Italian Film Festival is in town with thoughtful and insightful tales such as ‘The girl in the fog and Dogman etc ...
Following his incredible success, with three million copies of his novels sold worldwide, making him one of the most beloved thriller authors in Italy, Media Dragon, Donato Carrisi, has launched his directorial career with The Girl in the Fog [+], with 400 copies due to be released in Italian cinemas today with Medusa, after its premiere at Rome Film Fest. Carrisi has developed a fairly free adaptation of his latest best-selling novel of the same name, and it appears as though he got slightly carried away with the bewitching process of directing.
The Girl in the Fog brings together a lot of noir imagery from the past 20 years, drawing from TV series, the Coen brothers, and much more recently The Snowman [+] by Tomas Alfredson, adapted from Jo Nesbø's novel – another European master of crime fiction. The film – produced by Colorado and already sold by Studiocanal in Spain, Germany, France – includes all the necessary ingredients for a perfect postmodern Euro-thriller: a small community in the high Yarra like mountains, a lost girl, religious extremism, suspicious suspects, local useless police officers (with Fargo-esque fur hats), a self-righteous detective, an unscrupulous lawyer, a soulless journalist and a small nerdy boy with little propensity to socialise. Visually we see the addition of a few smartphone photos and some grainy videos, some 80s and 90s set design, hazy photography with vertical anamorphosis, and a piano, violin and flute soundtrack.
'Man's Pleasure, His Purest Delight'
“One must know how to make oneself appear ridiculous, and not only in the eyes of others but also in one’s own eyes.”
Popular German mystery-author (and sociologist) Horst Bosetzky, who published much of his work under the pseudonym "-ky", has passed away; see, for example, theFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung report.
That line has spared me a lot of lasting embarrassment, the kind that still makes your face hot after forty years. There’s a higher sense in some of the ridiculous things we say and do. Miguel de Unamuno is writing of his countryman Don Quixote and the helmet – or barber’s basin. We can almost find a strain of nobility in our ridiculousness: “For it was by making himself ridiculous that Don Quixote achieved immortality.” I underwent a medical procedure Friday morning that, had I witnessed it as a third-person observer, I would have found simultaneously disturbing and hilarious. That’s how I tried to look at it in the first-person. Perspective is everything.
One of the books in my possession longest is Anthony Kerrigan’s 1972 translation of Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations. It’s a rare book that grows proportionally with us. We will get out of it precisely what it is calibrated to deliver, depending on how much we’ve grown. Unamuno can be embarrassingly wise:
“. . . man’s highest pleasure consists in achieving and intensifying consciousness; not so much the pleasure of knowing, but that of learning. In knowing something we tend to forget it, to make the knowing of it unconscious, so to say. Man’s pleasure, his purest delight, is allied to the act of learning, of becoming aware of acquiring differentiated knowledge.
Unamuno was born on this date, Sept. 29, in 1863, and died on Dec. 31, 1936.
"-ky" was certainly among the more unusual pseudonyms -- French crime writers DOA and San-Antonio are others -- but it couldn't last into the internet age (though he revealed his identity quite a while ago anyway): it is literally impossible to search for on Google (see), for example.
Very popular in Germany, he doesn't seem to have made much of an impression abroad, certainly not in English; Cold Angel appears to be the only work available; get your copy atAmazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
Apparently, eighteen years in, we're deep enough into the twenty-first century that the question of what a twenty-first century canon might look like is in the air: Czech magazine A2devoted its most recent issue to the Literární kánon 21. století -- complete with a contribution from yours truly, Co přetrvá ?(okay, okay -- there's an English version too) -- and now atNew York's Vulture they offer A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon, as: 'A panel of critics tells us what belongs on a list of the 100 most important books of the 2000s ... so far'.
Apparently, 31 critics were asked, and The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt, topped the field, with seven nods; Christian Lorentzen devotes a separate piece to it, explaining that Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai Is the Best Book of the Century (for Now).
(I do note that I wish they'd be clearer on their terms: I would argue that 'the best' is not necessarily 'canonical' (and vice versa); similarly, 'important' is a very different quality than 'best'. So, for example, I do believe Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle -- the whole damn thing, from volume one to six is -- and likely will remain -- canonical; I think it is very good, but not among the best books of the twenty-first century -- and I'm split over the question of its importance .....)
The twelve 'new classics' -- the top vote-getters -- definitely skews too English-language for my tastes, but certainly a case can be made for some of these; after that the list gets really hit and miss.
'The canon' is a high, high bar, and I think very few books come close to clearing it -- and not nearly most of these.
At Год Литературы they asked 24 experts for their top five Russian works of fiction of the past thirty years (so a few Soviet titles slip in); see the complete (Russian) list here (and scroll down for each of the experts' individual choices).
Two of the top three titles are by Victor Pelevin -- 1990s works by him, the top title being his Generation П, published in English as both Babylon and Homo Zapiens (get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk).
Only a few of the titles on this list are under review at thecomplete review, though quite a few more are available in translation (of which I have several, some of which I should be getting to, eventually):
- 2. The Rehearsals by Vladimir Sharov
- 9. Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin
- 12. Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin
- 58. The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin
- 69. The Librarian by Mikhail Elizarov
- 76. The Light and the Dark by Mikhail Shishkin
- 77. The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin