(KinoFilm European Short Film Festival, Manchester) I first visited Hebden Bridge 20 years ago, and was captivated by its gothic remoteness and Victorian charm. Its plethora of book, record and junk shops didn’t hurt either, and I’ve been drawn back to the town every year or two since. If it hadn’t been so distant from […]
Identity Parade: New British & Irish Poets, ed. by Roddy Lumsden (Bloodaxe Books) £12.00
This new anthology from Bloodaxe, edited by Roddy Lumsden, is their second such offering in recent months, arriving hot on the heels (in poetry terms) of their last, Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (September, 2009); that anthology concentrated on newness and this one in many ways is no different, aiming to introduce […]
Arshile Gorky, A Retrospective/Van Doesberg & the International Avant-Garde, Tate Modern, London
If there’s some bad news for art lovers who haven’t been to London recently, it’s that there’s less than a month left to see the Arshile Gorky retrospective at Tate Modern. The good news is that there are seven weeks left to see its partner exhbition, Van Doesberg & the International Avant-Garde. The Gorky exhibition […]
Laila Lalami, Secret Son (Penguin) £9.99
Lalami’s Secret Son, long-listed for the Orange prize, is an interesting debut novel. Set in Lalami’s home country, Morocco, it deliberately eschews that cliché ‘Write about what you know’, in that the central figure of the book is a young man, Youssef. He has been brought up by his widowed mother, Rachida, to believe that […]
Jerry Dammers’ Spatial A.K.A at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall
The late, great Sun Ra operated his jazz Arkestra through much of the seventies and eighties until his ultimate and untimely return to the Saturn of his ‘birth’. Ra (aka Herman ‘Sonny’ Blount) was renowned as an iron disciplinarian who inspired either devotion or scepticism amongst the players in his band. In the early 1950s, […]
Perrier’s Bounty (2009), dir. Ian Fitzgibbon
With the summer blockbuster season still some way off, it’s possible that there may yet be a worse film released this year, but they’re going to have to try particularly hard to sink to lower depths than Perrier’s Bounty. Set in contemporary Dublin, this shockingly clichéd film follows Michael McCrea (Cillian Murphy) through 48 hours […]
James Kelman, If it is your life (Hamish Hamilton) £18.99
After the sprawling trawl through Glaswegian boyhood that was Keiron Smith, Boy, James Kelman returns to the short form with a new collection of stories, If it is your life. As ever with Kelman, the writing is sharp, blackly funny and masterfully aware of rhythm. But it also gives the reader a clear impression that […]
Lourdes (2009), dir. Jessica Hausner
The strapline for Jessica Hausner’s wonderful Lourdes is ‘Nothing tests faith more than a miracle’. The other issue that’s central to the film is the deeply human ‘Why me?’. Lourdes is set among a tour party to the shrine organised by the Order of Malta. It centres on Christine who suffers from multiple schlerosis; her […]
Don Delillo, Point Omega (Picador)
Foul deeds will arise ere the earth o’erhelm them to men’s eyes. The perspective in Hamlet seems unlikely to be shared by the main protagonist of DeLillos’s new novel, a ‘desert in the woods’ academic policy wonk grinding out the linguistic and idea upholstery to the neocon ideologues of the former Bush administration. Enhanced interrogation, […]
Glengarry Glen Ross, The Library Theatre
In Mamet’s coiled spring of a play, four real-estate agents are locked in a battle for survival. Each month as they compete to sell plots of undesirable land, the man with the biggest sales wins a Cadillac and the man with the smallest gets the sack. This month’s man on top is Ricky Roma (Richard Dormer). Slick […]
Ian McEwan, Solar (Vintage) £8.99
Ian McEwan is widely considered to be a ‘national treasure’. He is a literary heavyweight whose meticulous research and plot designs deliver novels that capture the zeitgeist of an age and also entertain. His latest offering, ‘Solar’ published by Jonathan Cape, is no exception. It is a reflection on the latest calamity plaguing mankind – […]
Shutter Island (2010), dir. Martin Scorcese
Shutter Island is a rather odd film. The script is sometimes very good; its abrupt transitions and elliptical style ensure a good if not great performance from the film’s main star, Leonardo Dicaprio. But elsewhere the script feels stagey and mannered, resulting in rather forced performances from the European players who play the supporting characters, […]
Midlake, Manchester Academy 2, 17 February 2010
Are Midlake adult-oriented? A few minutes into their set and I’m still at the bar, still wearing my jacket and scarf, as M. and I are late arriving for the sold-out show. The bartenders have never heard of Midlake, and the youngish one serving us is surprised they’re so popular yet unknown to her. ‘I’ve […]
Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Royal Exchange
Having counted George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four among my favourite books since the age of 13, I was concerned that over-familiarity might mar my enjoyment of Matthew Dunster’s new stage adaptation. After three hours’ immersion in this powerful and affecting show, however, I was overwhelmed by empathetic exhaustion, sadness and resignation, alongside deep admiration for the […]
Razmik Davoyan, Whispers and Breath of the Meadows (Arc Publications)
This book is not Davoyan’s first publication in the UK; Heinemann brought out an edition of his work some years ago but Davoyan can seldom have been as well served as in this sumptuous Arc edition, with its felicitous translations and its loving production values. In his introduction, W.N.Herbert notes that Davoyan’s work contains both […]
Paul Murray, Skippy Dies (Hamish Hamilton) £18.99
There aren’t many books like Paul Murray’s new novel Skippy Dies. It looks different for a start: instead of the hardback you’d expect for the RRP, you get a boxed set of three beautifully designed paperbacks titled Hopeland, Heartland, and Ghostland and Afterland instead. At about 220 pages long, they’re perfect to slip into the […]
Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums (Granta) £7.99
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 […]
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 […]
Avatar (2009), dir. James Cameron
According to the inverse law of action movie length vs. depth, every too familiar nuance of this nearly three-hour ‘epic’ can be recounted in a couple of breaths: A disabled ex-soldier is sent in to improve relations with an indigenous population who stand in the way of some economically precious natural resource. Inevitably, he grows […]
John Baldessari, Perfect Beauty/Pop Life, Tate Modern, London
Walking around London at present, it’s easy to think that Pop Life is the only exhibition on offer at Tate Modern this winter: Jeff Koons’ silver bunny shines at you from innumerable billboards like a sanitised version of Donnie Darko’s rabbit nemesis desperate for your cash. Were this the case, you might feel ready to […]
Sarah Arvio, Sono with Visits from the Seventh (Bloodaxe Books) £9.95, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
For all Sarah Arvio’s obvious intelligence, culture, technical adroitness and articulacy, I struggled with this book. In the end I didn’t feel the struggle brought anything like enough reward. My feeling of a fundamental aridity was at its most acute in Sono. The poem – a sequence of forty-two “cantos” arranged in generally blank verse […]
The BYG Deal. A “Finders Keepers” Production (FKR025CD).
