Bluebeard, Amélie Nothomb

Here’s an updated version of Perrault’s 1697 Bluebeard. In the original Bluebeard, a rich nobleman, marries a young girl. She’s initially terrified because the guy’s eight previous wives have all disappeared. He tells her that she’s allowed everywhere in their Castle except for one mysterious room.

“You should not enter that room, if you were to enter it you would sadly have to face my just ire and resentment”. She obviously will enter the room.

Perrault’s tale is a favourite among American feminist academics. Bluebeard’s will is a symbol of the Patriarchy’s rigid structure. The girl’s decision to disobey is a woman’s rebellious act in pursuit of her freedom of choice.

In Amelie Nothomb’s Bluebeard, Saturnine is a young woman from Belgium who works as a substitute teacher at L’École du Louvre. She’s also going through a nightmarish search for a place to stay in Paris. She suddenly finds a dream opportunity: A luxurious 40m2 room with ensuite bath for just 500 euros. 

Even if she finds a long queue of candidates (all female, btw), she gets the room straight away. Only to discover that the owner has had eight previous women as tenants, all of which have mysteriously disappeared. 

Elemirio Nibal y Mílcar is a slightly weird fortysomething aristocrat who lives in his magnificent mansion like some sort of Philip II locked up in El Escorial. Reading theology or mystical books, enjoying its dark aesthetics. 

Nothomb’s approach is somewhat different from that of feminist academics. Individualistic rather than collectivist. Saturnine seems to defend Elemirio’s right to have his own secrets. As a consequence, she’s ok with respecting the forbidden chamber. But she’s also dragged, human as she is, by a strong wish to know. 

They have dinner together every evening. She introduces the ascetic aristocrat to the pleasures of obscenely expensive champagnes. They share culinary delicacies.They reflect on aesthetics and chromatic miracles. Saturnine tries to dig up his sinister secrets while he displays his peculiar somewhat twisted wit.

Bluebeard flows nicely like some creepy romcom. An elegant dark narration and a very quick read: I devoured it in just a few hours.

Bid Time Return (1974). Richard Matheson

Richard Collier, 36, has a brain tumour, and only a few months to live. Out of despair, he decides to dump it all. Determined to live his last weeks without a care, with the sole company of his imagination and dying dreams, he leaves home. He drops a coin, and drives off northward, along the west coast.

He reaches Coronado, near San Diego, where he finds an elegant hotel, perhaps one century-old, neatly reminiscent of a time past. He checks in. There he comes across a 1896 photo of a gorgeous theatre actress, famous back in the day, who played in this same Coronado hotel.

He becomes obsessed with the woman, furiously dragged by the past. Probably because the present is a nightmare. He develops a maddening wish to travel back in time and meet, in the flesh, his beloved ghost. Meet Elise McKenna.

With a titanic effort of self suggestion (and carefully following the instructions of a JB Priestley book*), with the sole aid of his mind, he manages to travel back in time. From 1971 to 1896.

Really? Or was it all just an hallucinatory effect of his brain tumour? Matheson won't let us know. Up to us to decide.

Anyway this is one of the most subtle time travel novels ever written. (I believe Henry James left one* unfinished also on the topic, btw).

With precision and literary skill, Matheson describes the psychological experience of being transplanted (and adjusted) into another century. What would it be like to actually find yourself in the 1890s? Time travelling was never so close and tangible for the reader.

The 1980 movie version is way cheesier in my view. The novel is undoubtedly better and more complex.

(More on this novel and its conception on the Maude Adams post).

*Man And Time, 1964. JB Priestley

*The Sense of The Past, 1917. Henry James (Posthumous and unfinished).

Dying Of The Light (1977) - George RR Martin

 

There was a time when GRRM was not a world famous author, but just an obscure cult writer.

In Spain, DOTL was a hidden gem for years, even if it was translated as early as 1979. Talked about and referred to as a favorite, few had actually read it.

The title was audaciously picked from Dylan Thomas (Rage, rage against the Dying of the Light).

Its scenario is ominous, also impressive. Dirk t’Larien and Gwen Delvano, two ex lovers, meet on a rogue planet, Worlorn. What's a rogue planet? One not orbiting any star, but lost in deep space, except when temporarily approaching a star’s proximity.

