: reimagining the history of great figures. This is mentioned in the intro.I also thought of a couple of books I read ago by Peter Ackroyd, one about Milton and the other about Oscar Wilde, that imagined part of their lives. In this part, we see the Rimbaud, and no one ever saw the man tinged by North Africa. An event that profoundly affected Rimbaud from what is alluded to in the book. Do you have a favourite fictional or reimagined life of a writer?

Hungry for What by Maria Bastarós

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Hungry for What by Maria Bastarós

Spanish short stories

Original title  – No era esto a lo que veniamos

Translator – Kevin Gerry Dunn

Source – re4view copy

I was reminded that I had yet to review this when to was picked as one of the Guardian translated books of the year. In recent years, Daunt has brought some great books out in translation. This book fits in well with several Latin American and Spanish books I have read from female writers in the last few years. Maria Bastarós is an art historian and writer. She has previously written historical novels and worked as a screenwriter and creative writing teacher. Both of which you can see in these stories here; they have a scenic quality to them and feature lost, lonely children and women. These are voices you don’t often here, and darker undertones and sister macabre things.

As she waits, she reviews the table: theres wine, there’s foie gras, there are baby eels. All the things her father and mother used to eat when they sent her to bed early so that they could have dinner alone. She can hear shouting and crying from the babysitter’s movie. A woman is screaming, her voice shrill, punctuated by the occasional help or please don’t. The girl knows this sort of cry means the babysitter’s movie is almost over. And when the babysitter’s movie is almost over, it means her mother and the new boyfriend are almost back.

Tonight, in fact, they come back a little earlier than usual.

The girl’s face sharpens like a cat’s when she hears the key in the lock. She hears her mother shuffling around, then the door gliding over the parquet and swooshing like a broom. The babysitter hurries to turn off the TV, but she’s too slow. The new boyfriend’s deep voice wends its way into the kitchen:

The meal prepared like she had seen

There are thirteen stories in the collection, and I will only mention the couple I really connect with. The first one I really got was a small girl from divorced parents, and you get the sense that I did when I was young. She is treated by the teacher, and then when she gets home, and her mother doesn’t give her a gift, the lies start. This grabbed me the way she did, and you can. I did as a kid, those innocent lies your parents told you from one parent to the other for the birthday celebrations. One line made me laugh. Her father says something as they drive and passes something, and she says this is where the lies start! Heartbreaking but true. Added to this, her birthday wish and whether it will come true to add a dark overtone to the story.  The opening story sees another small girl making her first grown-up meal. Using a triangle of cheese instead of brie and other child-like replacements for a romantic meal between her later father and mother, one glimpsed by her. but the mother misreads the situation, thinking the meal is for her and her new partner. But no, it is the girl’s way of trying to cling to the hope of her parents reuniting. When that is impossible! The last story I will briefly mention is Girls Don’t, a tale of a group of girls. Gone Rogue is a story of a group of girls with boxes of spiders and scorpions making people look and have them on their arms. It is a very clever twist on what would maybe fifty years ago have been a group of boys doing similar things.

‘Make a wish!’ the teacher says.

This troubles the girl: there wasn’t enough time to think of what she wanted, and now a whole panful of wishes is ricocheting around her head like popcorn. She reflects for a moment before choosing one. Maybe this? Or that? No, this! That’s it. That’s what she’ll wish for. Definitely.

‘Will it come true?’ she asks.

Will the dark wishes come true ?

I chose three stories, and they all had child narrators or characters for me, they captured, particularly in the first two, the feeling of being a child of divorced parents. For context, my parents divorced when I was ten and the feelings and way the children viewed the world hit home on fact too much. The birthday girl reminded me of my parents and those little white lies and also the bitterness in a broken marriage that lies just underneath the lies. Elsewhere, we have violent acts, a woman on a psychiatric hospital ward.It is to compare with Fernanda Melchor. Both capture the dark side of the ordinary world at times. I also thought of Roald Dahl, a master of stories like this that, in many ways, have two layers on one surface and can seem a slice of everyday life, but with a hefty dose of the dark and sister we don’t often see is captured. A meal that is both a sweet act and heart-wrenching and maybe a statement from a girl missing her father. Wishes that can be dark as well as light, etc. Anyway, this will be near the top of my books for the year! Have you read this collection?

