A Review of “North Korean Movie”

I read somewhere that Stanley Kubrick had a major issue with Spartacus, which was that the main character, the eponymous hero, had no flaws. Spartacus is the man with a cleft chin you could cut diamonds on, a slave greater than a god, in fact, because he is so perfectly selfless he even finds himself transformed into Christ by the film’s end—always a sign of lowbrow creativity, that, making our characters out like this annoying Jewish magician—but the scriptwriters of Spartacus (and not Stanley Kubrick) went much further, and actually literally wholeheartedly totally completely made their main character Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ himself, threw him up on a giant crucifix, and even gave him a glimpse of the Madonna with Child—an oddly incestuous and existential moment that leaves Spartacus kind of speechless. But maybe it was just being nailed up on a crucifix to blame.

So while the film is great, and filled with incredible images (my favorite being the slave army marching down a mountain in the blue backdrop gloom while preparations for battle are made inside a luminous foreground tent) perhaps it lacks the same oomph as Kubrick’s wonderful bestiary of insane, murderous automatons, and other insane, murderous writers or psychopaths or primates or 18th century rogues. You won’t find many perfect characters elsewhere in his work.

I’m still in the process of watching Crossing (which you can see in its entirety on youtube), a South Korean film about a North Korean refugee who flees his homeland to China to get medicine for his sick wife. The story suffers from the same issue as Spartacus, but it’s taken to such an annoying extreme that I actually stopped the film to write this review—the sentimentality is outrageous. I mean there’s nothing wrong with crying in films, but this movie is, like, running around bawling its fucking eyes out. We have so many aching, heartbreaking scenes, with plenty of slow pianos and greased-up guitar and violin strings to let us know that we should be reaching for the toilet paper to wipe our tears away (toilet paper being the napkin or tissue of choice here in the Daehan Mingook). The main characters are flawlessly perfect human beings trapped in awful circumstances who are never once tempted to break the habit of being like self-sacrificing, suffering Christs. Because of that I can hardly recommend this film.

Actually it amused me to see that this slop had been submitted for the consideration of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and that the film was rejected, but forgive my schadenfreude! I’m just jealous because I would sacrifice every pitifully glass-eyed starving child on Earth to live my life even making willfully bad movies…

But no work of art is completely devoid of true beauty, and there are some impressive scenes here that show us what this film could have been—namely, when the hero’s son and the boy’s scraggly little girlfriend get thrown into a concentration camp because they were trying to escape the greater concentration camp that is North Korea itself, where they are forced to spend much of their time in dark rooms screaming out their love for Kim Jong-Il while other children are literally collapsing and dying and being dragged away by the demonic guards who always surround them, compelled to break open rocks for no conceivable purpose, to sift sand (perhaps for more sand), and to kill mice who are eating human corpses so that they can use mice skins to cover up the blisters they’ve gotten from severe malnutrition. One of the kids is even being eaten alive by maggots. This is cinema. When the movie doesn’t veer off into hysterics it’s definitely more watchable.

And this should have been the whole film: kid’s father goes out into China to make some money and forgets his family while he enjoys the riches of that faraway land, kid gets thrown in concentration camp, father hears about it somehow, father breaks back into North Korea and then into the camp itself to free his kid (maybe with a band of tough rogue mercenaries whom he himself recruits from the bowels of the Chinese underworld), inadvertently triggering an uprising that brings down the whole regime. It could even start with Kim Jong-Il sitting in a prison cell, beginning to explain to some big-nosed blond-haired waygookin reporter how his private kingdom collapsed: “Well, it all started when my guards imprisoned some meddling kids…” Either that, or a movie masquerading as North Korean propaganda, an Eisensteinian grotesque about the mortal perils of abandoning your fatherland, and how awful it is away from the embrace of the dear leader.

Another far more famous blogger has written about how the South (like the rest of the world) doesn’t give a damn about the North so long as Mr. Kim isn’t attacking random islands or blowing up enemy warships, and how people here don’t even like to think about the North, and I have to say I can’t really blame them, what with the North effectively holding the South hostage by aiming all of its guns at Seoul. There really is nothing they can do but wait for everyone up North to starve to death, or for China to become a democracy, or for hell to freeze over, and that’s what they’re doing. In his review, or summary, of this film, his website helpfully equates bathos with mawkishness, for minds that are not so subtle as ours.

