→ October 8, 2020
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Grief is the Thing with Feathers.

I recently included a link to a podcast that featured authors David Mitchell and Jasper Fforde where, at the end of the program(me), they each had to recommend one book and make the case for it in some brief period of time – I think it was three minutes – after which the host would choose the winner. Fforde didn’t take it very seriously, naming the owner’s manual for his car, but Mitchell recommended a book by Max Porter called Grief is the Thing with Feathers, reading a passage from it as part of his allotted time. The prose was so unlike anything I’d heard before that I felt like I had to read it immediately – easy enough to do since the book is a scant 114 pages – to see how Porter could stretch that lyrical yet dark language into something the length of a novella.

The novel is certainly about grief, telling the story of a young father of two boys whose wife has just died unexpectedly, and who is understandably consumed by his grief. He is assisted, in a way, in his grieving process by the Crow, a probably-imaginary being who speaks to the Dad and protects the three of them, but isn’t always as helpful as he thinks he is, and brings his own stories of woe and insecurity. The narrative rotates from the Dad to the Crow to the Boys and back again as it traces the path of their grief from shortly after the wife and mother has died to the point where the Crow decides to leave because his work is done.

Porter’s technique here means that the book is all dialogue and internal monologue, yet he infuses so much of it – notably Crow’s, but the Dad’s as well – with imagery and a sort of curious wordplay, where Crow seems to be trying words out for the sounds of them, that it comes off a lot like poetry. Prose doesn’t look or sound or feel like this, at least not in the sorts of literature I inhabit, and it enhanced the sense of magical realism throughout the book in a way that made Crow seem far less ridiculous, even when Dad explicitly refers to him to the Boys as imaginary.

The grief of the father in Grief is the Thing with Feathers comes through intensely on these pages, with no efforts by Porter to soften or deflect the blows. The fact that the wife died without warning – it is explained how later in the book – gives the Dad’s grief an acute edge to it, combining the emotional abyss with the realization that he is now a single father of two boys who will now look to him for the emotional and physical support they had received from their mother. Porter tries to take us inside his suffering, and then gives us Crow as the foil who challenges the father in a way that helps the father towards healing without obviously (or mawkishly) doing so.

The Crow’s passages are the most memorable, and the most poetic. He’s part fabulist, part black humorist, part wordsmith: “He flew a genuflection … Ley lines flung him cross-country with no time for grief, power cables catapulted loose bouquets of tar-black bone and feather and other crows rained down from the sky.” Perhaps my favorite of Crow’s words are a bit of apparent doggerel, starting with “Gormin’ere, worrying horrid. Hello elair, krip krap krip krap who’s that lazurusting beans of my cut-out?” but ending with the revelation that “I do this, perform some unbound crow stuff, for him.”

Mitchell is himself a brilliant writer, and his recommendation was good enough for me to read Grief is the Thing with Feathers, especially when I saw how short it was. It’s one of the most remarkable novellas – not a novel, certainly, not when it’s probably less than 30,000 words – I’ve read in years, like little else I’ve ever seen, for its prose, and for its unflinching look inside the grief of losing one’s partner at the peak of love and life.

Next up: I’m treating myself with something a bit more fun than my other recent reads, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Falling Free, the first book (by chronological order) in her Vorkosigan saga series of novels.

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→ October 6, 2020
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Monos.

Multiple readers recommended Monos, the Colombian submission for last year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (which didn’t make the nine-film shortlist), when I talked about the best films I saw in 2019. Now available on Hulu as part of that service’s deal with Neon, this modern twist on a Lord of the Flies setting is disturbing and grim, casting a dark light on indoctrination and how cults and similar movements take control of malleable young minds.

The”monos” (“monkeys”) of the film are a dozen or so teenage guerrillas fighting the government in an unnamed South American country, although the similarities to the decades-long FARC insurrection in Colombia are obvious. They’re holding an American woman, known only as Doctora (Julianne Nicholson), hostage, and take most of their direction over short-wave radio, visited only twice in the film by The Messenger (Wilson Salazar, himself a former FARC child soldier), who drills them and gives them further orders. When left to their own devices, however, the monos act like teenagers, showing poor judgment, fighting among themselves, pairing off in couples, and doing a rather poor job of monitoring their one prisoner, while it becomes clear most of the kids have no idea why they’re fighting or even taking orders from unseen authorities.

Nearly all of the actors in Monos were making their screen debuts in the film; only Nicholson and Moisés Arias, who plays Bigfoot, had previous credits. You’d never guess by the performances, however, as the actors are entirely credible, perhaps because the script asks them to act like teenagers and because the shoot was so tough on all of the participants. Each has a distinct character and a nickname that sort of fits them, and despite the film’s brisk pace most of them have enough to do to make it clear who at least the key ones are, especially once their discipline begins to break down early in the film and multiple things go wrong.

