***Octopus

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octopus

(photo: wikimedia)

By Richard Schweid. The silver-blue cover, with its sophisticated type treatment was almost as alluring as the topic of this slim book. If you (or your kids or nieces and nephews) are fascinated by natural history and some special branch on the animal family tree, one of these Animal series books published by London-based Reaktion Books may be just the ticket. Lively biographies of 70 animals from Albatross to Wolf have been published so far—a diverse array that includes ant, cockroach, crocodile, gorilla, lobster, moose, parrot, and trout.

You’ll want to take a peek at them first though. I wasn’t surprised by my book’s many intriguing facts about octopuses, like about their decentralized brains, about how laboratory octopuses sometimes dismantle their tanks—suicide for them, actually—and outsmart their keepers, about how they are caught and processed and cooked, and about their millennia-long role in art and literature, as the malevolent force behind many fictional sea disasters.

What I did not expect to learn was that octopuses have a firm place in erotic art (Octopussy, anyone? The movie, regarded as one of the weakest Bond films, took its title if not its plot from Ian Fleming). This tradition was perhaps most prominent in Japanese art, including the famous woodcut, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, which you can find out more about here.

“Mischief and craft are plainly seen to be the characteristics of this creature.” (Claudius Aelianus, c. 200 CE).

****Rage Against the Dying

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Route 66, highway, Arizona

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By Becky Masterman, read by Judy Kaye — Delighted to find this first-time mystery-thriller, which appeared on seven “best of” lists for 2013. At first, I thought, “Oh no, not another story about long-haul truckers and their women victims,” but the book soon took a sharp turn away from that tired track, and we discover the would-be victim is a retired FBI agent with certain skills.

The agent is Brigid Quinn, asked informally to help put to rest an old case—the murder of her young trainee by the “Route 66 killer.” A man has confessed to this string of murders and told authorities where to find the agent’s body. But the FBI agent in charge of the case doubts the confession and persuades Quinn to doubt it, too. Meanwhile, the real killer is out there . . . and no one but the two of them appears to care whether he’s caught.

The book uses its Tucson setting to advantage, and Quinn shines hard as a diamond in the unrelenting Arizona light. Her first-person narrative is “chilling, smart, funny, and what a voice she has,” said Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl. The narration was perfect. Cheers to both Masterman and Kaye. Looking forward to reading the second book in the series, out now!

N.J. Theaters Surviving (Thriving in!) Winter

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playbills

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

Caught revivals of two 1972 plays at two of New Jersey’s fine local theatres last weekend for completely different experiences.

In partnership with Syracuse Stage, Princeton’s McCarter Theatre brought to the United States the production of Sizwe Banzi is Dead as recently remounted by Johannesburg’s Market Theatre. McCarter has presented several other South African plays in the past few decades, and this work, written by John Kani, Athol Fugard, and Winston Ntshona is much livelier than I remember those created by Fugard alone.

In two main parts, the play illustrates through humor the frustrations of life in an autocratic system and how the only solution, when one is painted into a corner by rules and regulations, is to leap over them and start life anew. Thus, Sizwe Banzi, the pass book holder is dead, but Sizwe Banzi, the man, lives free. The actors, whom Emily Mann says are “two of the most promising young actors in South Africa”—Atandwa Kani (son of the playwright) and Mncedisi Shabangu—gave unforgettable performances. The play was most effective when it worked by humor, rather than harangue, and there was a bit of that, but not much.

Upstate New Yorkers—this production starts at Syracuse Stage 2/25. And if it comes your way, don’t miss it! The struggle for dignity belongs to us all.

Pure comedy was on stage at Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, with Alan Ayckbourn’s classic, Absurd Person Singular. Its three acts takes place on three successive Christmas Eves in the kitchens of the three couples who form the cast: one on the way up in society and life, one on the way down, and one decidedly mixed. Much of the comedy comes from Ayckbourn’s wry and exact observations of human behavior and motivation and his characters’ obliviousness to it. Jessica Stone directed the cast’s six members, who were uniformly up to the precise timing, physical agility, and intelligence needed to make this play work so well

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****The Long Goodbye

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$5000 bill

“The Madison” (photo: wikimedia.org)

By Raymond Chandler – This hardboiled detective story from 1953 is one of Chandler’s last featuring detective Philip Marlowe, and all the usual appeal is here—Los Angeles riffraff, a complex plot, and the sly, ironic first-person tone of wiseass Marlowe, who narrates. Although the prose conjures the voice of the ultimate Marlowe interpreter, Humphrey Bogart, the movie version was on ice for two decades, awaiting the deft touch of Robert Altman, with Elliott Gould as Marlowe. (FYI, the Rotten Tomatoes critics give this one a 96% rating, so it’s now on my Netflix list!)

