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in the film there is a deathly silence and a black screen it was so effective and the shock value when you are returned to the cafe de paris as part of the little boy s story was monumental sometimes less is more blitz will be screened everywhere i recommend it the same is true of conclave superb cast gorgeous locations many of which are not available to the public gaze so feast your eyes the film is based on the novel by robert harris if you have read it you will know the denouement if not i would recommend that you don t read it yet and that you don t look too closely at the cast list i was rather surprised at the audience reaction sometimes they laughed at some very strange moments this too will be everywhere its a great story and an illuminating film this was my first film of the festival you cannot win them all juliana rojas has had three films at the festival and i remember good manners as being very coherent and gripping cidade campo is very much a film in two parts beware the semi colon cidade worked very well a woman arrives in the city finds the address she is looking for there is enough back story based on a real event to make absolute sense of the film s purpose but it fell away after the semi colon campo while interestingly filmed with some sensitivity dumped two young women in the countryside with very little to go on except that the farm had belonged to one of the girl s father at this point the nudity drugs sex warning came into full play but since it was hard to relate to the young women where had they come from what had they given up to be there i personally had no interest in their situation it was too bizarre and too untethered i do understand the idea of the contrast but since the two parts had nothing to link them it made very little sense this was not an aesop fable the first part might have been but the second part began in such a way as to leave nothing to hold on to the best experience so far was today last swim is the first film of the iranian director sasha nathwani set in london spread over one day spent with five young people the cinemagoers known more than the young people there is a sense of time passing opportunities ahead and opportunities missed it was made after the pandemic was nearly over and there was a general sense of time lost and the grabbing of happy events to make up for it this is definitively not a pandemic film but it had an essence of it the best thing about a festival world premiere is that friends and collaborators are in the cinema with the paying audience and this gives everyone a very unique experience sasha asked everyone who had been part of making the film to stand up and it was about half the people there such a joy definitely a film to look out for deba hekmat as zainab was mesmerising leave a comment filed under london film festival travel uncategorized tagged as brazilian city life edward berger juliana rojas london life sasha nathwani steve mcqueen world war ii october 9 2024 10 19 am better late than never rather behind the times i have begun to read mike herron s long series about washed up spies who operate better than their masters and who are consigned to a strange outhouse in the shadow of the barbican london to execute mundane tasks but whose adventures spin wildly out of orbit slow horses begins a series of to date eight novels the writer is likened often to john le carre these novels are about men and women who at some point have screwed up and are side lined i arrived late in the field but intend to make up for lost ground spurred on by reading javier marias rather than personal recommendation though that too has played its part the team if you can call it that is made up of men and women of varying degrees of expertise and in each novel a different group become involved in an action which if it goes well can be attributed to head office in regents park and if badly to slough house spies at this level are expendable regretted by their colleagues but forgotten by hq the writing is compelling skillful and pacy what s not to like leave a comment filed under books crime culture espionage travel uncategorized tagged as javier marias john le carré london mike herron spies october 7 2024 12 03 pm the last of three the final volume of a series that started with the silence of the girls the women of the iliad given a voice we began with briseis war price of achilles and the cause of the great sulk the women of troy took us to the sack of troy and the parcelling out of the remaining women to the greek heroes and now here is cassandra on her way with agamemnon cassandra the priestess now despoiled and doubly cursed first with the power of prophecy and then with the disbelief her prophecies will be ignored she knows that they will arrive safely so is unconcerned by the raging storm but she also knows that having arrived she and agamemnon will die horribly but naturally no one believes her this has been a gripping reinvention of the iliad with all the drama and the action but seen from a different female perspective homer clearly had no interest in what the women thought or felt pat barker has teased out their stories for a twenty first century audience hopefully some of them will turn back to the epic poem leave a comment filed under art books culture greek myths and legends history travel uncategorized tagged as cassandra pat barker the iliad october 7 2024 11 43 am booker longlist 2024 final this new novel by richard powers had mixed reviews and failed to get on the shortlist for the booker prize i suspect that playground has been seriously underrated it is a complex three strand novel a long standing relationship which starts in boyhood between two very different and socially disparate boys a young girl whose father is an engineer and friend of jacques cousteau who uses the first aqualung and becomes a diver in a man s world and finally the island inhabitants of makatea a french polynesian island raped for its phosphate deposits and then left forgotten planet earth is seventy five percent water on its surface area but when you factor in the ocean depths the small percentage upon which land creatures live drops into single figures richard powers has in his latest novels tried to focus the reader upon the fragility of the planet s hidden parts root systems and trees and now the water lands playground i s a profoundly insightful look at the ocean and playing in it are a multitude of fascinating creatures these we will visit with evelyne beaulieu who ends up as a nonagenarian on makatea how the other characters reach the island is part of the novel s complexity and interest leave a comment filed under booker longlist 2024 environment travel uncategorized tagged as artificial intelligence french polynesia oceanography richard powers september 19 2024 11 08 pm who knew another masterful and enthralling novel from robert harris who never ceases to surprise this extraordinary narrative would be hard to believe if it did not come with impeccable sources precipice is the true story of a most unlikely love affair between a old man in his sixties and a young woman in her mid twenties set just before the beginning of the first world war the young woman in question is part of the bright young set know as the coterie which included many of the most entitled young men in society at the time her name is venetia stanley the daughter of lord sheffield moderately wealthy and with properties in wales the midlands and