A Literary Life

1970s American cinema was at a crossroads.   The musical-western-Technicolor extravaganzas that had dominated the 1950s and 1960s, and once so-wowed cinema audiences, were drawing less crowds.   They were stale in a contemporary world that had suffered the assassination of a president and the Vietnam War.   America had lost its innocence, and had gained a youth questioning how it had all come to this.   The ‘Young Beards’ took over from the late 1960s (Lucas, Spielberg, Coppola), and they made some loud, brash pictures.   But there was a second thread to 1970s cinema, not interested in chasing the youth money, as many of the pictures now were, but instead choosing to try and answer some of the questions of its demographic:   Why?   How?   What is the point?   Some mature, interesting pictures came out of that period: Five Easy Pieces, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Two-Lane Blacktop.   What these pictures shared was a gaze not ord...

Une Vie Sans Joie (1924) aka Backbiters, and sometimes called Catherine, is the first film on which Jean Renoir – that giant of French cinema – received a directing credit.    He shared directing duties with Albert Dieudonné, an actor and writer as well as director, who had some major roles in the silent era (including in this) before retiring from cinema with the onset of sound (though he would be recalled from retirement in mid 1930s and early 1940s for a couple of roles).   Despite the co-direction credit, Une Vie Sans Joie is stamped with certain Renoir preoccupations and imagery that his hand is easy to detect – some sequences are so painterly in their use of light, that one might even detect the hand of Pierre-Auguste in certain scenes. Looking back on this film, almost ninety years later, is really looking into history: the scenes of provincial life display rustic charm and ingrained poverty – at times it could be a Zola novel bought to life, but this ...

Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie A Review When The Satanic Verses was published in 1988, it gained immediate attention –not for the reasons now known – but rather for its quality of prose.   It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in that year (losing out to Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda), and won the 1988 Whitbread Award for novel of the year.   Many considered it a far superior novel to Midnight’s Children, which had won the Booker in 1981.   There was some uproar from the Muslim community in 1988, but it wasn’t until a few months into the following year, (14 February 1989, to be precise, and a date Rushdie will never forget) that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, issued his now famous fatwā calling for Rushdie's death. The life that Salman Rushdie lived under the height of the fatwā has long remained secret.   He received state protection – something not all quarters of ...

J.M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.   I know this as a fact as every work published by him after this date is plastered with this fact.   Two things are wrong with this statement: 1) you don’t win a Nobel Prize, you are awarded one, and 2) having a Nobel Prize conferred on you doesn’t automatically make all of your work wondrous.   I have always admired Coetzee – and admired is so the right word.   You don’t love Coetzee, in fact sometimes he repels you; sometimes he spits in your face and expects you to like him for it.   His prose is deliberately provocative, and it can be notoriously difficult.   I read Disgrace in hardback, in 1999, and about six years later I read Life & Times of Michael K.   Each successive new novel since Disgrace I’ve put on my ‘to read list’ and never gotten around to.   There always seems to be some other author I should buy first, read first, and be angered by first.   Then, the ot...