There’s also some nonsense there about the Korean concept of jeong, supposedly unique to the Korean people, which my wife once translated for me as “caring”, or in my own words, giving a damn about others (it’s contained inside a literary word, gamjeong iip, or, roughly, empathy), and how hypocritical this idea is so long as the South does nothing to help the people of the North.

But in my own experience I’ve found this place to be pretty lacking in empathy. Here come the anecdotes! Just two dinners ago my Korean family burst out laughing after a crazy homeless woman crept up to us out of the darkness on Haeundae Beach, maybe the richest area of the city, and asked us for about twenty cents, and then vanished back into the night before we could even deny her the gift—and since the cast of homeless characters in the city is pretty constant and familiar (I’ve gotten to know more than a few faces, most of whom hang around the subways; I had seen that crazy woman going to sleep in another part of the city at least once before), I usually pony up a bit when I run into them as a way of alleviating my guilt and acknowledging the awareness that little beyond the color of my skin and my own damn good luck have placed me in a nice apartment and this poor woman out in the cold darkness, and that things easily could have been the other way around—a sentiment, I’ve read, which was actually much more common in the Middle Ages, before capitalism convinced us that only lazy people are poor (when anyone who knows anything knows that the hardest workers are often the poorest, while the laziest rich are just begging, pleading, for a second wave of communist revolutions to sweep them up to the gallows, thanks to their shamelessly conspicuous flaunting of the law; the cycle of history whirling on and on like Ixion’s burning wheel).

Whew. So where was I? Turning into a communist where the Cold War is still being fought, and when I’m on the wrong side of the equation, both sides actually being totally fucked up? Attacking a successful blogger with pedantic insults to gain attention? Fantasizing about ripping off Inglorious Basterds? I don’t even remember.

Bandhobi

Bandhobi

I hope I’m not alone among westerners when George Harrison’s Concert For Bangladesh is the first thing that comes to mind at the mention of Bangladesh—the second is, naturally, a nearly unbearably nice family of Bangladeshi-Americans who hosted me (a perfect stranger) and my friend Omid (son of some old friends) when we went to go see Obama’s inauguration. These people embodied the supposedly long-dead American dream by living in an enormous mansion in Bethesda (I think) where they had come from a single small room in Bangladesh, proof as ever that the only thing that makes America great is the drive of its immigrants to make their lives better.

I’m talking about all of this because I watched a movie last night about a less-fortunate Bangladeshi immigrant working in a factory in Korea. You can watch the entire movie on youtube for free; and while this post isn’t really a review I will say that despite its imperfections I really enjoyed it.

The movie is about race-relations, and the interesting thing about it is the hierarchy that it depicts. Regardless of all the talk about Korean racial superiority and pure-bloodedness, which is dying a slow death in the south but still alive and well up north, the reality in South Korea today is that there are essentially three groups of people living on its soil: Koreans, who form the overwhelming majority, and generally consider themselves to be one race, even if they are related to Han Chinese, Japanese, Mongolians, and ultimately everyone else—even if the very idea of Korean racial purity, which seems to have its roots in this man, is just as absurd as the idea of any race being pure, or any race even existing. As for everyone else, there are two groups of migrant workers: English teachers, and unskilled laborers, both of whom form a near-insignificant population in the country, as compared to the fifty million Koreans they rub shoulders with. The English teachers always come from more successful western countries and the unskilled laborers always come from nations that are have not yet managed to pull themselves up out of the darkness of western exploitation, colonialism, and tyranny.

