Monday 25 July 2011

The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier

For now: http://occasionalreview.blogspot.com/2007/07/lost-steps-by-alejo-carpentier.html

Monday 18 July 2011

A Good Read

I'm reading Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale.' This is my first reading of the book. Is it why I'm feeling so down?

That's the thing about good literature. It does affect our mood. It seeps into us and we walk around, maybe not with anything concrete from the book in our minds, but a sense of difference. A question. Why do I feel like this? We may tend not to put it down to what we are reading, but it could simply be that.

Good literature can affect our view of the world, the way we think, the way we look at other people, other places. It makes us more understanding. Makes us angry, defiant.
Makes us believe. Makes us laugh.

Like music, it changes our mood, enriches, transforms, educates.

'The Handmaid's Tale' gives us information in drips. They accumulate, grow and increase. It doesn't spoonfeed. For that I am very grateful.
And it is not self important and pompous in its length. I really dislike books that pad themselves out and say, 'Aren't I important and clever because I'm so BIG.'
A good book is modest. It doesn't need to do that. Every word is there for a purpose and it doesn't sledge hammer or waffle or repeat pointlessly and annoyingly and it doesn't let the reader down.

And I love the pages. They are silkly smooth, slighly off white, you flick your fingers over the edges and they turn easily, no sticking. The cover is hard and the image intriguing. But most of all it is the feel of the pages I like. Touch. Back to touch. It is so important. Books to hold in the hand. To feel.


And it's raining, raining for three days. As it Thomas Hardy novels, the weather suits the mood of the character.

Saturday 16 July 2011

Mid July

Watched 'The Miracle Worker' again last week. Late at night. Cat by my side. On my own, which I like doing late at night with certain films like this one.
The opening visuals with the credits and music are stunning. Black and white. The iconic image of the blind Helen Keller, arms outstretched, reaching for something, wandering over the horizon and down the hill. And then her mother following.

Her coming into a room seen through the reflection in a large Christmas tree bauble. She reaches out. It breaks.

Legs kicking, heels pounding on the floor.

Sheets blowing on the washing line and becoming entangled.

And then The Scene. The battle of wills between deaf and blind Helen and her teacher, Annie Sullivan, once blind herself, after several operations and eye drops and glasses, able to see.

The Scene goes on and on. Helen WILL sit down on a chair at the table and eat her food from her own plate with a spoon. She has never done this before and never been stopped from wandering around the table eating from other people's plates. Annie isn't having that. And it's violent. Looks improvised. Even the actors are suprised and desperate and shattered. It's not pretty. It's also funny and shocking.

And then there are the hazy images when the past leaks into the present as Annie is tortured with memories of the time she and her younger brother, Jimmy, grew up in a workhouse.

The only way Annie can reach Helen who is growing more and more distant by the day, is through touch.

The Miracle Worker, starring Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke, directed by Arthur Penn in 1962 is highly recommended.