Archive for the ‘Literature’ Category

Newer Entries »

The Last Station

February 28, 2010

The other day I went to see The Last Station. It concerns the last year of Tolstoy’s life. It tells the story of Valentin (James McAvoy) who is hired by Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) to act as a personal secretary for Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer). Chertkov is the head of an organization dedicated to spreading Tolstoy’s religious and ethical ideas. He wants Tolstoy to add a clause to his will that would make his works public domain after his death, so they can be more readily available to people. Tolstoy’s wife, Sofya (Helen Mirren) is bitterly opposed to this; she is afraid that she and her children will be left without an income. Valentin gradually develops sympathy for Sofya, and he comes to regard Chertkin as a fanatic. Valentin also has an affair with one of Tolstoy’s followers, Masha (Kerry Condon).

Tolstoy is portrayed as a complex character. He disapproves of sex, but he fondly remembers the sexual adventures of his youth. He enjoys the attention of his followers, yet at moments he seems uneasy with their tendency to idolize him. He loves his wife (who bore him thirteen children!), but her rejection of his ideas deeply upsets him. (I thought Plummer was very good as Tolstoy.)

I found this film interesting to watch, but not terribly moving. It failed to make me feel that the issues involved were important. The subplot of Valentin’s romance with Masha is not entirely convincing and detracts from the main story. The film also struck me as a bit sentimental – something Tolstoy would not have approved of.

I’ve always had deeply mixed feelings about Tolstoy. He was undeniably a brilliant writer. I remember reading an early short novel of his, Family Happiness, which is told from the point-of-view of a young wife. The narrative voice was so convincing that at one point I had to stop and remind myself that the book was written by a man and not by a woman. Yet there is this moralizing tendency in his writings that I find annoying and even somewhat offensive. (A Russian aristocrat is the last sort of person who should tell other people how to behave.) This tendency became greater as he grew older, until he began to preach a sort of religion that included, among other things, vegetarianism and celibacy. What kind of fun is that?

One interesting thing about this film is that we’re shown photographers standing outside Tolstoy’s home snapping pictures at every glimpse of Tolstoy or his wife. Their marital troubles are reported on in newspapers. Our celebrity culture apparently began with Tolstoy.

Posted in Cinema, Literature | 4 Comments »

J.D. Salinger (1919-2010)

January 30, 2010

It’s been a busy week for the Grim Reaper: first Howard Zinn, then J.D. Salinger. Both men had a strong influence on American culture, albeit in very different ways. It’s been said that reading The Catcher in the Rye has virtually become a rite of passage for young people. It’s not hard to see why a young person would find the book appealing. It tells the story of a bright, idealistic teenager who is narrowly saved from going completely bonkers. A certain type of person can easily imagine this as his or her own story.

Salinger almost became more famous for being a recluse than for being a writer. In the early sixties, he stopped giving interviews and he soon stopped publishing anything. Now, one sure way to draw attention to oneself is to noisily proclaim that one wants to be left alone. Salinger reportedly built a six-and-a-half foot tall fence around his property in New Hampshire. People in that part of the country are more likely to simply put up “No Trespassing” signs. Ultimately, Salinger’s reclusion proved futile. His own daughter wrote a book about him. His former girlfriend, Joyce Maynard, wrote a book describing in intimate detail how they had sex – telling us more than we ever really wanted to know about Salinger.

Mark David Chapman, the nutjob who shot John Lennon, was reportedly reading The Catcher in the Rye when the police arrested him. Perhaps one of the reasons Salinger became a recluse was that he may have sensed that his work appealed to people like that.

All of this talk about The Catcher in the Rye reminds me of a story. Years ago I worked at a bookstore. (This was before I worked for that behemoth, Barnes & Noble.) One of the managers there was the daughter of the store’s owner. (I wonder how she got her job?) It was embarrassingly obvious that she knew nothing about books. What’s more, she was often mean to the employees, and she was sometimes rude to the customers as well. One day, Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown, came into the store. Word went around among the employees that a celebrity was in the building. This manager got wind of this, and she asked one of the head managers who the celebrity was. This guy was a snooty little fellow who had a deliciously wicked sense of humor. He told her that Holden Caulfield was in the store. She then went around saying to people, “Holden Caulfield is here.”

I grin whenever I think of this story, but at the same time something about it strikes me as being kind of awful, partly because I feel a bit sorry for this woman, and partly because of her ignorance. I wonder what Salinger would have made of this.