In the movie, the hierarchy works like this: English teachers are on top, Koreans are in the middle, and unskilled laborers are on the bottom. Koreans are depicted sucking up to an “American” English teacher, who not only has a strangely persistent South African accent and an even more strangely persistent inability to act, but also a number of odd lines that have obviously been written by Koreans—for example, he says something like, “Now I eat more kimchi than hamburgers”; Koreans have this idea that Americans eat nothing except hamburgers and pizza, and that these two staples form the entirety of America’s cuisine, when in fact the greatness of American cuisine comes from its inclusion of practically every form of ethnic food you could possibly think of—! But, no matter. Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent. There will come a time when there is no ignorance.

The Koreans don’t just suck up to this South African American, they apparently, seemingly, possibly, allow him to sexually exploit them—another Korean stereotype depicts middle-class American college graduates (i.e, most of the English teachers here) as voracious sexual tyrannosaurs ruthlessly devouring hordes of innocently pale defenseless pure-blooded Korean women—and the only way for the main Korean character in this film to triumph over this adversity, to triumph over her own country’s peculiar obsession with learning the English language from native speakers, is to grab her American teacher by the balls (I do not exaggerate) and force him to the ground, when, so far as I could tell, he did not say a single inappropriate word or lay a single salacious finger on anyone in the film. So this was weird. But South Korea is a weird country. Possibly the weirdest. Except for North Korea, and, like, Liberia.

The film does a much better job depicting the plight of its main character, a Bangladeshi migrant worker. Here is an invisible man whom salespeople refuse to touch or speak to (a woman ostentatiously puts his change on his bag, rather than in his hand), here is a fellow whom two brawling Koreans shamelessly scapegoat in front of a police officer, and here’s a guy who can’t even take a girl to the police after she steals his wallet—all because she threatens to turn him in for sexual harassment (and of course he’s innocent). A piece of advice given to every English teacher here is to avoid any sort of conflict with Koreans, because the police will always, always, always, take the side of the Koreans; and things are even worse for the migrant laborers. Like the notoriously corrupt owners of Hagwons, or cram schools, Korean bosses will attempt to withhold pay from their workers, and in the film the Bangladeshi guy—Karim—hasn’t been paid in a year, and spends the whole movie trying to get his ex-boss to pony up, until finally, in a moment of divine retribution, god strikes him down with a heart attack (or something), only to seemingly resurrect him a bit later for a dramatic confrontation with Karim’s young girlfriend, Minsuh. It’s unfortunate that the only place a man with wrinkles and a business suit can be criticized in this society is in an independent movie that no one in Korea is even going to watch. With these two important accouterments a Korean man is effectively above the law and can do anything, short of going on a murderous rampage, without running into trouble from anyone.

Karim has to worry about getting deported constantly, he has to live with racism constantly, and even though I myself am in a much better position, I still have to put up with a similar species of this bullshit every day—unusual for a white American, isn’t it?—and let me tell you, it never gets old, it never ceases to be infuriating, when people everywhere view you as being a barbarian rather than a human being, especially when you know so well with every fiber of your being who the real barbarians are.

Minsuh is a remarkably unique Korean character in about a thousand ways, and it should be said that the film would have been ten times better if they had made the American guy just as iconoclastic as everyone else—she is sexually aggressive, where sex in Korea is strictly a guy thing (but not in a gay way), and all women who have sex without having children are whores; and she drops out of high school and has a happy life, where, as in America, children are taught that one cannot succeed without sacrificing their lives to the passage of useless and arbitrary tests, in preparation for the long haul as miserable adults working as cogs in society’s machine (to acquiesce to an effective if cliche metaphor). If you have a suit, a cubicle, a wife, and a child, you have succeeded—if you lack any of these things, you should just get it over with and kill yourself. Minsuh defies these rampant, rioting idiocies, and succeeds on her own terms.

The horrible lesson here is that Korea is re-enacting, in miniature, the absurdities staged as truths in the West. Natives are pure, good, and trustworthy while immigrants and those who look different are reviled, ostracized, insulted, and exploited. People have been putting up with this shit for as long as there have been people; you would think that we would’ve outgrown such childishness by now, but unchecked ignorance still reigns supreme over the world, and even in our enlightened modern age people everywhere are vicious and cruel to one another with a really spectacular passion when there is no reason at all to act like this. It is not enough to call human beings insects, parasites, or even a plague on the surface of the Earth; this entire species should have been exterminated a long time ago.