Caesaria by Hanna Nordenhök

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Caesaria by Hanna Nordenhök

Swedish fiction

Original title – Caesria

Translator – Saskia Vogel

Source – Review copy

I am a little late to this one. I had hoped to get to it earlier as Heloise is a small publisher bringing some exciting books out in translation from around Europe. I was drawn to this as I saw Hanna was a translator from Spanish to Swedish and had done books from Melchor and Zeran. Both of which works I have enjoyed. She also had success with this book, and her follow-up novel Wonderland made a number of the year lists in Sweden. This is maybe the perfect creepy book for winter.It follows what happens when a doctor performs a caesarian. He was an early gynaecologist. But he then keeps the baby for his own.

Maybe it really had been the badger that screamed on those summer nights, maybe the screams had not been Beda’s but the badger’s, but for some reason the animal had stayed silent on the night we took to the woods. And I wonder if any of what followed that winter, the winter during which the one who called himself Master Valdemar arrived at Lilltuna, would have happened had I not discovered my morbid disposition. The disease that had begun in one loca-tion, only to spread, which is when I’d started beating it into submission with tightly wound bandages.

The scream of the badger one night

A babe ripped from her mother’s stomach and whisked off to a remote country estate of Dr Eldh. He is an early gynaecologist who rescues the baby from a mother who later died. He kept the mother’s pelvis after she had died, something he tells Caesaria. The book is told in the years that followed as surrounded by servants, the young girl Caesaria is trapped in this rural doll house like a living doll just for the Doctor to see Caesaria, hence the title of the book and the procedure the Dr had used to bring the Baby into the world. We follow the young girl over the following years trapped in the estate as the only outside influences are the doctor’s visits over the years. Hanna captures the seasons so well, the height of summer and the bitter cold and darkness of the winters in this remote estate, as we see a girl heading to become a woman. What will be her fate at the doctor’s hands? What was his intention in having her there all those years? Will she be okay? Later in the book, another man also appears to be living on the estate. He, a conductor from Copenhagen, is invited to the estate to recover? But when we hear screams in the night as he has his way with one of the maids, we fear for Caesaria. The Dr seems to come less as she gets older as well!

Doctor Eldh had then made several small incisions in the exposed uterus, and jets of blood the length of quill feathers spurted from it.

The anaesthetised woman had then suffered a severe and prolonged contraction of the uterus, and sponges were pressed against the bowels to stem the haemorrhaging: when the contractions subsided, the uterus was cut right through, and the lifeless little creature, covered in birthing custard, who was me, could be plucked out and resuscitated, by means of insufflation and cold compresses.

How she was brouyght intpot he world as he did one of the first caesarian operations on her mother

The book is v told in observations and descriptions of the events with no real dialogue; it is a gothic tale of a girl growing up alone as a living doll for a doctor. Why he does it has never really gone into detail. It says a lot about the uncontrollable nature of Male power at the time, which was late 19th century Sweden in the early years iof Gynaecology and Dr Eldh is sadly a leading surgeon.. The fact he could just tear (Well, do a Caesarian ) the baby that became Caesaria from the dying mother and whisk him off. To live like a sort of child-like Miss Haversham in an estate, I can see Caesaria being like Haversham as the estate rots around her, trapped in the world as she isn’t allowed to leave and see the wider world she is trapped in the confines of the estate. A dark gothic tale of male abuse of a woman and a young girl a stolen choldhood. A girl becomes a living doll, a toy for the Dr to come and play with occasionally. But what happens when the doll becomes a young woman? What happens when his visits stop? How will a girl unaccustomed to the world cope? All this is captured in such detail that you feel the summer heat, rotting leaves, and snow in the winter. A book that is both disturbing for the reader but also thought-provoking. Partly based on actual events at the time, it seems even darker to read. Have you read this or any other books from Heloie Press?

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au

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Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica AU

Australian fiction

Source – Personal copy

As many of you know, I tend to avoid Hype books, in fact, I hate how the whole of book reviewing in papers and end-of-year lists tends to orbit the same list of books; now, this is a book on the edge of that list. I was drawn to it as it is from Fitzcarradlo, but they are very popular these days.It is also set in Tokyo, which is the one place in the world I would love to go and spend some time. I just love watching YouTube videos of the city. It seems like a fantastic place. So this book follows a mother and daughter as they meet and wander the city.

