may I remind myself to reactivate my paused Netflix account! My morning peruse of The New York Times alerts me to the coming soon (Nov. 10) of Rebecca Hall’s adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing which I wrote about at the beginning of the year.
In her excellent NYT piece, Alexandra Kleeman not only offers a wonderful portrait of Rebecca Hall – the privileged and complicated biography that so informed her film making, the difficulties of financing and maintaining her artistic integrity – but also revisits her own first encounters with Larsen’s novel and reflects upon her own multi-racial heritage. Kleeman’s appreciation of the monochromatic aesthetic and the grey areas in-between where truth resides is about the best thing about film I have read in a long time.
Unbeknownst to me in the months since the film was previewed at Sundance, there has been an enormous amount of banter, especially surrounding the social and historical phenomena of “passing” and how it should be portrayed, and the various degrees of “colorism” that remain prevalent in society and reflected in Hollywood (or vice versa!), and the casting choices that are (or are not) made accordingly.
Surely, I will have more to say after seeing Hall’s film.
From my last post, The New York Times has now published an article on Christie’s forthcoming auction that will include three works from Vincent van Gogh; one of which is the Meules de Blé of which I wrote, stolen by the Nazis and only now returning to the public arena.
Fortuitously, the NYT linked to The Art Newspaper and the Van Gogh expert, Martin Bailey’s blog piece which provides relevant and well-informed background to the van Gogh works being offered. My interest is now ignited by Jeune Homme au Bleuet (1890) – The “Young Man with a Cornflower”, has its own particular narrative through place and time, that had “him” as a “her” – Jeune fille au bluet (the mad girl in Zola’s ‘Germinal’) – when it all began …
And when did it begin? Well, according to Virginia Woolf“… on or about December 1910 […is when human character changed]“. And, Van Gogh’s girl/boy was right there at the legendary Autumn 1910 exhibition at the Grafton Gallery in London, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, curated by Roger Fry, about which Woolf spoke – where more than a word was created that defined a direction, but the visual artistic representation displayed that signaled an end and a beginning. And by the bye inflamed the establishment to various degrees of rage! In 2010, The Burlington Magazine celebrating the centenary of the show, included an interesting piece about the original exhibition catalogue.
Young Man with Cornflower June 1890
Though I am not adverse to haystacks, nor to cypress and olive trees, this figure I do find captivating. Unlike the stolen haystacks, an image of Jeune Homme au bleuet is in Wikipedia. It’s not at all a good reproduction so I post it here reluctantly – the colors quite wrong; the cornflower is blue, as is the blouse, the hair copper-red, the face pink and lips paler as if masked, the eyes emerald – so I refer you again to the very good Christie’s site; for both the much better visual reproduction and, again, an excellent lot essay.
The gender ambiguity is one aspect, but in these days of fluidity (making ambiguity somewhat obsolete!) I am more taken by the almost carnivalesque nature of the portraiture; reminding me of Pippi Longstocking illustrations and depictions elsewhere – the essay description of “mischievous ragamuffin” seems more than apt.
Tracking down lost art is a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack. So every story of success is worthy of note.
Looted, then lost, now finding its way back into the light of day: on November 11th a Vincent van Gogh watercolor on paper, executed in Arles in 1888 and titled Meules de blé, will be auctioned. Should anyone have a spare few tens of millions please inform yourself in a timely fashion on the Christie’s website – as I write “bidding begins in 29 days”!
This all came to my attention today via an article in Zeit Online written by one of Germany’s most prominent commentators on the art market, Stefan Koldehoff, who has written widely on provenance and stolen art. This particular work’s journey out of the nineteenth, through the twentieth century and into this, and across one continent and into another, sounds extraordinary – and it is, but it’s also not; for the stories surrounding the art – makers, buyers, sellers – that got entangled in the horrors of fascism and its aftermath are legendary, and are emblematic of the greater story of war, dispossession and displacement that defined that time.
