Rumors of Delirium

Good and evil don’t exist in heaven or hell, they exist between people. The cinema exists for showing that, too. - Pedro Costa

Last night I saw Pedro Costa’s film Bones (Ossos) at the wonderful Amherst Cinema. If you live in the Five College area, please support this magnificent resource. They show an array of popular and “art house” films, as well as films you rarely have an opportunity to see in the theater.

We were lucky to have the filmmaker himself there to introduce the film and take questions afterwards.

This is a mysterious, exquisitely shot movie — fictional, but with the feel of a documentary. The setting is a slum on the outskirts of Lisbon. The pace is slow, but a meaning-filled slow that invites the observer to question and ponder the ambiguous significance of the elliptical plot and the equally ambiguous relationships between people.

Shot at night with little light, in crowded slum streets, or in interiors where the viewer is conscious of looking into a room, through a doorway or window, the visually the film is dark, color soaked, rich, and luminous.

Costa spoke at length –

• About his definition of realism — being true, he said if I remember correctly, to something you knew as a child.
• About the sexuality and tensions in the film — some of the female characters have a masculine aspect, the male characters feminine. The actor who played the father, in life a junky, told him that he felt more fragile than the baby he held.
• About the significance of the baby: a metaphor for life and rebirth.

The film is full of near deaths and re-awakenings, of waiting.

The visuals reminded me of paintings by Vermeer — seeing through doors and windows to a private world that remains in some ways unknowable, intimate, forbidden. The colors looming out of darkness are reminiscent of Rembrandt or Goya’s late “black” paintings.

Costa on the cinema as an art of absence:

Griffith saw that the cinema could show things that everybody knows, that everybody wants to recognise, and at the same time, not show certain things which are very violent, which must be hidden. (more…)

Juicy life; dry read. That was the club verdict on Vindication, the recent biography of Mary Wollstonecraft by Lyndall Gordon.

Grade — B- (C readability; A- subject matter)

Barbara was taken with the historical and literary aspects, most particularly Mary Wollstonecraft’s friendship with John and Abigail Adams. To augment Gordon’s biography, she read Wollstonecrafts’s most famous work — A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – as well as three other biographies. The one she’d recommend for general readers is The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft by Claire Tomalin, which is shorter and more focused.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s life was marked by obstacles and adventure — a violent father, financial strains, needy siblings who constantly beg for money, a love affair with a charming but faithless American spy (Gilbert Imlay), life in France during the Terror, travels with a baby in tow through Norway and Holland on the trail of stolen silver.

Despite these ills, she produced many influential works including the first declaration of women’s rights, a history of the French Revolution, and books on the education of daughters, child-rearing, and travel. Many of her ideas are still current after two centuries. She was one of the first advocates for mothers’ breast-feeding, for example.

Sadly, when she found and married a possible soul-mate*, William Godwin, she died in childbirth, leaving two daughters without a mother.

I felt the book went overboard describing the romantic and sexual aspects of Wollstonecraft’s life and shortchanged her intellectual contributions. We are too often reduced to our sexual and emotional selves.

Terry felt Gordon went off on a tangent at the end — connecting the lives of the daughters and a student Margaret King (who dressed as a man in order to study medicine) to Wollstonecraft’s ideas.

Others felt Gordon made poor transitions, went on and on about irrelevant details, and left out connecting information leaving the reader feeling lost or bewildered, scratching her head and saying: Where did this character come from?

That said, we found plenty to talk about — the horrors of childbirth in the 18th century, the shocking practice of the French aristocracy of sending their infants off to a wet nurse to be reared (where they often died), and the absolute legal rights of men over wives and children. It was wrenching to read about women being forced to give their very young children to the father upon separating, and about wives having no recourse if physically or psychologically abused by their husbands.

We touched on Rousseau (education, child-rearing), the fact that Wollstonecraft can be seen as a transitional figure between Enlightenment rationalism and the Romantic / Sentimentalist movement (Sorrows of Young Werther; poets Shelley and Byron), free love and its consequences in a world without contraception (free love is free only for men), and Wollstonecraft’s daughters (Fanny Imlay who commits suicide; Mary Godwin Shelley who writes Frankenstein and lives in a menage à trois with the poet Percy Shelley and her step-sister Claire Clairmont).

Yes, great topics of discussion…if you can make it all the way through the book!

*Point of contention — was he indeed the right man, or a cold fish?

Update:

Barbara adds –

Vindication is truly fascinating. It is a feminist classic but its feminist concerns have more to do reforming marriage and motherhood than in winning political or sexual freedoms. In particular, Wollstonecraft wants mothers to become the nurturers and educators rather than turning their children over to hirelings. Here’s a money quotation: “To be a good mother, a woman must have sense, and that independence of mind which few women possess who are taught to depend entirely on their husbands.”

By the way, Gilbert Imlay’s novel, The Emigrants, is still available in a Penguin classic edition.

At the end of Vindication, Gordon includes an aftermath concerning Mary Wollstonecraft’s heirs and followers — her two daughters, Fanny Imlay and Mary Godwin, their step-sister Claire Clairmont, and her early pupil Margaret King, Lady Mount Cashell. Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary married the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and is best known as the author of Frankenstein. Read more about her and Frankenstein’s Shadow at Fickle Foe.