The heart of the story is the kids, although Nicholson has more screen time than any individual fighter does because so much of the story revolves around their inability to handle any of the tasks they’ve been assigned, including guarding her. None of the child soldiers has a single line in the film that indicates any allegiance to or understanding of the cause for which they’re fighting – the audience never hears it from anyone, in fact. We just know they’re fighting the government, but not which one, or why, or what any of their goals might be. Their participation in this ragtag troop is the end in itself, and with none of them mentioning parents or other family at any point, you might assume they’re either orphans or kids who ran away from something at home, and have tried to replace that with their affiliation with this terrorist group. That leads to an inevitable conflict when interpersonal relationships interfere with their allegiance to the movement, and when obeying the orders from The Messenger and his superiors might mean betraying one’s friends, possibly even to the point of handing one of them a death sentence.

There’s also a political subtext here that I assume resonates more strongly if you know the history of armed insurrections in South America, especially Colombia (FARC, ELN) or even Peru (Sendero Luminoso, MRTA), which endured long, violent conflicts with guerrilla movements on the right and left. I’m not conversant enough with those histories to think I would understand all references within Monos, but at least know that FARC took many hostages during their 43-year terror campaign and conscripted children into their ranks, so I assumed we were watching a proxy for that group. Regardless of the real-world inspiration, this script shows the pointlessness of these guerrilla movements and the futility of the deaths they caused and lives they ruined by stripping the struggle of its ostensible goals, most of which would mean little or nothing to the children handed automatic weapons and a hostage to protect.

Monos is strongest when it focuses on the interactions between the child soldiers, though, getting into themes of homophobia and alienation as well as the sort of squabbling that readers of William Golding’s novel would recognize. They’re still just kids and they act like it, especially when they’re left to their own devices and handed responsibilities no teenager should have. When one of the soldiers realizes they’re no longer on board with the group’s mission or decisions, they try to leave, and then it’s clear that this hasn’t all been some elaborate game. It is that choice, to show what happens when we hand children and their underdeveloped brains adult responsibilities, that gives Monos meaning.

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→ September 16, 2020
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The Personal History of David Copperfield.

When word came out in mid-2019 that Armando Iannucci (The Death of Stalin, VEEP) was filming an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, I read the book in anticipation of its release, also rectifying a rather large gap in my own reading history. (I’d read five Dickens novels, two in high school and three by choice, but not this one, which Dickens himself called his favourite, and which the Guardian called the third “most Dickensian” of his novels.) The movie came out in the UK last year, but its arrival in the U.S. was delayed by COVID-19, and it just hit theaters earlier this month. It is marvelous, the best 2020 release I’ve seen so far this year, with a mostly faithful script, wonderful casting, and excellent use of the humor in Dickens’ rags-to-riches novel.

If you haven’t read the book, which I had not other than one of those Moby Books’ abridged, illustrated versions back in 1981 or so, it is the life story of its title character, from birth into straitened circumstances, through his widowed mother’s unfortunate choice of a misanthropic, controlling husband, to his indenture at his stepfather’s wine-selling business, and on and on in somewhat picaresque fashion. He encounters a host of eccentric characters, a few of whom, notably the venal Uriah Heep, have gained lasting reputation among the pantheon of literary creations, with several others providing comic relief among David’s series of misfortunes before he finally turns to writing as a vocation and finds success and financial security for the first time.

The first theatrical film version of Dickens’ classic novel in a half-century, The Personal History of David Copperfield might be most notable for the color-blind casting, although I’d argue that this choice is notable for how quickly you’ll stop noticing it. The casting itself is so perfect top to bottom that casting all-white actors couldn’t have produced a comparable result, notably Dev Patel as David himself, handling the pivotal role with aplomb, adapting to David’s changing views of the world and greater understanding of the people around him over the course of the story. Characters who are related by blood don’t share skin tone, and it couldn’t matter any less.

Many of the side characters are superbly cast as well, but none more so than Hugh Laurie as the befuddled Mr. Dick, which sees Laurie at his Woosterian best, and also gives that character a bit more to do than just to serve as comic relief. Mr. Dick’s host, David’s aunt Betsy Trotwood, is played by Tilda Swinton, who can certainly dominate a film in the wrong way when she gets to play a severe character; here, she gives Aunt Betsy more depth than the character has in the novel, making her more sympathetic and thus making it easier to understand why David is so generous to her as her own circumstances decline and he finds their relations reversed. Ben Whishaw delivers an unctuous, loathsome performance as Uriah Heep, complete with bowl-cut and affected speech that Patel later mimics to great comic effect. Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor, has a lot of fun with the shifty but good-hearted Mr. Micawber, making him a little less exasperating on the screen than he is on the page.

The movie is brisk at two hours, and spends far more time on the first half of the novel than on the second, with great length given to David’s childhood and early adulthood, including his relationship with Mr. Micawber and time in a boarding school where he meets James Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard). That choice gives us rather more prologue than David requires and rushes some of the resolutions, so that David’s marriage to Agnes is treated almost as an afterthought, and the unmasking of Uriah Heep plays out in a far less satisfying manner, because the audience has so much less time and reason to despise him, and also has less time to appreciate Whishaw’s deft portrayal of Heep’s scheming nature. The first half of the novel is important, but the second half is the payoff. The film gives you all of that payoff in the last thirty minutes, and it’s still fun, just condensed.

Iannucci and his co-writer Simon Blackwell play the story extremely straight until close to the very end. The compression of the last half of the book requires a large change to the arc with Dora, which the screenwriters handle in a way that also comments on Dickens’ original story, where David marries Dora, realizes it’s unsuitable because she’s dull and needy, so Dickens has her conveniently die after suffering a miscarriage so that David can marry Agnes. Dora here is even sillier than she is in the book, making her a great comic presence, but rather than kill her off, the writers give her the perspicacity to find her own way off the stage. The Ham/Emily/Steerforth subplot, itself rather tangential to David’s own narrative, also has a rather significant change that I would argue is less successful even though Dickens’ own handling of that arc relied too much on coincidence.

I had no trouble following the plot, because I’d read the novel recently, but I do wonder how well viewers could follow the plot, especially the last half hour or so, if they had no exposure to the book or previous adaptations. It’s the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy problem – a novel of 500+ pages is hard to condense into a two-hour film without losing something, and you’d rather lose details or exposition than plot or character development. Perhaps the Emily subplot could have gone instead, as essential as it is on the page, because so much time is spent on David’s childhood visit to the seaside hovel where she lives, to give us more time with Heep and David at the law firm so we better understand their rivalry and why Heep is so odious. (We do see plenty of Mr. Wickfield, played by Benedict Wong, in various stages of inebriation.) Yet The Personal History of David Copperfield is joyous because of what Iannucci and Blackwell retained – Mr. Dick, Dumb Dora, the Micawbers – and how well Dev Patel brings that title character to life.

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→ August 28, 2020
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The City We Became.

N.K. Jemisin became the first author ever to win three straight Hugo Awards for Best Novel when all three parts of her Broken Earth trilogy took home the honor; she also became the first black woman to win that award at all, which is hard to believe in a field that brought us Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson, but the Hugos have had their issues with gender and especially race.

The City We Became is Jemisin’s first novel since the last book of the previous trilogy came out in 2017 (although she has written some short stories and a lauded novella called “Emergency Skin” in the interim). This new novel, which marks the beginning of a new trilogy or series, feels like a complete departure in tone and style from the Broken Earth novels, trading the dark, forbidding atmosphere of her future earth devastated by climate change and tectonic shifts for a modern New York City that’s full of life and humor, and also extradimensional superbeings.

Cities in this new novel can come to life, and express that through individual people – usually just one person for a city but, because New York is the Greatest City in the World, it gets one person per borough. When a person becomes a city, they gain powers related to that city’s identity and characteristics, or in this case the borough’s characteristics. Each borough of New York City has different demographics, and a different reputation, and Jemisin infuses the book with all of that, not least with the way Staten Island is a borough apart from the rest, and the quiet enmity that exists between it and the rest of the City.

As the novel opens, however, there’s another enemy that requires the immediate attention of the various City-humans, who also include Saõ Paolo and later Hong Kong. Something is invading New York City from an alternate dimension, although it appears to be coming up from below the ground, and it’s causing real damage even though only a few people – the City-humans and, for reasons never explained here, a few people with them – can see its physical form. The five boroughs are all ‘born’ simultaneously across the city, and have to find each other so they can team up, assuming they can work together, and try to fight their new, common enemy. She is, as you might guess, no pushover, and she comes with some serious attitude.

If the often funereal tone of the Broken Earth trilogy was an obstacle for you, you might find The City We Became a much easier go, because this book is madcap. If Zadie Smith wrote a speculative fiction novel, it would probably look a lot like this. Some of the humor is specific to New York, and maybe not everyone will enjoy Jemisin’s digs at Staten Island as much as I did, but plenty of it is situational and often laugh-out-loud funny.

That’s possible because Jemisin has put so much time and effort into creating these five main characters, giving them diverse identities, back stories, and personalities, so that each of them feels fully realized and their interactions with each other come across as natural conversations. So much of what’s funny in this book is organic, and even though the humor is entirely beside the rather serious points Jemisin is making, it also allows the seriousness to play better on the page.

And there is a lot going on under the surface, too. This is a novel of man’s impact on the environment, but it’s not anti-urban or anti-development; it’s a love letter to cities, to the life and culture they bring, and to the way they bring people together despite differences. The enemy’s tactics may make her rather unsympathetic, but, like Killmonger, she also makes some good points. When you learn why she’s so adamant about destroying New York – that the birth of a city here has dire consequences where she exists – and consider the parallels to real life, that there’s no such thing as unfettered growth without consequences, you can at least see her point, and why she might be able to convince one of the boroughs to listen to her.

Jemisin has clearly set up a larger story arc here beyond what happens in this one novel, although this story does have a concrete ending that’s more complete than those of the first two Broken Earth books. There are multiple unresolved questions, even some minor details (like what happened to Brooklyn’s townhouses), that point to a sequel. But there are also more characters in here to whom you might relate on some level, and the fact that these novels are written in the present day and in a very contemporary voice put me more into this story than I ever was in the previous trilogy, making this the best Jemisin work I’ve read to date.

