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| What Michael Haneke owes to Kafka | Peter Bradshaw As the Austrian director's Cannes-winning The White Ribbon arrives in UK cinemas, a long-overdue viewing of his film of The Castle has opened my eyes to another thread running through his workMichael Haneke's new film The White Ribbon is to be released next week. With the director's steadily advancing reputation, his big commercial success here with his 2005 film Hidden, and of course the Cannes Palme d'Or for his new movie, this could all mean that he is approaching a kind of cultural critical mass. He appears to have reached a tipping point at which people outside the gated arthouse community have really heard of him – heard of him the way they've heard of Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick. His work is being widely discussed, but with a persistent emphasis on his "bleakness" – ironically at the very point at which, in The White Ribbon, he is actually offering audiences glimpses of un-bleakness: moments of gentleness and even a sort of comedy. Preparing to see The White Ribbon again, I settled down to watch the one feature film of Haneke's that I hadn't yet seen (I'm afraid I haven't managed to get hold of his television work). This was his dark, spare, austere version of Kafka's The Castle. It is an eye-opener. Like everyone else who has watched Hidden and The White Ribbon, I have pondered the meaning of leaving mysteries unsolved. Perhaps obtusely, I hadn't grasped something that has probably been evident to serious Haneke scholars for some time: could this not be a variant on Kafka? Ulrich Mühe stars as K, a man who arrives at a remote, wintry village on the understanding that he has been engaged as the official land surveyor. But there has been a mistake. There is no such engagement; yet, whenever K tries to speak to an official to iron out the misunderstanding, he is told that he lacks the right authority, the correct paperwork, or that the appropriate official is not at liberty to discuss the matter, and he has in any case not made the proper approach. The Castle, the feudal centre of this power, is never seen. Lost in the bureaucratic maze, K begins an affair with Frieda, played by Susanne Lothar, and the despairing intensity of their love stands out against the blank wall of this strange, closed, dysfunctional society.Ulrich Mühe and Susanne Lothar were later in the same year, 1997, to play the married couple in Haneke's horrifying shocker Funny Games (the two actors were to marry in real life) and the idea of being terrorised by two strange young men may have its origin in the two bizarre "assistants" that K has in The Castle, who find their way into his lodgings and even his bed. He is always chucking them out – something he is very much unable to do in Funny Games. Susanne Lothar is also something of a Haneke repertory player. She is to reappear in The White Ribbon, in a similarly dark role, redolent of defeated sexuality and self-loathing. Mühe was to earn his moment of fame in the widely admired Stasi drama The Lives of Others in 2006, playing the East German police-state snooper who finds a kind of redemption. His death from cancer at the age of 54 in 2007 was desperately sad – who knows what else this superb actor might have achieved? In any case, his performance as K is outstanding. Haneke said he cast Daniel Auteuil in Hidden because of his face – the face of a man who has a secret. I think perhaps the director might have found something intriguing in Mühe's face too: it looks like that of a middle-aged man, but sometimes that of someone much younger, even rather boyish. It is an open face, expressing bewilderment, incredulity, pain – but also defiance.Notably, Haneke deploys the severe "blackout" effect to end scenes, almost arbitrarily, a technique also seen in his Code Unknown: a sharp, alienating sort of punctuation. This has its ultimate expression at the very end: Haneke does not attempt to, as it were, sand down the broken stump of Kafka's unfinished manuscript. He does not try to round it out and create a sort of ending or fade-out. He just stops, and flashes up an announcement to the effect that this was all Franz Kafka wrote. Somehow, its unfinishedness is all the more disturbing. What happens to K? We never know. What was the point? Maybe all our lives will end like this. Kafkaesque is a word which has come to mean the individual's helplessness in the face of an incompetent or malign state apparatus. Haneke's film brings out the dimension of human pain: the pain of not knowing, not knowing what is going on, not knowing what you are supposed to be doing, or if something is your fault. The advances of the 20th century and beyond – rationalism, progress, science – are supposed to