zelihatrifles - Tumblr blog

[zelihatrifles]

Pyre

You didn't want to start reading this at all because it felt like it might hit too close to home. The title itself gives you the spoiler. It is the story of an intercaste marriage in a remote conservative Tamil village. Indians any way are not too fond of love marriage. And then there is a widowed mother, expectations from the only son, oppressive patriarchal conventions. There is almost too many social issues to even begin analysing. But the emotions that Murugan expresses are so raw and triggering. The way Kumaresan's widowed mother insists on incessantly insulting Saroja is horrifying - it doesn't help to know how much she herself had suffered in life, because that can never justify the pain she deliberately keeps on inflicting on the new wife. It is enough to chip violently at your rosy dreams of marriage, because not everything can be adjusted to. It is very difficult to keep hope towards the end of this small and sparse novel that threatens to break you down badly. Good luck if you think of reading it.

[zelihatrifles]

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Chaos chaos chaos. Angst. Pleasure. Dejection. Expectations. Social norms. Black holes. Turbulent emotions. Revenge. Coming out. Connecting. Kindness. Ambition. Peace. Bliss. Love. Silence. Chaos again.

[zelihatrifles]

anatomie d'une chute

Here you have a child who is precocious, bilingual, visually impaired, deeply caring, loving, intelligent and decisive. Here you have too a mother who is frustrated, famous, foreign to the land and its language, beautiful and dedicated. There you had a father as well who is difficult to understand, with his deafening music habits, writing ambitions and crippling guilty anxiety. Here you also have a dog who is a "super chien" (super dog) and helps the boy navigate both spaces and life situations. And there you have a good lawyer who never won a case, who clearly once had a soft spot for the accused, and who takes it on himself to try and acquit her from the murder accusations. And of course there is one rude public prosecutor who is bent upon invalidating and belittling anything presented by the witnesses that might be in her favour. It bothers you till and beyond the very end, because of all the nuances that point to all possibilities of accident (most comforting as a conclusion), murder (most appealing and newsworthy), or suicide (very cliché for a failed writer), how each of these seem to fit into the narrative so organically. And in spite of the (surprising) lack of an open-ended denoument, you are left wondering what really happened, wallowing in the deliberate discomfiture of death. 

A film absolutely worth its Palme d'Or.

[zelihatrifles]

From Up on Poppy Hill

A family(ies) drama, very very pretty visuals, no supernatural elements but still magical, disappointment almost turning into grief then turning into a deep deep companionship based on love and mutual need, innumerable cycle rides and cleaning sprees, domestic responsibilities and bliss, and an almost epic-like backstory that paves the way towards an unexpected triumph.

[zelihatrifles]

My Neighbor Totoro

Pretty pretty visuals, a haunting soundscape, endearing characters sometimes with a creepy smile, an actually (and realistically) happy ending, and vagaries of a child's and a genius' imagination.

[zelihatrifles]

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Márquez, the great magic realist. Márquez, the great storyteller of our times. Márquez, the turmoiler of our emotions. 

Although it was a foreseeable event, the circumstances were not. 

You can never grieve enough for the loss of a loved one. You of course know that the loss is inevitable but you never really expect it, or see it coming. Here, it is about the veteran gypsy Melquiades.

He writes things that make you question the whats and whys of your life, things that break your heart and twist and turn it in unforeseeable ways, things that are so simple and profound yet stay unnoticed. 

... but in any case, he could not understand how people arrived at the extreme of waging war over things that could not be touched with the hand.

The title itself plunges you into a swirling tornado of alone-ness and loneliness. It makes you contemplate what distance and time does to relationships and self-perceptions. Márquez pins down sensitivity to estrangement.

They had not seen each other for such a long time that Colonel Gerineldo Márquez was upset by the aggressiveness of the reaction.

The old Catalonian bookseller who is another Melquiades-like figure in the book, he often spews pearls of wisdom. When he is returning home by ship, he laments the degeneration of the world and the values it's come to prioritise:

"the world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight."

All the untruths, fabrications, deaths, violences and losses in the novel which spans so much more than hundred years lead the old bookseller to lose his sense of repose and constructs new truths as he leaves his home of so long.

Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that day leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.

[zelihatrifles]

Wonka

If you make the mistake of asking me how was Wonka, I'd of course say it was amazing because I'm in love with Timothée Chalamet, Roald Dahl characters, musicals and all things chocolate. Even then, this was so much more enjoyable than I expected! The Tim Burton movie on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was definitely amazing, but it showed Wonka's backstory as much darker than it should be. Given Wonka's extreme eccentricity, he must have had a troubled childhood or at least some really sad memories that drove him into this insane chocolate-making. Paul King crafts a much more believable (according to Wonka's character arc that is, you have to discount realism) backstory with "a hatful of dreams" and the "secret ingredient". The movie also negotiates with power, conspiracy and greed in a very graspable manner, all the while staying true to the comedic musical tone. It does justice to this favourite Roald Dahl character of mine, and has just the right bit of magic to lift it up to another level altogether.