At the moment I can’t seem to find a good English language report, but I dare say something will turn up – at the latest when a $$$ record is set in New York – money always sells! On the Christie’s site linked to above, the so-called “lot essay” gives some excellent historical background – from the time of execution until now. Quite how this work found its way into the United States remains unclear, but an amicable settlement has been reached between the current owners and the heirs of the two families in whose possession the work was up until its confiscation by the Nazis in occupied Paris in 1941.
With Berlin’s International Literature Festival, another cultural event made tentative steps back to normality last month. I read with great interest Leïla Slimani’s opening speech in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and fortunately it has made its way into the wide world with an English translation in pdf format available here. Also, I suppose in the interest of the “International …” bit, Slimani delivers her address in English so I have embedded the YouTube video (54:00) below. (I have to say, with opening passages that invites her listeners to join her in a thought experiment, Slimini immediately outs herself as a Virginia Woolf acolyte; for such is a technique not dissimilar to that which Woolf often used in her speeches (including those that were to form the basis of “A Room of One’s Own”). Sure enough Woolf is quickly catapulted to center stage; the direct quotes come from a wonderful 931 essay called “Professions for Women” – to be read here, and found in many anthologies of her work.)
Opening 21st International Literature Festival, Berlin, September 2021
A star of the literary scene in Europe and beyond, Leïla Slimani carefully constructs an argument that is concerned with some of the contemporary tendencies; ones that stifle constructive discourse and shy at the complexities of literature. Having encouraged us to (do a Virginia Woolf) and brutally kill off the angels within; she reminds us of the fates of the famous, the notorious, the literary heroines of yore; how little girls are molded to fit an ideal and come of age conditioned to please and in fear of transgression; how our voices are so often curtailed or silenced. And it is here, and with her own experiences, she connects with the fashionable preoccupation of renegotiating the past, of speaking at one’s own peril! For, she maintains, we must speak up, and without trepidation, without fear of reprisal (yes, of being cancelled.) Writers and artists (but we all really) must have the freedom to break down walls and resist categorizations and assumptions – and this can only be achieved when we are in command of our voice. There is more, so whether watched or read or both, Ms. Slimani’s words are well worthy of our time and thought.
Having now done so, and following the recent talk surrounding Slimani’s new book, In the Country of Others, the first of a trilogy and this one set mostly in post-World War II Morocco, and with very much familial biographical elements, I surprise myself by the realization that I have not read any of her work (slender though it is; to date only three novels) – even successfully “not reading” Lullaby (The Perfect Nanny in the US) her controversial, prize-winning and best-selling novel of a children-murdering nanny (well, that’s the short version, presumably there is much more to it than that). Why I deemed this a success on my part I couldn’t say. Subject matter? Aversion to hype? The first would imply an over-sensitivity that I would be quick to deny; the second, an affliction that I have often overcome. Whatever the reason, its status suggested it as an appropriate literary starter. But alas, at least here in Germany, it remains so popular that I must wait my turn at the local library.
However, the German translation of her 2015 first novel Dans le jardin de l’ogres, which was published outside France in 2019 after the success of Lullaby, was available. All das zu verlieren, meaning literally in English “everything to lose” and which was published as Adèle in English, was certainly a difficult introduction to this lauded writer. Normally, perhaps, I would have read the dust-jacket blurb and thought: well, rather not. (I swear I am of an age where I struggle with contemporary twenty-somethings or thirty-somethings with husbands or wives and/or lovers, kids, parents – none of whom understand them – doing what they sincerely believe to be radical!) What could this Adèle, for that is the thirty-something (with husband and child, et cetera) subject’s name, have to say to me?
Copied beneath is a post-script to my reading of Book 8 of The Odyssey, which I have updated here.
[22. September 2021] Odysseus weeps and weeps some more as Demodocus sings of the mayhem and blood shed as Troy falls, but it has come to my attention, that the sorrow he exhibits, the tears he sheds, can be interpreted as an asymmetrical act to the grief of Andromache on the death of Hector and her anguish about what fate now awaits her.
Odysseus was melting into tears; his cheeks were wet with weeping, as a woman weeps, as she falls to wrap her arms around her husband, fallen fighting for his home and children. She is watching as he gasps and dies. She shrieks, a clear high wail, collapsing upon his corpse. The men are right behind. They hit her shoulders with their spears and lead her to slavery, hard labor, and a life of pain. Her face is marked with her despair. In that same desperate way, Odysseus was crying [...]