make things clearer and give us the answer in the end. But what if they don't? What if they can't eradicate human evil and what if all they do is intensify our agony at our ignorance and irrelevance? These are the ideas being gestured at in Haneke's films, and probably can't be appreciated without understanding this director's relationship with The Castle. At any rate, it's sent me back to Kafka's work.Michael HanekeWorld cinemaCannes 2009Franz KafkaPeter Bradshawguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Book of Genesis illustrated by R Crumb Robert Crumb's straight retelling of Genesis lacks his trademark humourIt's the old story. Milton tried to retell the Bible and discovered that Satan was a more interesting character than God, and now, three centuries later, Robert Crumb confirms that God is a hell of a lot less fun than Fritz the Cat. "The first book of the Bible graphically depicted! Nothing left out!" declares the cover of this 214-page comic version of Genesis, and for a moment you think it's a teasing double-entendre, capitalising on the fact that Crumb's depictions of sex have always been "graphic" in the porno sense of that word, and that there's plenty of deviant behaviour in the Old Testament that an impious illustrator might relish. But no. Crumb's Genesis fulfils its blurb on a solemnly literal level.All 50 chapters are present and correct, and, apart from some discreet nudity when there's begetting to be done, there's nothing to disqualify this from being sold in the staidest Christian bookstore. The text, heavily reliant on a recent translation by Robert Alter, reads like the King James partially revised, in haste, by a primary school teacher. Crumb is a non-believer but frowns on the liberties taken by some other graphic adapters of the scriptures. "This is a straight illustration job," he states, "with no intent to ridicule or make visual jokes." Intentional humour is indeed scarce, although the bit in Chapter 28 where God and the messengers of Abraham float down a heavenly ramp has a Teletubbyish daftness that made me smile.If the book does not intend to ridicule, what exactly is its intent? Hard to imagine. Crumb's lack of religious fervour means the images lack the weird mystery that suffuses the visions of, say, William Blake or David Tibet. But, with his gifts for satire and grotesque playfulness locked away, Crumb merely manages to depict the soap-opera antics of primitive Israelites in a manner that neither illuminates nor nuances them. His drawing style here – unexaggerated, painstakingly cross-hatched – is the same as he's used for other "serious" works in the past, such as his adaptations of Boswell's journals, Kafka's life story, Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, or the biographies of various American blues singers he adores. The difference is that there's no one, in the narrative of Genesis, through whom Crumb can vicariously live.Of course there is some fine artwork. In a project encompassing one and a half thousand panels, there ought to be. The evocation of human wickedness that precedes God's decision to flood the world has a nauseous pall of Bosnian war crimes about it. Noah's construction of the ark is masterfully handled. The genealogy pages swarm with tiny yet distinctly characterful portraits of semitic faces. Abram's haunted sleep when the Lord tells him his seed will be scattered for 400 years is powerfully imbued with preternatural dread. Too much of the book, however, differs too little in conception from the many other graphic Old Testament stories that have been produced by inferior artists. In his foreword, Crumb thanks a pal for supplying him with source material in the form of "hundreds of photos from Hollywood biblical epics". Contempt for the mainstream entertainment industry used to be one of Crumb's strongest instincts, so it's sad to think of him earnestly studying kitsch Hollywood movies for inspiration.In the long term, I suspect this book will be regarded as an inessential curio in Crumb's oeuvre. In the short term, it's likely to win lavish praise from people who are dazzled by the halo of "magnum opus" radiating off its hardback bulk (even the gothic lettering under the dustjacket is lustrous gold). It's a godsend for those sensitive souls who always wanted to admire Crumb's oft-trumpeted genius but couldn't stomach the copious lashings of bile and sperm.Actually, this is not Crumb's first attempt to infiltrate the bookshelves of respectable folks. In 2006, MQ Publications brought out The Sweeter Side of R Crumb, an anthology of miscellaneous sketches picked by "Mr Nicey-Nice Himself" specifically to charm those who might regard him as a "misanthropic sex pervert". That book was enlivened by flashes of inspiration: the pure urge to capture in ink whatever delighted or possessed the artist at that evanescent moment. The Book of Genesis, by comparison, comes across as the fruits of indentured drudgery. Not since Crumb last worked 9 to 5 – for a greetings card company in the mid-1960s – has his talent been so cramped, so subservient to the service of another agency's agenda. While I don't expect a man of 66, living contentedly in the south of France, to rail against the world as he once did, I can't help believing there must be more spirit in the old devil than this tome suggests.Michel Faber's latest book is The Fire Gospel (Canongate).Robert CrumbMichel Faberguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Critical Eye Round-up of reviews'Tis the season for Christmas round-ups and "Books of the Year" lists. "The publication of the magnificent six-volume Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters will count for many art lovers as the book event of the year," Rachel Campbell-Johnson announced in the Times, although in the Sunday Times Frank Whitford went one better: "It has already been declared by some not so much book of the year as of the decade." "This is a rare treasure," Margaret Drabble agreed in the New Statesman, "and a joy to handle and to read." A snip at £325."Historical ignorance breeds political apathy, and it is this deficiency that two excellent books will correct," Dan Jones noted in the Times, recommending David Horspool's The English Rebel and Ben Wilson's What Price Liberty?. "Both these books felt extremely relevant in a year of expenses scandals, the G20 protests and backbench rebellions in parliament." Dominic Sandbrook in the Daily Telegraph also chose The English Rebel, describing it as "a wonderfully old-fashioned narrative in which few pages pass without somebody losing his head to a masked axeman". Elsewhere in the Daily Telegraph, Boris Johnson chose Stanley I Presume by his father: "It is a rip-roaring read and I hope it helps him to break down the barriers of political correctness and win the safe Conservative seat he so richly deserves.""The novel that has dominated the year is Hilary Mantel's magnificent Man Booker prize-winning Wolf Hall," Lorna Bradbury wrote in the Daily Telegraph. "The triumph of the novel is its modern sensibility, which keeps it just the right side of pastiche." "Tour de force is a term much overused," Erica Wagner said in the Times, "yet it is applicable here: all Mantel's gifts are on display in this novel painting a searing portrait of intrigue at the court of Henry VIII." Other favourites included Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn ("A work of such skill, understatement and sly jewelled merriment could haunt you for life," Ali Smith warned in the Times Literary Supplement), JM Coetzee's Summertime ("Coetzee is back on form as the world's best novelist in English," Nicholas Shakespeare declared in the Daily Telegraph) and AS Byatt's The Children's Book ("Easily the best thing Byatt has written since Possession," Peter Kemp wrote in the Sunday Times). Robert Harris's Lustrum is dedicated to Peter Mandelson, who claimed it as his book of the year in the New Statesman. "You will not need to be a political animal to enjoy his vivid reconstruction of life at the top in ancient Rome," observed the Prince of Darkness."The most bracing read was The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929–1940," Seamus Heaney declared in the Times Literary Supplement, "a portrait of the Dubliner as a young European with a hard gemlike gift for language, learning and mockery." "Seamus Heaney has released a Collected Poems, reading each of his 12 collections on a series of CDs," Paul Batchelor recommended in the Times. "After countless critical appraisals, it is wonderful to be sent back to the poems by the man himself." "The single piece of literature that affected me most was Carol Ann Duffy's 'Last Post', marking the deaths of WWI veterans," Ian Hislop said in the Daily Telegraph. "When she became poet laureate some doubted whether 'public poetry' was possible any more. When I heard this poem read at Westminster Abbey, I knew they were wrong."Van GoghBoris JohnsonJM CoetzeeAli SmithPeter MandelsonSeamus HeaneySamuel BeckettCarol Ann Duffyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
How to calculate the odds without a calculator Short cuts which allow you to easily work out probabilities are worth their weight in goldJeff Rubens, editor of the American magazine The Bridge World, has written one of the most useful bridge books of recent years. Expert Bridge Simplified contains a number of suggestions to help you work out the best percentage play in a wide variety of different situations without resorting to a pocket calculator.Consider the problem South faces as declarer in six spades with:West leads the queen of hearts. You win with dummy's ace and… well, what would you do next? If you play a diamond to the jack and it holds the trick, what is your next move? If you play a spade to the queen and it loses to the king, what then? How many times out of 100 do you think you will make the contract? (obviously you won't have to play it 100 times, but such considerations are important if your team-mates are apt to blame you for bidding bad slams, since you will need to convince them that this is in fact a good slam).If a diamond to the jack holds, you will next cash the ace of spades, ensuring only one spade loser whenever it is possible to do so. If a spade to the queen loses to the king, you will use dummy's remaining heart entry to take the diamond finesse, hoping that it works and that the jack of spades will fall under the ace. You will make the contract a little less than half the time whichever line of play you follow, so this is a bad slam, but I won't tell your team-mates if you won't. To calculate which of the two lines above is better would be beyond most non-computers, but Rubens is always looking out for short cuts. If you finesse in diamonds first, you will gain compared to finessing in spades first when East has the queen of diamonds and West the singleton king of spades. If you finesse in spades first, you will gain when West has the queen of diamonds and the singleton jack of spades.In both cases the gain comes when West is short in spades, in which case he is more likely than East to have the queen of diamonds, so you should begin with a spade to the queen – and put your pocket calculator back in your pocket.BridgeZia Mahmoodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser: a perfect match Antonia Fraser's memoir of her life with Harold Pinter reveals the warmth, passion and romance in their marriage. And, says his biographer Michael Billington, it shows he was not always in a bad temperDo revelations about Pinter's private life shed light on his work?Diaries and journals are always compulsive affairs. I defy anyone to open Pepys, Boswell or the Goncourts at any page and not carry on reading. And, on a theatrical level, Peter Hall's Diaries offer the best ever account of the hazards of running a theatre. But Antonia Fraser's memoir of her life with Harold Pinter, Must You Go?, is extraordinary by any standards. Based on the diaries she kept during her 33-year-long relationship with the dramatist, it is simultaneously a love story, an intimate portrait of a great writer and an exercise in self-revelation.I should, from the outset, disclaim any objectivity. As Pinter's biographer, I was given rare access to the man himself and I'm happy to say remained on friendly terms with him right up to the end.I was amused, however, to be told by Antonia, shortly after Harold's death, that my book was never expected to happen. In order to fend off another would-be biographer, Harold and Antonia concocted a plan whereby they told the persistent writer that I had been asked to do the authorised version. They both assumed I'd be far too busy to accept and were astonished when I said yes.Reading Antonia's book, I was also intrigued to discover that as long ago as 1980 they had discussed a future biographer ("What a morbid subject," said Harold) and decided, very astutely, that Ronnie Harwood would be the man for the job.Inevitably, my relationship with Harold was complex. I had to get close enough to him to write the book while remaining sufficiently detached to review his work. I can truly say that Harold and I hardly ever fell out: only once did he show irritation. That was when, on the opening day of a Pinter festival in New York in 2001, I pushed a note under his hotel door about criticism from Germany of his attack on the trial of Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes. That evening in the bar I asked whether he got my note. He simply growled in response.But that was a rare event. During all my contact with Harold and Antonia, I was offered unwavering support. Antonia talked candidly about Harold for my book, gave me a mass of new information about his family's origins (revealing they were east European Ashkenazic rather than Portuguese Sephardic Jews) and has gone on being a good friend. I was more touched than she can have realised when she asked me to coach her granddaughter, Stella Powell-Jones, in reading one of Pinter's love poems for the family funeral. "Normally," said Stella, "I came to Grandad himself for this kind of help."So reading Antonia's book puts me in a strange position. I learned much that was new and had other impressions confirmed. But the dominant feeling I got was that the love of Harold and Antonia, which was passionate and intense, was based on the mutual force