That night, we went to a restaurant, in a tiny little street near the railway line. I took us by a route along the canal, which I thought might be nice at that time of evening.

The buildings around us were dark and the trees dark and quiet. Plants grew on the steep walls of the canal, trailing downwards, and the water gave a shaking, delicate impression of the world above. Along the street, the restaurants and cafés had turned on only low, dim lights, like lanterns. Though we were in the middle of the city, it was like being in a village. This was one of the experiences I liked most about Japan, and, like so many things, it was halfway between a cliché and the truth. It’s beautiful, I said, and my mother smiled but it was impossible to tell if she agreed.

One of the first nights out

The book follows a few days in which an unnamed mother and daughter have chosen Tokyo, a place new to them both, to reconnect. I was reminded of the previous series as the pair wandered the city, calling in on cafe art exhibitions as the talk drifted over them into the present and to the past. We saw this in the later films of the Before series of films, how we connect in the present, make echoes, and recall the past. From here, Monet’s art sparks memories in the mother and leads the daughter to her past. This is a book where nothing much happens, but that reminds me of what I love in great cinema, the films it is about the moments, and this is that sort of book, the connection between the two. That connection you have with family where it is about being connected by blood and how that can lead to ups and downs. An ode to the city and trying to reconnect with the past.

The lecturer had said that I was welcome to have people over and so during the middle of the stay, I asked my sister and some of my classmates to come. I cooked several dishes that I had already made from the cook-books, and brought these out to the big wooden table in the garden. During the lunch – perhaps because the day was beautiful and the orchard peaceful, and perhaps also because we were all young, drinking and talking and laughing, and because I had tied my hair back with a scarf as blue as the cobalt of Delft tableware – I had again the sensation of seeing us like a still in a film, or a photograph, and the feeling was paired with another one of satisfaction, and rightness. In the kitchen, I found several small blue and white bowls, much like the ones that we had in our house, with a decorative border around the rim and what looked like translucent grains of rice arranged in a flowerlike pattern around the sides. I used these to serve the sweet-savoury Cantonese dessert I had made, which was a recipe of my mother’s, the only one of hers I had cooked during my stay.

A memory of the daughters this caught my eye as my dad has lots of blue and white house KLM used give away as well as some actual delft

This book has been so well reviewed that my personal thoughts on it aren’t going to add anything to it. But as I said, it is crying out to be made into a film . Like I said above, it has what makes an excellent film for me: a slice of time where the actual events of the day aren’t the story. It is the connection, the past, the memories. The Before series or even past Loves I watched earlier in the week, even going back as far as something like Tokyo story, which again had parents trying to reconnect to children. This is that for the modern age. The backdrop of cafes, shops, and art exhibitions makes Tokyop itself a character. A slow story of reconnecting told in one of the fastest cities in the world. I hope it is picked up and made into a film it would be perfect. Have you ever read a book and thought of it as a film as you were reading it ?

weekend catch up

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I’m sat, and the first week of December has flown By, I visited my dad this time last week, and whilst helping with some garden waste disposal, I think I may have damaged my shoulder as later in the week it killed, we had a busy week both our cars were serviced, and Amanda had a minor repair on her car my old car which she then later drove to her family. I hence haven’t reviewed a book, and I sometimes [prefer these chatty posts for some reason, I ll be back to review a few books tomorrow. I did read a few books this week and watched a couple of interesting other bits. I am, of course, a huge Star Wars fan. Like most men my age, I was drawn in by the Empire strikes back when it came out. So I caught the first two episodes of another series from the Star Wars Universe. I started as a  sort of suburbian planet, and we follow two young friends who stumble on a starship and end up at a hang-out in the middle of nowhere for Pirates.`A sort of Goonies meets breakfast club in space. Then I also caught on Mubi Past Lives, which, when I saw the trailer last year, had caught my eye. A pair of teen sweethearts reunite after one had moved to America aged 12; she was a writer and had settled down, whilst her sweetheart in Korea had never entirely moved on from her it turns out as the spend a couple of days, it is like the opposite of the Before series of films in a way as they talk about there lives and the past and he imagines what if and what if they were destined to meet in every lifetime ?. I loved this. I wish I was better at keeping up my letterbox account, but this is one of my films of the year.