Rogue planets are not fiction. They exist in reality, and many have already been identified (btw none back in 1977, when DOTL was first published).

Dirk travels to Worlorn, to reunite with Gwen, years after their love story was over. The planet had capriciously been terraformed, just to hold a big Festival of Cultures: those of all 14 outer planets (all inhabited by humans and their rich and different cultures).

The terraforming took advantage of the fact that Worlorn was to be, for just a few decades, within the proximity of a group of stars, thus receiving daylight. Now the Festival is over, and light is dying out. Cities abandoned; ice, decay and death spreading over.

This is the bleak place Dirk is asked by Gwen to travel to. After years of not hearing a word from her.

DOTL is a love story, sure. With such titles, we could perfectly come up with a new subgenre: Romantic Sf. But it is also adventure, violence and an anthropological feast.

The DOTL universe is populated by humans, all originated from Old Earth. Human condition remains unchanged, though (no genetic improvement here). Larteyn, the city in Worlorn modeled after High Kavalaan, with its virile culture of the medieval type, of clashing clans and ancient codes of honor, might give the reader an early taste of Game of Thrones.

Kindred (1979), by Octavia E Butler

 

Dana is a black young woman, living in 1976 California. She’s achieved her dream: becoming a writer. Just moved to her new apartment with Kevin (her white husband). Also a writer, a successful one at that.

They’re busy placing their many books, when suddenly Dana feels unwell, experiencing some sort of dizziness. To his astonishment, Kevin sees her dissolving before his very eyes. To magically materialize again a few minutes later.

Dana appears to be deeply shocked; and what she tells Kevin is quite weird.

While vanishing, she lost sight of the room, only to find herself in a natural setting, with trees and grass all around. And a river, where a white redheaded boy seemed to be drowning. Still dazed and confused, she rushes to save him.

What happened? Well, a disturbance of spacetime. And where she ended up, she finds out, is not California, but somewhere in Maryland: like 3000 miles away. And most of all, it was not 1976, but 1819!

The redhead's name is Rufus, who happens to be her ancestor (probably through the rape of a slave black woman?). The spacetime disturbance repeats itself; Dana comes to understand that there's now a strange connection between her and Rufus.

Everytime Rufus is in trouble, or in a life threatening situation, Dana is pushed back in time. To the early 1800s Maryland plantation of the boy’s family or whereabouts; where black slaves live, work and die.

On every occasion Dana is sent back to antebellum Maryland, she spends more time there. From hours to months; she will have to learn how to survive on the plantation. Also make a sense of the experience, as a free woman of the future.

Dana experiences the brutality of the 1820s, a time when a set of people owned the lives of another set of people. This gives the past a rough, more aggressive turn. As if 1819 felt more real and tangible than (comparatively) easy going 1976.

The reader experiences the same shock. The immersion in 1819 is quite realistic. Along with Dana, you sense 1819 as well.

Kindred was first published in 1979. But to me this is the finding of the year, or the decade.

The Invisible Man, by HG Wells

The invisible Man is one of the author’s best narrations, the ones he wrote in his youthful years. The “fantasias of possibility”, as he called them, which he published between 1895 and 1901. The Invisible Man is a tale of solitude and alienation. A tale of an ambition wrongly (wickedly) directed. 

It is also, one fiction work that clearly casts a shadow on Science.

By the late 19th century, Science was a positive force, linked to progress and improvement of life. The treatment of Science in literature or papers was almost unanimously positive. Let’s recall Jules Verne, for instance: a positivist feast, and Science and Technology as radiant deities. That was the norm. 

From 1945 on, however, the thing was to change dramatically, even if there were some previous warnings, like Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World. Hiroshima and nuclear devastation was to damage the social image of Science since the mid 20th century onwards. And novels and movies were invariably to provide scenarios of Apocalypse.

But when The Invisible Man was published (1897), the suggestion of Science as evil was still rare. 

In the novel, Griffith, a chemist, discovers a way to make matter invisible, through a scientific process that Wells does not explain in the same technical detail as Verne used to. The author is more concerned with the social and moral implications of Science. Griffith is, like Victor Frankenstein, a guy who’s passionate for the wonders of the natural world. He researches tiressly, determined to pull out secrets from matter.