I’ve just spent the morning with the 24-page booklet that accompanies the latest release from Manchester-based reissue masters Finders Keepers. The write-up in small print is a history of an obscure but seminal French record label that formed out of the wind-blown ashes of the May ’68 student demonstrations in Paris. It tells this via […]
Maurice Carême, Défier le destin – Defying Fate, trans. by Christopher Pilling (Arc Publications) £9.99
The Belgian author Maurice Carême (1899 – 1978) is apparently much loved and seen as a major figure in his homeland. I read this volume with growing respect and a growing sense that for all their absence of obvious difficulty these were poems that would reward extensive rereading. Carême’s predilection for short (sometimes very short) […]
Katalin Varga (2009), dir. Peter Strickland
Peter Strickland’s Katalin Varga is a revenge tragedy set in a part of modern-day Europe so remote that people still turn the hay by hand, put strangers up for the night and where a lone woman can drive her son on a horse and cart for miles between villages. Yet it is a place where […]
Three New Titles, reviewed by Ian Pople
20 Canadian Poets Take On the World, ed. Priscila Uppal (Exile Editions) $24.95 Anne Compton, Asking questions indoors and out (Fitzhenry and Whiteside) $15.00 Carmine Starnino, This Way Out (Gaspereau Press) $18.95 To accuse a book of generosity of spirit can be to suggest rather a generosity of ego. But generosity of spirit is what […]
New Collections from Liz Almond and Brian Johnstone, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Liz Almond, Yelp (Arc Publications) Brian Johnstone, The Book of Belongings (Arc Publications) Liz Almond’s new collection introduces us to a wide world, full of sensual pleasures but also of cruelties, pains and dangers which she suggests we must actively face and face down if we are to live life to the full. “Rosita Rules […]
Valerie Rouzeau “Pas revoir – Cold Spring in Winter“ trans. Susan Wicks; Arc Publications
Pas revoir, Valerie Rouzeau’s brilliant sequence of poems on the death of her father, is challenging in many ways and on many levels. The linguistic demands posed by its verbal dislocations and fragmentations, its allusiveness, and multiple lexical ambiguities would have put it completely out of reach of my French if I’d attempted to read […]
Vetiver, Manchester Academy 3, 7 September 2009
If we could travel back in time (and what good story doesn’t begin with a time machine?), pick up a few core members of the Grateful Dead, bring them and their gear forward and get them to release an album of Curtis Mayfield covers, one of the songs on that record (likely an Impressions-era Mayfield […]
Prefab Sprout. Let’s Change The World With Music. Kitchenware Records
When is a new Prefab’s album not a new Prefab’s album? When it was written and recorded in 1992-93, and isn’t played on by anyone other than Paddy McAloon. And therein, perhaps, lies the problem. McAloon is incapable of writing a bad song. He also has that touch of the truly great songwriter in that […]
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (Jonathan Cape) £18.99
For readers whose wrists are still aching from nursing Thomas Pynchon’s previous novel, the gargantuan Against the Day, Inherent Vice – his latest bulletin from his own alternative version of America – may have arrived with unseemly haste. Yet at a mere 369 pages, this new work is not only lighter in terms of its […]
Sin Nombre (2009), dir. Cary Fukunaga
With so much debate today focussing on immigration, it seems strange that so few films have looked at the topic. Hollywood rarely goes near it for anything other than a new slant on romantic comedy (remember Green Card?) and Michael Winterbottom’s In this world remains a fairly rare instance in European cinema. Yet the immigrant […]
Broken Embraces – Abrazos rotos, (2009) dir. Pedro Almodovar
Ever since taking the best foreign picture Oscar for Todo Sobre mi Madre, Pedro Almodóvar has seen anything he does loved by the majority of his fans, regardless of its actual quality. His films can belabour under ridiculous plots or drift along without even the merest hint of narrative progression, and praise will still be […]