Today’s gem was this: I found a Harvil in the wild is always worth bagging. I also have ordered a few books for next year’s classic project. I picture them below, and some will hopefully make next year’s list of books read. I have chosen a mix of Nyrb and Oxford classics.

A few more to go into the mix for next years year long reading challenge. I have also altered the original idea and moved the year of books from 1939 to now. I’m reviewing books before my birth year, so anything from 1971 will count. I add this as I think this will give me a broader scope of books from my own TBR. But also gave me World War Two, modernist and early post-modernist works, and a whole scope of books. I think it may give me a better year for the classic Booker International Year, where I can make up for not doing the Booker International. I will make my own list of books for a year. I am still looking for a year. I will have it ready for the new year. Any old booker guys are welcome to join in on what, for me, is a fun idea like a lost booker, almost a list of books that may have been on a booker international list. as they all have come out the same year in their own language. I will, or hopefully, read and pick a winner with others. I’m hoping this grabs someone’s attention. Anyway, I’ll be back with a review tomorrow as we have put our decorations up. I intend this type of post to be a new weekly post, either Saturday or Sunday, a way of touching base with bits about books, films, TV and music. and a bit about life in general. This is a post I used to see a lot of years ago, and I loved it; I always better chat about book finds, bits of films and TV I have seen, and it also is something to help me look back. Apart from that, nothing much has happened, Oh, someone bumped my car whilst I was working one night in the High Peaks, so I had a bang to remove at some point, which was annoying. I love my car. It was my aunt, and it was more luxurious than I could have ever afforded in a vehicle. Oh well, I learned to move the car a foot closer. How has your week been?

 

That was the month November 2024

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  1. Hotel Cartagena by Simone Buchholz
  2. Brightly Shining by Igvild Rishøi
  3. Twenty two day or Half a lifetime by Franz Fühmann
  4. The ring is closed by Knut Hamsun
  5. The ways to Paradise by Peter Cornell
  6. The book against Death by Elias Canetti 
  7. The Seed by Tarjei Vesaas     
  8. the sea in the radio Jurgen Becker

I managed 8 books this month, I started at a hold-up and hostages at a hotel min Hamburg that had a connection to events in Latin America many years before. Then a tremendous heartwrenching piece of Christmas writing about a family struggling in Norway. Then an East German wandered Budapest as a way to the last forty years in Germany from Nazism to Communism and what effect it has had on his life whilst discovering Budapest. Then a man comes full circle, trying to not be his father but never escaping the small village he came from no matter how far away he went, the past and the present always connect. Then, two books, one a collection of pieces found after a Swedish academic died he had spent forty years in the library, and this is an espresso shot of his thoughts. Then Elias Canetti spent years trying to fight death, collecting thoughts on death from himself and other writers. Then, one of the best Norweigan writers, Tarjei Vesaas, in a less-known book about a man who kills a girl he is mentally unwell, but the island turns on him. Then we finished off with a piece of experience writing a bare-bones journal from a writer who sadly recently died and was a member of the Gruppe 47 post-war writers.

Book of the month

I LOVED THE FEEL MOPF THIS YOU CAN TEWLLIT HAD BEEN WRESTLED WOITH FOR YEARS I said it had been trimmed and trimmed to this was what a very clever man had left a collection that could easily set you forth on a lifetime of connecting the dots he wrote about even further.In your mind, it is a project that I think a few people may take, going down the rabbit hole, and that is this book of ideas.

Non-book events

We watched one great film, Blitz, by Steve McQueen, which had a young boy in the central role who played the main character. He had a real presence and the ability to speak volumes in silence. Then we watched a series from a few years ago, Cold Call, about a woman and man who tracked down the people who took the money she had just got from selling her house. It was on Channel Five a few years ago, but we missed it the first time around. Music wish, I think I had mentioned the new Cure album last time, which I did eventually get on vinyl, as well as these records this month.

