All Shot Up

All Shot Up (Pegasus Books paperback, 2007)
by Chester Himes
France, 1960

I'm not sure that "mother-raper" or the adjectival "mother-raping" are any less offensive than the similar expletives in use today, but those are just two of the colorful linguistic oddities to be found in this gritty police procedural novel set in late 1950s Harlem. #4 in a series featuring tough-talking/acting black police detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, All Shot Up lives up to its title with virtually non-stop action and what feels like an insider's take on crime, political corruption, and racism in the big city. While this 160-page thrill ride may be a little too high testosterone for the Jane Austen crowd, Himes does a great job at keeping the narrative roller coaster twisting and turning. In addition, he has a flair for description that's simultaneously funny and arresting: "It was ten minutes by foot, if you were on your way to church," he writes of one destination, "about two and a half minutes if your old lady was chasing you with a razor" (p. 21). This sort of mordant, streetwise sense of humor permeates the novel, a fine thing since the almost surrealistically violent caper at its heart is studded with lots of sordid characters who don't really represent Harlem's more churchgoing sides of the population. All in all, a very enjoyable read--but somebody else will have to fill me in on how closely Himes' imagined Harlem, so vividly portrayed by a U.S. expat then living in France, matched the real deal city at the time. (Pegasus Books/45 Wall Street, Suite 1021/New York, NY 10005)

Himes and cat

For a nice little bio piece/book review having to do with Chester Himes, check out Courttia Newland's 2000 "From a life of crime to watching the detectives" here.

The Old Dark House

The Old Dark House (Kino DVD, 1999)
Directed by James Whale
USA, 1932
In English

Did you know that that little old lady from Titanic (Gloria Stuart) was something of a hottie back in her silver screen heyday? Well, neither did I until saw her in this cheesy 1932 "haunted house" thriller/romantic comedy from Frankenstein director James Whale. In The Old Dark House, Stuart plays one of five unfortunate travelers who wash up in a dilapidated Welsh manor as houseguests for the night after rains make the roads impassable. The old dark house itself is populated by five creepy family members including a mad butler (Boris Karloff, mostly wasted here), a homicidal pyromaniac, etc. Like the 1927 silent film The Cat and the Canary, with which this is often compared, Whale's successes here owe a great deal to his cameraman's spectacularly shadowy cinematography (Arthur Edeson, take a bow) and to his cast's ability to dexterously juggle comedy and suspense. In addition to the lovely Stuart, who spends much of the movie in a slinky white evening dress trying to escape the unwanted attentions of Karloff's drunken and menacing butler, I particularly enjoyed watching Ernest Thesiger and Eva Moore as the oddball elderly brother and sister act who deliver many of the script's most memorable lines with obvious thespian relish. Grade: "E" for entertaining! (http://www.kino.com/)

Thesiger and Stuart share a quiet moment

The Cask of Amontillado

"The Cask of Amontillado"
by Edgar Allan Poe
USA, 1846

How it starts: "The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge."
How it ends: "In pace requiescat!"

Apuleius' digressionary effusiveness notwithstanding, there's something to be said in favor of that other type of writer who can get his message across with as little wasted space as possible. Poe's seven-page "The Cask of Amontillado," for example, has always struck me as one of the most economical short stories ever, but I'd forgotten just how much of a pleasure it was to read until I picked it up again recently. The outwardly affable but inwardly calculating narrator, the Buñuelesque humor about the difference between a trowel-wielding mason and the brotherhood of freemasons, and the exquisitely controlled balance between madness and menace all add up to a perfect tapas dish for those who'd agree that revenge is a dish best served cold. Rating: 5/5 stars. Source: The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (ed. J. Gerald Kinney). New York: Penguin, 2006, 208-214.

Are you a Poe fan? Tell me about it.

Want to see what the Los Angeles Times had to say about Peter Ackroyd's new Poe biography a few days ago? Read about it.

Pour ceux qui aiment le cinéma espagnol...

Cinespagne.com, avec de nouvelles videos, entrevues avec de grands cinéastes, etc., est un bon site web qui mérite toute votre attention.

Orbis Terrarum 2009 Challenge

While I like reading about reading challenges way more than I like participating in them, I have some good news about my absolute favorite challenge of them all. Bethany of the book-crazy B&b ex libris blog is hosting the Orbis Terrarum Challenge again this year, a 10-month extravaganza dedicated to reading "10 different books, written by 10 different authors, from 10 different countries" beginning March 1st. Although the so-called rules thankfully haven't changed all that much from the 2008 version of the challenge, Bethany has livened things up by adding optional bilingual, film, poetry, and short story mini-challenges for those who are interested. You can check out the blog's dedicated page post here to sign up for the challenge yourself or here if you just want to keep up with all the updates throughout the year. In the meantime, a few of the things I'm looking forward to reading/watching for this year's challenge are listed below. I'll link all my other OT 2009 Challenge reviews here once things get going in March. ¡Hasta pronto!

Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina): a likely candidate for double duty in the poetry and short story mini-challenges.

Margaret Mazzantini, Non ti muovere (Italy, 2001): I'm going to try to read this romanzo in Italian for the bilingual mini-challenge, but unfortunately my Italian is basically limited to food and wine vocabulary and a few other helpful words like "aiuto"!

Carlos Saura, Cría cuervos (Spain, 1976): One of my favorite movies of all time, this was recently released in a deluxe US DVD edition from Criterion. A natural for the film mini-challenge.

Click here to jump to my OT list from last year.

1) BRAZIL: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (review)
2) MEXICO: José Emilio Pacheco, Las batallas en el desierto [Battles in the Desert] (review)
3) CHILE: José Donoso, Historia personal del "boom" [The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History] (review)
4) SPAIN: Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby y compañía [Bartleby & Co.] (review)
5) LEBANON: Hanan al-Shaykh, The Story of Zahra (review)
6) SUDAN: Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (review)
7) PERU: Mario Vargas Llosa, La guerra del fin del mundo [The War of the End of the World] (review)
8) NORWAY: Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter (links forthcoming)
9) HONDURAS: Horacio Moya Castellanos, Senselessness [Insensatez] (review)
10) COLOMBIA: Fernando Vallejo, La Virgen de los Sicarios [Our Lady of the Assassins] (review)

1) MÉXICO: José Emilio Pacheco, Las batallas en el desierto (reseña)
2) CHILE: José Donoso, Historia general del "boom" (reseña)
3) ESPAÑA: Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby y compañía (reseña)
4) PERU: Mario Vargas Llosa, La guerra del fin del mundo (reseña)
5) COLOMBIA: Fernado Vallejo, La Virgen de los Sicarios (reseña)

1) GERMANY: Werner Herzog, My Best Fiend [Mein liebster Feind] (review)
2) DENMARK: Carl Theodor Dreyer, Vampyr (review)
3) FRANCE: Jean-Pierre Melville, Le Deuxième Souffle (review)

1) ???

The Golden Ass

Apuleius Metamorphoses (Asinus Aureus) (Penguin Classics paperback, 2004)
by Apuleius (translated from the Latin by E.J. Kenney)
North Africa, c. 175

That 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list sure has a lot of outright dogs on it, kind reader, but I'll spare you a sermon on it tonight since it also includes this 1800-year old classic about a man turned into a donkey. Although anyone interested in the history of the novel should certainly read Apuleius at some point in time just because, suffice it to say that his The Golden Ass (a/k/a The Metamorphoses, here translated with verve by the University of Cambridge's E.J. Kenney) isn't the sort of boring fiction that's been popularized by today's writers. Bestiality, murder, and witchcraft all play a big role in the comic proceedings that plague poor narrator Lucius after he's been transformed into an ass and abused by one unsavory owner after another, and the work's gleeful mix of high and low humor and freewheeling use of a frame narrative will seem completely unrestrained to anyone conditioned by literary fiction's current vogue for precious and tweedy prose. While I don't know enough about second century mystery cults to hazard a guess as to whether Lucius' final metamorphosis from an ass into an initiate of Isis is as spiritually significant as some scholars would have it, I do know enough about the modern novel to wish we had more Golden Asses and Satyricons and fewer Paul Auster and Ian McEwan titles. A pagan classic! (http://www.penguinclassics.com/)

Apuleius: not just another dead guy on a painted ceiling tile.

Osaka Elegy

Naniwa ereji (Eclipse DVD, 2008)
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan, 1936
In Japanese with English subtitles

Osaka Elegy, the first of four films in the Kenji Mizoguchi's Fallen Women box set, concerns an attractive young switchboard operator, Ayako (Isuzu Yamada), who is driven into a life of prostitution to save her deadbeat dad from embezzlement charges and to fund her ungrateful brother's final year of tuition so he can finish college. It shouldn't surprise anyone to find out that she, and not the unappreciative and weak-willed men who surround her who are truly responsible for the economics of her "fall," will ultimately pay the price for the family's subsequent shame once news of her delinquency becomes known, but much of the interest in this bleak and surprisingly modern melodrama is the way Mizoguchi actively questions society's share in the blame with a sort of proto-feminist sensitivity. Although I found the pace slow at times and a little too one-dimensional in its portrayal of gender relations, Yamada's strong performance and a justifiably-famous final scene--a close-up of Ayako confronting the audience with a defiant glare right before the end credits roll--make it easy to understand why some people think Osaka Elegy is more impressive than it actually is. Which is not to say that it's not provocative or reflective of its own times or all that jazz: one of Mizoguchi's own sisters, in fact, was infamously given up for "adoption," only to be sold as a geisha, in real life herself. (http://www.criterion.com/)