Next up: Jessica Luther and Kavitha Davidson’s Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back.

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→ August 20, 2020
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Port Royal.

Port Royal came out in 2014 and was brought to the US in 2017 by Steve Jackson Games, one of the oldest extant board game publishers, who first rose to prominence with the 1980 game Car Wars and have since had success with the extensive line of Munchkin games. Designed by Alexander Pfister (Isle of Skye, Great Western Trail), it’s a very simple press-your-luck card game with a pirate theme to make Sid Meier proud, where players draw cards from a common deck and take one per round, but you can bust if you push too far when trying to draw something better, with the ultimate goal of becoming the first player to accumulate 12 victory points from cards and expeditions.

That deck has three main card types: ships, persons, and expeditions. The ships all have gold coin amounts ranging from 1 to 4 coins, and if you choose to take that ship, you get that many coins, represented by cards drawn face-down from the deck. (Their face-up side has no meaning when they’re used as coins.) They can also show a number of crossed swords on the bottom of the card, ranging from 1 to 6, or just a skull and crossbones. If you draw two ships of the same nationality on your turn, however, your turn ends immediately and you get nothing.

The persons can cost anywhere from 3 to 9 coins to hire, and they come in seven basic roles. The most common are the Sailors and Pirates, who are worth one or two swords each, respectively. You can use all of your pirates together to ‘repel’ any ship with a sword number equal to or less than your pirates’ total number of swords, discarding that ship card but keeping your pirates. This is one way to reduce your odds of busting on a turn, although you can’t do anything to repel ships with the skull & crossbones on them.

Other people you can hire give you lasting benefits for future turns. The Settler, the Priest, and the Captain all can help you complete Expedition cards, which require two or three of those in a specific combination and grant you 4 or 6 victory points. The Jack-of-all-Trades costs a bit more but is a wild card that can represent any of those three people for the purposes of fulfilling an expedition. The Governor lets you take a second card on your turn. The Admiral gives you 2 extra coins if it is your turn to take a card and there are at least 5 cards in the display. The Mademoiselle lets you pay one fewer coin to hire a person. The Jester gives you 1 coin if there are no cards in the display when it’s your turn to take a card – even if that’s because you busted. Traders give you an extra coin if you ‘trade with,’ meaning take the gold coins from, a ship of their matching nationality.

Once you’ve completed your turn by taking a card, if there are any cards remaining, all other players get the opportunity to take a card from the table by paying you 1 coin and then paying the regular cost to hire a person or simply taking a ship and receiving its gold value. This means what you leave on the table might be a consideration for what you take, or how far you keep pushing your luck – it may be better to keep going rather than take a mediocre return and leave a valuable card on the table for another player who has the coins to buy it.

Pushing your luck can yield another benefit as well. If you can get four ships of different nationalities on to the table without busting, you get to take a second card on that turn; if you get ships of all five nationalities, you can take three cards. There are also a couple of taxation cards in the deck, where all players with 12 or more coins must give back half of their stash, and either the player with the most swords or the fewest victory points gets a one coin bonus.

Person cards can be worth 0 to 3 victory points; expedition cards are worth either 4 or 6 points each, although they require you to turn in Settler, Priest, or Captain cards that are worth 1 point each, so taking an expedition adds 2 or 3 net points to your total. The official victory condition is 12 points, after which you complete a full round so every player has had a chance to be the start player an equal number of times. You can also just agree to play to any point total you like, or to say you can’t win without completing an Expedition, two popular variants.

I’ve played more than 100 games of Port Royal online, and I own the physical game as well (which is just a deck of cards, so it’s really portable). I definitely have my preferred strategy, and I think the Just One More Contract… expansion helps address some of the base game’s issues with certain cards being too valuable. But even the base game is still kind of a blast, because it’s a gambling game at heart. Every turn is a bet, one you can make a little smarter by collecting swords and maybe keeping an eye on what ships have gone by, but ultimately it’s no better than smart luck, and I find it very enjoyable even when I bust a few times and know I can’t come back to win. (Although I did do that once, busting three times early in a game, taking more risks after that to try to get extra cards, and storming back to overcome an 8-point deficit. Good times!) If you’re into push-your-luck games, like the Quacks of Quedlinburg, Clank!, or Can’t Stop, I definitely recommend Port Royal.

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→ August 4, 2020
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Utopia Avenue.

David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue is, by his standards, almost a weirdly straight story, riveting and clever but mostly grounded in the realistic and the mundane. Following the rise and fall of a fictional English rock band in the late 1960s, featuring copious cameos by real-life rock figures from the British and American scenes of the time and more than a few references to Mitchell’s other works, the novel runs 570 pages and somehow feels like it’s still insufficient.