london her lover is non other than the liberal prime minister herbert asquith i wrote that it was the true story however much of the novel is fictional what still exists to prove the intensity of the affair are all asquith s letters around five hundred and sixty of them to which mr harris has been given unfettered access although it is quite clear that venetia responded her letters have not survived so here is part of the fiction furthermore in the novel the matter is being unofficially investigated by a special branch of the metropolitan police paul deemer is also a fiction the affair continues even after the onset of the war with asquith writing to her while politics raged around him even making short notes to her during cabinet meetings post at that time was a very different operation from our experience today the two of them could exchange as many as three missives a day each paul deemer s investigation reveals to the reader the astonishing carelessness that asquith shows as he repeated tells venetia top secrets even at the height of the war so that she became unwillingly the repository of knowledge that no one else in the nation knew eventually his arrogance in burdening her thus kills her affection after all her friends were going into action dying and being wounded and at the same time she was being made aware of how badly the war was going and could not tell anyone leave a comment filed under books history travel uncategorized war tagged as gallipoli herbert asquith robert harris venetia stanley world war i september 18 2024 11 58 am water water everywhere so obviously it was a relief to dive into this latest novel by elif shafak ms shafak has an affinity for extended narrative her previous booker longlisted novel 10 minutes 38 seconds in this strange world also takes the reader into a braided trajectory involving characters who have not actually met in life but have passed each other maybe in there are rivers in the sky we follow a single drop of water from the head of ashurbanipal king of mestopotamia in nineveh to the mouth of a baby where it falls as a snowflake by the river thames in 1840 to the river tigris and the last drop of water slipped into the mouth of narin in the siege of mount sinjar in 2014 the characters upon whom this drop of water falls are various three dimensional and vivid arthur smyth king of sewers and slums grows up to become an expert on cuneiform writing and discover the lost poem of gilgamesh narin a yazidi girl growing up within her threatened community near the tigris in 2014 zuleekhah a hydrologist living on a boat moored in the thames whose work involves water in all its aspects each of these characters have a story to tell which is braided together by the author to make a coherent tale one of wonder at the treasures of nineveh the great stone lamassus arriving at the british museum and glimpsed by arthur the horrors and brutality meted out to the yazidis over centuries culminating in a massacre by isis in the 21st century and the strange background of the hydrologist and her uncle malek who somehow has amassed a fortune huge enough for him to become a collector of many of the items previously seen or held by other characters in this wonderfully enticing and entrancing novel leave a comment filed under art books culture environment geography history modern history religion travel uncategorized tagged as ancient history elif shafak lapis lazuli nineveh river thames river tigris the epic of gilgamesh victorian london yazidis september 18 2024 11 29 am booker longlist 2024 7 i found this a very slow burn and at the end had a feeling of so what so it came as a great surprise to find it on the shortlist and what a shortlist more on than later once the richard powers novel has actually been published though i daresay there will be an unexpected dip in his possible sales as his title is not on the shortlist even back to rachel kushner the premise of this story told by the central and pretty much only character though there are others sketched in is of an agent provocateur infiltrated by some private entity into a group of environmentalists in france aiming to provoke them into some violent action during an agricultural fair due to be held later on creation lake covers her arrival with the group settling in and not being part of any particular gang she is not popular with the women partly because she is having an affair with one of the men who has a wife on site the narrator knows that this is only temporary she will disappear as soon as the action is in progress the writing is dry and observational which since it is only her narrative is to be expected but i had no sympathy with her and hardly found any emotional attachment to the group or what their aims were all understandable since the agent had no interest in them either but i need more than this from a novel leave a comment filed under booker longlist 2024 books environment politics travel uncategorized tagged as environmental activism france rachel kushner september 10 2024 4 35 pm island hopping two very different but incredibly readable novels whale fall is set on a small island off the coast of britain and a whale has beached manod feels somehow that her world is ending and the arrival of two anthropologists to study the culture and customs of the welsh islanders many of whom do not speak english simply adds to the tension manod can speak both languages and the two english scientists latch on to her in ways that lead her to believe that they may be her passage out from the islands a tender but unforgiving look at island life while the whale becomes the metaphorical symbol of manod s hopes and fears elizabeth o connor has managed to put into prose the way this is graphically portrayed in the actual disintegration and dismembering of the whale s carcass francesca segal has gone the other way and invented a whole island culture and custom in some far distant ocean an example of pristine or nearly pristine biodiversity welcome to glorious tuga finds charlotte a newly trained vet who has secured a grant to study the island s remaining gold coin tortoises in flight from her forbidding mother on the voyage out she is seasick and the only doctor on board is another passenger a returning tugan this is a wholly delightful book full of twists and turns island secrets and hidden treasures friendship loyalty and rivalry all play their part and above all it is the first volume of a trilogy hurrah leave a comment filed under books culture environment travel uncategorized tagged as biodiversity elizabeth o connor francesca segal island life whale beaching august 30 2024 6 06 pm not the longlist 2024 these two titles were on the tbr pile and to the outward eye would appear to have nothing in common but quite coincidentally the two principal characters suffer an identical life changing accident stockholm sven in a natural disaster and john o shea in a war time battle both novels have an historical background the memoirs of stockholm sven is loosely based on a real life explorer i have my cousin to thank for this recommendation and i thoroughly enjoyed this novel sven is uncomfortable with life in sweden his propensity to lose one job after another is legion and so finally he ends up as nursemaid to his sister s children when they are old enough to go to school sven is once again out of a job he ends up in a mining town in svalbard an arctic archipelago where after less that one yea...
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