After he gets screwed, Karim makes an impassioned speech toward the end of the film where he cries out to the sea that he just wanted to be happy, and don’t Koreans see that everyone’s still enslaved to the Man? They can live in their nice western homes, they can wear western clothes, struggle to ape western languages, and suck the West’s dick for all they’re worth—but this little country will always be the lapdog (at best) to an America and a Europe that together rule the world militarily and also culturally, declaring, without reservation, that if you do not act like us you are not human. To join that enemy, to take up the whip of their slavemasters, is exactly what every Korean does the moment he or she looks down on a migrant laborer—to say the least.

I say all of these horrible things, but there is a ray of light: the fact that this good but not great movie was even made. There are people in this society who actually know what’s going on, smart and talented people who have put together a halfway-decent picture that’s meant to undermine their society’s weaknesses and, in so doing, ultimately strengthen it. Korea has come a long way, and there will come a day, someday in the future, when the world no longer believes in races, nations, rich, or poor—and this film is a step on the long path to that civilization, one which is not just mature, but fundamentally good.

Anything to add about Synecdoche, New York?

He started writing on all these slips of paper after he made sure to close every window in the house.

Not really, except that I can brag about knowing the meaning of the word—and thinking that it sounded just like Schenectady—at least a year or two before I had even heard about this film. This is all thanks to one of those great, fabled college professors who heavily influenced my development for years and years—a kind of person whose existence is certainly doubted by those who have never had the pleasure of feeling their mind molded into something far more expansive and curious than it had ever been before. A brain turned into a nebula! But I was gifted with the presence of several of these people over the course of my short life.

Anyway, about the movie, yes, at first glance it’s easy to conclude that I don’t get it, but I think people who say I don’t get it actually understand a lot more than folks like Roger Ebert, who in his review went totally astray and really got suckered into believing that there was some kind of interesting and unique point to this mess. But thankfully Matt Cale hit it on the head. This movie makes no sense and is, in fact, kind of boring and annoying. There is as much wisdom here as you’d find in a fortune cookie or a lottery ticket. By the end of it I was yawning more than breathing.

Annoying people react to further incidences of random quirkiness.

What’s the root of this philistinism on my part?—another favorite professor once told me the philistine hates every work of art he cannot understand (and when it comes to concept art I hate it, but understand that it works better conceptually than in actual practice (who wants to look at a fucking kitchen sink in an art gallery?))—so the trick is to know your enemy before you decide to hate him. I think an obvious sign of the badness of this film is its cheap reliance on sappy music to give its everyday sentimentality—”I’m annoying, fat, ugly, worthless, and sad, so please, please give a shit”—more gravitas than such commonplace ideas would ever warrant on their own without the assistance of music.

You see all kinds of people like this on the street every day, people who excite pity. Then you forget about them and move on. If you were forced to watch a film about each pathetic person you saw on the street with lots of monotone mumbling and crying and sad music you would probably feel more for them at first—and I did like this movie at first—but then you would get bored and start wondering when if ever these characters would grow or mature into something greater than themselves—at least I would. And if you watched film after sentimental film of these poor buggers, you would figure out all the cinematic tricks that are put in place to make you cry. Sad music when people hug after yelling at each other. Sad music when people shed crocodile tears. Sad music when people beg each other for forgiveness when one is (apparently? maybe? probably) on her deathbed. Slow whiteouts when someone dies at the end. It’s cheap, it’s weak, and it’s beneath the work of an artist who has put together much better films in the past—Eternal Sunshine is on everyone’s favorite movie list and Being John Malkovich is a riot.

I am ugly and sad which means you should care about me.

So the sentimental music is the most obvious case in point that the movie is trying to make up for itself. Great emotions do not need music to help them along—although of course music by itself, like any work of art, is (or should be) an outburst of great emotion—and great, good, beautiful films do not need music to make you cry (although almost all of them rely on music to help things along). Whose eyes could stay dry while watching the end of a perfectly silent and muted City Lights? And what sort of person could keep from being mesmerized into all kinds of odd emotional states while watching a music-less version of Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo? This is a little point but I’ve expanded it so much here (into unreadability for the average reader) because it’s possible no one else has written about it with respect to this particular bad film.