Lots of alcohol gets sloshed in this story, written at a period when Chandler—an alcoholic himself—was at a serious low point (his wife was dying) and discouraged about his writing. It was late in his career, and he wanted to be taken more seriously. A few plot elements don’t quite hang together, and “the Madison” (a $5000 bill a client sent him) is not the unbelievable windfall it was in 1950, yet the writing propels you forward from sentence one: “The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.”

Keep reading, and you’re rewarded with thrilling descriptions (“His eyebrows waved gently, like the antennae of some suspicious insect.” “On the window sill a bee with tattered wings was crawling along the woodwork, buzzing in a tired remote sort of way, as if she knew it wasn’t any use, she was finished, she had flown too many missions and would never get back to the hive again.” A metaphor that probably says as much about how Chandler—and Marlowe—were feeling at that moment as it does about how the fictional bee may have felt.) Of course, Chandler was equally observant and precise in his descriptions of people: “There was the usual light scattering of compulsive drinkers getting tuned up at the bar . . ., the kind that reach very slowly for the first one and watch their hands so they won’t knock anything over.” Oh yeah.

In a crime fiction anthology published in 1995, mystery writer Bill Pronzini called The Long Goodbye “a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery.” Contemporary novelist Paul Auster wrote, “Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.” A pity Chandler didn’t anticipate that the critics’ unwavering praise of him ultimately would extend beyond genre borders.

If the books leave you wanting more, take the awesome Esotouric Raymond Chandler Tour or get the map of his Los Angeles settings, described in this popular post from last fall.


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Word Count to Movie Minutes

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The Wired crew set out to answer an interesting question for the January print edition—how does a book’s printed word count convert into movie minutes? Writer Seth Kadish took a look at 18 book-film pairs and found that, on average, every 1000 words of text translates into two movie minutes. Authors who struggle over each and every one of those words may blanch, but movies don’t have to spend time describing how people look or what they’re wearing—the casting and costume directors have supposedly taken care of that. They don’t have to describe the time of day or the setting, the audience can see it.

popcorn

(art: pixabay)

Peter Jackson’s movie version of The Hobbit (in three parts and clocking in at a full eight hours) is an outlier, spending five minutes per 1000 in visualizing that story, with the movie of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe not far behind. Padding stories out with special effects may be one way a movie gobbles up the clock. Adding new content, of course is another, which makes fans of the original squirm. The Harry Potter movies are generally right on the nose, but The Order of the Phoenix practically skims through the text, devoting less than a minute per 1000 words.

To be sure, the 1000-word standard is elastic. In my house we have two-hour (Greer Garson, Laurence Olivier), four-hour (BBC, Elizabeth Garvie, David Rintoul), and six-hour (BBC, Jennifer Ehle, Colin Firth) versions of Pride and Prejudice, and they’re all quite different. If you’ve just luxuriated through the long one, you can’t abide the two-hour 1940 version, much as you might admire the leads. You’re too aware of everything that’s been chopped.

If only someone would make a movie out of Neal Stephenson’s entertaining REAMDE. At 1056-pages, it’s three times the length of a today’s typical novel. That would be roughly nine hours, Peter Jackson, knock yourself out! And order me an extra-large popcorn! Meanwhile, Publisher’s Weekly has compiled a list of the most anticipated page-to-screen adaptations for 2015, with, at the top, a seriously toned down 50 Shades of Grey.

*Death at the Château Bremont

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wine, wine glass

(photo: wikimedia.org)

By M. L. Longworth–Usually I’m generous in reviewing an author’s first novel, because there’s a lot to learn about how best to guide readers down a fictional path, and even a good story can stumble into the Swamp of Difficulty. (And let’s face it–I, too, want to have a first book in print some day, and it is unlikely to be without flaws, no matter how hard I try!) However, I expect a book that a publisher—in this case, Penguin—has decided to invest in to be guided out of the murky waters in which this mystery novel flounders.

My general concerns are the story’s lack of coherence and convincingly drawn, engaging characters. Their dialog seems to be conducted in American slang. Maybe French people speak that way these days. I hope not. In Fiction Writing 101, students are harangued endlessly about maintaining a consistent point of view and warned against dipping in and out of different characters’ consciousnesses, as Longworth does, often from one paragraph to the next. The result is inescapably messy and confusing.

I’ll confine examples of specific quibbles to one three-page sequence late in the book, in which the author makes three startling mistakes that leave the reader shouting for (or at) the book’s editor, if one there was. In the first, the omniscient narrator announces, “He (Auvieux) had always been frightened of Cosette.” Auvieux and Cosette are two principal characters, why are we being told this important information so late in the game, and why hasn’t it been shown throughout in Auvieux’s behavior? With appropriate signals from Auvieux, the detective would have deduced his fear by now (never mind that we don’t find out whether there is any real basis for it), so that it can be served up to the reader as the character’s insight, not a bald assertion by the narrator.