He applies his technique to himself and so becomes invisible, except when dressed, or after lunch. But he can't properly manage his new power, as a result he abandons all moral constriction. And knowledge without morality, science without conscience, leads to disaster. The topic has now become a cliché. But it was not in 1897.

The Invisible Man also makes us wonder if our morality could not just come from the fact that we are being watched at all times. By the others, by Society, by the State. Un uneasy thought. But if our morality truly depends on that, let us not worry too much. We cannot certainly complain of not being monitorized enough these days.

The Night Land (1912), by WH Hodgson

William Hope Hogdson (1877-1918) was praised by Lovecraft, and that’s no easy praise. Such works as House On the Borderland or The Night Land were proclaimed “impossible to forget by any reader” by the author of Providence. And we should not rule out the possibility that WP Hogdson’s visions could be even more powerful. 

 Hogdson’s literary style is a bit harsh, or cumbersome, as Lovecraft himself pointed out. In The Night Land, for example, this might be something of an obstacle for a comfortable read, mainly if English is not your first language. Hogdson’s writing here is some kind of pretended 17th century style which can prove hard to swallow. 

 Perhaps it’s not an overstatement to say that WHH is more readable in translations, as translators usually “fail” to reproduce this obscure style. Then you have the brilliantly gloomy plot and mise en scène created by Hogdson, but you avoid the harshness of his original writing. 

 The Night Land is an impressive description of a horrid world. The sun has died out, and it is now millions of years in the future. The Earth is frozen and resignedly keeps revolving around her star. (In 1912, when TNL was published, star evolution was not as well understood as today). The whole surface of our planet is in darkness. 

The remains of humanity live in the Redoubt. This is a huge pyramidal construction that holds all men and women surviving in this half-dead world. Away from the Redoubt, and sorrounding it, are the deep shadows, the Night Land. A full mysterious geography: paths, valleys, mountains. Also monstrosities wandering by: lovecraftian creatures whose origins, nature or purpose are unknown. 

A man from the past transports his mind into this distant dark future. He will inhabit the Redoubt. One day he hears a woman’s voice by telepathy, and this voice reveals that there is a second Redoubt, also inhabited by people. The mysterious narrator, who traveled through the ages into this horrible time, will now venture onto the Night Land, in search of that second pyramid. 

 One must agree with Lovecraft. Few other times has human imagination conjured up such a terrifying scenario, fascinating in its weird originality.

Borges, drawing the world

"A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face."

Yes, we built up our reality, and we do so with all objects, physical or spiritual, we encounter on our way and which we process. Borges is truly a literature of thoughts, smart speculations, impeccable imaginary constructions. With a flavor of truth, he invented historical or literary figures so perfectly recreated one would swear they must have existed. 

He famously stated that "writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes." Borges was not a very "prolific" author. The number of pages he produced was not huge. He never wrote a novel. (Maybe the story The Congress, quite long for borgesian standards, was the closest he ever was). 

He basically wrote short stories and essays, interestingly with a blurred line between the two. Stories looking like essays and essays you could hardly differentiate from stories. Also poems that could be read as short narrations. 

But if we consider his richness, the complex fascinating ideas with which he constantly fills his texts (a full volum could be forged out of many of the ideas he “wasted” for just a 10-page narration), then Borges is among the most "prolific" authors in all Literature. A vast author, a sea of infinitude. 

He also reframed a language, reverting a literary tradition. The narrative of Castile started off with some sort of magnificent psychedelic road novel, but ever since one would have considered Castilian only valid for a dry realism. Borges turned it into a key to a splendid intellectual and aesthetic universe.Those colorful supernatural realms of contemporary Latin American literature would be unthinkable without the argentine’s luminous prose.

Coherence (2013), by James Ward Byrkit

A dinner party is being held, and eight friends of the young professional type gather for a presumably nice evening of food & drink and conversation. But that night something out of the ordinary -and from outer space- will appear to disturb the party: the passing of a comet in the proximity of Earth. And during the time of the passing, some unexpected things will happen to the very structure of space-time. At first in a discreet unnoticeable way, more visibly later.

So at some point at dinner, and even before it, you'll have mobile screens cracking, lights going out or wifi going down -which leads to sudden incomunication and not little alarm for these (sub)urban individuals of the 2010s. First thing they ask themselves: are these disturbances somehow related to the passing of the comet? Unease increases as they go through the evening. During their meetup, they talk over their drinks and dishes, and we learn of their lives, their past relationships, their vital goals or little frustrations, and we can start to figure out what's their psychological makeup, or how they are going to behave -each of them- in the face of this approaching disruption of the universe.

And what is happening to the houses nearby? Are they through the same thing, the same aforementioned weird events, lights going out, wifi going down? Those taking place over there as well? Some of the friends decide to venture outside and try to find out, and they end up by doing a disturbing discovery: the other houses around are inhabited by people who look exactly like them. People who are propably them! There appears to be, by their place, some sort of an unlimited wheel of houses like their own, containing the same lot...of themselves! And the film turns into some sort of quantum version of Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel. 

A wheel of universes 

They will reach a conclusion. The comet has produced some kind of damage or disturbance in the fabric of the universe. How could that be? Wait, why could not that be? Let's not forget after all that the Universe at work is in itself deeply weird, as quantum mechanics has revealed to us and still reveals constantly. Ours is a world, which is in a way nonsensical at first sight, and even the mere existence of any given being is quite unbelievable as it is extremely unlikely, if you think of it. Why is there something instead of nothing? is quite a (first) question. And yes, particles only come into existence when observed, says quantum physics. And one of possible states emerges just when the system is observed. So why couldn't it be possible that alternative universes exist, like those defined by Hugh Everett III?

Why could there not be un unexpected event -the passing of a comet or anything of the sort- that suddenly alters the universe, so that it will reveal hidden (so far) aspects of its nature? The famous Schrödinger cat thought experiment had been thrown in during the dinner as a key idea to understand what might be happening. To try to explain this unexpected wheel of parallel universes: of parallel houses each containing the full identical lot of them.  So here we are, deep into the evening-night, this initially nice gathering disrupted, a menace of unconceivable nature pending over the house. The Everett universes stressing out the (sub)urban friends, A science-fiction scenario set up for good old human nature to display. How are these characters going to react to the quantum challenge?

 Going for it 

Sometimes (or yet more often than sometimes) we feel miserable in our lifes, and we start fantasizing about the idea that, had we done things in a slightly different manner, the outcome would have been hugely different. Hapiness and satisfaction, which we sense so far from us in our actual circumstance, would be right here making our ordinary reality. What if one of those happy parallel worlds is inhabited by another self who is living a fullfilled life of harmony? And so without having neither more talents o more intelligence than we have, only having enjoyed more luck or (slightly) better decision making? If only we could enter that parallel world! We could so easily reach what we deserve! What are we to do in order to get it? Could we even get to the point of, say, killing?

Tonight's gathering is at Mike's (Nicholas Brendon); two of the friends attending the dinner are Emily (Emily Baldoni) and Kevin (Maurey Sterling), who are now a couple. Another of the guests is Kevin's ex, Laurie (Lauren Maher), to the annoyance of Emily. Let's put the lens on Emily. She appears to be rather insecure about her life outlook and the choices she made that, through the years, built up this life she now has. Probably she feels that what she has achieved is under her true potencial. And she probably has lost herself sometime into fantasies of parallel worlds. Out of her dialogues we can guess a bit of what's inside her mind. At some point she will make a decision: she truly deserves another existence, a different outcome. Now, happily provided by an unnerving cosmical disruption, she has a chance to alter. And (even to the point of killing?) she will go for it.

World Order: Singularity

In the 1980s, if you wanted creativity and innovation in what's generically (and inaccurately) labeled as "pop music", it was probably the UK you were to find that. But I bet today you would have to look somewhere else.

Like Japan, for example, an astonishing country in so many areas. Check out Japanese band World Order and their spectacular world wide street choreographies. It is among the most clever and creative things I have seen in recent years.

On Chesil Beach, the movie

“This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.”  

“It's shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum's sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush?” 

“Thinking of her friends, she felt the peculiar unshared flavour of her own existence: she was alone.” 

“This was still the era - it would end later in that famous decade - when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.” 

The movie version of On Chesil Beach is scheduled to be released on June, 2018 in the UK. (In Spain I don't know if it will be released at all). Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting will be played by Billy Howle and Saoirse Ronan (who will feature in another McEwan adaptation after 2007's Atonement). 

So far only critics and the like have seen the movie, giving it a "fresh" 63% approval on Rotten Tomatoes. Not too bad. Probably watchable.