[zelihatrifles]

Les Parents Terribles

Seulement à l'époque on ne disait pas un fou. On disait <<un maniaque>>. Aujourd'hui, avec un peu de complaisance, tout le monde passerait pour fou.

Your typical Jean Cocteau characters and plot twists, I guess.

[zelihatrifles]

Remember to Blink

Spoiler Alert!!

Did you ever think that a mother could threaten to perpetuate her motherhood? Have you ever seen it being prohibited to teach a language to children in the easiest manner? This is what the EU Film Festival Lithuanian-French gem Remember to Blink brings to you. Especially for a linguistics student, it was a treat to watch. Stunning visuals and backdrops coupled with an attempted bilingual adoption make for a surprisingly intriguing film.

When the bilingual nanny Gabriele/ Gabi wins the affection of the two adopted children Karolina and Rytis, she also gains the appreciation of the father who is obsessed with sculpting Medusa and playing the "good cop" parent, but she also must face the acerbic brunt of the jealousy of the control freak mother. It is disconcerting when the mother does not keep her word of letting her new children retain their mother tongue Lithuanian because it allows them to have a special relationship with Gabi which she is unable to pry into. Moreover, she forbids them from speaking Lithuanian and shift fully to her language French, not even paying attention to her own excuse about bilingualism being a boon during higher education. The scariest part is when she proceeds to change the children's names to French ones out of sheer spite towards Gabi.

You question yourself about the ethics of all of it as the acculturation process does not quite seem to succeed. The children are deprived from communicating with their biological mother, from speaking their language at ease, from retaining their identities. Instead of adoption, it sometimes feels like a coerced acculturation. The culture shock pushes the precocious Karolina into Gabi's arms, wishing themselves to be sisters in the face of a harsh foreign tongue and culture, and to impudently spit into her adoptee mother's face when confronted. You see then an adoption almost going wrong, and you see a rescue almost in operation, as Gabi tries to take the children away with her, saving them from the monstrous love of the mother, but things hardly ever work out ideally. An open-ended denoument helps you retain your own illusions and complaints simultaneously, and at the end of all of it, you ask yourself this too: who is it that the auteur wants to remember to blink, the mother, Medusa the Gorgon, or you?

[zelihatrifles]

Yayyy Duolingo!!!!

[zelihatrifles]

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

I'll refrain from trying to articulate what I feel after reading this overwhelming book, so I'll just leave you some snippets that really caught my mind:

1. Whatever advantage Einstein had over a parrot, it wasn't vocal.

2. If a forager boy wanted to take a forager girl to a romantic spot, did the shade of a walnut tree suffice?

3. One of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once peope get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count in it. Finally they reach a point where they can't live without it.

4. ... we all know that the brain's retrieval system is amazingly efficient, except when you are trying to remember where you put your car keys.

5. Gender is a race in which some of the runners compete only for the bronze medal.

6. In other words, money isn't a material reality - it is a psychological construct... Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation.

7. Still, humans have a wonderful capacity to believe in contradictions.

8. Linguistics received enthusiastic imperial support.

9. ... capitalism has created a world that nobody but a capitalist is capable of running... we may not like capitalism, but we cannot live without it.

10. ... we are on the threshold of both heaven and hell, moving nervously between the gateway of the one and the anteroom of the other.

11. ... any meaning that people ascribe to their lives is just a delusion.

12. Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?

[zelihatrifles]

Persepolis

Quand tu as déjà lu Persepolis mais c'était en anglais, donc tu as décidé de le relire après plusieurs ans, mais cette fois-ci, en français, tu ne peut que'être absolument étonné par le style littéraire de Satrapi. Il y a une apathie que tu peux toucher avec les doigts lorsque tu tournes les pages en noir et blanche. Il y a une humeur très très noire.

Par exemple, après la république islamiste est déjà établie, tout le monde veut se rassurer et convaincre les autres qu'il est la personne la plus réligieuse. Alors, un garçon à l'école se vante: "Moi, je fais mes prières cinq fois par jour", Marji répond: "Moi, dix ou onze fois... voire douze." 

C'est aussi absurdiste que la réponse que Dieu donne à la jeune Marji quand elle veut pas parler de la foi, et lui demande de changer le sujet, Dieu dit: "Demain, il va faire beau". C'est comme même Dieu sait la futilité de parler de la météo bienque'il te faille te rappeler que pour Marji, "C'était amusant de voir comme Dieu et Marx se reassemblaient peut-être que Marx était un peu frisé."

Et tu continues lire pour t'amuser ou t'humilier, ce qui te convient.

[zelihatrifles]

Five Broken Cameras

Emad Burnat's documentary about the Israeli settlements encroaching Palestinian land will make you question your peace of mind. He is a common farmer, a normal father of four beautiful sons. But by the virtue of his camera(s), becomes a kind of a living chronicle of the resistance towards Israeli audacity. You see him experiencing the brunt of meaningless violence through the lenses of his five cameras that are broken in the course of five years at the end of which you cannot expect a happy ending because this is real life. 

Gibreel's birthdays punctuate the growth of the resistance which more and more villagers embrace, even beyond Bil'in. The innocence of the children is not exactly juxtaposed with the army's grenades and tear gas because even a sensitive child like Gibreel wants to kill because hate and anger are not easy to ignore when your closest friends are shot dead at random.