of their characters. Early on, just after their affair had got under way in 1975, Antonia was warned by her brother, Thomas: "You have a special problem. You are a woman and a strong character yet you want your husband to be stronger. Women with strong characters who want to dominate are always fine because there are plenty of weak men around. Also plenty of strong men for weak women. But yours is a special problem." Actually, Antonia concludes, "He's quite right in a maddening way."What may, initially, have seemed a problem was, arguably, the key to the relationship. If Harold was an irresistible force, Antonia could also, on occasion, be an immovable object. And one of the delights of the book is reading about their sometimes tempestuous political disagreements. On the matter of Milosevic, Antonia argued, rightly in my view, that it was legitimate to try him as a war criminal even if others were not similarly arraigned. And, when Harold claimed that the US was the world's most barbarous empire, Antonia reasonably argued that the Nazis or Pol Pot might have superior claims.But, although Harold and Antonia often had vehement political arguments, they vowed that they would not, as in the Bible, "let the sun go down upon our wrath".I was not totally surprised by this. But the book dispels the popular myth that Harold was the eternal grump and Antonia always the soothing diplomat. Antonia, although she has a great capacity for outward calm, comes out of the book as an independently strong character and a fierce champion of women in public life: one that led her to vote, however madly, for Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and to warm to Cherie Blair even when Harold was branding her husband a war criminal.The book should also put to bed for ever the idea that Harold spent all his life in a towering temper. In matters of the heart, he was a total romantic: one who arranged for the first house he and Antonia shared, in Launceston Place, to be strewn with banks of flowers on the day they moved in. "August 17, 1975. He took my hand and led me into the drawing room. Lo! A vast arrangement of foxy lilies and other glories in the window and another on the mantelpiece, a huge arrangement of yellow flowers in the pink boudoir . . . I shall never forget them. Or Harold's expression. A mixture of excitement, triumph and laughter."'I'm not just sitting here waiting to die'He was also – and this really will shock some – capable of self-mockery. There's a vivid account of Harold exploding with laughter when he saw Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce. The reason? He saw in the frustrated rage and impotence of Derek Newark as a suburban husband an echo of himself.If anything in the book surprised me, it was how accommodating Harold was towards Antonia's Catholicism: something I signally failed to take on board in my own book on Pinter. I knew – because he told me many times – that Harold had abandoned the Jewish faith after his barmitzvah at the age of 13. What I learned from Antonia's book is that in 1990, 10 years into their marriage, she persuaded him to have a ceremony of validation in an upstairs chapel at Farm Street. It helped that Father Michael Campbell Johnston, who conducted the ceremony, was a leading supporter of liberation theology in Latin America. But, when it came to the actual service, Harold joined in vocally and enthusiastically celebrated the idea of a fruitful life. This doesn't mean Pinter was innately religious. But it does prove, as Antonia claims, that "he had a deep sense of the spiritual".Time and again, in fact, the book draws attention to the complexity, and even contradictoriness, of Pinter's nature. I nearly fell out of my chair when I read Antonia's comment, made in 1977, that Harold "resents any effort to link his plays closely to a particular incident in his past". It was certainly true that Harold, who was writing Betrayal at the time, was anxious that it should not be seen as a literal account of his affair with Joan Bakewell, the existence of which I revealed, nearly 20 years later, in my biography.Yet while Harold was never a purely autobiographical writer, I found that his imagination was invariably triggered by a memory of some past event. The Caretaker was born out of an image that stuck in Harold's mind when he and his first wife, Vivien, were living in a modest flat in Chiswick High Road: one day he paused on the stairs and looked in a room to see the tramp who had taken up residence rifling through a bag, silently watched by his benefactor. And, while The Homecoming is a universal play about family life, it had its origins in the story of one of Harold's Hackney friends who for years kept his marriage to a Gentile girl a secret from his Jewish family.Even more surprising