Utopia Avenue is also the name of the band in the novel, formed by an ambitious if not-very-successful producer Levon Frankland who assembles the band from the ashes of other London groups. Singer and keyboardist Elf Holloway is the most established, while guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet seems to have come from nowhere, bassist Dean Moss is about to hit rock bottom when Levon grabs him, and drummer Griff is looking for a new band. The four seem like they shouldn’t get on, let alone create music that will resonate with critics and fans, but it does happen in credible fashion. Mitchell chronicles their ascent from obscurity to moderate success in such detail that even mundane events and conversations become compelling.

The band’s story, at least their rise, is somehow that of every real band of the time but of no band at all. Each band member has some off-field drama, mostly drawn from the annals of rock history but deconstructed and recombined in Mitchell’s hands so that most of the parallels are obscured to the point that you won’t particularly care. Jasper’s trouble with mental illness derives from Syd Barrett’s, but Syd shows up in the pages of Utopia Avenue and Jasper’s story goes in a different direction than Syd’s did. Dean probably gets more than his share of the plot that happens away from studio and stage, although much of that is of his own making, and it’s not as if any of what he provokes or endures is unrealistic anyway. Perhaps there’s a bit too much of the Yoko Ono myth here, a bit too much sex-and-drugs there, but the current of the stream here is strong enough to keep the story moving despite those liberties.

The only misstep comes with the lyrics – granted, many rock bands’ lyrics are less than scintillating, but Mitchell’s strength in prose does not translate well to verse, and it doesn’t quite fit the praise the band members receive from critics and other musicians for their lyrics. Each chapter in Utopia Avenue is also the name of a song from the band, which one band member wrote in reaction to a real-life event described therein. It’s a clever conceit for the plot, but translating those ideas into lyrics doesn’t read well on the page.

I’ve only read two of Mitchell’s previous works, Cloud Atlas and Slade House, so I caught many of the references to characters from the former but also know I missed copious allusions to some of his other novels, notably Bone Clocks and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I loved Utopia Avenue, but I almost certainly didn’t get the full experience because I haven’t read all of his prior works; it has convinced me to go read the other five, starting from his first, Ghostwritten. Luisa Rey, my favorite character from Cloud Atlas, appears as a secondary character. Robert Frobisher gets a mention. You can see Jasper’s surname appears in one of his earlier books, and if you know what Horology is – I only barely knew, by way of Slade House – that ends up playing a role in one of the characters’ stories. The universe across Mitchell’s books is intricate and I assume rewards deep reading, leaving what I presume was a layer below the surface of this novel that I couldn’t appreciate.

Utopia Avenue’s fictional stay at the top doesn’t last, of course, but even with the detailed description of their gradual rise, it’s still somehow too short. All four band members are wonderfully three-dimensional; the three men are all emotionally complex and flawed, while Mitchell gives Elf a different sort of complexity without imbuing her character with as many negative traits. Even Levon, who gets quite a bit less screen time, has his moments and at least gives the sense that Mitchell drew him more completely even if it didn’t all appear on the page. How well Mitchell handles the various cameos by real people is probably a question beyond my capacity to answer, given how little I know about what these men and women were like in real life, but I’d like to know if any of their contemporaries weigh in on the topic.

Mitchell has been shortlisted for the Booker twice, and my sense of that award is that, like so many awards in the arts and in sports, the more you’re considered for it, the more likely you are to get it at some point. I’ll be curious to see if Utopia Avenue at least gets him on the shortlist again, as it feels less ambitious than, say, the nested six-novel structure of Cloud Atlas, yet in the perspective of his entire oeuvre it’s clearly a more progressive work than it might first appear. At worst, it should grace many best-of-2020 lists this December.

Next up: I’ll be interviewing Dr. Angela Duckworth for my next podcast, so I’m reading her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

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→ July 21, 2020
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Les Misérables (2019).

Les Misérables won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2019 and was France’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film this past year, earning one of the five nominations but losing out to eventual Best Picture winner Parasite. The first full-length film directed by Ladj Ly, who was born in Mali and raised in the Montfermeil commune in the eastern Paris suburbs, Les Misérables takes its name from the Victor Hugo novel, but tells a very timely story of police brutality and racial strife that seems like it was made specifically for the current moment both in France and in the United States.

Based loosely on an actual incident of police violence Ly witnessed in that same commune in 2008, Les Misérables takes place over the course of about 36 hours, following three police officers – one, Stéphane, new to the job and to the city – who patrol a specific neighborhood of apartments and shops that are largely populated by immigrants from former French colonies in northern Africa. Both veteran cops, Chris (who is white) and Gwada (who is black and speaks Bambara as well as French), take the approach that they must use force to make the residents ‘respect’ them, with Chris especially willing to profile people, even kids, and rough them up while frisking them without cause, while Gwada often stands by. They’re entwined in the subculture of the neighborhood as well, with rival forces that include the “mayor,” who works with Chris in particular to maintain his local authority, and the Muslim Brotherhood, led by former drug dealer turned imam Salah. When a touring circus of Roma performers threaten the immigrants unless a lion cub stolen from them by one of the children in the neighborhood is returned, the cops’ overbearing tactics leave one child seriously injured and spark a cascade of violence.

