Wednesday 27 March 2013

My Last Breath by Luis Bunuel (1983)



Bunuel by Salvador Dali
Salman Rushdie calls Spanish film director Luis Bunuel's memoir My Last Breath, “pure delight”. I agree and would add that from the dedication page, through the photographs and to his last chapter, aptly-titled Swan Song (Bunuel died shortly after the book was finished), Bunuel treats the reader to an entertaining, sensitive chronicle of his personal and professional life.


My Last Breath is also a work of art in and of itself, demonstrating how beautifully and precisely the filmic expertise of its creator has been adapted to the the written word. Descriptions are not overly long or adjective-heavy but they are carefully measured so that scene after scene opens, reveals a moment, an incident, then closes and a new scene opens elsewhere in time, giving us another detail or an idea which eventually leads to a full and satisfying story. Here is a filmmaker who is able to use words as effectively as celluloid to create close-ups, panoramic shots and flashbacks to relay a story.

Memory, the first chapter, lasting a mere three pages, introduces us to Bunuel's skills. In these dozen paragraphs, he tells us about the relationship of memory to old age, identity, fidelity and tragedy. Here is the first paragraph:

During the last ten years of her life, my mother gradually lost her memory. When I went to see her in Saragossa, where she lived with my brothers, I watched the way she read magazines, turning the pages carefully, one by one, from the first to the last. When she finished, I'd take the magazine from her, then give it back, only to see her leaf through it again, slowly, page by page.

Imagine this scene in a film: short, compact, silent, devastating....

Luis Bunuel was, of course, best known for his surrealist films, his collaborations with Salvador Dali (indulging as he did, in “vestimentary provocation”), his friendship with Federico Garcia Lorca but above all, he was a storyteller of great elegance.

Wednesday 20 March 2013

Intimacy (1998) by Hanif Kureishi

Some authors are bigger than their works – their lives are larger, more complex, more controversial than their protagonists' lives ever are. Some authors lead quiet lives and they create characters who do all their sinning for them. Hanif Kureishi lies on the edges of the first camp and his novel “Intimacy” encourages the reader to think about how to read a work of fiction that is so obviously grounded in the author's own life.

“Intimacy” is a short book written and published shortly after Kureishi left his wife and two young sons to pursue another woman. In the novel, Jay, the narrator, does the same thing. The comparison between Hanif and Jay should ideally stop here, but it doesn't...


Jay is a complicated, intelligent but altogether disagreeable character who, when asked by a friend, “Don't you believe in anything? Or is virtue only a last resort for you?”, will answer, “I believe in individualism, in sensualism and in creative idleness. I like the human imagination : its delicacy, its brutal aggressive energy, its profundity, its power to transform the material world into art. I like what men and women make. I prefer this to everything else on earth, apart from love and women's bodies, which are at the centre of everything worth living for.”

This is a Big Statement made by Jay in this novel and other characters in other Kureishi novels and by the author himself in interviews he has given over the years. Whether the reader agrees or disagrees with such a credo (it would make a good topic of conversation in an ethics class or a reading group), the problem remains this : how does the reader of literature assess a work of art when the artist's own life and opinions are transposed onto the life of the characters?

Do I like Jay? No. He is an existentialist fool.  Do I understand him? Yes. Do I like Kureishi? Well, how much like Jay is he really? And finally, should this matter?

Wednesday 6 March 2013

A Sweeper-Up After Artists : a memoir by Irving Sandler (2003)

One could say that the title Irving Sandler chose for his memoir is perfect. After all, it comes from a Frank O'Hara poem which names Sandler personally (a kind of immortality already) and it implicates poet and art critic in the altogether exhilarating moment in American culture where abstract expressionism (Americana, pure and simple) is born. Frank O'Hara registers the moment in his poetry and Irving Sandler sweeps it up, organizes it, makes sense of it, shows us the glorious dirty/clean floors, splotches of paint, discarded early efforts – and every sentence is pure gold.

L to R: Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, Mark Rothko,
Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Rotert Motherwell,
Bradley Walker Tomlin, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlied, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne.
Photo by Nina Leen in Life Magazine, January 15, 1951.

Sandler shows us the main players as well as the odd, minor pundit and punter. Take the Vogels, for example : Herbert and Dorothy – two tiny people, he a post-office worker, she a librarian, both with a modest salary but an uncanny eye for the new or the up-and-coming – in the span of 50 years, they fill their tiny New York apartment with avant garde art that they eventually bequeath to Washington's National Gallery. Sandler knew them and many other unusual people personally. The Vogel's is a lovely story and one which Sandler squeezes into pages that also recall the likes of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko.

There is also a brilliant chapter devoted to the clash of the titans: the unmovable, curmudgeonly, formalist art critic Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, the existentialist and inventor of the term "action painting" (with the focus on "action"). Sandler regales us with stories of his encounters with these two but he also teaches us a great deal about art history, connoisseurship and the real life battles that produce what we come to regard as the canon.

This book was a pleasure to read. It ended too quickly. More Irving Sandler in my library, please.