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| Performance Anxiety Philip Roth’s novel stars an aging actor who can no longer act. feeds.nytimes.com |
JM Coetzee's Disgrace | Film Theo Tait on the transition from page to screen of Coetzee's novelIt's often said that good novels make bad films: they're too nuanced, too complex, too long to fit into a slot two hours long. Readers don't thank film-makers for trampling on their treasured mental visions of a book – for making Sebastian Flyte shout "All you ever wanted was to fuck my sister!" at Charles Ryder, as in last year's film of Brideshead Revisited, or for casting Demi Moore as Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter or Nicolas Cage as Captain Corelli. The resulting adaptations tend to be, at worst, a travesty (Bonfire of the Vanities, Love in the Time of Cholera) and, at best, faithful and bloodless (Atonement, Revolutionary Road) – weighed down by the desire to do justice to a big reputation.Few contemporary novels have a bigger reputation than Disgrace, JM Coetzee's chilly, shocking 1999 tale of post-apartheid South Africa, which comes with Booker and Nobel prizes attached and is regularly cited as one of the best English language books of recent years. The Australian husband and wife team of director Steve Jacobs and screenwriter Anna-Maria Monticelli were, however, undaunted – even though one assumes that Coetzee, who demanded full script approval, wasn't the easiest or most forgiving collaborator ("His intellectual honesty erodes all basis of consolation and distances itself from the tawdry drama of remorse and confession," noted the Swedish Academy approvingly). They also chose John Malkovich, America's scariest character actor, as their leading man. All in all, the adaptation must have been a terrifying prospect – particularly if one considers that, in South Africa at least, the book is highly controversial.Like most of Coetzee's work, Disgrace is richly suggestive. It reads like a parable, or perhaps a series of interconnected parables. David Lurie, a disillusioned white South African professor of literature, is drummed out of his job in Cape Town after he has an affair with a female student and refuses to make an appropriately contrite public statement. He then joins his hippyish lesbian daughter Lucy on a smallholding in the Eastern Cape, where she lives alone, growing flowers and vegetables for sale at a farmers' market. There, the two are subjected to a brutal attack at the hands of three black men; Lucy is gang-raped; Lurie is set on fire with methylated spirits. To her father's horror, she decides to keep the child that she conceives as a result, and to stay on the farm despite the danger – handing over her land to her neighbour and former farmhand, Petrus, who seems to be implicated in the attack, and throwing herself on his mercy. Lurie, struggling to find a new role for himself, fails to write an opera about Byron in Italy, and instead devotes his time to euthanising unwanted dogs at a local animal welfare clinic. Deftly sweeping up various big subjects – political correctness on campus, crime and rape, sex and exploitation, land ownership and historical wrongs, the treatment of animals – into one compact, unified narrative, the book seems to encourage one chunky, unified interpretation.Certainly, Disgrace has been taken that way in South Africa, where its central episode is unmistakably political. A wave of attacks on white-owned farms since 1994 has seen at least 2,500 people killed and many raped and tortured. Many white farmers regard these as a concerted attempt to drive them off the land (some attacks have been led by squatters and others have come in tandem with claims to restore historical land rights), which are ignored or even covertly sponsored by the ANC government – "One settler, one bullet", "Kill the Boer, kill the farmer", went the old revolutionary slogans. The government and police dismiss this view entirely, seeing the attacks as just another instance of the much larger problem of violent crime in South Africa, or possibly a result of maltreatment by farmers of their black workers.In this heated context, the ANC issued an official denunciation of Coetzee's novel, accusing him of "subliminal racism" and of dealing in stereotypes about black male sexual violence. The then president Thabo Mbeki objected to its portrayal of the country, saying: "South Africa is not only a place of rape." And, from one perspective, you could see the book as a parable in which the hopes of the "rainbow nation" are systematically crushed, and the characters fall back on their old racial emnities. When Lurie finds one of Lucy's attackers, since revealed as Petrus's disturbed nephew Pollux, peeping at his daughter through the window, he attacks him: "He would like to give the boy a sound thrashing. Phrases that all his life he has avoided seem suddenly just and right: Teach him a lesson, Show him his place." The nephew responds by kicking at Lucy's potato beds and shouting: "We will kill you all." During the conversation that immediately precedes this incident, Petrus explains that he must protect Pollux, because he is one of "my people". "So that is it", Lurie thinks. "No more lies. My people. As naked an answer as he could wish. Well, Lucy is his people."Conversely, RW Johnson, a fierce critic of the ANC, complains that Disgrace convicts