More of the same, somewhere else

I'm cross-blogging!: http://www.indyish.com/fringe-review-acte/

Hari Kunzru, Transmission (2005)

There's such a focus on anxiety in contemporary novels. The Corrections comes to mind, and Infinite Jest - which is about a lot of other things too, but man, is there some anxiety in that book, especially in the first chapter. Edward St. Aubyn's Mother's Milk is pretty anxious. Another common theme of recent novels is satire of a caricaturish kind: The Russian Debutante's Handbook comes to mind, The Corrections again, Zadie Smith's On Beauty or White Teeth and lots and lots of New Yorker short stories (some of them by the authors of the books just mentioned, which might seem like it doesn't count, but it adds to the subjective feeling of the pervasiveness of this kind of writing, which I grow tired of). None of these are among my favourite books (actually I haven't finished The Corrections and don't want to pre-judge, but so far it's given me a similar feeling to the others: interesting enough to go on with, but not moving). For the first hundred or two pages of Infinite Jest, I was feeling emotionally connected, but in the subsequent 800 pages flagged a little.

Transmission shares both of these contemporary preoccupations, and, as with the others, I thought at first that it might be great, then thought good. It is good, and readable, and interesting. It's about computer hacking and virus creation, ramifications of the economics of globalization, adult virgins and Bollywood.

From the first, it put me on guard that the anxiety might be coming. We meet Arjun Mehta, an innocent whose glasses are "blurred with fingerprints." He is going for a job interview, and is brought to "a waiting room filled with nervous young people sitting on orange plastic chairs with the peculiar, self-isolating stiffness interview candidates share with criminal defendants and people in STD-clinic reception areas." I was slightly hopeful that he might turn out to be an agent, and not a painful victim of circumstance, by this detail:

Above [the receptionist] a row of clocks, relics of the optimistic 1960s, displayed the time in key world cities. New Delhi seemed to be only two hours ahead of New York, and one behind Tokyo. Automatically Arjun found himself calculating the shrinkage in the world implied by this error, but, lacking even a best estimate for certain of the variables, his thoughts trailed away.

And he is a bit of an agent, but not generally enough to get out of the clutches of the big bad world (is that saying too much? I try not to reveal anything, but that's a bit difficult). But at the same time, it's nice writing. I think it gets a bit rushed and slightly less artful later on, but no, it's technically pretty good throughout -- all those other aforementioned books also show good technique, resolving for me a question I had as a teenager about whether great craft was enough to make great literature.

This is an example of the slightly overdone satire that makes me wince:

Guy had known even before he moved in that this was a living space that would require something extraordinary. Feeling both time- and knowledge-challenged, he had (at the suggestion of the attractive brunette property consultant) employed an agency to help him buy furniture. That way, he reasoned, he could be certain everything about his personal environment was in the best possible taste. And so the white-leather table with the cut-out airport city code motif [...] and the low-rise smuggled-teak patio furniture on the balcony; all of it was personalized, individual, signature. It was all--every sandlblasted bathroom faucet of it--him.

It's predictable. Mostly the plot is not so predictable and is nicely paced. It disappointed me a little though, I was expecting more from the twin storylines of Arjun and Guy, based on some clues dropped in middle chapters.

Midnight in Paris, Montreal

Woody Allen's new movie, Midnight in Paris, is a super fun dream of a film, reminded me of some of his older movies even though Allen's character played by Owen Wilson rather than himself. Wilson is a successful Hollywood screen writer who wants to give it up to be a novelist and live in Paris. Most of the movie is his time travel back to 1920s Paris where he meets F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso and various others (I'd mention Dali and Bunuel, but I never figured out how to get keyboard accents on a mac). It's pure fantasy but funnily scripted and well acted and it transported me, I let myself think I was talking to Hemingway and listening to Cole Porter sing at the piano in the bar. What could be better, really? I liked that it's a fantasy that doesn't revolve around male ideals, and even the women (some of them) are allowed personalities and individual desires, and even the fulfillment of those desires. After the movie, to keep the feeling going, we went to L'Express on St. Denis, which was packed at 10 PM, and which perfectly rounded out a lovely francophile evening. I don't go there often enough, so I don't know whether it's always so full of stylish people or if it's because this is Grand Prix weekend. I'm staying in Little Italy this week, and there are sports cars (and cinquecentas) everywhere.

Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech

Tonight at Place des Arts, saw a Japanese play by author/director/choreographer Toshiki Okada, with English and French subtitles. Rare to see plays in foreign languages, but they do it for opera and movies all the time, so why not plays. And the six-hour Dutch Shakespeare last year was so great, and was put on as part of the same festival as this play, the Festival TransAmeriques (neither of them has any connection to the americas, so I'm a bit confused about what the festival is really about, but still very impressed with the acts it's brought over). The play is actually three short interconnected plays, Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech, which is a bit disappointing since I thought the title was pretty awesome if it was one title, but maybe it still is one title even though the pieces were written at different times, since they interlock extremely well, and are obviously meant to be performed together. Very movement-based, they are almost dance pieces. The setting is an office break room. In the first act, three temps plan a farewell party for a temp who's just been fired. The first man stands up and, with some very awkward gestures, tells his two co-workers they should all pick a restaurant, since they are in charge of organizing the party, and that although the best would be a suggestion, he has brought in a magazine called Hot Pepper that has restaurant listings (the screen behind him informs us, quoting wikipedia, that Hot Pepper is a free monthly magazine). He repeats himself, the best would be a suggestion but otherwise he has this magazine, and his gestures get bigger and more awkward, and the two women sitting down completely ignore him. The second one gets up, she says, as far as restaurant recommendations go, she thinks that Erika, the one who has been fired, once said she really liked motsu hot pot and though this is old information and might not be current, if no one has any other ideas maybe they should choose a motsu hot pot place (she later divulges that this was a lie, but she has a craving for motsu hot pot since she saw it on tv two nights ago). She is also making some really painfully awkward gestures, swinging her arms around and generally being ignored. The third one gets up and addresses the issue of it being the temps who are organizing this party. She has the most awkward gestures to date, involving pelvic rotation, and she also seems extremely shy, which makes it more embarrassing. She feels it's a task for full-time workers, but that they were given the job because they are temps too. Later, the first man says he thinks that they should organize the dinner so that the full-time people pay more. He keeps actually looking at the other two, which in some ways makes him seem like he's the most pathetic, since they do at times have some response to what he says, but they never look at him. The third woman has a later speech wondering why Erika was fired, since she had really good Excel skills, and wonders when they will be fired. She says, when it's her turn, she wants them to pick Chinese for the restaurant, and suggests they all state their preferences now.

Act two, the air coditioner, has two people, full-time workers. First, a man talks about a political talk show he likes, then a woman talks at length about how damn cold it is in the office. Someone keeps resetting the air conditioner. In response, repeatedly, the man suggests they should call the police, if the AC is such a problem. It's hard to tell if he's making fun of her or not. But he seems pretty into her, so you kind of think not. They also have the awkward motions and weirdly, by now, I'm getting very used to them, they almost seem like normal gestures.  The other thing about the crazy motions is that they feel very much like they are the expression of inner feelings, where the words are so banal. They are not wild or rageful, but angular and uncomfortable, slightly sad, maybe like the movements you would make after sitting in one spot for eight hours. They are also kind of beautiful.

One distracting thing, the English and French translations sometimes really didn't match up. For instance, at some point the French says, "Mais oui" and the English says, "No, maybe not, not really." I had to first spend some time wondering whether the disconnect was intentional, then spend time pondering whether they translated the two separately from Japanese, and if so, should I be reading both languages and amalgamating them into a better composite rendering of the original? Better to have made them more similar with such a bilingual audience (but then that brings me back to the first wondering).

The third piece is back to Erika (incidentally the others all had japanese names; Erika's is the only really prominent name), who comes in and makes her farewell speech. She is dancing through a lot of it, doing an extremely endearing little bop with her knees while she shakes her balled-up fists in a circular motion near her head. She says the last almost two years, this job, have been a great time in her life, she's not sure she'll ever be this happy again. She also says she bought these shoes a long time ago, they're just plain black pumps, really, but she's grown fond of them. They kind of remind her of two penguins. Sometimes, when she is bored, she has them talk to each other. At first they didn't like each other. He would say, hey, why you following me? But then they developed a relationship and then she was pregnant, and Erika couldn't believe it, since the shoe had so recently been a little girl, now she was a mother. Then, the shoe goes into labour while Erika is at her desk, and she's worried that someone will come ask her to send a fax, but no-one does. At this point in the play, her awkward motions incorporate the stillness of just one foot, which cannot be disturbed as the shoe-penguin lays her egg. Does any of this sound like the matter of a great play (or triptych)? After having seen it, I can't go back and judge. It was awesome.