The firearm Auvieux carries is described first as a hunting rifle then as a shotgun—an amazing continuity break for an author of murder mysteries. In this same passage, Auvieux has led the detective to a remote cabin at night. Although the detective has never been there before, he says, “We will [go around and]. . . sneak up on the north side of the cabanon, since that side doesn’t have a window.” Huh? How the heck does he know that?

The author, who apparently is charming in person, has produced a number of subsequent mysteries in this series. They have the advantage of a colorful setting—the Aix-en-Provence region of France, where she lives—and her sprightly writing style, but this first one does not make me eager to read another.

On her website, Longworth admits she doesn’t read mysteries very often, and it shows. Also she takes a swipe at the genre (and here I admit to being perhaps a little thin-skinned, as my parenthetical editorializing indicates), saying, “I was too shy to begin writing [real!] fiction, so I thought that if I wrote ‘genre’ fiction [the easy stuff!] I would have some boundaries to work with. Every mystery has the same framework: someone dies, there is a murderer, and the hero/heroine looks for that killer.” Creatively and persuasively, one hopes.

The Last Sentence

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The Last Sentence, Jesper Christensen, Torgny Segerstedt It was troubling to view Swedish director Jan Troell’s 2012 film (trailer) based on the experience of crusading journalist Torgny Segerstedt, so soon after the recent tragic events in Paris. Segerstedt was editor-in-chief of one of Sweden’s leading newspapers, and between 1933 when Hitler came to power and his own death in 1945, Segerstedt was a fierce opponent of Naziism, even though much of Sweden’s leadership, including the king, was determined to remain neutral and out of the war. The struggle for journalists’ right—some would say duty—to speak out despite risks to themselves and others has not ended.

Beautifully played by Jesper Christensen, Segerstedt left himself open to criticism and to the devaluing of his motivations by his long affair with a Jewish woman, wife of his publisher. Hollywood’s crusading journalists are noble and flawless (think All the President’s Men), their presumed moral authority overshadowing any rough spots in their personalities, whereas Segerstedt’s uncompromising character is pompous at times and unpleasant at others, he basks in his celebrity, and he’s downright cruel to his wife. “Easy to admire, but very hard to like,” said RogerEbert.com reviewer Glenn Kenny. Truth told, he loves his dogs best.

Producing this film in black and white may have symbolic significance or may be just the preferred Scandinavian style—the film is Swedish, after all. In another Bergman-like touch, Segerstedt sees and converses with the black-clad ghosts of his mother and other women. Slow-moving, like the clear stream (of words?) against which the opening and closing credits appear, there is only a fleeting soundtrack to support the action.

The film left me with a lot of unanswered questions. What happened with his writing? When the authorities demanded that a particular edition not be distributed because of its anti-Nazi editorial (which suggests they had imposed some censorship regime), Segerstedt printed it with a big white space where the editorial would have been. Nice. But we never learn whether he was allowed to continue writing after that (or how he was stopped) until a scene that takes place years later. How did the war affect the Swedish people? There’s little hint of that, beyond putting up blackout curtains. It seems they had electricity, they had food, petrol, champagne at New Year’s. It’s primarily the awareness of Nazi behavior that the viewer brings to the film that explains and justifies both Segerstedt’s simmering outrage and his country’s policy of appeasement. He and his mistress both have suicide plans, if it came to that, but in the absence of any tangible, on-screen threat, their preparations seem self-dramatizing and almost childish.

Segerstedt in a sense provides his own epitaph, which is also the Swedish title of the movie—“Judgment on the Dead”— based on a line from a famous Old Norse poem, which says the judgment on the dead is everlasting. History’s judgment on Segerstedt would be that he was of course right about the Nazis. And if, as the King believed, it would have been his fault if the Germans invaded the country, he would have been among the first to die. NPR’s Ella Taylor called the film “A richly detailed portrait of a great man riddled with flaws and undone by adulation.” Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 76%, audience score 44%.

 

****Mr. Mercedes

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car, Mercedes

(photo: commons. wikimedia)

By Stephen King. I’d resolved to read some Stephen King this year and picked this one up in the San Diego airport. I see that the Mystery Writers of America have nominated it for the Edgar Award—“Best Novel” category—for 2014. Five more nominees to go.

King fulfills all the standard thriller conventions—ticking clock, protagonist who must act outside the system with aid only from clever, but unofficial sources (in this case a black high school student and a woman with a serious mental disorder), a diabolical threat against a passel of innocents, and an opponent with sufficient intellectual- and fire-power to keep the stakes stoked. With characters from the crime novel version of Central Casting, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the plot–despite its interesting set-up–is more than a wee bit predictable.