Les Misérables is a serious film that balances its multiple themes of police brutality, racism, and xenophobia with a plot that often unfurls like that of an action film. Most of the adult characters have some complexity to them, other than Chris, who is your garden-variety racist white cop like you might find in a less nuanced film. Stéphane has a real arc to his story as he’s confronted with Chris’ increasingly violent and counterproductive tactics and Gwada’s tacit approval despite the latter’s racial and ethnic ties to many of the residents of these apartment buildings, and thus has to choose when to speak or act, finding his voice more as the story progresses and puts him into increasingly more difficult situations. The main child character is Issa, who we’re told is always causing trouble, and who ends up a central character in the trouble that follows – in no small part because the police already know him, and Chris and Gwada seem more than ready to treat him like a dangerous adult rather than a small child who (as we see in an early scene) has no guidance at home.

While this film was made in 2019 and hit amazon prime back in April, watching it right now made it seem like it was written as an argument for community policing. The racism and xenophobia depicted here are nothing new and the script isn’t making any novel points or arguments about them, but the way that Chris and Gwada maintain ‘control’ of this area is extremely damning of what I would think of as the American model of policing. It’s punctuated by their link to this local fixer/boss who calls himself the Mayor, and how they react when they find out they’ve been filmed during one such act of violence against a suspect, and in turn how Stéphane, who isn’t from this geographical area and hasn’t worked as this sort of cop before, reacts when seeing it from an outsider’s view. While the script at least creates some ambiguities around some of the adults in the community, this is a protest against the power given to and wielded by police against underprivileged and mostly powerless communities that lack avenues to fight back through political or legal channels, leaving them little recourse but to respond in kind.

—

I went to put Les Misérables on my rankings of 2019 films, only to discover that I didn’t post them back in March/April like I’d planned to do. So while I still have a few stragglers from last year I’d like to see (Monos, Invisible Life), here’s everything I saw from 2019, with links to my writeups, from my favorite to my least favorite:

1. Parasite
2. Knives Out
3. Little Women
4. Uncut Gems
5. Pain and Glory
6. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
7. The Irishman
8. Corpus Christi
9. The Farewell
10. Ford v. Ferrari
11. Les Misérables
12. Monos
13. Hustlers
14. American Factory
15. Wild Rose
16. The Whistlers
17. The Two Popes
18. The Souvenir
19. 1917
20. Toy Story 4
21. Marriage Story
22. High Flying Bird
23. Non-Fiction
24. FYRE
25. Honeyland
26. Bombshell
27. Climax
28. Jojo Rabbit
29. Atlantique
30. Joker
31. Booksmart
32. Judy
33. High Life
34. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
35. The Great Hack
36. Frozen 2

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→ July 15, 2020
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Say Nothing.

Patrick Radden Keefe won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction this spring for his book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, a well-deserved honor for what is easily one of the best narrative non-fiction books I’ve ever read. The future of the NBCC is in doubt after mass resignations over the behavior of board member Carlin Romano in the wake of the board’s attempt to draft a strong statement on structural racism in the publishing world, but with this, Everything Inside (Fiction) and The Queen (Biography), they picked three tremendous books for their three big awards in this cycle.

Say Nothing is the story of the disappearance of Jean McConville, a widowed Protestant mother of eight, in Belfast in 1972, who was “disappeared” and whose body wasn’t even found for forty years. Keefe uses that as a framing device to provide an incredibly detailed, unsparing history of the Troubles, taking advantage of the trove of new information that has become available in the last decade on the conflict, including copious interviews with people actually involved in the violence who spoke to historians working at Boston College.

McConville was one of sixteen people who were considered Disappeared from the Troubles, and her case, and its ultimate resolution, work extremely well as a point of entry to discuss the conflict as a whole – particularly because some of the people involved in or with knowledge of her abduction were major figures in the Troubles. Keefe walks back to the origins of the strife between Catholics and Protestants in the six counties of Northern Ireland, focusing on the rise of the Irish Republican Army and its various splits (into the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA), and on the violent repression by the British authorities that created a war zone in Belfast for decades.

Keefe shifts the focus in the second chapter, after depicting McConville’s abduction, to Dolous and Marian Price, Catholic sisters who joined the Provisional IRA, the terrorist wing of the group that sought the unification of all of Ireland and expulsion of the British from Ulster at any cost. These two fanatical women were involved in numerous critical events of the Troubles, including the car bombing of the Old Bailey and other London sites in 1973, for which she went to prison; the first series of IRA hunger strikes in the 1970s; and several of the abductions of the Disappeared. Dolours eventually gave up her role in the violent struggle but remained politically active, opposing the Good Friday Agreement and eventually revealing that Gerry Adams was far more involved in IRA violence than he admitted, while Marian continued to engage in terrorist activity well into her 50s. The two make fascinating characters to study while conveniently bringing the narrative to several events critical in any retelling of the Troubles.