Another thing: Nabokov counsels us against judging a work of art based on whether or not we relate to the characters, but we’re only human and we can’t help it. I didn’t relate to anyone in this film. It’s not because they were all stupid, annoying fuckups—and they were—but because I could discover no motivations for any of their actions, and, as the film wore on, as the film bore on, they began behaving increasingly, seemingly, randomly, with plenty of sentimental moments mixed into the randomness in an attempt to provide some kind of unity to the general incoherence. I am not the only one who threw up his arms in despair when one of the main characters bought a house that was perpetually burning down. Why. I don’t really understand why there was a blimp in a few of the shots. Why. The crazy old lady (who may be the same crazy old lady from the beginning of Ghostbusters) makes even less sense than most of the other characters. I don’t know what the hell happened to the repulsively fat man’s daughter. I find it difficult to believe that any of the numerous beautiful women in this film could be attracted to any of the numerous ugly men whom they freely slept with (is there a single handsome man to be found in any of the shots here? is there a single ugly woman?). For some reason there is background social unrest toward the end of the movie. Why?!?!

All aboard the Tearful Redemption Express!

The time we see at the beginning is mentioned at the end—for what possible reason? WHY!??!!?!? Is the guy going to be reborn into his own play or something? Oooh, how deep! Unlike Matt Cale I enjoyed the meta-meta-meta moments but I myself prefer a cop chasing a tramp around in a house of mirrors and think that has far more to say about the human condition than actors playing actors playing actors. Layers like that do not necessarily add depth; reading Freud and Jung and then putting Freud and Jung in your movie does not necessarily add depth. To have depth, you need something to add depth to, and underneath these layers (which anyone can create just by saying I know that you know that I know that you know…) there is absolutely nothing.

This is the point: show us weird stuff, great, wonderful, show us beautiful stuff, great, wonderful, but if you lose track of whatever story you are trying to tell, if your characters shift their beliefs and allegiances on a whim of the plot, you can count everyone but yourself out. If it’s all just a strange, random dream, why are we supposed to care?

A Review of Henri Troyat’s Biography of Gustave Flaubert

You should seriously consider embarking upon the richly-rewarding study of Gustave Flaubert if you meet the following qualifications:

—You are a human being, alive in the present day;

—You enjoy entertainment, passionately displayed; and

—You possess at least one ear, one eye, or one finger.

The piqued student must first indulge in the author’s oeuvre.  It is a guilty pleasure and should be consumed only in secret, in the same way a fat man hides behind couches to gobble down sweets.  Madame Bovary, Salammbo, The Temptation of St. Anthony, Bouvard and Pecuchet, and Three Tales, in any order.  There are all kinds of places where one may engage in such shadowy behavior as the consumption of Flaubert, but I would recommend ill-frequented public restrooms, forests that are prowled by wolves at night, and the windy rooftops of skyscrapers.  Any illicit place where one may find the solace of solitude is practicable.

Once you’ve bolted these candies down your gorge, you, Mr. Chubby Checker, are prepared to begin smacking your flabby lips over the chocolate cakes, i.e., the exegetical works, of which I have only read two—Flaubert’s Parrot, a bland pseudo-fictional mediocrity, and Henri Troyat’s biography.  Since local libraries are generally packed with paperbacks not fit for the kitty litter, you may spare your lumpy rump, and merely haul yourself over to your computer, where the appropriate volume is purchasable through a number of online venues which I would advertise here if any were interested in actually paying me for the exhausting effort of doing so.

