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Staff Picks and Suggestions

Hole in My Life

I would heartily recommend Jack Ganto’s memoir Hole in my Life as a good read for anytime at all. The main reason that I believe it could be read at anytime (and by anybody, whatever your overall reading habits are) is that it is one of the simpler and more economical books that I’ve ever read, making it easy to get through in about three days–the length it took me. The book follows the young Jack Gantos, and his struggles to become a writer, which turn out to be rather more drastic than the ordinary struggles of aspiring writers. While working for his father’s construction company down in St. Croix in the early seventies– at that time run amok with race-riots and crime– Gantos is offered a job on a sailing boat by one of his father’s shadier customers. The nature of the job is to deliver two thousand pounds of hash buried on a nearby island to New York, where Gantos would then recieve ten thousand dollars for his services. Gantos immediately accepts the job because of the money, which he plans to use to pay his college tuition. He also thinks that getting wild life experience of any kind is the key to becoming a great writer, and so he largely overlooks the simple fact that what he is doing is seriously illegal. From that point on, he sails with the captain, a prickly english drug-smuggler named Hamilton, up to New York, everything going smoothly up until and after arrival. But then, Gantos and his companions start to notice a car that has been following them while they are driving back from upstate New York. Then, they hear that their boat was searched one night while they were gone. It all culminates in the FBI busting in on them at their Chelsea hotel and arresting Hamilton. Gantos, ever the one for adventure, briefly escapes, but is soon forced to turn himself over to the FBI, as they have at least as much information on him as they did on his partners and informed his family about all his activities. Gantos is sentenced to an uncertain amount of time in a federal prison; anywhere between sixty days and six years. He begins serving time in the truly ugly world prison racked with guilt, fear and regret. I came about this book myself in a somewhat unusual way; one of my professors, who vaguely knows the author from her job at Emerson, bought me the book as an end of the semester present, saying that she thought I would enjoy it. (I was not an exception in the class; every one recieved a book). I  started reading it that same day and finished it some fifteen minutes ago as of this writing. Gantos actually has a background in mostly children’s literature, and while this book is certainly not for children, this background comes through in the writing. Everything is stated in a matter-of-a-fact, unsensational way, the vocabulary is simple and straightforward and Gantos portrays himself in a way that anybody else could emotionally relate to, even though some of the early chapters reveal a predilection towards recklessness that do make him a unique and worrisome character. What Gantos goes through is far more painful than what the average idealist in their early twenties has to go through and if anything, will leave you telling yourself ‘I will never, ever go to prison.’ At the same time, I was sometimes faced with the strange envy that I haven’t had quite this interesting a life; that is, the same envy Gantos felt about other writers, leading him to make such a massive mistake. But this is an emotion that evaporates for Gantos while he is in prison. The book is ultimately reassuring. As he writes in one passage; ‘Prison may have been serious, but from within it, looking out my cell window, I knew life outside prison was more interesting.’

Embroidered History

I recently saw two films with unexpected parallels: Waltz With Bashir and Frost Nixon. The first film is an animated feature about an Israeli soldier’s quest to uncover hidden memories of his time in the 1982 war in Lebanon, during the massacres of Palestinian camps in Sabra and Shatila. The latter presents the events surrounding flashy talk show host David Frost, first losing a battle of wits with American ex-president Richard Nixon in a series of interviews, then turning the tables on the savvy Nixon and eliciting a confession of wrongdoing in the White House. Both films, different in format and story, are worthy of viewing, as they offer several layers of ideas that challenge cinema goers today. The similarity between the two films is their debt to the documentary filming style and their blurring of the edge between reality and fiction. Talking heads portrayed by actors and animations intercut more fanciful scenes of the narrative, jarring the viewer to question where reality stops in the film and where the fiction begins. Today, I still question if the devices work, if history will applaud or censure this blend of documentary style with fictional narrative. To its credit, the device is effective for pulling the audience out of a passive viewing exprience into a more active one. To its detriment, the flow of the film’s narrative is interrupted as the viewer questions the intent of the director and the content of the narrative. This idea of blurring fiction with reality in the film medium, although treated with a new style in today’s films, is hardly a novel development. Italy’s Neorealist movement of the 1940s produced some of the most celebrated films of the struggle of everyday man: Rome, Open City, La Strada and The Bicycle Thief. Inspired by the movement and the writings of critic Andre Bazin, French director Francois Truffaut in turn produced a cinematic masterpiece, The 400 Blows, a simple but tragic story of a boy sent to reform school. Autobiograpical in nature, the film’s gritty scenes and natural acting performances leave the viewer unsettled by a certain reality creeping into the cinematic experience. In the years since Italy’s Neorealism and France’s New Wave movements, it seems a new movement has developed in cinema: a director takes a historical event and actually uses the devices normally employed by a modern-day documentary to advance a narrative, which takes license with the actual historical events themselves. The intent of Neorealist and New Wave directors was to bring cinema back to the people, to strip away the artifice of the day. What directors Milos Forman (Waltz with Bashir) and Ron Howard (Frost Nixon) intend with their choices of narrative will be interesting to follow.

