Seven Degrees of Separation from Proust

http://www.gnooks.com/

Go to this site and type in your favorite author and it supposedly creates a sort of constellation of all similar authors that you might like. I typed in Margot Livesey and got all the usual and predictable suspects: Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, Anthony Powell, Margaret Drabble, Iris Murdoch. The fun is the sort of initial big bang when the names all go flying off the central name and then hover as if thinking and reconsidering...'should Somerset Maugham go here next to A.S. Byatt or over here near Ian McEwan?' And the most pleasing thing was that Proust showed up in the constellation, I am feeling a small glow of accomplishment already. Today Margot Livesey...tomorrow Proust....

The House on Fortune Street

I just read House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey. I always wonder if she's related to Roger Livesey (red headed Scottish star of my two all time favorite old movies (Emeric-Pressburger of course), Do You Know Where You're Going? and Colonel Blimp.) She is Scottish but I have never heard Roger mentioned in any review. Maybe Livesey is the Scottish equivalent of the Vietnamese Nguyen?

Anyway the book is quite good, four different characters retelling the same relationships through different eyes. In comparison to last weeks Post Birthday World, it's not as torturous or self involved, and the character's voices are from people you might possibly care about. My only hesitation is that Livesey might have meant the two different central women had different attitudes to the men in their lives because of their fathers. More pyschological work than I cared to do...so I let that possible subtext wash over me.

One of female characters is quite shy and very insecure with men, when she's going out to meet yet another loser, her office mate tells her 'Remember Pavorotti': apparently when someone asked Pavorotti if a particular audience would like him, he replied" the question is--- will I like them?" A nice way to put it.

A Book I Won't be Reading

O.K. It sounds amazing and like something I should read but....I can't do it. One story is supposedly about a Kenyan street family in which the wage earner is a 12-year-old prostitute and the parents give their children glue to sniff because it’s cheaper than food and makes them forget they're hungry. According to the NYT today: “As translucent a style as I’ve read in a long while,” Alan Cheuse wrote in The Chicago Tribune, adding that the subjects “nearly render the mind helpless and throw the heart into a hopeless erratic rhythm out of fear, out of pity, out of the shame of being only a few degrees of separation removed from these monstrous modern circumstances.”
What has happened to me? Single childless Gaye read Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and loved it and laughed at Todd Solentz films. She was made of sterner stuff. Have I become a timid tremulous little person living in Swampscott and ignoring the cries of the oppressed? Apparently---yes. I will leave it to Angelina Jolie to read.

Allen Shawn

A really lovely little essay in the NYT magazine this weekend entitled Family Meal. Allen Shawn is son of the New Yorker editor and brother of that odd hummunculus of a man Wallace Shawn. Allen Shawn apparently has a twin sister Mary who was mentally retarded and institutionalized.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22Food-t-001.html?oref=login#

It's a story of the sister Mary's annual visit home with the family for her birthday when their mother is 99 and completely infirm. The piece ends with the lines: 'How could I not cry when Piergiorgio recited these lines in Italian from a poem by Salvatore Quasimodo:

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra

trafitto da un raggio di sole:

ed è subito sera.

Everyone stands alone on the heart of the earth

transfixed by a sun ray:

and suddenly it is evening. '

The Post-Birthday World

This was exhausting...500 pages of a self involved heroine slogging through her boring life. The conceit is that a live-in couple in London have a friend they see every year for his birthday. The woman one birthday goes out alone with him and wants to kiss him, the narrative breaks into two threads, one where she kisses him, one where she doesn't and it's 450 more pages of the years that follow with the consequences for the characters. Michiko Kakutani from the NYT loved it I might add.
On top of this annoyance the author has the temerity to write in italics what I imagine are meant to be the character's imaginings of what one of the men is doing at that very moment. ARGGHHH...layer on layer of deception. This teeters perilously close to authors recounting character's dreams in books and expecting you to read them(I mean they're fiction and then they have dreams? Please.)...anyway this is something that WILL NOT BE TOLERATED by our heroine (me, in case you forgot.).
So don't bother with the book, but if you like the idea of the different paths our lives can take by chance I would say watch Kristof Kieslowski's Blind Chance or even that Gwyneth Paltrow film Sliding Doors. (the first hinging on catching or not catching a plane, the second (lower budget?) a subway.)This is probably where Ms. Shriver got the idea from.
Come to think of it maybe in a parallel universe somewhere I am not reading Post Birthday World and Michiko Kakutani is stranded on a desert island with only it to read...

Mas! Mas! Mas!

I have a very small collection of old Mexican movie posters, my favorite being the one above. It's from a movie called El Vestido de Novia (The Bridal Gown) with the provocative question below: ?Pierde la pecadora el derecho de llevarlo...? (Does the sinner lose the right to wear it?). This film stars someone named Ana Luisa Peluffo. I just Googled her and apparently she exists, was born in 1931 and made El Vestido de Novia in 1959. She is known for being the first actress to be seen nude on the Mexican screen. There are nude pictures of her on the web(not sure if she was the first on the web too) but since this is a family site I will leave it to you to Google them. She made 201 movies, according to them she made her name by appearing nude in the 50's, got bigger more serious opportunities in drama as a result, and then "returned to her roots" in the 70's. Meanwhile here she is in the flesh (well not all of it).

I didn't realise there were books about Mexican movie posters too and so I just got one called Mas Cine Mexicano which had some very wonderful old posters but none of the same ones I have. The Mas indicates that there was a prior book which I must have missed. Maybe Ana Luisa Peluffo will be immortalized in there returning to "her roots".

Careful Use of Compliments

Just whipped through Careful Use of Compliments by Alexander McCall Smith. On 7 day loan from the library, it was a space filler, a time waster. It was one of those books you can read quickly, which is good since all I wanted to do was get to the end. Not very good, but once you get invested in characters you are pretty much stuck. I am stuck with Isabel Dalhousie now, this is the 4th or 5th book, but at this point I just tolerate her.