You’ll learn that the pattern of Flaubert’s life is as follows: desperate, hard, dire work on literature (endless reading, endless writing (but really re-writing)), diseased whores, pseudo-fascist elitism, passionate hatred of everyone except his friends, epilepsy, monetary anxiety, and very human hypocrisy.  Flaubert was nearly sixty when he died and there is little variation to these themes, which not only makes for difficult reading but also undoubtedly presented a real challenge to the author, who overcomes that challenge by applying a very light gaze to the man’s life.  There is no heavy analysis of any kind, and Troyat the narrator generally seems to hop from one letter or diary entry to the next rather than rack the reader with the crushing rhetoric of Jean-Paul Sartre.  So instead of nailing up the likes of Gustave Flaubert, George Sand, and Guy de Maupassant up on a threefold crucifix of interpretations, Troyat is content to let the characters of this novel walk about and speak for themselves—

“When I was young, my vanity was such that when I went to a brothel with my friends I would pick the ugliest girl and insist on fucking her in front of everyone without taking my cigar from my lips.  It was no fun for me, but I did it for the gallery.” (Goncourt, Journal, May 9, 1865)

He is aware of the risk of this approach, and more dedicated readers (perhaps with an academic bend in their spine) will have to look elsewhere for their critical kicks—I for my part fell in love with Foucault’s Introduction to The Temptation of St. Anthony.  Regardless, the final words of the biography not only justify Troyat’s light approach, but affirm a philosophy of life and art that I completely support, and which I found really refreshing to see so eloquently expressed, especially as I find myself constantly consumed with the same debilitating doubts that plagued Flaubert:

…those who seek to track down the truth get nothing for their pains and that, despite the most learned explications, the mystery of the artist remains inviolate.

The Sound of Baudolino

“What are you up to?” he asked, to open the conversation. And one of them, giving him a nasty look, said they were building a machine to scratch their cock. Now, since all the others started laughing and it was clear they were laughing at him, Baudolino…replied in the Frescheta dialect…that he had no need of a machine because, as a rule, his prick, as respectable people called it, was regularly scratched by those sluts of their mothers.

Baudolino is my kind of book for all sorts of reasons that I’m sure I’ll write about later, but the one I want to talk about here, very briefly, is its lightness—this book is quick and funny, and treats all kinds of heavy plodding topics of medieval thought with a kind of dancing whimsical joy. Umberto Eco is Julie Andrews, and, for him, the hills are aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive with the sound of filioque!

That obsessively numbing topic, the question of the nature of Christ’s essence, has probably claimed many other novelists—a black sticky resin that seizes their ankles and drags them deep down into a black tar pit, never to be seen again, except as bleached skeletons surfacing every now and then with the help of a hot volcanic bubble—but Eco gets to the whole thing in a single quick paragraph, and then dances on through his field of medieval grain.

Historical Fiction is probably my favorite genre because I believe it has the greatest power to bring forgotten and neglected worlds to life, and in our own age, which has no awareness of anything beyond its most immediate past, I think that power is vitally important. We learn lessons, we learn how to live, from our own memory and our own past—and history is the memory of civilization, history contains all the wonderful stories and folk tales you could ever hope to ask for—it’s a cave packed with mounds of golden treasure, the deepest oil well in the greatest desert, set afire and shining through the night.

And Baudolino is an exemplar of historical fiction. This is a great book, and even if you have no interest in the destruction of Constantinople or the myth of Presbyter John, you’ll soon find yourself with all kinds of questions about these things, and a thousand more on top of those—it piques curiosity in the past, hints at the lives of people long since forgotten, and spurs us to a greater awareness of human civilization.

Cinematic Transformation in Sea of Lentils

Antonio Benitez-Rojo died long before I ever read his wonderful book, and I never took a class at his college anyway, as I was too busy desperately writing my own fiction to venture more than a few dozen feet away from my Platonic cave and out to the swine-flu-, J-Crew-, infested ways and avenues of Amherst College, by the time I’d read Sea of Lentils.  Had Benitez-Rojo still been around, I would have braved the journey.

John Updike has written a great review, a model book review, available at the New Yorker’s website, and I’m not even going to try to compete with that kind of eloquence, nor am I going to complete a short summary of plots or ideas or themes—you can find that in Updike’s review or on Google Books.  And you already know that I like the book and that I think you should read it, that it’s a great work of intelligence with broad appeal, so you’re not going to have to wait for my judgment at the end of the review—it’s already here.  Instead, you get a passage, and a literary explication, which hopefully interest you.