Posted in Literature | Leave a Comment »

Howard Zinn (1922-2010)

January 28, 2010

I was saddened to learn of the death of Howard Zinn. This is a great loss, because there is no one else on the U.S. left quite like him. There is Chomsky, of course, but, because of the latter’s dry academicism, he has never been able to have the same visceral appeal that Zinn had. Through his writings Zinn was able to make people feel excited about history and about politics. He could present ideas in a way that made people care about them.

Although I knew people who knew Zinn, I never actually met him. (The closest I ever came was when I helped organize a book signing he did in Los Angeles several years ago.) I once did the lighting for an L.A. production of Zinn’s Marx in Soho, which starred Brian Jones. My job was pretty simple. I would turn the lights up at the beginning and turn them down at the end, and I would flicker them a couple of times in between. Sitting through so many performances, I got so that I could recite much of the play by heart. I was struck by the shrewd way the play is constructed. The topics are brought up in such a way as to have a maximum emotional effect on the audience. Zinn had a great feel for the theatre in addition to being a great historian.

I first heard about Zinn in the 1980’s when I was living in Massachusetts. Zinn was teaching at Boston University at the time, and he had gotten in a public feud with the university’s politically ambitious president, John Silber, a darling of neoconservatives. The media sided with Silber, portraying him as an advocate of “tough love” for the university, while dismissing Zinn as “politically correct” and clueless. It’s nice to know that Zinn had the last laugh. His reputation has grown, while Silber has been largely forgotten.

Zinn will be missed.

Posted in Anti-Capitalism, Literature | Leave a Comment »

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

December 14, 2009

A while ago I saw the film The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965). I found it sufficiently interesting that I then read the John le Carré novel on which it is based. The book was written at the height of the Cold War, which provided fertile ground for spy novels, since it was essentially a war of bluff.

Alec Leamas works for British Intelligence. He is in charge of British agents in East Germany. His plans are all foiled by the head of East German Intelligence, Hans-Dieter Mundt. When Mundt kills Leamas’s last operative, Leamas returns to London, expecting to be sacked. Instead, his boss persuades him to undertake an audacious operation. Leamas will pretend to defect to the East. He will then spread disinformation meant to make the East Germans think that Mundt is a double agent working for the British. I can’t tell much more without giving things away. Suffice it to say that, like any good spy novel, it is essentially a story of betrayal.

The British agents in this novel are shown as being no better morally than their East German and Russian counterparts. They justify their actions to themselves by saying that they must use the same tactics as their opponents. (One can perhaps detect a foreshadowing here of the arguments later used to justify torture in the “War on Terror”.) At one point, Leamas says that such methods are necessary so that “the great moronic mass… can sleep soundly in their beds at night.” He expresses contempt for the people he is supposedly serving. Indeed, a contempt for people in general seems to underlie the operation he is carrying out. Leamas says of his fellow spies: “They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards. People who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.” Le Carré was reportedly working for British Intelligence while he was working on this novel. One can only wonder what his colleagues thought about this book.

The communists in this book all sound like religious fanatics. (An exception is Fiedler, an East German spy who is one of the few sympathetic characters.) I read somewhere that when le Carré was working for MI5 in the 1950’s, he spied on meetings of the British Communist Party. I take it from this book that they didn’t make a very good impression on him. Also, it is implied that Mundt is actually a Nazi. I find this a bit far-fetched. It seems that le Carré wanted to make Mundt as repulsive as possible, but I think this was over-doing it somewhat.

There’s a general belief that movies are never as good as the books they’re based on, but I don’t believe that this is necessarily true. When the source is a mediocre novel, the film version can actually be better. A good example of this is The Shining. Hitchcock’s Rear Window is based on a barely competent story by Cornel Woolrich. (The Tarzan movies, as silly as they are, are actually better than the even sillier novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs.) There’s an episode in the novel in which someone tries to kill Leamas, which is never really explained. This is left out of the movie, with the result that the story hangs together better. However, in the novel there’s a wealth of detail that’s lacking in the film, and the motives of some of the characters are clearer in the former than in the latter.

I’m told that in recent years le Carré has been an outspoken critic of US foreign policy. I will have to check out some of his recent works. If they are anywhere near as good as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, they will be well worth reading.

Posted in Cinema, Cold War, Literature | 2 Comments »

Newer Entries »