You see Emad's cameras saving and endangering his life simultaneously - he is targeted because of his filming that the Israeli soldiers feel threatened by, but his life is also saved because the bullet gets lodged in the camera, barely missing his face. His wife Soraya begs him to stop, she cannot take the anxiety any more, but you keep asking yourself why the filming is so important. In the end, you don't see hope, but like the note at which Khaled Hosseini ended his first novel, you can find the beginnings of hope.

[zelihatrifles]

Love in the Time of Cholera

Márquez is one author who is so widely recommended that you feel anxious about whether he'd actually live up to all your expectations. Even if you have learnt about magic realism, and about love, about life, Márquez's novel tells you clearly that there is so much more to experience.

And so she thought of him as she never could have imagined thinking about anyone...

"Tell him yes," she said. "Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no."

The way he frames the story, the phraseology he uses, the way he narrates the characters - you cannot but be overwhelmed by the sheer description and the sheer novelty of it.

He was a perfect husband: he never picked up anything from the floor, or turned out a light, or closed a door.

... and then he read it four more times, until he was so full of the written words that they began to lose all meaning.

You may not agree, you really don't have to, but you learn that love is even more complex than you thought, yet at the same time, it's so simple in its fundamental nature. Society doesn't have to be a villain, and rebellion is not something only raging teens do, but also aged lovers.

All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first of the patient and then of the mother, to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.

Passion is nobody's monopoly, and love can be quite scary especially if it's the kind of Florentino Ariza's, whom I've wanted so much to see in person, what he looks like. I learnt about the quintessential maternal love, which is not because of the umbilical cord solely, but also because of something cherishable as a process.

...and she discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.

Márquez takes you across landscapes. You get to experience a novel hot air balloon ride, many ship voyages, rides in fancy cars and carriages, endless walks in nocturnal city streets and even more endless waits in particular park benches. You get to experience crippling pain, nostalgia, affection, and compassion.

... for a long time he had boarded ships from his country just to drink a glass of water from the cisterns filled with the rains of the village where he was born.

And Márquez leaves you at a weird juncture of the lovers' life. It is odd compared to the trajectory of their journeys throughout. But that is Márquez, right?

... and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.

[zelihatrifles]

Victory City

The latest Salman Rushdie, and the more potent when you know that his life has been made an attempt on already, and that he survives like the fighter he is. In this epic novel, because it's more epic than novel actually, he writes of the rise and downfall of a whole empire. You may even say, garnering similarities with his narrative, okay, Pampa Kampana's narrative, and with the nonsensical atrocities that are happening today, that his voice has prophetic overtones. Because:

'Anyway,' she wrote, it's good to learn that over there is not so very unlike over here, and that human intelligence and human stupidity, as well as human nature, the best and worst of it, are the greatest constants of the changing world.'

And right she is. Not only over there and over here, but also then and now. Then, the Remonstrance was fighting to get back old familiar names of streets because the rulers were changing their names to make them starkly religious, and i hardly need to point out why i mention this. Rushdie's epic prose takes you right back to this divine muse-inspired Pampa Kampana and her magical abilities which she revered as well as was weary of. You travel a long way but you don't get a prediction as to how our civilisation would really end, because, as Rushdie states:

Words are the only victors.

[zelihatrifles]

Dear Shameless Death

When someone spoke of Latife Tekin and Gabriel García Márquez in the same breath, they possibly weren't out of their mind. But Tekin surely is way off the beaten path in this small novel that is both confusing and hard-hitting in equal measures. I remember someone complaining that literary or artistic criticism always tends to identify contradictions and paradoxes, but she would have been somewhat baffled by the sheer number of narratives juxtaposed in these few pages. All these perspectives and stories fight each other, and there are djinns, Azrael and hallucinations that punctuate this constant war being waged, but none of it is any less true. Tekin writes so lucidly that you have no idea when and where your belief is suspended, and then you would probably question yourself, why indeed things happen the way they do, and what in the name of life is logic?

[zelihatrifles]

See How They Run

Self-deprecating humour at its highest. Plenty of allusions you can miss but still enjoy. Saiorse Ronan's Constable is never pity-worthy but very much laugh(and smile)-worthy. Sam Rockwell looks very much like a suspect in his detective-ish drunk pessimism, but it's good to see him make more of an effort. The real Christie play "Mousetrap" and its run-time make your jaw drop but the fictionalised Dennis Corrigan's death leaves a bad taste inside, also (spoiler alert), Christie's own appearance. Here are some snippets from the "brilliant" dialogue for you to enjoy!

"Did you ever meet Stoppard's wife, sir?"

"I did."

"You don't happen to remember her name, do you?"

"It was ... Mrs Stoppard."

"Brilliant."

Or, another.

"What is it, Constable?"

"Uh, nothing, sir. Do you, um, want a cup of tea?"

"Listen to me, Stalker. No one is ever going to take you seriously as a police officer if you act like a tea-lady, do you hear me?"

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."

"Milk and two sugars."

So, yes, a lot of fun!