It’s an artful page-turner, if you don’t think too hard, and King fans may love it, but it breaks no new ground. (Read about the “King for a Year” project, which so far revisits some of his more innovative works.) And perhaps it’s no surprise then, that Mr. Mercedes will be turned into a television series, with the script to be written by David E. Kelley (Boston Legal and Ally McBeal), and Jack Bender (Lost and Under the Dome) to direct.

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****The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

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Texas, guns

(photo: C. Holmes, CC license)

By Anand Giridharadas (read by the author) I missed this nonfiction book when it came out last May, and was astonished that I haven’t heard any chatter about it. The book probes the 2001 murders of two South Asian men and the attempted murder of a third because they “looked Muslim” to the assailant, a “Texas loud, Texas proud” man named Mark Stroman, who viewed his actions as revenge for 9/11. The story is told from the points of view of Stroman and the critically injured Bangladeshi man, Rais Bhuiyan, “two men bound, as it turned out, by more than just an act of violence,” said Ayad Akhtar in the New York Times.

Over the course of the trial and the long wait on Texas’s death row (the death penalty applied because one of the murders occurred in the course of another crime, a robbery), the victim, Bhuiyan, comes to believe Allah saved him from death so that he could do something remarkable. That something, he decided, was to forgive Mark Stroman. Not only to forgive, but to save him from execution.

The lengthy interviews journalist Giridharadas conducted give unparalleled access to the thinking of both Bhuiyan and Stroman, however tangled and inconsistent it may be. Bhuiyan, who would appear to hold all the moral high ground here, at times gets caught up in the self-promotional aspects of his international justice campaign. Meanwhile, Stroman cannot be simply dismissed as another gun-toting nut, either. He has been let down in many ways by people and institutions that should have served him better; in his time on death row, he learns to admire Bhuiyan and to think more deeply about his actions—or at least to mouth the words.

In this truly riveting tale, the author comes to no simplistic conclusions about these possibly imperfect motives on either side. As Akhtar says, “Giridharadas seeks less to uplift than illuminate.” And, Anne-Marie Slaughter says the book “explores two sharply opposed dimensions of the American experience in a style that neither celebrates nor condemns. We readers become the jury, weighing what it means to be a true American today.”

Update: 5/30/15: Anand Giridharadas won the New York Public Library’s 2015 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism for The True American.

 

Selma

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Selma, Martin Luther King, civil rights

David Oyelowo as Rev. Martin Luther King

The movie Selma (trailer), directed by Ava DuVernay is a beautifully realized reminder of the struggle for black voting rights half a century ago. Casting was so perfect that viewers who know the real-life characters can easily identify Andy Young (André Holland), John Lewis (Stephan James), and other era heroes. (As a Detroit native, I’m glad the movie remembered murdered Viola Liuzzo.)

Some commenters have quibbled with the movie’s historical accuracy—especially the portrayal of President Lyndon Johnson—but it isn’t a documentary, after all, and the presentation is probably more accurate than not. In a personal conversation, a White House insider at the time told me he heard Johnson said to King, “You have to force me to do what I want to do.” The political risks were too great (and chances of success too small) for Johnson to act unilaterally on voting rights, but if the pressure and public outrage became strong enough—as it did become after Bloody Sunday—he would act and did.

David Oyelowo is perfect as Rev. Martin Luther King—thoughtful but fiery when he needed to be, and he has King’s oratorical cadences down perfectly. Tom Wilkinson is always good, but I missed Lyndon’s Texas accent. Oprah, awesome. And Wendell Pierce could just stand anywhere, and I’d be with him a hundred percent. The whole cast, sincere and convincing.

My biggest frustration about the movie is the reaction to it. I hope leaders (black and white) use the triumphal feeling it engenders to remind people how important the courage and sacrifices of the Movement were. (And those of the Suffragettes before them.) But what’s happening now? People—black and white, men and women—don’t even bother to use their vote. They may vote for President every four years, but the person at the pinnacle has a lot less influence over our daily lives than the people in the state house, the mayor’s office, the township committee, the school board. The candidates are all lousy, you say? Crackpot idealogues? Those people get picked in the primary elections which have even lower voter turnout, except among extremists. When people don’t vote in primaries, every extremist’s vote counts more.

Further, the justifiable pride being expressed regarding the accomplishments of the heroes of Selma should be turned into anger at the way the Voting Rights Act is now being chipped away in state legislatures. New restrictions on voters are transparently intended to limit the votes of minority and young people. Perhaps the movie will be popular in these groups and be an educational and motivational tool, so that effective campaigns can be mounted against these voting restrictions.

What’s the point of feeling good about this struggle of 50 years ago if we let it lapse into meaninglessness through apathy today? Rev. King believed the power of the vote was the key to changing people’s future, and I believe it would break his heart to see how that right has been degraded.