all white South Africans of "collective guilt". In the first section of the book, Lurie visits a coloured prostitute and then sexually preys on the student, Melanie, whom he calls "Melani: the dark one"; one of their encounters is describes as "not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless". Johnson argues that the book is saying: like South African whites down the ages Lurie has taken advantage of those in a weaker position than him; and thus both he and Lucy are symbolically punished – the sins of the fathers are visited upon them. When his daughter asks why her rapists seemed to hate her so much, Lurie suggests: "It was history speaking through them. A history of wrong. Think of it that way, if it helps. It may have seemed personal, but it wasn't. It came down from the ancestors." Self-abasement seems to be the only way out for them – Lucy gives up all her rights and lives "like a dog", Lurie spends his time picking out his doomed opera on a banjo among the stray dogs in the backyard of the clinic, while having a desultory affair with the "remarkably unattractive" Bev Shaw. The message of Disgrace, Johnson says, is that white South Africans ought to emigrate, as Coetzee himself did in 2002: "If you are white, no positive, active role is left to you. Either you accommodate yourself to the unreasonable, or you play out your life in some futile back alley. You are doomed to this by the disgraceful history of your kind. Maybe it's fair, maybe it's not, but it is the way things are."All of this is another way of saying that the novel is rich and resonant enough to inspire fierce, competing interpretations, and unflinching enough to make some of them rather uncomfortable. So it's not surprising, in the circumstances, that Jacobs decided to step back and take a neutral position: "I tried to make the film like the book," he explained. "It was a surgical examination of a situation, not an argument for or against the situation. It's like you're a witness rather than a participant." In many respects, the screenplay is meticulously faithful to the novel: most of the dialogue is taken word for word; with some inevitable compressions and a few modifications, the story follows the book scene for scene.The problem with this approach is that Disgrace, though written in the third person, is clearly told from David Lurie's point of view. From the very first line onwards, which describes his visits to the prostitute, the book's voice is his voice – sharp, dry, and cultured, but lacking some basic human warmth: "For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well." Instead, in the film's first scene you see Lurie gazing through a Venetian blind, telling the woman that he is worried about his daughter: a minor change which seems nevertheless to strike very much the wrong note.Naturalistic dialogue is not one of Coetzee's special gifts. In his fiction, speech tends to be used either for the crisp expression of ideas, or to show characters failing to communicate. (After the attack Lurie asks Lucy: "'Are you alright? Are you hurt?' Stupid questions; she does not reply.") The genius of Disgrace lies to a large extent in Coetzee's use of free indirect style, in his presentation of Lurie's perspective: what Lucy calls his "terrible irony" and, later on, his anguish; his wonderfully clever yet often very partial vision. So, for instance, when he tells the disciplinary panel that he had an affair with Melanie because he "became a servant of Eros", part of the drama, the strange comedy, is that he doesn't note his inquisitors' reaction to this unusual defence. In the film, by contrast, you get a disappointingly literal reaction shot of their bemused faces. Instead of the brilliance of the narrating voice – never more brilliant than in the terrible scenes in which Lurie is locked in the lavatory during the rape – the viewer sees Malkovich staring blankly, or gurning through what seems like a rather spare and diagrammatic drama.Malkovich is certainly compelling. He has the right mixture of cold creepiness and magnetism for the main part, and he shows flashes of amazing talent, particularly when he is being condescending to other characters. But he is badly weighed down, both by his baggage as an upmarket panto villain – Being John Malkovich has surely fatally damaged him as a serious actor – and by his terrible South African accent: a flat, strangled monstrosity which means that the viewer can often concentrate on little else. An otherwise impressive cast struggles to cope: Jessica Haines is good, though much too pretty, as Lucy. The French actor Eriq Ebouaney is terrific as Petrus – succeeding where Malkovich's mannered performance fails, creating by gesture and speech a character as rich as Coetzee's description: "If there is such a thing as honest toil, then Petrus bears its marks. A man of patience, energy, resilience. A peasant, a paysan, a man of the country. A plotter and a schemer and no doubt a liar too, like peasants everywhere. Honest toil and honest cunning."In general, Disgrace is a creditable, serious film which is driven along by its viscerally gripping plotline. It's probably as good as it could have been, given the constraints placed on it by the "talent". There's a loss of nerve at the end, perhaps: instead of ending with the miserable scene in which Lurie gives up to the fatal injection the stray dog he has come to love, it finishes with the penultimate one, in which he visits Lucy at her smallholding. The pair put their quarrels behind them, and there is a tentative suggestion of "a new footing, a new start". But the switch does emphasise the movie's one undoubted advantage over the book: the shots of farm's setting, in bleakly picturesque area of the Eastern Cape – a place that partially justifies Lucy's powerful love of the land. Coetzee himself characteristically chose to not to comment on the film, beyond remarking that: "Steve Jacobs has succeeded beautifully in integrating the story into the grand landscape of South Africa."Disgrace will be shown at the ICA, The Mall, London SW1 from December 1. Box office: 020 7930 3647. www.ica.org.ukJM CoetzeeDramaFictionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Inside Yarl's Wood immigration centre Author Beverley Naidoo, who herself first came to the UK seeking refuge, is moved and saddened by the plight of children she meets detained in a UK immigration centreYarl's Wood immigration removal centre is not exactly easy to reach. Our taxi from Bedford station drives through the village of Clapham, with its 11th-century church and ancient yews, then out again through fields. Suddenly, we see low-lying buildings like those on a modern industrial estate. A lone man walks purposefully with a dog. From inside a glass-paned office, a man waves us through the boom gates. His uniform could be that of a security guard in any official establishment.Karin Littlewood is an illustrator and I'm a writer. We're going to run a storytelling workshop – organised by Women for Refugee Women – with children detained in Yarl's Wood, and we have been instructed to bring Criminal Records Bureau "enhanced disclosure" forms and visual ID. This concern over child protection sits oddly with instances of children being seized in dawn raids.About 1,000 children are locked up every year under immigration rules, many of them in families who have sought asylum. Yarl's Wood is the main centre for detaining children, with about 30 held at any one time. Although the government says it detains families only as a last resort, just prior to removal, the majority of these children are released back into the community. Many will later be granted leave to remain in the UK.We step into the visitors' centre under a sign that reads: "Serco bringing service to life." Karin has brought rolls of drawing paper, as well as original paintings from our picture book Baba's Gift. We've had to specify in advance every item that we wish to bring. Apart from books to give to the children and library, our list includes a little wooden elephant and hippo, a finger-puppet hare, a small mbira (thumb piano) and an oyster shell.As we walk along an empty corridor, I scribble down words from a notice: "Yarl's Wood IRC is committed to promoting and celebrating racial equality and diversity." We are searched in a claustrophobic little room, with two women guards, then a door is unlocked and I step into a huge visitors' waiting room with comfy seats and children's toys, overseen by a single guard. By the time Karin has been processed, we've lost a third of our workshop time.Five locked doors and corridors decorated with murals lead to Crane section for families – mainly mothers with children. We are introduced to the primary teacher. The young lady smiles and we shake hands, but my brain takes time to connect. She is wearing the Serco uniform, with keys attached to her waist. A guard-cum-teacher or a teacher-cum-guard?Along more corridors and through an indoor sports hall, we come to patches of grass, high wire fences, and two elongated chalets that house newly-opened schoolrooms. The secondary schoolteacher, also with uniform and keys, greets us. It's unusual to run a workshop for people ranging in age from five to 16, but there is nothing usual about today.School inside Yarl's Wood is voluntary. Today, three older students are attending, along with 11 younger children from Albania, Egypt, Namibia, Uganda, Kenya, Jamaica and Nigeria. Some have just arrived in Yarl's Wood. For one boy, it's his 37th day. As I give them my South African handshake, a boy of about 10 immediately asks whether I can speak Afrikaans. He asks, and I answer, in Afrikaans. I tell him I have forgotten a lot. Quietly, he replies: "My ook (Me too)." I catch the sadness in his eyes and ask: "What places do you know in South Africa?" Jo'burg, he says. "But I'm a Jo'burg girl!" I exclaim. I pull out a copy of my book Journey to Jo'burg. Within seconds, his head is buried in it.Most of the children seem to speak English, and within seconds we are playing a name game to break the ice. I sense a generosity from the older students. How easy it would be for them to dismiss our workshop as something for little kids.Introducing Baba's Gift, about two children's first trip to the seaside in South Africa, I recount how I wrote the story with my daughter, Maya. I slip in that many years ago I came to Britain seeking refuge. I tell them how Maya had wanted to set a story in the place where her father grew up, but from which we'd been cut off for many years. Karin interweaves my reading by showing her artwork close up, drawing in the teens. They are intrigued.The children begin to open out. I retell a traditional African story from my collection, The Great Tug of War, about the little hare, Mmutla, who must use his wits against the powerful, bossier animals. Karin draws the animal characters as I act out how Mmutla tricks the elephant, Ttlou, and the hippo, Kubu, into a tug of war with each other. Beneath these age-old stories is the message about resilience that enslaved Africans carried to America and kept alive through Brer Rabbit. In identifying with the little hare, I hope the children may gain their own strength.Our workshop has to finish before Karin has time to get everyone drawing, but she leaves a painting of Mmutla tugging a rope. It stretches across a long roll of paper, and the teachers say they will give the children a chance to draw in their own players for this new tug of war.Karin asks the two small boys from Albania to help hold up the paper. They have avoided eye contact and been terribly quiet. If for a brief moment we might have almost forgotten where we are, these young siblings most visibly remind us that here are children undergoing a deeply traumatising experience.The government has signed up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, yet its policy runs completely counter to the spirit of the convention. It pays Serco to "normalise" the imprisonment of children – something morally abhorrent that should never be considered normal.Moral issueThat is why almost 70 writers and illustrators for young people have this week signed an open letter to Gordon Brown, supporting the End Child Detention Now campaign. It follows a joint report by the Royal Colleges of General Practitioners, Paediatrics and Child Health, and Psychiatrists, and the UK Faculty of Public Health, warning that detaining children in immigration centres puts them at risk of mental health problems, self-harm and suicide, and demanding an end to the practice. This is a cross-party moral issue in which we should ask every MP to stand up to the rising tide of anti-immigrant xenophobia and support Chris Mullin MP's parliamentary motion to stop detaining children.After leaving Yarl's Wood, we meet someone who knows it well, and who says the atmosphere inside has been subdued. Last week, she tells us, a woman was deported, naked. It was her final protest.What else have these young people – who have struck us as so delightful and thoughtful – witnessed in their uprooted lives? Have we no shame?There is an online petition atpetitions.number10.gov.uk/ NoChildDetention Childrenguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Is Tolstoy the greatest writer of all time? What do today's novelists think of the great Russian author Leo Tolstoy?Philip HensherI do think he is the greatest novelist who ever lived. I didn't used to, but I have grown into him with age. When I was a boy I used to groan at the farming bits in Anna Karenina – now I could read about farming all day. Thee is so much in his work that you don't understand, but you feel that one day you might.What is great about him is that he lets his characters grow up – they change, act totally out of character, and yet they are recognisably the same people. In War and Peace, Natasha starts out as a girl bouncing around quite happily, and at the end she is this grumpy matron who doesn't want to see anyone – yet somehow you believe it's the same person. I don't know how he does that. He does such rounded people.War and Peace is the book that stays with you, but I also love his very late fables. There are two unforgettable ones: How Much Land Does a Man Need?, about the greed for land, and What Men Live By, a fable or fairy story where an angel comes down to earth. He attained this perfect simplicity of expression towards the end, and he grew out of the novel. I don't think anyone else has ever done that. You can learn more from Tolstoy than any other writer – but as a technician, not as a moralist.Tom KeneallyTolstoy is one of those annoying people of genius who performed in the 19th century the ultimate tricks that the rest of us are now stuck with trying to perform imperfectly and on humbler scale. In War and Peace, he successfully depicted the public and national soul as incarnated in a vast array of individuals, and the novel tries, in a compelling way, to define the same unity amongst his characters. In Anna Karenina, by contrast, he deals with one doomed soul on an intimate, psychological level. Thus he is a super-Balzac and a Flaubert at the same time.Is he the greatest novelist of all time? I think Dostoevsky is a fellow giant. Fortunately, literature is not like the Premier League or the Olympic 400m. Let's just say that Tolstoy is transcendent, and that we are grateful he lived long enough to endow us with his grand inheritance.AS ByattWhat is extraordinary about Tolstoy is the way in which his imagination was never daunted. His world is large, and his characters have their own life, and are not his puppets – even the ones he set out to disapprove of, such as Anna Karenina. His descriptions – of battlefields or mushroom-picking or meals – are full of exactly the right amount of idiosyncrasy and detail. He gives us more than enough information and still leaves space for the reader's imagination. He is the only writer I am not bothered by reading in translation: I don't notice what I might be missing as he sweeps me along. Celebrating him, we should also celebrate Constance Garnett, who changed the English novel and the English reader by translating the great Russians.James MeekJM Coetzee calls Tolstoy the exemplary master of authority, by which he means, I think, that he makes us trust what he tells us. This is all the more surprising since Tolstoy seems to speak freely, in his fiction, with the sort of moralistic-prophetic voice – the voice of a teacher of right and wrong – that lesser writers are obliged to use sparingly, unless they want to sound pompous and didactic. While that is distinctive and remarkable, it's not what makes Tolstoy a great writer. Nor is it his tight focus on the three essential themes in narrative art, namely love, death and money.What makes him stand out is his skill with the very cloth from which narrative is cut – time. His fictional places are in time, not space. His descriptions of landscapes and interiors are never merely descriptions and never merely symbolic; they are waypoints in a journey, burdens to be got rid of, obstacles to be overcome, lessons to be taken.More startlingly, he has the ability to do something that sounds easy but is in fact very difficult, namely to write about a moment – a man at the point of proposing marriage, a woman about to kill herself, a dissolute youth arriving in a frontier village – without any apparent consciousness of all the moments that have led up to that moment, or of all the moments that are about to come.Great? Certainly. The greatest? Impossible to answer. One of the greatest literary craftsmen? Undoubtedly, and someone from whom today's writers can learn.Ian RankinI put off reading Tolstoy for a long long time. But then, four or five years back, my wife and I went on holiday to Kenya. I knew I needed a big book to keep me going on the long flight, and plumped for War and Peace. I enjoyed the book, though I've never been a great fan of historical fiction. I did feel that he was happier writing about the haves than the have-nots, but he is a true general among novelists, marshalling his forces and always in control of the battlefield. Strangely, perhaps, I first came across him as a philosopher/non-fiction writer; I studied his writings on aesthetics at university. So I knew more about his life than about his novels. He has always seemed to me like a character from fiction himself – a tragic, complex personality. I get the feeling I will return to his novels as I get older, and will take more from them.Marina LewyckaI can still remember the first time I read War and Peace. I was 20, a student, and already had dreams of becoming a writer. I read it at a single sitting – about a week, including bleary breaks for eating and sleeping. There were times when the tears were pouring out of my eyes so much I couldn't focus on the tiny print. I felt proud to belong to the same culture (Ukrainian and Russian are very similar), but having Tolstoy as a model made it much harder to even dare put pen to paper.Anna Karenina, which I loved too, was more manageable, if only because it is shorter and the narrative more focussed on an individual, but my all-time favourite is Resurrection. Its themes of social injustice and personal redemption resonated in the 70s, when I first read it. This, I thought, is what all books should be like: serious, committed and passionate. Maybe that is one of the reasons it took me so long to become an author. It is only when I gave up trying to emulate Tolstoy that I was able to discover my own voice as a writer.Howard JacobsonAll novelists of any stature have this in common: they are engrossed by the apparent accidentality of life. "Things and characters go as nature takes them," Matthew Arnold wrote in an early appreciation of Tolstoy, "Levin's shirts were packed up, and he was late for his wedding in consequence . . . Serge was very near proposing, but did not. The author saw it all happening so – saw it, and therefore relates it." Arnold makes it sound easy. And indeed when we read Tolstoy, it feels easy. This is life itself. It barely feels like artistry. But it takes genius to make art so closely resemble life.In Tolstoy's case this genius is the more remarkable for being at odds with other impulses in him – the impulse to preach, to teach, to reform: the impulse, in other words, not to be an artist at all. Anna Karenina set out to be a tract against adultery in high society; "Vengeance is mine and I will repay," is the epigram on the novel's title page. The voice of God. But Anna becomes a tragic heroine as a consequence of Tolstoy's "seeing" rather than judging her and relating what he sees. The novelist shuts out the moralist. To "see" Anna is to comprehend her. Later on, morality reasserts itself and Tolstoy regrets writing such trivia. For my money, Tolstoy is the greater for these self-divisions. An artist ought to doubt the value of his art. The moralist needs to be in there somewhere, questioning the "seeing" and "relating", forever trying to sabotage the work, otherwise the surface charm takes over and we fall in love with narrative for its own sake. Art that is not in an argument with itself declines to entertainment. Tolstoy is the towering genius of the novel because in him the artist's sense of life's accidentality is forever challenged by the moraliser's drive to give life purpose.Leo TolstoyRussiaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
One Thing After Another How to manage the complexities of the modern world? Simple checklists, a surgeon argues. feeds.nytimes.com |