Claire Clairmont, perhaps jealous of Mary’s relationship with Shelley, seduced the poet Byron, who seems to have cared little for her. After she gave birth to his daughter, Byron took the child but refused to let Claire see her, even after he left young girl to be raised at a convent, where, tragically, she died.

Claire outlived them all, dying at the age of 81. In addition to being immortalized in several of Shelley’s poems, she appears as Juliana Bordereau, a central character in The Aspern Papers by Henry James. A good summary of Claire’s long and interesting life can be found here.

Naturally, curiosity aroused, I wanted our next book to be The Aspern Papers. I’ve always been drawn more to survivors and strivers than victims. The group decided to go with James’s more famous — and much longer — The Ambassadors. The first half is on deck for early November.

By the way, I’ve linked to Amazon for your convenience, since there are plot summaries and reviews there. But the full texts are available online at these links:

• The Ambassadors
• The Aspern Papers

Last night I finally saw The Human Stain, adapted from Philip Roth’s novel. The film was moving and true to the book, but what was left out interested me.

It’s about a Coleman Silk, a New England college professor who loses his job over an unintentional racial slur against a black student who files a complaint. The twist is that the professor himself is African American, but has slipped across the racial divide and has passed as white and Jewish for his entire career.

In the novel Roth moves the narrative back and forth through time with tremendous ease. The film reflects this style. Seamlessly interwoven are moments in the Silk’s life–his first love, his first realization that he can pass for white, his estrangement from his siblings and mother. The main plot traces his love affair with a much younger woman who is being stalked by her ex-husband.

The tragic elements of the tale were beautifully portrayed in the film. There were stunning performances by Anthony Hopkins, who plays the Dean, Nicole Kidman, his young lover, and Ed Harris as her crazy ex-husband suffering PTSD from Vietnam.

In adaptations a lot of material has to be cut. Novels are complex, often sprawling, and films need to have clear, efficient plot development and risk losing an audience if they are much longer than an hour and a half to two hours.

This film, at about 100 minutes, leaves out a great deal. So it’s worth reading the book, especially for Roth’s humor. He’s at his virtuoso best in a scene, nearly over-the-top, where the manic Vietnam vet is attempting to overcome his post-traumatic stress by having dinner at a Chinese restaurant. It’s simultaneously hilarious, shocking, and tragic.

By all means, see the movie. Then go home and read the book.

Some great resources that I’ve just discovered:

• Bookslut
• So Many Books
• Ready Steady

Well, that’s enough to get started. The discussion of Bruno Arpaia’s The Angel of History, J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach on today’s Ready Steady will keep me busy for a while. Walter Benjamin, the subject of Angel of History, died attempting to cross from France to Spain to escape the Nazis is someone who I’ve been wanting to read, but haven’t yet had the time or the intellectual energy. Arpaia’s novel–which has a parallel story about the Spanish Civil War–might be the place for me to start.

Ah, maybe the next rainy day.

One of the nicest experiences during my travels in Ireland was a rainy day. After ten days of nonstop hiking, biking, and sightseeing, it was delicious to have an excuse to cuddle up with a good book and lose myself in someone else’s adventures instead of having to sweat them out on my own.

While Paul went searching for a prehistoric burial mound in the downpour, I curled up in bed and allowed myself to be swept away by Dickens’s Dombey and Son. Every so often, I paused to stare at the gray skies, the sheets of rain blurring the picture windows, the soft green pastures and rocky hills. What a luxury!

The plot unfolds slowly, but once it starts chugging, it is hard to put down this long novel. While the raindrops pattered and splashed, I wandered through the mean, labyrinthine streets of nineteenth-century London with its teeming crowds, unscrupulous villains, and wizened eccentrics. The novel relates the trials and tribulations of Florence, the neglected daughter of the proud and wealthy Dombey, who is furious because a daughter is unable in his eyes to carry on the name of his firm–Dombey and Son. When Florence’s mother dies giving birth to the much desired son, poor Florence must fend for herself in a cold, unloving household.

A reader does so want her to survive the many cruel twists in the plot. These include a kidnapping by the evil “good Mrs. Brown,” the illness of Florence’s beloved but frail little brother, her father’s loveless marriage to a haughty but beautiful stepmother, and the treachery of her father’s assistant, a scheming, catlike man, who contrives to divest her of her true love, Walter, by sending him off to the Barbados on behalf of the firm, where he is lost at sea.

Here’s a taste of Dickens’s description of the effect of the railroad on the layout of the town and people’s lives. The Charles Dickens Page, where I found this excerpt, is a wonderful resource.

The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; (more…)

My fiction group met last week for some chat on our summer travels, critiquing our manuscripts, and sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly about careers and writing.

We got to talking about my trip to Ireland and Finland, Bruce’s upcoming trip to Italy, and Dina’s cruise to Alaska, where she traveled close to a glacier which had big chunks falling in a cascade. Disturbing, first-hand evidence of global warming.

Among the good writing news is that Jeannine’s new book, Anne Hutchinson’s Way, just out from FSG will be named one of the”Top Ten Religion Books for Youth” in the October 1, 2007, issue of Booklist. Plus a great review from Kirkus, which calls it a “complex story of faith and freedom with clarity and strength.”

Way to go Jeannine!

The next book we’re reading is Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft by Lyndall Gordon.

Our discussion takes place on September 20th. So far, I really love it–though it took a while to get going.