Claire Denis and the Angular Gyrus

Since I’ve been getting flak for not loving Claire Denis’ L’Intrus (The Intruder reviewed here before) I decided to check out a 1996 Denis film Nénette et Boni. Unlike L’Intrus the dialog of this film is incredibly strong and there’s more of it. Grégoire Colin and Alice Houri who play the siblings Boniface and Nénette respectively perform magnificently.

Denis uses images with the same versatility as she does in L’Intrus. But for me these cinematic movements went much further than they ever did in L'Intrus. In Nénette et Boni the image, the displacements of desire, love, and relationships are intensely potent because they go till the very edge of meaning but they deftly step away before falling into vagueness.

Moments and scenes are connected sometimes by story, at other times by image and yet others by dialog. This kind of loose association leaves us free (and presumably Denis to create without the suffocation of a formula) to reflect, digest, and revel in the many gorgeous moments of this film. The film begins with a man trying to sell phone cards to a group of Africans in Marseille. It cuts to Nénette swimming in a pool. Later when Nénette hangs by a phone booth we see the card vendor again; he is trying to talk a man into photographing his phone card. He claims his daughter loves phone cards and he’d like to show her this card. Nénette as we’ll later find out is pregnant. She’s also a daughter who sided with her father after a divorce while Boni her brother lived with his mother.

Boniface first appears to us reading from his smutty journal. In rather Bataillesque fashion he swears over his mother’s grave to procure the baker’s wife. Vincent Gallo plays the baker and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi his wife who in Boni’s words is "built like a brick shithouse." A fact that doesn’t stop Boni from investing his energies in her. Scenes in the bakery that involve Tedeschi and the many imaginary scenes that run through Boni’s head are priceless. In the way they are shot, in how little is said and how much conveyed.

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s performance moves along without cause for note until a chance encounter with Boni in the mall. They sit together for a coffee. She talks nervously about a radio program she’s heard on pheromones, on how men, women, animals, truffles, and truffle pigs are all emitting this scent out in the ether that carries no smell but all these signals. As she talks and Boni listens wordlessly we see her for what she is, an ordinary baker’s ordinary wife and not as the fantastic larger than life female that Boni has been imagining her to be. The scene is delicate, in perfect balance. The acting exactly right, the dialog just taking us as far as we need to go. Yet later alone Boni's imagination once more gets the better of him.

The real story of the film is of course that of Nénette the sister and Boni her brother. Denis builds this story as the rest of the film brick by brick. With scenes of violence, anger, tenderness, and memory between the siblings. A scene of Boni on the beach in another day and age, a photo of the mother, enough to guide us into the story and see it through the eyes of the siblings. Enough. And this was my problem with L’Intrus, there wasn’t enough. In that film the father-son relationship was obscured by noise. In this one both the noise and the silence work together to tell us the real story. The Tindersticks soundtrack is not continuous, not overwhelming. The film itself both art and story.

Denis is an artist. And she uses that license to push on the edges of what a story is in L’Intrus. In Nénette et Boni the metaphors, images, words, and songs are all in the service of the story. No doubt those of you who love L’Intrus will tell me it’s just me who doesn’t get the metaphors there. Possibly. We don’t know yet that there is a sliding scale involved in the comprehension of metaphors. Science only knows so far that the angular gyrus is located at the "junction of areas specialized for processing touch, hearing and vision." One day we might know enough of the basic functioning of this part of our brain to submit the metaphorical understanding of Denis’ films to further testing. Maybe the difference between those who prefer L’Intrus to Nénette et Boni stems from the displaced axis of the angular gyrus.

ManBooker International 2005--People's Choice

For all those of you who haven't gone in and voted for your choice for the ManBooker International please http://www.manbookerinternational.com/peoples/ cast your vote. You can see my vote on http://www.manbookerinternational.com/peoples/comments.php?authid=18.