The Belfast Project provided Keefe with a wealth of material to fill in much of the historical record on the McConville case and many other Provisional IRA operations from the late 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, thanks to hours of in-person interviews the two historians behind the project conducted with former and even still current IRA members. The original intent was for the content of those interviews to remain confidential until after each subject’s death, and after the first few passed away, including Brendan Hughes, who ran multiple terror attacks for the IRA against British soldiers and also led the 1978 “dirty protest” and the 1980 Hunger Strike while in the prison known as Long Kesh, and who opposed the peace accord as too favorable to the United Kingdom. Hughes named many names, including the person he said ordered the abduction and murder of McConville, and these revelations – coming after Hughes’ death – led to prosecutions and an international court proceeding that eventually forced Boston College and the Project to turn over all of their interviews relating to specific crimes, even those that involved confessions by still-living persons. Without those materials, Keefe wouldn’t have much to add to the history of the Troubles beyond what had already been written by 2010, but the interviews with Hughes and Dolours Price both shed substantial light on multiple attacks and murders, also allowing Keefe to provide a conclusion to the Jean McConville story (albeit one that never led to a conviction). There’s also a tangent here about the nature of oral histories and whether the Belfast Project might have deserved some legal protection, although the school declined to fight the subpoena and subsequent efforts to invoke journalists’ privilege failed.

The detail is what carries the day here for Say Nothing; even if you’ve read about the Troubles before, as I had for a project while in college, you probably haven’t read anything this specific and well-structured. Keefe weaves multiple narratives together, giving nuance to so many of the people involved, even those who participated in multiple murders and carried out vicious campaigns of terror against their own neighbors and fellow citizens. You won’t leave with sympathy for Hughes or the Price sisters, but you will still get to see them as three-dimensional actors, and their revelations help give more texture to the portrayals of other major IRA figures all the way up to Gerry Adams, who had a whole second act as a politician and supporter of peace while denying that he was ever involved in the IRA – a lie that he was able to perpetuate for more than two decades because of the very code of silence that kept Jean McConville’s killers from ever facing justice.

Next up: Tony Collins’ The Oval World: A Global History of Rugby.

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→ July 12, 2020
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Walking in Burano.

Walking in Burano is a 2018 game from Taiwanese designer Wei-Min Ling, who also designed the semi-abstract, chess-like game Shadows in Kyoto; and Mystery of the Temples. Ling owns one of the most important board game publishers in Asia, EmperorS4, which produced Hanamikoji and Realm of Sand, and uses Taiwanese artist Maisherly Chan for the majority of their games. With great art and a fairly simple set of mechanics, Walking in Burano is one of the best EmperorS4 games yet, not quite at Hanamikoji’s level but on par with their other top titles, especially given how quickly you can learn to play.

Players in Walking in Burano will acquire cards from the central market to create three-story buildings on their streets, ultimately filling out a 3×5 grid with five scoring cards, one beneath each house. These represent streets on the Venetian island of Burano, and the idea is to appeal to tourists and locals with various combinations of features on single buildings or streets as a whole. The catch is that building cards come in six colors, where each building (or house, they’re the same in this game) must comprise three cards of the same color, but adjacent buildings can’t share a color – unless you want to use one of your ‘rule-breaking’ tokens to break that rule and cede three points at game-end.

The market has three rows of cards, each of which corresponds to a specific floor of the houses you’ll be constructing. You may take one, two, or three cards from any column in the market, although you must start with the top or bottom row and can’t skip the middle card (e.g., you can take cards 1, 3, 1-2, 2-3, or 1-2-3). If you take an entire column, you don’t get any coins; if you take one card, you get two coins, and if you take two cards, you get one coin. You may then choose to build as many floors as you can afford, with the first floor you build on any turn costing you one coin, the second costing two coins more, and the third two coins beyond that. You get two scaffolding cards that you can move as needed, so you don’t have to build from the first floor up. You don’t have to build cards immediately when you take them; you can keep up to three from one turn to the next.

Once you complete any building of three cards, you can choose a scoring card from the available supply. There are four tourist cards that are worth four points each, and then give you additional points based on what’s showing on the three cards in the building you just finished – one point per flower pot, one point per plant, three points per cat, or two points per cat/awning/lamp/chimney. There are seven inhabitant cards in the base game, the supply of which is more limited, that offer very different bonuses that often apply to entire floors or to several adjacent cards. (I also have the one mini-expansion for the game, which adds three more inhabitants; you shuffle all ten types together and randomly choose seven to use in any single game.)

Once any player finishes their fifth building, it triggers game-end. You get points from your bonus cards, points from some first-floor cards that show shops, and 3 points for each rule-breaking token you still have. All players then count their “closed” windows on cards, those with X’s on them, and the player with the most loses one point per such window.

Even tough turns are quick, there’s quite a bit of strategy involved in Walking in Burano, as you try to collect certain symbols on cards to maximize your potential bonuses from cards you don’t yet have. You can end up losing out on a bonus card after collecting the house cards that would have granted you a huge bonus from it; you won’t end up with nothing, as you get another bonus card, but you’ll probably get fewer points than you’d planned. You are also betting on the availability of future cards, and future symbols, regularly during the game.