First up is the latest from Father John Misty, a singer I have been into since he was in Fleet Foxes many years ago. He had an early album out as J Tilman and has gone by the name Father John Misty since then. This is good, I didn’t connect with his last album that had the 30s feel to it this went back to the style I used to from him. Then two from my local record shop where they sell two for 30 after a while i got the Bright eyes collection of early demlos I have most of Bright eyes and Conor Oberst who is the singer and band really. Then, Richard Dawson is from Newcastle and evokes the area and this reminds me of the years I spent in  Northumberland, with an epic forty-minute track from him. Then I was looking for something else entirely and saw these two on offer on the Mute website the last two albums from the reformed Crime and the  City solution. The reformed band well Simon Bonney and a new group of Musicians This band should have been as big as Nick Cave, really but they never quite matched them as they tried a similar path in Berlin in the early 80s and both Australian singers .

Next month

I think the two books I showed in yesterdays post will be reviewed and i have another two novellas. I am struggling with the blog , the fact that I feel it now is something to be proud of, and I feel that I move forward. I need a new challenge. I mentioned just reading classics next year, which may still be on the cards, but I feel I need a new challenge to wrestle. I have long talked of trying to work this all into some sort of guide to world lit where a theme could be shown to connect books about war, villages, coming of age, being parents, etc. This has been on the back burner for years as it is an interesting way of grappling people and giving them some exciting books from around the world. I had, for a while yesterday, made the blog private. My mind is always working around the blog, but my time to blog seems less, and so is my reading time. I need to spend less time daydreaming around the blog and just blog. One of the problems with being neuro v=diverse is a constant thinking around the reading and the blog. Yesterday I just was drained and annoyed as i hadn’t a book to review time of year etc. Oh well, that is enough of drifting in my mind. I need to get these new ideas and challenges off the ground and see where I end up. I can be very flighty, but for me, my neurodiversity makes me great at my day job as I am just the same when I working with someone I am always working and looking at their life as a whole and what we can do to help often disappoint we can’t do more as I want everyone to have the best support they can, i always did this when working with people and feel that is what I can pass on to people that love of connection and the difference you as a support worker can make both big and small to someone’s life.

An oxfam trip

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I love to visit our Oxfam. I may go twice a week, but unfortunately, we don’t have a bookshop, just a regular store, but it can turn up some real gems. So when Amanda and I headed to town, I wasn’t sure what would turn up as I had only been a few days earlier, so when I found four great books today, it was a real turn-up for the books as I had only been in a few days earlier. But the book gods had looked down and said you need these gems on your shelves, I found two and Amanda saw two for me.

Now, the two I found would be ones on my long, long list of books to get. The first is Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, a tale of a mother and daughter who wander around Tokyo looking at art and talking weather horoscopes and clothes as one would in Tokyo, a city on my list of places I want to go most in the world who knows one day Amanda. I may get there/ Then Another book on my trip around the works of Cesar Aira. The proof was one of the books from him I hadn’t got. There is a number I need to get, and when I see them over time, I will be getting them as I want to read all his books over the coming year. I feel that the more you read from him, the clearer the picture of the bigger view of the world he has as a writer. I had hoped for a few more gems as they were on the first part of the shelf, but I had no such luck. There is nothing else in the fiction. Now Amanda loves a little bit of true life and was looking through the biography section, she will look at books she thinks I may like as she says usually an unusual name will be the ones she may show me the book and today she found two gems. For me

Amanda showed me the Pamuk, which has been on my list of books to find at some point, and his memoir of Istanbul and his books around the city he lives in are always an ode to the chaos and world that is Istanbul, I had this down significantly as the collection of his illustrated journals has just come out. I first saw these on a BBC tv show he did a few years ago, and you saw him painting and writing in his journal. And I remember thinking at the time, I wondered if we would ever get to see these in English, and we have, so I will be getting a copy of them at some point. I can’t wait to read this. Next to that was Tove Jansson’s collected letters. I have read most of her adult works and thought her letters would be insightful and excellent books to dip in and out of over the years. A great selection of books from three writers I have read before and one I really wanted to read,

 

 

The Sea in the Radio by Jürgen Becker

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The Sea in the Radio by Jürgen Becker

German fiction

Original title – Im Radio Das Meer

Translator = Alexander Booth

Source – Personal copy

Now I start with a far better review of this book by Joe at Roughghost. Not to put myself down, I don’t really know how to get into these experimental novels like this. I ordered this after seeing he had died earlier this month. The name was one I had seen on the list of writers connected with the post-war group of German Writer Gruppe 47, I have long been a fan of this loose collective of writers shaping post-war German writers. I, like many, feel this from reading Böll and Grass, which may be the two best-known names. When I read them, they were, and in recent years, I have read some others from the groups, especially Alexander Kluge, a writer I hold in the upper echelons of my personal pantheon of writers. Now, as for this, this is a collection of snippet sentences around a village. For me, it is like he has taken the world he sees down to the bare minimum. I saw this in Helmut Heißenbüttel’s work texts , which I reviewed a few years ago. He was another member of the group.

Where were you last night?

The small yellow plane is back, somewhat further away, somewhat higher.

At night you could hear trains. Nights you would always hear trains.

The first tractor out on the fields. Still. Then it begins to make large circles.

Now the bumblebee buzzes out the open door.

Glancing at the clock. One’s startled. Or one’s not.

The filling-station attendant says, You don’t see the fuel, but it’s there.

A bit slower getting up the stairs today.

We’ll have one more little one, but then we’ve got to get going.

When Charlie was still here, the neighbour says, Evenings I’d always be entertained. But she doesn’t want a new cat.

Preparations for a trip one doesn’t want to take at all.

The morning begins cloudless. At midday a few. Cloudless again in the evening.

An example of the style of writing

The novel is not really. It is maybe more like a redacted journal if you removed all personal details from it and dates and places, so what you have is like snippets one after another. If you took Under Milkwood and removed the characters and names from it there is, for me a connection to that. I find this is like a radio of images and thoughts going around the dial, I was reminded at times how, as A kid, I used to marvel in bed at night, slowly moving the dial on my short wave radio and moving over the stations from around the world. This is the effect here. We grasp just a bare thought, a tiny observation of nameless characters. What we have is the space in between these sentences. These aphorisms are ours to fill or not fill. That is the beauty. Like John Cage’s 4′ 33”, the silence is individual and just yours to saviour so it is heard with the gaps in. The sentence’s voids to fall in or steeping stones sometimes when the thoughts suddenly loop back to an early idea.

At night the man would sleep in his tent, hidden in the woods; during the day he’d go eat soup and pick up his mail.

Before flying off, the woodpecker lets himself drop.

It is hot and damp, and out in the garden there are snails.

The day hasn’t ended yet, and you don’t know what’s still to come.

Flags hanging from the windows. That hasn’t happened in a long time, and he almost got scared. Not all windows have flags. But some of them do.

The filling-station attendant says, Air doesn’t cost a thing, air is priceless.

Cloudless the night. You should be able to see the stars. If you can’t see any stars, the night isn’t cloudless.

The boy had come along to the station and waved after the train. He didn’t realize how soon he would be sitting on the same train himself.

It’s the same house, but the people living there today don’t know it.

After that, he began to count the days. At some point, it became too much, so he began to count the months instead.years

Another snippet from the book

So you get the idea. If you want a better idea, look to Joe. This is through my limited prism of the world and my limited knowledge of the language. But in a slight nod to Joe. The other piece of media, well, two, but the first links to Joe and the fact they live in Canada, I love the Guy Maddin film My Winnipeg: A Glimpse of his Childhood in That City, but the film was made up of little snippets like this another film directors work I felt connected to this was  Jonas Mekas the avant grade filmmaker his films flash from place to place and through time in a way maybe its all the effect of the world war on these figures. I can see Kluge in this as well it is the way the war is always a prism for the events and way a writer filmmaker looks at the world. An experimental poetic collection of journal sentences that left me wanting more from this writer. I think this may be his only book in English so far. Another book for German lit month. Before anyone says I admire Joe, and yes, his reviews are a million times better than mine, I aim to hit his hits one day, but I now find myself in my own orbit of reviewing books.

The Seed by Tarjei Vesaas

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The seed by Tarjei Vesaas

Norwegian fiction

Original title – Kimen

Translator – Kenneth G. Chapman

Source – Personal copy

I move on to one of my all-time favourite writers in Tarjei Vesaas; although I have only read a few books by him, there is something about how he describes his world: the second you open a book by him, you fall into it. I have a number of his books on my shelves, and I had a look at them all for men; this stood out as it sees him move from his earlier books, which are maybe the lesser known of his works now, to the later books that are more symbolic and set in the world he lives in the place almost becomes a character in the lot of the books I have read the ice in the Ice Palace. This Island reminds me of the Island we spent a summer or two on when I was younger. The cost of Donegal Islands is that they are such little microcosms in themselves, although there was never a murder like in the book.

