For a language that bears such a close relation to English, German has been poorly served by translations. Compared to, for example, the ease with which French or Spanish has been rendered, translations of German have often seemed heavy and cumbersome, as if it was being translated into a language that looked and sounded like […]
Archive | January, 2010
Still Walking (2008), dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda
This quiet, lovely Japanese ensemble piece is much haunted. It is haunted by the constant presence of Junpei, the older son whose death by drowning is the cause for the family gathering this film records. It is haunted by the Japanese film maker Yazojiro Ozu and, in particular, his Tokyo Story whose pale but intense […]
Carlos Fuentes, Happy Families (Bloomsbury) £8.99
One thing connects the sixteen stories in Carlos Fuentes’ Happy Families: despair at the state of modern Mexico. The first story’s ‘family like any other’ live mostly in separate rooms, clinging to fantasy notions of both their country and their chances within it. Elsewhere we see corrupt priests, faded actors, lovers separated by the expectations […]
E. L. Doctorow, Homer and Langley (Little Brown) £11.99
When John Updike died last year, various critics suggested that Philip Roth was the last remaining of the great American novelists. Even at the time, this was hard to take at face value. It seemed nothing more than a kneejerk reaction from the same critics whose glowing reviews of Roth’s annual postings from the frontiers […]
Life on Earth: Music from the 1979 BBC TV series. Composed by Edward Williams. Trunk Records 2009 (JBH034CD).
While lacking a childhood nostalgia for the various incarnations of Sir David Attenborough’s long-running nature series – a nostalgia expressed often by many British friends and colleagues – I have in recent years developed a profound respect for what is, by North American standards, very exotic television programming. What would be relegated to the public […]