The rules also include a solo mode that works extremely well, almost exactly mirroring the two-player rules (where, after each round, you remove all cards in the rightmost column of the market, to keep it moving and create a bit more urgency), but also requiring you to remove one Character bonus card of your choice after each turn. This creates an upper bound on the number of turns you can take, as the game ends either when you complete your fifth building or when there are no bonus cards remaining, after which you score your street as you would in a multi-player game, deducting one point for every closed window you have, then comparing your score to the table in the rules.

Walking in Burano only came out in the United States in 2019, although the Chinese edition was released a year earlier, and I think the timing of the U.S. release during the flood of July/August releases last year led it to fall through the cracks. It’s pretty great across the board – easy to learn, quick game time, deeper strategically than you’d guess at first glance, with gorgeous art. Light-strategy games in small boxes that give you more to chew on than the typical short game are right in my wheelhouse, since it’s just easier to get people to sit for a game that’s short and that doesn’t require a long explanation of the rules; Walking in Burano is exactly that kind of game.

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→ July 9, 2020
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The Dutch House.

Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House was one of the three finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, losing the top honor to Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys. The honor was long overdue for Patchett, who received a Pen Faulkner award and what is now called the Women’s Prize for Fiction for Bel Canto and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Commonwealth. She’s in the uppermost echelon of American novelists, and worthy of more critical acclaim than she’s received. The Dutch House isn’t her best – that would be Bel Canto, a more ambitious novel that Patchett says was her attempt to write her take on The Magic Mountain – but it’s something different from her, a return to the narrower character studies of her earlier career but with greater emotional depth, informed by the wisdom of a quarter-century of living.

 The Dutch House tells the story of Danny, the narrator, and his older sister Maeve, who live in the colossal estate that gives the book its title, in the northeast Philadelphia suburbs. Their mother left the family several years earlier for unknown reasons, leaving them with their real estate mogul father, who, as the novel opens, is about to marry Andrea, a much younger woman, and then brings her and her two daughters into the house. Andrea loves the house and the status it confers, but has little use for Danny or Maeve, and eventually casts them out when the opportunity presents itself, starting the siblings on decades of acrimony and grief for what they lost, emotions and memories they process by parking outside the house, often for hours, over the ensuing years.

Danny tells us the story, but Maeve is just as much a central character here, better developed than Danny is, and the most influential figure in Danny’s life. (As an aside, I couldn’t help but picture Maeve as Emma Mackey, who plays the character by that name on Sex Education.) Maeve has the memories of their mother that Danny lacks, and has just enough of an advantage of age to be wiser and more perceptive than her brother, which serves them both well when Andrea arrives on the scene. She’s a diabetic, which becomes significant at multiple points in the book, and appears to sacrifice some of her future to help Danny – although it’s possible her motives are mixed up with nostalgia and an unwillingness to leave the area where she grew up.

The story jumps forward and back in time, so we see Danny as an adult, after medical school, then find out how and why he ended up pursuing that academic path from the point where we first saw him as a kid who played basketball and loved going around with his father once a month to collect rent and see properties, but didn’t have a ton of use for school. The relationships between the siblings and their distant father, and the siblings and the two older women who work in the house and end up helping raise the kids – at least until Andrea kicks them out –  form part of a foundation for both Danny and Maeve as they mature into adulthood. The problem they encounter is that the void left by their mother’s departure, which they’re told was so she could go help the poor in India, leaves the foundation incomplete, and their obsessive, nostalgic attachment to the house, even after there’s no one living there who truly matters to them, seems both symbolic of what they’ve lost and a sad testament to how the past can prevent us from moving into the future.

I had a hard time reading Danny’s voice for at least a solid third of the book, continually ‘hearing’ the narrator as a young girl, probably because I know Ann Patchett’s style so well (and know that she’s a woman), and can’t recall her writing in the first person for a male character before. That sensation faded as Danny grew up in the first half of the novel and his voice became more distinctive, while he also felt like more of a participant in the action rather than a passive observer (to whom many things happen, however). I think this also arose because Maeve is a much more clearly defined character from the start of the book, while Danny starts out as unmolded clay and grows into adulthood before the reader, a maturation that comes in fits and starts and doesn’t end up where you – or Maeve – expect it to finish.

Of all contemporary authors whose work I know, Patchett might have the most empathy toward her main characters, no matter how flawed; only Andrea, who is a bit of a one-dimensional plot device here, misses out on this, while her two daughters, Maeve and Danny’s mother, and the nanny who was fired when Danny was just four all reappear in some form before the novel is out to get resolution, if not actual redemption. You can probably see the main plot event at the book’s conclusion coming, but I was neither surprised nor dismayed to see it happen, because in Patchett’s better novels, the pleasure of reading is in the journey. These two characters are so richly textured, and so realistic, that I was willing to buy into the less believable aspects of the story, just to get to the end of Danny’s arc, and to read more of Patchett’s prose.

Next up: I just finished Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland yesterday.

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