than Harold's disavowal of his work's personal origins is the record of an evening in 1977 spent with Samuel Beckett and his close friend, Barbara Bray. Since Beckett hardly ever went to the theatre, Harold acted out for him the Simon Gray piece, Close of Play, that he was directing at the time. This prompted a discussion in which Bray claimed that everything in art is political. To which Harold replied, vehemently, "Nothing I have written, Barbara, nothing, ever, is political."This hardly squares with Pinter's later assertion that early plays such as The Birthday Party and The Hothouse were driven by a strong political motive. But, while Pinter-sceptics may seize on this as proof of his inconsistency, I suspect it simply proves Harold's dislike of aesthetic dogma. I can actually picture him bubbling with resentment at being told by Bray what art has to be.But, if Antonia's book sometimes makes one's eyebrows start upwards in surprise, it also offers the most vividly intimate portrait we're ever likely to have of the real Harold Pinter. It records the energy and exuberance for living that burned off him and that made him so attractive to male and female friends alike. It describes his passionate love of England: its cricket, its countryside, its natural beauty and its historic regard for liberty. It was precisely because he saw that liberty being curtailed and eroded that he became such a ferocious opponent of successive governments. Indeed, the book pins down the embattled despair that Harold sometimes felt in later years as his sense of the world's injustice coincided with his own declining health. But he never gave up. As he said when about to perform at the National in his own sketch, Press Conference, while wrestling with chemotherapy for his cancer, "I'm not just sitting here waiting to die."This for me sparks a memory of Harold in his later years when he was afflicted by cancer of the oesophagus and pemphigus: his consideration for others. It may seem a relatively trivial anecdote, but I rang Harold one day when I had been summoned to hospital for an endoscopy on account of sharp internal pains. The literature I got from the hospital implied that there was no need for an anaesthetic while a length of tube was stuck down your throat: real men, it suggested, didn't need such things. Seeking advice from Harold, I was instantly told, "Don't be such a bloody fool – of course you must have an anaesthetic." Not only that. At a time when Harold was weighed down by his own, far greater, medical problems, he rang up immediately after the endoscopy to ensure that all was well. That, for me, was a measure of the man's kindness and generosity.That day, anyone who crossed his path was in dangerAll this – and much more – comes out in Antonia's memoir. It is not the story of a saint. Everyone who knew Harold was aware that, on occasions, his anger was disproportionate to the event: I once heard him, at a Dublin dinner party, going hell for leather at some poor chap who had guilelessly suggested that Johnson was a greater figure than Swift. On another occasion in Leeds, admittedly when he was severely ill, he tore into some local academic whom he mistakenly thought had laughed at his reminder that the American president was, like many tinpot dictators, also the military commander-in-chief. That was an evening when anyone who crossed Harold's path was in danger.But what you get from the book is a portrait both of an inordinately fascinating, richly complex man and writer ("the half of Harold which is not Beckett," says Antonia, "is Hemingway") and of a genuine "marriage of true minds".Although the book is free from personal vanity, it also reminds one just how much Harold owed to Antonia. Even with her own career to pursue, she was always on hand to advise, support and encourage: it was Antonia who tentatively suggested – correctly as it turned out – that there was a scene missing in the first draft of Betrayal ("December 31, 1977: Harold very cross and went for a walk round Holland Park. Came back and wrote the scene. It was brilliant and not at all what I had asked for of course") and who recommended that Harold's last play, Celebration, should be paired with his first, The Room.It's a testament to the resilience of Harold and Antonia's relationship that it overcame both the insane press hysteria that accompanied their affair and the initial doubts of Antonia's parents. I am hardly an impartial witness. But I would say that if this remarkable book proves anything, it is that marriage thrives when it is a partnership of equals and that Harold and Antonia, as a pair of strong-willed and impassioned romantics, were that rare thing: a perfect match.Harold PinterBiographyTheatreMichael Billingtonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |