Short Stories, Irish literature, Classics, Modern Fiction, Contemporary Literary Fiction, The Japanese Novel, Post Colonial Asian Fiction, The Legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and quality Historical Novels are Among my Interests








Tuesday, March 19, 2024

The Favourite - A 2018 Film Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos- Starring Emma Stone, Olivia Coleman and Rachel Weisz



 The Favourite - A 2018 Film Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos- Starring Emma Stone, Olivia Coleman and Rachel Weisz


Available on Netflix

Having recently completed my third viewing of Poor Things I was delighted to find on Netflix another movie directed by  Yorgos Lanthimos starring Emma Stone, The Favourite.

The Favourite is set in early 18th century Great Britain. It follows the story of  Queen Anne's  frail health and her relationship with two  women: her close friend Lady Sarah, who governs the country in her stead, and Abigail, a new servant who  arrives at the court.

The set are marvelous, the male aristocrats are besieged fops, the Queen a bit mental, with some sex of various sorts happening.  We see the brutal way servants were treated and the sycophantic based government of 18th century England as depicted by Yorgos Lanthimos.

The Favourite received critical acclaim for its acting, screenplay, direction, and visual style. It won numerous awards, including the Academy Award for Best Actress for Olivia Colman, the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Colman, and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for Colman.




Monday, March 18, 2024

"Fire Starter" - A Short Story by Alan McCormick - 2022 - An Irish Short Story Month XIII Work

Irish Short Story Month XIII 




"Fire Starter" is the first story by the highly awarded Wiclow resident Alan McCormick to be featured in The Reading Life.  Going forward I hope to delve deeply into his work.

"Fire Starter" is set in an asylum of some sort, the exact location and nature of it are a  bit cloked in shadows. Conventional religion is employed as part of the therapy"

"Theo thinks he’s Christ.  At my first attempt to eat breakfast in the retreat’s communal dining room, he’s shouting:

‘I can save some of you but I won’t be able to save all of you!’

‘That’s fine, Theo, do whatever you can,’ Simon the warden replies, pulling him away

Later, as I try to eat, I hear sobbing coming from the lounge.

Simon’s head appears around the doorway: ‘Theo has had an unfortunate accident, kids,’ he says, ‘and won’t be staying with us for a while.’

Simon’s wife, Ursula, wears tight purple leggings that smell of citrus and sandalwood. She looks young for fifty, and speaks as if she’s a WW2 German spy expertly repeating dated bookish English, a Teutonic phrase occasionally intervening between exacting vowels and corrective grammar. She is also a healer.

I lie on my bed, eyes closed, head propped on a mound of pillows as she kneels beside me, lightly stroking my left temple, my face turned into the soapy incense of her legs, soothing purples filling my eyelids.

‘Breathe in the calm beautiful energy of God’s nature. God loves you if you are good, and he loves you even more if you are bad. God loves you and so does everyone else.’

‘Even Theo?’

‘Especially, this Theo,’ she replies."

The narrator is a patient, inmate  at the asylum.  There is a very powerful description of a therapy session.

I do not want to spoil the plot for first time readers but I do wish to share a bit more the amazing prose of McCormick.

"Tall red spikes of light jag above a bush behind them, and Theo arrives on the lawn swinging a flaming stick above his head. He runs past Saskia who dances unsteadily around an upturned wheelchair. Sparks scatter, the crackling sound of scorched wood; the pungent smell of sulphur as he gets near to us. Ruth walks purposefully from the house to stand in his way, licks from the stick’s flame reflected in her eyes. She holds out her arms to welcome him. Theo stops and prods the stick toward her, flickers of fire falling to the ground and dying by her feet. She stays still, her arms held open, and smiles. Theo drops the stick and walks slowly into her embrace. She holds him, and then frees one arm to invite me in too."

You can read "Fire Starter" and other stories on author's website 

https://alanmccormickwriting.com/

Alan McCormick lives with his family in Wicklow. He’s a Trustee and former writer in residence for InterAct Stroke Support, a charity employing actors to read fiction and poetry to stroke patients.