A change of air from Paris

I read recently in an article in Le Monde (which I haven’t been able to recover since) that the French find the classification of Anglo-Saxon literature almost ridiculous and it might be said rightly so. The author of the piece asked if one could imagine the French having special prizes or literary categories that classified Tahar Ben Jelloun as a Moroccan writer the way the UK so easily classifies Hari Kunzru as an Indian one. Applied to literature in French the idea is absurd. Eliette Abécassis might write about Israel, Yann Apperry might write about America but their books are treated quite rightly as part of the French canon and awarded their merits as such.

The United States and the UK have almost made an industry of the classification of books. If we must all submit to the Starbucks era nomenclature (decaf mocha, skim soy, no sugar, grande please) then I want to forward the idea that we should classify the book and the not the author. Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate is a novel in verse sent in California. The author splits time between the UK and India. Must we apply our coarse perspective of Indian to what is a beautiful book that salutes Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin? Our perspective of Indian is too coarse to classify Indian cuisine even in a city like Paris which doesn’t begin to boast a range of Indian cuisine. In a city like London or New York the cuisine is shamefully better classified than the literature.

But why kvetch? (You will notice that since I have been subjected to this classification myself my kvetching too is circumscribed by this identity) Who has escaped this after all? Not the Nigerians, not the Eastern Europeans, not the South Americans. One is lucky if one can get in a mention of the name of the country instead of an entire region. But does anyone think of Paul Auster as a Jewish writer? For that matter, despite several novels dealing with very Jewish themes we don’t think of Philip Roth as ever being only a Jewish writer. We think of him as being first and foremost an American writer, the American writer. I am naïve enough to hope that it is just a matter of time and good writing. If there are enough books from India that are different enough we will cease to be treated like cuisine and instead be treated like holiday destinations (already much more specific: Kerala, Rajasthan, South, North, mountain, beach). And finally one day the classification would have become minute enough, cellular enough to cease to make any sense. Amitav Ghosh will then remain in the memory as a writer. Period.

What we risk losing, and it is not little, is a precious book once too often. A writer of a nationality that is not quite à la mode. Never mind that the book is universal, the writing crisp, the story our own in the way true art always belongs first and foremost to the viewer. On this visit to Paris I’ve recently read one such book in French by Ornela Vorpsi. Vorpsi grew up in Albania, moved to Italy at 22 and learnt Italian. She wrote her novel in Italian but was living in France and was published here in translation before the release of the novel in Italy (upcoming September 2005, Einaudi). It turns out that while various European publishers are busy having the novel translated into their respective languages America thinks that no one is interested in Albania! If we continue our classification of literature along these lines we can be sure that ever fewer people will be interested in ever fewer countries. These prophecies risk self-fulfillment partly because of the marketing within the industry which relies heavily on classification.

Till I moved to the United States in 1991 I don’t think I was much aware of the nationality of any writer I read. Often the stories themselves were set in certain places and the back cover gave away information. But I never thought while reading a love story by Carlos Fuentes that he was Mexican. I couldn’t escape thinking that Kundera was Czech but it was because his novels grappled actively with the state of the regime. It was always the interior of the novel that determined how I thought of it and how I classified it. In that sense it was organic, holistic, and most likely a nomenclature that would have sat well with the author himself or herself.

Thematic classifications of novels of course do exist. One hears of coming-of-age novels, family sagas, etc. This kind of classification is relatively defunct outside of the academic world; most people walking into a bookstore to browse seem to read not by theme but by ethnicity (excluding genre fiction). Last year I picked up three books that dealt with writing by Norman Mailer, Margaret Atwood, and Marguerite Duras. I wanted expressly at the time to read about writing since I am a writer. It was a sort of self-assigned homework I’d given myself qua writer and this informed my intention. Never mind the nationalities of the authors, in the end, even the theme itself faded in face of chapters that were powerful and I found myself simply a reader. A reader qua reader reading these books. And I was liberated.

In the end books are here to set us free. By binding them to our limited visions of the day, to fad, trends, columns and categories it is not so much the books but ourselves that we are imprisoning.

Babyji out in Italian & Spanish!

For more on Babyji in Spanish http://www.alfaguara.santillana.es/alfaguara/index.html
For more on Babyji in Italian http://www.feltrinelli.it/SchedaLibro?id_volume=5000454