Book 8 [lines 521-532], The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson (pp. 237-239)
It is really quite extraordinary that it is a woman who is introduced as a simile for the state of the grieving Odysseus, and then takes on a life of her own in the verse. And that life could be, generically speaking, the widow who has lost her beloved on the battlefield and is facing an uncertain future, or it could be imagined more specifically as Andromache. Though, in the moment, Odysseus’ emotions are being stirred by his intense warrior pride and the desire to hear again tales of days of glory, perhaps I was remiss in not allowing some credence to the possibility that Odysseus’ reaction was not also a gesture of empathy for those who had suffered in Troy; after all he has come some way – and in more than nautical miles – since the Trojan war.
Enjoyed very much this long read (a couple of months old) by the great Amartya Sen at The Guardian; adapted from his memoir, Home in the World: A Memoir , that was published in the UK this summer by Allen Lane. This particular extract, which is memoir only in that it harks back to the India of his youth, resembles more a miniature lesson in post-colonial imperatives, and one in which Sen refutes some of the spurious arguments in defense of the Raj that regularly do the rounds.
For example, the oft spun notion of the inherent isolationism of the sub-continent, regional kingdoms and ethnic and religious fragmentation; purportedly to be solved only through imperialism. Sen offers instead alternative narratives of what might have been from which follows an imagined history, but nevertheless one that inspires a more thoughtful awareness of how India’s long history was (and still is, he would suggest) embellished and appropriated to fit a particular world view. Contrary to the social and economic arguments that show British rule in a good light, Amartya Sen emphasizes the two centuries of, amongst other things, economic stagnation and low literacy rates that all the virtues of parliamentary governance and public service can not recast. Of course, the East India Company can not help but make its ugly presence known, and this reminds me of William Dalrymple’s 2019 book The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company, reviewed here at The Guardian. (Dalrymple also contributed a very worthy long read on the aforesaid in 2015.)
Amartya Sen was on my mind not so long ago – well, on reflection, longer than I thought, last year actually – when he was awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade – clumsy, I know, but their English translation not mine!); usually a very big deal in Germany – lots of fanfare, sometimes controversy, and the presentation televised on the final day of the Frankfurter Buchmesse. Unfortunately, the 2020 honouring of Sen got somewhat lost in the cancellation of the Book Fair (Covid!) but, through the wonders (!) of our digital second-life, the laudatory remarks from the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeir (but delivered by Burkhart Klaußner because …you guessed it – Covid quarantine!) and Sen’s gracious acceptance speech are available here.
Every time I get to work on a new book of the Iliad I find myself thinking, 'Wow, this is my favorite book of the whole poem". I may have never felt quite that way before about Book 10 — the night raid — but I'm feeling it now.
An update on Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad is always welcome news, and especially given that I have been reading through it again (well sort of!) in recent weeks and it still remains a mystery – which is okay only up to a point.
The above tweet relates to Book 10, and I do hope she is not working absolutely chronologically; should she be, there is an awful long way to go! Ever the optimist, this YouTube video clip is of a segment from Book 18 (recited by Wilson in Greek and her work in progress English translation) where Thetis and the nereids are singing their lament, suggests otherwise. Actually, I would be really interested in knowing a little about her work practice and methods.
From the previous post – in Dresden with a Baroque master one day and the evening prior in Düsseldorf with a contemporary literary superstar. As I suggested: some of the perks of higher office!
As I post, I haven’t as yet seen this video, but the event has been well reported upon in Germany and I hear tell it was a successful meeting of two outwardly very different women – of different generations and heritage – but both of whom during the last decade or so have found (international) fame and influence, and a search for (and finding of) commonality that included, beyond their respective crafts of State and art, a quiet and personal discussion on grief springing from Adichie’s essay (now book) that I have previously discussed and an open and sincere invitation from Adichie for the soon to be ex-Bundeskanzlerin to visit Nigeria, that is, with all the freedoms and interests of the private person.