His writing has won prizes and been widely performed and published, including recently in The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Southword, Sonder and Exacting Clam magazines, and previously in Salt’s Best British Short Stories, A Wild and Precious Life – A Recovery Anthology, Modern Nature Anthology – Responses to Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, The Poetry Bus, The Bridport and Fish Prize Anthologies, Popshot, Litro and Confingo.

Work has appeared online at Epoque Press, Words for the Wild, 3:AM Magazine, Dead Drunk Dublin, Trasna, Mono, The Quietus, Fictive Dream, The Willesden Herald and Found Polaroids.

His story ‘Firestarter’ came second in the 2022 Francis MacManus RTE Short Story Competition and ‘Boys on Film’ came second in The 2023 Plaza Prizes Sudden Fiction competition. Stories in the past have won the Ruth Rendell InterAct Stroke Support Story Competition, The Liverpool International Short Story Competition and the Middlesex Literary Festival Story Prize.

DOGSBODIES and SCUMSTERS , his collection of short stories with flash shorts inspired by Jonny Voss’s pictures, was published by Roast Books and long-listed for the Edge Hill Prize.  

Alan and Jonny also collaborate on illustrated shorts known as Scumsters – see more at Deaddrunkdublin and Scumsters.blogspot  






Friday, March 15, 2024

"The Big River" - A Short Story by Desmond Hogan - 2017 - An Irish Short Story Month XIii Post

 Irish Short Story Month XI




Today's Story, "The Big River" is included in the most recent collection of short stories by Desmond Hogan, The History of Magpies.

Shauna Gilligan's Highly Illuminating Introduction to  Desmond Hogan

http://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/2012/06/desmond-hogan-irelands-most-famous.html

I have been reading Desmond Hogan for 12  years now.  I take his work very seriously.  I was first introduced to his work by Shauna Gilligan, PhD, author of Happiness Comes From Nowhere.  Through her kindness I met Hogan in May of 2003, at the office of Lilliput Press.  We spoke of two authors for whom we share great admiration, Nathaneal West and Zora Hurston, among other things.

"We were here when the Christians first came to Ireland and we will be here when they leave" - A proverb of Irish Travellers 

A considerable portion of the work of Desmond Hogan focuses on Irish Travellers.  Irish travellers have an ancient history.   They Are  acknowledged as an ethnic group.

Travellers play an important part in "The Big River", numerous suicides mostly by hanging are alluded to in the story,

"‘Shannon Crotty was my cousin. He hung himself. His wife Ethlinn Flavin from Knocknaheeny in Cork hung herself before him. Her brother Besty hung himself in between them. A lot of Travellers are hanging themselves now. One man because he had cancer. A girl because she was pregnant and did not want her father to know it."

(Amusingly in the Comedy TV series Derry Girls Travellers are depicted as dangerous and terrifying.)

Hogan makes extensive use of colour and references to historical-cultural entities in "The Big River" which I find fascinating:

"In their trailer the newly weds had a picture of two elephants kissing, horns wrapped around one another’s trunks: a photograph of Santa Claus presenting a cup for hurling to Shannon as a child, in a black bow tie; the dead Hunger Striker Martin Hurson with miner’s locks, white shirt, white tie, smile reserved for weddings; a statue of Saint Patrick with ashen hair and peach lips; a parrot with flaked red head; a pair of beige polka-dot wellingtons; a donkey and four Edwardian children, boy in young Edward VIII cap, clinging to a little girl’s waist on top of the donkey"

I hope to post on other stories by Desmond Hogan during ISSM XIII.

Mel Ulm







Thursday, March 14, 2024

Poor Things - A 2023 Film Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos - Starring Emma Stone (winner 2024 Academy Award for Best Actress), William Defoe and Mark Ruffalo




 Poor Things - A 2023 Film Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos - Starring Emma Stone (winner 2024 Academy Award for Best Actress), William Defoe and Mark Ruffalo

Academy Award 2024 - Best Actress in Leading Role

Academy Award 2024 - Best Production Design

Academy Award 2024 - Best Costume Design 

Academy Award 2024 - Best Makeup and Hair Styling 

I totally love Poor Things. It is incredibly beautiful with a  masterful use of colour. Emna Stone is truly magical as Bella Baxter. Poor Things is Hilarious, Magical, Sensuous, Sexuality Enthalling  and Scary,  Cinema as High Art. 