The Enormous Radio

Short stories are valuable for the simple reason that everybody has time to read one. A novel is necessarily a complex undertaking and in this day and age, we are overloaded with so many appliances and distractions that an interest in novel reading, to say nothing of reading in general, has declined. Google, IPhones, MP3’s, NetFlix and Tivo are all various culprits in squashing the attention span of the general public and thus making people believe that reading takes too long and is too inconvenient. Will reading as a practice eventually die out altogether? That is not for me to say. But I very much believe the short story will outlast the Novel. Since this is the case, here is a great short story for people to read. In a sense, it is really about all of the above. The Enormous Radio, written by John Cheever is a story set in Manhattan during the 1940’s, detailing the almost-happy marriage between Jim and Irene Wescott, who decide to purchase a new radio. This radio seems like simply an additional luxury to their life, but it soon becomes apparent that it is, in fact, a menace. Every time it is turned on, a different domestic scene of another family’s life elsewhere in the apartment is broadcast; all of them involve scenes of violence, alcoholism and crumbling relationships that begin to tear the Wescotts apart. There has recently been a slight revival of interest in John Cheever, with a new biography of him having just come out called Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey. He is about as quintessentially an American writer as one can find and The Enormous Radio, due to its message that owning commodities exposes our lives and alienates humans from relationships, is a quintessentially American story for this day and age as well as the late 40’s. The story can be found in The Stories of John Cheever.

For a good precursor to a really bad horror movie, check out…

Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960) is an odd little movie that started a bigger chain than anybody could have expected. It was initially a small production based on a Swedish folk ballad called ‘Tore’s Daughter at Vange.’ The ballad is about a girl who awakes and gets ready for church in her father’s farm  (her father being the Tore of the title). She puts on her royal robes and goes riding off to church.

She rides around a giant tree,

now three herdsman she does see.

They say to her, “Come be our wife,

or thou shalt forfeit thy young life.”

“Do not lay a hand on me,

“Or my father’s wrath you’ll see.”

“For they kinsmen care not we,

We’ll kill them all as well as thee.”

These herdsman do proceed to rape and kill Karin, then hide her body under a tree, from which a spring mysteriously begins to sprout. They ride in to town and  arrive at her father’s farm, where he and his wife give them shelter and accomodation. When the herdsman offer the mother the golden robe that Karin was wearing as a gift, she realizes why her daughter has not returned. She informs her husband and so he does the only logical thing: kills them all with his knife, only reluctantly killing the youngest one; the ‘little brother.’ Being a man of faith, he feels guilty for his deed and decides to build a church of stone in atonement.

The Virgin Spring won an Academy Award for best foreign film in 1961 and stirred some controversy over its (by 1960’s standards) graphic rape scene. But today, it is known only as one of Bergman’s minor films, even among his devotees. Bergman himself would later dismiss it as a “cheap Kurosawa imitation.”

Fast forward forty-nine years and we have a teen-slasher/horror flick being released in theaters with roughly the same story, and not by coincidence. The Last House on the Left is a remake of Wes Craven’s original Last House on the Left from 1972, which was a remake of The Virgin Spring. There are numerous changes in both Last House films: there are two girls, not one; the religious significance of the original story is gone; the stories are set in the present. But the twisted ‘family’ of killers carries over, the ambiguous character of the Little brother carries over; the rape carries over. Craven’s film also became quite controversial for its over-the-top violence. But it is unlikely that this new Last House on the Left will cause any major contoversy or even be memorable at all. In fact, it is likely that the makers of the new film did not even realize the geneology of their own film. It was made as a simple attempt to cash-in, without having to come up with anything new. We’ve all heard that story from Hollywood before.

Still though, the lineage is there, and it is interesting in and of itself. The Virgin Spring can be found in Snell Library, containing a full version of ‘Tore’s Daughter at Vange.’ There’s half of the story for you.

Henning Mankell Update: PBS’s Wallander

PBS Mystery Series: Wallander

 

The new series coming to PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery Series is one that I was initially skeptical about: the work of a Swedish mystery writer (Henning Makell) being filmed in English, in Sweden, starring British actor Kenneth Branagh. As strange a concoction as this might seem—at least to people who have read any of the Kurt Wallander books—it must be said that it’s also a strategic move on the part of PBS. There are no Swedish actors who have big enough names to attract a real American (or English) audience to this program, so from a commercial standpoint, it is best to go for a well-established actor like Branagh. Also, if the dialogue were in Swedish, well, then it would have to be subtitled, most people who watch T.V aren’t used to that, it might cost a lot of money… So I’ve decided, due to these purely practical considerations, that I have no qualm with this particular miniseries. After all, Branagh is a great actor and as long as the spirit of Mankell’s books are retained, then the miniseries should work out well.

I wrote a separate blog post about Henning Mankell’s book Firewall, which is an immensely entertaining read, last fall. That book and his children’s story Secrets in the Fire are both available in the Snell fiction stacks. It seems that the PBS miniseries will be lumping a few Wallander books together in one series, and whether Firewall will be one of them or not, I do not know. But it should be interesting regardless