Some context for the following quote: the young John Hawkins is climbing a mountain with the family of his father’s commercial contact in the Canary Islands.  It’s the Age of Discovery.  Things are a little different.

…and Don Pedro’s beard was dripping as though made of dark brown moss, and Ines seemed almost dry, like a polished fruit in that region of mists and sulphurous vapors, and they walked along a red lava path and he kept looking at her, looking at her, and then he stopped because Don Pedro had transfixed him with that look of his, and he could see that Don Pedro’s face was puffing up and he was growing bags beneath his eyes and wrinkles on his brow and at the corners of his eyes, and his shoulders sagged and his chest had bent and sunk below his black silk tunic, and the beard had thinned and now seemed poor and blotchy, and he was frightened for a moment, being there among these Pontes, his father had told him once that Don Cristobal was a Jew who knew about sorcery and could read the future in the stars, and now Don Pedro had become almost like Don Cristobal, leaning on the very same gold-handled cane, although his eyes looked at him big and shiny like Ines’s eyes; Ines of the crimson bodice, of the radiant face both orange and apple, an impossible but ripened fruit, Ines of the mouth accentuated by libidinous down, a lip of wine from Malvesie; up above his head the strange Adeje tower room seemed to flash and yearn, and a shudder seized the brocades hanging at the bed and the magnificent tapestries, and it was the wind from the Levant, wind blowing papers from the great stone table, setting the beads dancing on the abacus of ivory and bamboo, rippling charts of planets and of zodiacs, snuffing the candelabra’s seven flames, welcome John, how good to see you, we’ve been waiting for you for so long.

Read it again, read it closely for the style and the feel and the atmosphere, read it closely for the cinematic transformation—forget your need for context, you can only get that from reading the entire book very closely, and I think even the most stalwart of this book’s readers would be challenged by the question of what is going on here?  The answer is a technique I’m calling cinematic transformation—Updike’s review provides the appropriate jargon and literary technobabble, “polyrhythms of interruption, divagation, reconsideration, extenuation”, if you prefer an academic terminology with a more classical resonance.  He’s quoting an Introduction that was not included in my own edition, perhaps for the better, perhaps referring to the same ideas I’m having now, perhaps not.

The cinematic transformation in this novel is abrupt and confusing, occurring specifically, in the quoted passage, at the delightful semicolon winking between ‘Malvesie’ and ‘up.’  The narrative shifts from the mountain to the tower, from the narrator’s youth to his adulthood—jumping forward in the blink of a very perplexing eye, both for the reader just dipping his toes into this text as well as the reader who’s been thrashing her way through the bathetic depths for 114 pages.  The shifting technique in this book is always interesting and never overdone, and so visceral and intense is this language, so purple is this prose, that I feel at times as if I’m watching a film, and that the screen has cut, has twitched, has flipped, from a massive mountain rising over my head like an ocean wave to a sturdy medieval tower hunched over in the gales of a billowing storm.  This technique is only one of many arrows stuffed in Benitez-Rojo’s crossbow quiver, and he uses all of them to bull’s-eye effect.

At the same time, this wasn’t the passage I was searching for in this review, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t find it.  I’ve written earlier about the quantum effect of art, how once we’ve read a book, for example, we may imagine, in our impressionable memories, events and words associated with that book which do not, in fact, exist; and upon re-reading this book, the memory changes, the tower of Adeje burns away in a pillar of broiling sand that whirls and whirls in the turning winds sent down from the glaring sun, and as a piercing ringing fills our ears we see the sand fall away beneath the dark silhouette of a conquistador, whose crossbow is cocked on his armored shoulder, whose face is shadowed by the gleaming rim of his morion.

It’s Anton Babtista, one of the four main characters in this book not even mentioned in this review, the victim of a moment I found to be nonexistent upon re-reading, and the modern descendant of Sancho Panza, a man who deserves his own forthcoming essay.

Links

Listen to this post read by the author!

New York Times Book Review

John Updike’s Review (registration required)

Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Amherst Magazine