 

Inside the summer-hot barn itself there was commotion and turmoil – in sharp contrast to outside. The youngest sow was having her swarm of young.

A girl sat there and saw that everything went as it should. But she sat staring and absent-minded.

The barn was full of buzzing flies. All the windows and doors were open. The strong sun intensified the odor from the pig pens.

The flies buzzed dully, as if on the point of falling asleep in a dark

corner.

The girl was young. She sat bent over on a stool. Leaned forward with her adolescent arms pressed against her breast. What was happening in front of her eyes was nothing new to her and it was going well, so it was something else that was causing her tenseness, her sadness. She thought: I’m not happy. Things should be different.

How? I don’t know, just somehow

The young girl looking after the pigs when he meets her

This novella is brutal at times. A Troubled man with apparent mental health issues comes to the tiny island where Pig farming is the primary industry and way of life and kills a young girl in the height of summer. This sets off a chain of events where the locals all go feral and chase this man down, and the brother of the dead girls kills the man. This book mixes the brutality of nature with the darkness of the human soul and the way one moment can change so many lives and affect so many. All this is mirrored as a mother pig eats its own young, A piece that reminds me of the line in Snatch where a gangster talks about how pigs will eat anything. This is also a scene in the film Hanibal where a foe of Hanibal ends up getting eaten by the pigs. We also have echoes of the madness in Lord of the Flies. One of the characters is called Piggy, and I wonder if Golding had come across this book as it came out 14 years before the lord of the Flies, and one also thinks of the island-wide madness of Whicker man. But this also is the way he uses the scenery of his homeland. In this case, it adds to the darkness on a bright summer day, which, when reading it, can send a chill down your spine. Sun and Darkness can lead to madness. One only has to think of the Spike Lee film Do the Right Thing, where heat adds to the tension and leads people to act differently.

The baby pigs lay in a pile in a corner. They had ducked down, and lay there unmoving. Something in them had forced them into this position. The danger. The tumult. Something incomprehen-sible. They ducked down and lay still.

A crash. The pen gave way under a heavy side blow. The sows tumbled out into the barnyard and headed for the people standing there. They attacked the people – at the same time that they were fighting with each other to the death and gashing each other’s sides.

They attacked everything that moved.

The two men and the woman ran for the house. The girl slipped. back into the barn.

But the devil was in the sows now. No sooner had the people begun to collect themselves a bit behind the closed door of the tidy house than the door flew open. They had not thought to lock it, and the door opened inwards. The sows were suddenly there and stuck their bloody snouts through the door. They stopped and stood still an instant to take aim.

The effect of this sight on the three people in the room was para-lyzing. An instant of fear. Wild beasts. Demons.

What was it? What would happen?

Nothing! It was only the two sows that Bergit carried food to many times a day! No; they were transformed. They were something else. Bestiality itself stuck its snout into human life: dark, filthy and consuming.

Thje brutal nature of the pigs later mirrored in the islanders

This saw Vesas shift in his writing style; he had written 12 books before this, and the books after this all have a more symbolic nature. But also his world of rural Norway, which, like I said in the start, really draws me in with his writing, is that mix of symbolic world and the rural Norway he so loved, which becomes another character in his books. Do you know any other writers whose place is so connected to their works?

 

The book against Death by Elias Canetti

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The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti

Bulgarian literature

Original title – Das Buch gegen den Tod

Translator – Peter Filkins

Source – Subscription book

I should have got to Canetti sooner than this. I have Aut de Fe, his best-known novel, on my shelf and his non-fiction writing from his time in the blitz in London. Born in Bulgaria, he spent his first few years in Manchester. His mother then moved him back to central Europe. They eventually settled in Vienna. He spoke many languages and was the perfect example of the Jewish intellect in central Europe in those pre-war years. He escaped and was in London in the war. He wrote in German he started this book in the war years. A book that has years of him raging against death was abridged from over 20000 pages of notes he had on the subject and other thoughts he had collected together with the idea of the book against death. This came out after his death and was distilled to a few hundred pages.

15 June 1942

Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. I know that she is dead. I know that she has rotted away. But I can never accept it as true. I want to bring her to life again. Where do I find parts of her? Mostly in my brothers and me. But that is not enough. I need to find every person whom she knew. I need to retrieve every word she ever said. I need to walk in her steps and smell the flowers she smelled, the great-grandchild of every blossom that she held up to her powerful nostrils. I need to piece back together the mirrors that once reflected her image. I want to know every syllable she could have possibly said in any language.

Where is her shadow? Where is her fury? I will loan her my breath. She should walk on my own two legs.

I fear living historians. If they’re dead, I read them gladly.

I ;loved the last line about historians

He talks early on in the book about how the book came to him five years after his mother’s death. He seemed to have lost both his parents when he was at a young age. In addition to the war, it is easy to see why young Elias raged so much against death. He deals with death from mass deaths he mentions Saddam Hussein a lot in this regard. Then, To The Death of Saints, which discusses how writers have tackled death, is a book that goes from here to there. What comes across is a humanist view of the battle against death and how he tackled it in his life. He talks about a fellow writer I love, Thomas Bernhard, and yes, he likes him as a writer, but isn’t he obsessed with death? This is a man wandering in his thoughts, getting snippets of his fellow writers as he tries to learn what dearth is by raging against it. He is very much the character Dylan Thomas had in mind when he said rage against the night!

Everyone asks me about Thomas Bernhard, everyone wants to know what I think of him. I praise him and explain what he’s about, I try to help others better understand him. I elevate him to my disciple, and naturally he is, and in a much deeper sense than someone like Iris Murdoch, who is always so pleasant and light, while underneath it all she has become a brilliant and amusing popular writer. She is not really a disciple of mine, because she is so obsessed with gender. However, Thomas Bernhard is obsessed with death.

On the other hand, in recent years he has come under the influence of another, which conceals my own, namely that of Beckett. Bernhard’s hypochondria makes him susceptible to Beckett. Like him he gives in to death, rather than opposing it. He sees it everywhere and passively damns all to it.

Therefore I think that now, because of his empowerment through Beckett, Bernhard is somewhat overrated, but overrated by the higher-ups: the Germans have found their own Beckett in him.

The entanglement of my influence on Bernhard with that of Beckett is curious and obvious. It’s a little too simple to really please me. So, I declare here, for myself, that I have defended him too much out of generosity. I am not entirely sure if it serves him.

His thought around Thomas Bernhard

I know that post-war, he struggled to write another novel. One wonders if all this collection and raging against dearth was his way of dealing with the horror of the war years and the wiping out of his central European Jewish world. This is maybe his momento mori. He never quite finished. Part of me would happily love to have seen the total 2000 pages that made up his vision of the project even if he never got to thin it down I imagine there are some real gems to be uncovered from one of Europe’s leading thinkers of the time. I hope to get Auto de Fe read next year. I like this. I had hoped for something, maybe a little more digression and drifting, as this is collected in the years from 1942 until his death. One wonders how he would collect them if he had got around to it? But this is an exciting view of one man’s fifty-year struggle to deal with death. Have you a favourite book about death?

 

Classics around the world 2025

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I signed up to join a read-along of Proust, which Trevor from Mookse and Gripes has been setting up for the new year around the same time. I felt the need to read Dickens. My mind then started to drift, and as I have for many a year, I always feel even though I have reviewed over 1400 books, the blog is light on classic books in translation. Now, this is partly the fact I am to drawn to shiny new books and a little bit of me not being overly confident in reading classics. I often get upset, but I have been putting off reading a pile of books on my TBR. So I’ve drawn. Line in the sand and decided on 2025 as a year for classic books worldwide. I have put the cut-off year of 1939 so they have to have been originally published before 1939. To me, that seems a good point, including World War I and the run-up to the war in Europe, which has always been a period that has interested me. Of course, as far back Greek classics I read Homer and a few other years ago, but know there is some great new translations of classic around and some publishers have been brought out lost classics and new translations of books.. I am due to sort out my library at home early in the new year and will be doing a shelf for the coming year and I will also be going through my copy of 1001 books to see if there is any books to get. I want to cover as many countries in the next year.

Have you a  favourite classics from around the world ?