Movie Review (The Guardian)
Novel

Dolores O'Riordan

1971-2018

From Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? (1993)

Ian McEwan: Nutshell (2016)

Nutshell is a narration made from the point of view of a... foetus. Yes, a still unborn baby, a child in waiting. At the moment the tale starts off, this shakespearian foetus ("I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space") is just a few weeks away from leaving his mother's womb, a few weeks away from finally making it into the (outside) world. Ian McEwan's new novel is a foetus' monologue, but as we soon discover, it is also a crime narration: an adulterous woman and her lover plan to murder her husband. The woman is no other than the foetus-narrator's mother. And the lover is, well, his father's brother. This is a absolutely awesome mise en scène, even if it is not really the first time we encounter a foetus-narrator in literature. 

We realize, as the monologue progresses, that the unborn child's intelligence and verbal capacity is similar to, say, that of a young college guy, and an engagé one at that. He has a bit of a social conscience and philosophical leanings. With the addition of a layer of sophistication that our (very) young narrator has obtained from his mother's penchant for Radio 4 as well as cultural postcasts of all topics, which he somehow manages to listen to through the placenta. (He has even become some sort of wine connoisseur, thanks to the respectable variety of liquors his mother drinks and which get to him). Along with the action, the not-yet-born baby keeps on learning and so he changes and develops his psychology. Of course his extreme cleverness and sophistification is a literary fantasy license by McEwan, not unlike that of Gregor Samsa transforming himself into a monstrous insect: a sole giant supernatural element ingrained into a realistic story, or just a deliberately comic element.

Never mind. The narration flows wonderfully in any case, like nearly all of McEwans' works, no matter the register. It is ironic, and it is dead serious. It is hamletian: the foetus feels itself paralysed by the doubt of either beeing or not beeing. Not beeing means considering the possibility of erasing himself from existence (an existence that might be so disturbing) by comitting suicide hanging himself with the umbilical cord; the alternative, that is opting for beeing, is managing to finally be born and set out to act in the outside world: perhaps avenging his father's murder with an adult's hands: his future hands. The foetus' life is a full life within a very peculiar and strange world, the world we all live in inside our mother's placenta: only this one lasts nine months and not nine decades, as is the case with the existence coming right after birth. But fetal life is a life in full, one of its own all the same.

He anticipates his "death" to this uterine life, which means entering the utter world which is the physical world of born people, our world. He vindicates to be let in to have his chance. His chance to live the bunch of decades he's entitled to, to eventually manage to make it all the way to the 22nd century, perhaps beeing at that point, in that distant future, a fragile and thin (if quite in decent form) old man in his early 80s, by 2100. This is a awesome idea: the phoetus'birth is his death as a phoetus and so it is the end of this fetal nine-month life, it implies his entering into a sort of after life which is the birth into our world. (Of course, an inmediate idea springs out of this : Is there another after life after the adult's life?)

The (outside world) is a exhausting riddle to the soon-to-be-born narrator. His mother is a cold blooded killer who tries to escape the unbearable sense of guilt through self explanatory moral narratives, but she is also a riddle, as are his changing feelings towards her. She is beautiful and seductive and devastating, but also she is his sole shelter and protection. His uncle, on the contrary, is not that much of a riddle: rather a primary egotistic materialistic being whom he despises. Even without having been born yet, our protagonist has already had the chance to know about life's pains, about its maddening complexity, the lies, the secrecies, the betrayals. The moral mess which is the actual world. And yet he wants to fill his place in it, a world of things, and thoughts and actions, a most exciting place for a strong conscience, provided this is aided by the ordinary physical tools we all have and take for granted.

He yearns for the possesion of his due pair of hands and his pair of legs, the possibility to listen to his favourite music simply of his own will (not having to wait for his mother to, say, turn on a CD player), or drinking wine (if possible all kinds and varieties, as he loves it) by holding a cup with his own hand, or climbing mountains by himself; or whatever he wishes to do. So finally after a due cycle of existencial doubts (in him quite advanced in time), even more dramatic in his case as evil and murder have been involved, his decision is clear: he wishes to be helped into the sunlight, to show the head, to look directely at her mother's face. To unreservedly embrace beeing, with all its pleasures and pains, taking control of his existence. As it was his choice, his will be a true birth.