The story follows Bella Baxter (Stone), a young woman in Victorian London who is brought back to life via brain transplant by an eccentric scientist, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Dafoe). She is eager to learn about the world and soon finds herself on an adventure with a roguish lawyer named Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo). 

The movie has settings in London, looking very Gothic Horror Movies style in Black and White, in Paris, Lisbon,  Alexandria and abroad a ship. I especially liked how Bella became an avid reader of philosophy mixed in with some furious jumping.

With a bit of tounge in cheek Poor Thing is kind of a menage of Frankenstein, My Fair Lady, A Beautiful Mind and Debbie Does Dallas.  


Bella Baxter, not unlike the Buddha, leaves her safe environment to discover the real world. Poor Things, as in Don Quixote, depicts an innocent in a corrupt world. Going back to the start of Western Literature, Bella would have enjoyed furious jumping with Gilgamesh, probably exhausting him, and cruising with Odysseus.



Mel Ulm




Wednesday, March 13, 2024

"Fictive Dreams" - A Short Story by Brian Kirk - August 2017. Iish Short Story Month XIII

Irish Short Story Month - XIII



I first observed Irish Short Story  in March 2011.  Irish Literature and history is an important aspect of The Reading Life.



I first encountered the work of Brian Kirk in March 2013, during ISSM III.  One of the reasons I have continued on with ISSM for eleven years is to provide me with the motivation to keep reading writers as supremely talented and perceptive as Brian  Kirk, watching them develop, expand and keep up the grand tradition of the Irish Short Story.  I posted on two short stories by Brian Kirk in 2013 and with the post you are now reading have posted on two of his short stories in 2018. 

 We also did a very wide ranging Q and A session in 2013.  (There are now four links to stories by Kirk in posts on his work on my blog, all of which I strongly recommend to lovers of the form.)  

"Fictive Dreams" can be read at
 
www.briankirkwriter.com

"Fictive Dreams", told in the first person, relays the late teenage years of an aspiring young poet.  He is from a large family with numerous siblings, none at all a bit orienteering toward literary or intellectual pursuits. He lives a brief train ride from Dublin, the Emerald City of young Irish poets.  After high-school as his parents cannot afford college, he gets a job working on a farm.  

He has a mentor, a middle-aged aged gay man who sees himself riding to success as a literary agent on the young man's already one highly regarded poem.  

I do not want to divulge much of the intriguing plot.  I will share the opening of the story in order to convey a sense of the elegance of the work.

"There were times when I wished I was an only child. Sometimes I thought that if my parents were to die suddenly, in a freak accident or by some mysterious but swift illness, I would not grieve too sorely for them. I loved them both, of course, but at the same time I yearned for the certain changes, the endless possibilities, their deaths would surely bring.

I come from a big family, but worse, I am the youngest, the baby, the runt of the litter. I can never decide which of these pithy descriptions I like least. In the first case, even now as a young man, I am immediately infantilized, and in the second derided as being physically weak – which I must admit I am relative to many of my peers.

Even before my English teacher, Mr. McIntosh, singled me out for praise, I sensed I was different. My mother had always doted on me, her youngest, and gave me to think I was special, in a way that was always unspecified. But, at the same time, I was equally alive to my limitations, acutely aware of the possibility that I might be just another nobody. For this reason I sought to create the special person that I felt must surely live within me by altering my external appearance, and in so doing I became strange in the eyes of my family, my friends, my peers and the whole town.

The town was part of the problem. It encompasses the geographical site of the houses, shops and streets that make it up, but it also includes the surrounding town lands, the houses and farms, and more particularly all of the people who reside therein. It’s not that I disliked the town, but I savoured each moment I spent away from it. When I finished school I began to make regular trips to Dublin on the train and I relished those journeys."

His website has a detailed biography and links to this and other of his stories

http://briankirkwriter.com

I hope to follow the work of Brian Kirk for many years.


Mel Ulm
The Reading Life


Tuesday, March 12, 2024

"Words" - A Short Story by Carol Shields - Included in The Collected Stories of Carol Shields- 2004


 This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.


The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all in 2024.


Buriedinprint.com


"Words", four pages, is the tenth story by Carol Shields I have so far read,


"Words" is a fascinating story about global warming seen through a marriage that originated in a conference, spanning ten years.  They met as delegates to a global conference.


"WHEN THE WORLD FIRST STARTED HEATING UP, an international conference was held in Rome to discuss ways of dealing with the situation. Ian’s small northern country—small in terms of population, that is, not in size—sent him to the meetings as a junior observer, and it was there he met Isobel, who was representing her country as full-fledged delegate....They played truant, missing half the study sessions, the two of them lingering instead over tall, cool drinks in the café they found...The second International Conference was held ten years later. The situation had become grave. One could use the word crisis and not be embarrassed. Ian—by then married to Isobel, who was at home with the children—attended every session, and he listened attentively to the position papers of various physicists, engineers, geographers and linguists from all parts of the world. It was a solemn but distinguished assembly; many eminent men and women took their places at the lectern, including the spidery old Scottish demographer who years earlier had made the first correlation between substrata temperatures and highly verbalized societies. In every case, these speakers presented their concerns with admirable brevity, each word weighted and frugally chosen, and not one of them exceeded the two-minute time limitation. For by now no one really doubted that it was the extravagance and proliferation of language that had caused the temperature of the earth’s crust to rise, and in places—California, Japan, London—to crack open"

The story forces through the theories advanced to ponder or look for a meaningful conclusion as the climate crisis becomes worse every month..

The Carol Shields Literary Trust Website has an excellent biography 


https://www.carol-shields.com/biography.html









 




Monday, March 11, 2024

The Zone of Interest - Directed by Jonathan Glazer - Starring Christian Friedel as Rudolf Höss -'Sandra Hüller as Hedwig Höss - 2024 Academy Award Winner for Best International Picture and Best Sound Design


 

The Zone of Interest - Directed by Jonathan Glazer - Starring Christian Friedel as Rudolf Höss -'Sandra Hüller as Hedwig Höss - 2024 Academy Award Winner for Best International Picture and Best Sound Design 

One Hour 46 Minutes 

Available for Purchase on YouTube and Amazon Prime 

Among the numerous print reviews of The Zone of Interest I found that of the Los Angeles Times particularly perceptive.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2023-12-14/the-zone-of-interest-review-jonathan-glazer-drama-auschwitz-holocaust-wwii


The film focuses on the Hosses as they strive to build a dream life for their family in a house in zone of interest next to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp.  A wall separates their property from the camp.They have five children. Hoss is a dedicated father, reading stories to his children.

When the mother of Mrs Hoss visits she tells her daughter she has done very well. They have a beautiful garden, the household staff are a mixture of prisoners and Poles.  Hoss seems to be a Nazi for career purposes more than ideology,

We never see directly the horrors of Auschwitz but there are sounds of gun shots and screams.  The smoke from the ovens is always visible and the ashes of the murdered get into everything.  

. The Zone of Interest premiered at the 76th Cannes Film Festival on 19 May 2023 to acclaim, winning both the Grand Prix and FIPRESCI Prize, and was named one of the top-five international films of 2023 by the National Board of Review. It won three BAFTAs (including Film not in the English Language), two Academy Awards (Best International Feature and Best Sound), and three Golden Globe Awards.

In his acceptance speech at the Oscars the director Jonathan Glazer he hoped the film would make people think about the walls the set up to allow us to ignore  the Middle East War.


The Zone of Interest is High Art.  Along with Schindler's List and The Pianist it is essential viewing