The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

 The Sisters

By Jonas Hassen Khemiri

The Sisters and The Brothers might be more apt, since this saga follows the parallel and periodically intersecting lives of two sets of three siblings born in Sweden of a Tunisian-Swedish union. In both cases, the Tunisian parent is shifty, unreliable, inexplicably absent, withholding. The Swedish parent is solid but colorless. In this autobiographical novel, the narrator, who shares the author’s first and last names, is the oldest of three brothers whose Tunisian father lets them down, repeatedly, while their hardworking Swedish mother keeps them afloat. The three sisters are the daughters of a Swedish father who died early, and an unstable, cold Tunisian mother who repeatedly abandons them, dipping in and out of schizophrenic episodes. Ina, the oldest sister, like Jonas, the oldest brother, is abnormally tall, and carries the weight of responsibility. The middle sister, Evelyn, is the irresponsible charmer, and the youngest, Anastasia, the damaged drug dependent.

This is not Khemiri’s first work of fiction, but it is his first to be written in English. It shares the length and exhaustive detail of many first autobiographical works. It also subscribes the unhurried sense of time of Scandinavian writers. The chapters weave in and out of unconnected anecdotes not entirely justified by the resulting final tapestry. Some one-sentence passages move with almost Joycean propulsive force, but others indulge in play-by-play, pointless accounts of a basketball game, for example. Still, Khemiri’s voice is distinctive and often compelling, if the reader is prepared to go along for a ride where the detours, not the destination, are the purpose.

Did Nolan “whitewash” Homer? Should he have?

 Did Nolan “whitewash” Homer? Should he have?

The self-styled “champions of Western civilization” who are outraged by Christopher Nolan’s revisionist version of the Odyssey should be defending it instead. Why? The Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer, who may have lived circa the 8thC BCE, retell Bronze Age myths that preceded their author by some 500 years. So Homer’s retelling of these myths was not only influenced by the mores of his own time and place, but also by what he imagined the lives of Bronze Age Acheans to have been. In a word, or rather three of Hobbes’s: nasty, brutish, and short. Men were violent, cruel, greedy, deeply ignorant and superstitious. They were also misogynist. In Homer’s retelling, women and demi-goddesses seduced men to betray and enthrall them. The infidelity of Sparta’s queen Helen is the justification for launching “a thousand ships” of war against Troy. Calypso and Circe lure, deceive, blackmail, and enslave Odysseus and his men. Only patient Penelope falls on the right side of the “Madonna or whore” divide.

Is this the edifying image of Western Civilization that we wish to present? Critics of Nolan’s film who accuse him of whitewashing Homer’s stories are quite right, he does so. He presents his protagonists as men of conscience and honor, and attributes to them the moral and intellectual virtues developed over the intervening 32 centuries of progress in history, religion and philosophy. The civilizing centuries that brought us Aristotle and the Abrahamic religions, Rousseau and the Enlightenment, Newton and space exploration. The centuries that separate us, we hope, from the mindless, guzzling man-pigs of Circe’s Bronze Age.

Book Review: the Magdalen Laundries horror brought home in a novel by Claire Keegan

At the urging of a friend, I read this fictionalized account of one man’s shocked awakening to the hidden horrors of the Magdalen Laundries. Of course I had read the journalistic exposés about the cruel exploitation of unwed mothers by a particular order of nuns. But the novel addresses a thornier question: how could an entire town have remained willfully ignorant, or at least unwilling to act? Claire Keegan sets the narrative in 1985, a time of great economic hardship in Ireland. Her protagonist, Bill, is a decent, hardworking man, making an honest but precarious living as a coal merchant, providing for his church-going wife and five daughters, in a tight-knit community where the nuns are figures of power and wealth. The novel is very short, but Keegan takes her time laying out the daily details of Bill’s family and work life, relaying the exchanges in the local patois, to make a point. An ordinary man, not a hero or a rebel, must make a stand. One of the pleasures of this novel is the occasional unexpected image: a woman’s hair is neither red nor brown, but the colour of cinnamon. If I have a nit to pick, it is that the dialogue can sound too expository to be natural. And there is a puzzling episode: Bill happens upon an unknown neighbor in her nightgown, and experiences fleeting desire for her. Is it meant to emphasize that he is no saint? But that aside, how is it that, in this tight-knit community, he has no idea who the woman and her family in the house across the road are?

Somerset Maugham and DH Lawrence, revisited.

According to my principle that if you read a work before you were twenty, that first time doesn’t count, I am now (re)reading two masters of early twentieth century English fiction, Somerset Maugham and D.H. Lawrence. Not exactly beach reading, but what you grab at random from your old schoolgirl bookcase as you head out the door. Both writers were obsessed with class, both borderline misogynistic. One of them, Lawrence, bonafide working class; the other, Maugham, bourgeois, sophisticated and cosmopolitan. In his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, Maugham’s mercilessly mocking parody of Cockney underclass accents, tastes, and mores comes across today as shockingly snobbish and judgmental. Their lives are “nasty, brutish, and short,” in Hobbesian terms. They drink and procreate “in the double digits.” The men beat their wives and even their lovers, and the women have hair-dragging, face-clawing catfights. And yet Maugham is not entirely unsympathetic. His eponymous heroine, Liza, high-spirited and coquettish as she is, starts off with her own code of conduct. Maugham presents her downfall as an inevitable consequence of her circumstances rather than due to an inherent vice.

Lawrence also transcribes the Nottinghamshire dialect of his coal miner milieu with its “thee” and “thou” but without caricature or irony. He is equally aware of the ready brutality of the men, and the hard lives of the women, but he sees their lives as essentially tragic, and worthy of dignity. Lawrence himself escaped the “downpit” life he was born into, but the humiliation and class resentment transpires through all his work.

Two Related, Timely Books addressing Conflict and Conscience

 Two timely, related books: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message and Omar El Akkad’s One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This. Both are reporters and both make a plea for the humanization of those whose victimhood is conveniently ignored by the media. The world view of both writers springs from a personal history that is inextricable from the objective realities they witness and report.

Coates travels to Dakar, Senegal, to retrace the origins of the slave trade, and experiences a conflicting sense of himself as, simultaneously, belonging as Black but foreign as American. He then travels through Israel and the West Bank and is shocked by the systematic oppression of Palestinians under Israeli rule. When he notices that some houses have cisterns on the roof to catch rainwater and others do not, he learns that Israelis are given permits to have cisterns but Palestinians are almost always denied that permission. He relates these conditions to what his slave ancestors experienced in the South.

Omar El Akkad recounts his family’s journey from their native Egypt to Qatar then Canada and eventually the United States. In due course, after college, he becomes a journalist, a war reporter covering the invasion of Afghanistan and other conflicts for major Canadian and American newspapers. Years later, he is jolted out of his comfortable middle-class life in Oregon with his wife and child, by the Gaza war and its brutality. He is particularly shocked out of his complacency by the dehumanizing way in which the relentless bombing of Gaza is covere in the Western media. He had believed that American society would not violate its own rights, freedoms and principles beyond a certain point. But El Akkad does not absolve himself of the human struggle to fully empathize with the suffering of others: he notes that a momentary fright over the health of his five-year-old daughter terrifies him beyond anything he sees on the news.

Is This Really Iran’s “Arab Spring”?

 Is This Really Iran’s “Arab Spring”?

I remember the precise moment in February 2011 when I decided to go to Tahrir. I had been in Egypt on vacation that winter, as I often am, when the revolt against the thirty-year dictatorship of President Hosni Mubarak erupted on January 25th. My initial caution was shared by many: dread of chaos and pessimism about a democratic outcome. The tipping point for me came when Mubarak’s police forces started shooting at peaceful civilian demonstrators. For the first time, I joined the throngs finding their way to Tahirir in support of the young protesters camping there.

I wonder, now, how Iranians are feeling. Is the tipping point for many of them the massacre of student protesters in January? By all reports the majority of the population is young, well-educated, and chafing under a cruelly repressive regime. Are they now welcoming the chance to topple the regime, even at the cost of foreign intervention? For others, is the bombing of their cities and collateral deaths of their fellow Iranians at the hands of Israeli and American forces too high a price? Do they look at Iraq after the American invasion of 2003 and want none of it?

In Egypt in January 2011, there was no bombing by foreign forces. There may have been covert intervention, as some have claimed, but whatever the case, the young idealists in Tahrir acted in good faith. If there had been an aerial attack by Israel in support of toppling Mubarak, there is no doubt in my mind that it would have spelled the end of any support for a revolutionary movement. Case in point: when Egypt was attacked in 1956, and again in 1967, even those who hated Nasser, those he persecuted most, like my father’s family, did not hesitate for a moment as to where their loyalties lay.

Liberal-minded Iranians today are in a hard place, whether they were hoping for foreign intervention to free them from the yoke of draconian mullah rule, or distrusting it. The odds of a democratic outcome are problematic, to say the least, and the lessons of the Arab Spring are cautionary in this respect. Egypt today, after months of turmoil and a brief, unserious flirtation with an Islamist party, has defaulted back to military dictatorship. 

military 

Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell

Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell

Italian Shoes sounded like an intriguing title for a Henning Mankell novel, a departure from the police procedurals he is best known for, so I embarked on it as a sort of neutral “palate cleanser” between other more controversial books. It defied my expectations. The protagonist is an aging, misanthropic former surgeon, Frederick Welin, who self-isolates on a rocky outcrop of Sweden’s remote northern archipelago after a disastrous surgery mistake. For twelve years his only regular contact with the world is the postman who comes on his hydrocopter every week. In winter the ice is so thick even the sea is frozen, and he can walk across to the mainland. The day by day, hour by hour shifts in the weather; the turning of the seasons; the details of every rock and inlet of this barren islet, form not the backdrop but an essential, active agent in the story.

One day, the hermit’s self-imposed isolation is invaded by a woman he brutally abandoned thirtyfive years ago, announcing she is dying of cancer and that he has a daughter he knew nothing about. Now he must face his ugly past, not only with them, but with the patient whose life he ruined on the operating table.

The characters are typically unforthcoming, but when they do engage in long expositions of their feelings, they sound stilted and totally unconvincing. No one speaks like that, not even in Swedish. Also, Mankell spells out every metaphor, even the most glaringly obvious. Finally, a caveat: the book can affect you with its Scandinavian gloom—even on a sunny Carolina day.

Deja Vu

Déjà Vu

Where does it come from, this overwhelming sense of Déjà vu I get watching the coverage of the Minneapolis protests? Then it hits me. Another city, fifteen years ago. Cairo. Tahrir Square. The Arab Spring. A particular incident, the torture and murder of a young man by savagely empowered law enforcement, proved to be the spark that set ablaze fury and resistance to encrusted brutal policing.

The same scenes as in Minneapolis, but to the scale of a city twenty times its size. Eventually a million protesters, mostly idealistic young people, camped out in Tahrir Square, ground zero in the city. Police and security forces, many out of uniform, cracking down on them with tear gas, clubs, violence. And in sympathy with the protesters, a citizenry mobilized to bring food, water, medical supplies and moral support. Even people who did not necessarily sympathize with the cause of the protest were shocked by the brutality of its repression.

At some point, army tanks rolled in, and the desperate protesters turned to the soldiers as saviors, protectors from the police. The same dichotomy, in reverse, as the role played by state as opposed to federal forces in Minneapolis. But in the case of Tahrir, this alliance between the army and the citizenry did not last. In the end, though , when public opinion had reached the tipping point, the regime of thirty years capitulated. Whether or not what replaced it was an improvement is not the issue here. But Tahrir Square reminded the world that the cycle of fear can be broken.

The determined citizens of Minneapolis must be tired of showing up for their most vulnerable communities, day after day, week after week, in freezing temperatures, at the risk of their own lives and safety. Who knows how this story ends? One thing is certain: they have reminded the country, and the world, that “this is not who we are as Americans” is not an empty slogan.

 

 

You Never Know: an essay I wrote for Writers for Democratic Action

 “You never know,” my mother used to say. And my father and I would shake our heads at her unwarranted optimism.

“There’s no hope for this country,” my father would tell me. “There’s no future for you here. Get out as soon as you can, go study abroad.” Nasser’s Egypt had slipped ever deeper into the Socialist bloc for nearly twenty years. Nasser’s grip on power was absolute, his one-man regime uncontested, his rubber-stamp parliament a transparent fig leaf; his very name struck terror in many and inspired blind adulation in the masses. After the shocking defeat of Egyptian forces in 1967, there was a stirring, a glimmer of hope, that public discontent, student demonstrations, and military humiliation might shake his seat. But that proved ephemeral.

The despair I sensed in my family was especially acute. As a politically powerful family under the ancien regime, we were targeted for arrest, sequestration, and confiscation of all assets. We still lived in a large, beautiful home filled with elegant antiques, but my father drove a fifteen-year-old car. A pall of gloom, of helpless despair and constant anxiety, pervaded the air as long as I could remember. It looked like the order of things was set in stone.

Yet my mother would repeat: “You never know. Only God knows.” Her faith was genuine, and she was of a naturally sanguine disposition, but now I realize that there was more to it. She was trying to keep my father from sinking into an irremediable depression. Still in his forties, he had already had several heart attacks, and indeed he was to die at fifty, years after I had indeed gone to study abroad.

And yet, my mother was right. The unimaginable happened. After Nasser died, his vice president Sadat, perceived for twenty years as Nasser’s yes-man, overnight veered sharply towards the West, kicking out Egypt’s Russian overlords, throwing in his lot with Western democracies, and flinging open the doors of the Egyptian economy to world markets. Egypt had its glastnost and perestroika avant la lettre. The pall of fear was lifted.

So this is the comfort I would share with you today: Don’t despair. Don’t be so overwhelmed by the hurricane forces sweeping through our America, upending norms and laws we thought as immovable as Mount Rushmore, laying waste to the democracy and freedom we held sacred.

It was that ideal of America, a country of laws, of rights and freedoms, that absence of fear, that my father had wished for me, and that I had sought when immigrating to this country forty years ago. And when I despair, I remind myself that what seems irrevocable, what seems entrenched forever, can change back. The pendulum never stops swinging. My American grandchildren still have a chance at a better world. As my mother said: “You never know.”

Samia Serageldin is a novelist and magazine and book editor. She is the author of The Cairo House, The Naqib’s Daughter, and Love is Like Water. She grew up in Egypt under Nasser, studied at London University, and emigrated with her family to the U.S. in the 1980’s. She is a resident of Chapel Hill, NC, for well over thirty years.

Evil Incarnate in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde vs The Picture of Dorian Gray

The problem of separating good from evil in human nature is addressed in literature through the guise of making evil incarnate: the Devil, in “Dr Faustus”; Mr Hyde, in R.L. Stevenson’s “The Curious Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”; or the portrait, in Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. Rereading the latter two revised my opinion. Stevenson’s short novel is an absolute page turner, and the sense of place is remarkable: his London is a character in the book, its changes of mood, time of day, and weather, as sensitively rendered as anything by Virginia Woolf. On the other hand, Wilde’s Dorian Gray, in the 1890 pre-censored edition, is almost unreadable. Stupefying, pointless pontification by “Lord Henry,” contrariness failing to pass for wit, let alone philosophy. London, as a city, is atmospherically absent, whereas the detailed descriptions of luxurious interiors serve no more purpose than Décor magazines.

In the end, though, the coexistence of good and evil in every human remains irreconcilable, at least outside of the realm of religion.

Blame it on the Algorithm!

 If I needed proof of how “algorithms” work, this is it: lately I discovered that Italian PM Georgia Meloni’s speeches and interviews are perfectly easy for me to follow with my limited Italian. I’m no fan of Italy’s hard right PM, but something about her speaking style—deliberate, clear, without regional accent—makes it good for practising Italian. Well, I soon found video clips of Marine LePen popping up in my feed! Apparently the “algorithm” inferred that I liked right wing female European leaders. It couldn’t be more wrong! Blame it on the medieval Arab mathematician Al Khwarizmi after whom Algorithm is named. Both these ladies are happy to blame Arabs for everything, anyway. 

“You Never Know.”

 “You never know,” my mother used to say. And my father and I would shake our heads at her unwarranted optimism.

“There’s no hope for this country,” my father would tell me. “There’s no future for you here. Get out as soon as you can, go study abroad.” Nasser’s Egypt had slipped ever deeper into the Socialist bloc for nearly twenty years. Nasser’s grip on power was absolute, his one-man regime uncontested, his rubber-stamp parliament a transparent fig leaf; his very name struck terror in many and inspired blind adulation in the masses. After the shocking defeat of Egyptian forces in 1967, there was a stirring, a glimmer of hope, that public discontent, student demonstrations, and military humiliation might shake his seat. But that proved ephemeral.

The despair I sensed in my family was especially acute. As a politically powerful family under the ancien regime, we were targeted for arrest, sequestration, and confiscation of all assets. We still lived in a large, beautiful home filled with elegant antiques, but my father drove a fifteen-year-old car. A pall of gloom, of helpless despair and constant anxiety, pervaded the air as long as I could remember. It looked like the order of things was set in stone.

Yet my mother would repeat: “You never know. Only God knows.” Her faith was genuine, and she was of a naturally sanguine disposition, but now I realize that there was more to it. She was trying to keep my father from sinking into an irremediable depression. Still in his forties, he had already had several heart attacks, and indeed he was to die at fifty, years after I had indeed gone to study abroad.

And yet, my mother was right. The unimaginable happened. After Nasser died, his vice president Sadat, perceived for twenty years as Nasser’s yes-man, overnight veered sharply towards the West, kicking out Egypt’s Russian overlords, throwing in his lot with Western democracies, and flinging open the doors of the Egyptian economy to world markets. Egypt had its glastnost and perestroika avant la lettre. The pall of fear was lifted.

So this is the comfort I would share with you today: Don’t despair. Don’t be so overwhelmed by the hurricane forces sweeping through our America, upending norms and laws we thought as immovable as Mount Rushmore, laying waste to the democracy and freedom we held sacred.

It was that ideal of America, a country of laws, of rights and freedoms, that absence of fear, that my father had wished for me, and that I had sought when immigrating to this country forty years ago. And when I despair, I remind myself that what seems irrevocable, what seems entrenched forever, can change back. The pendulum never stops swinging. My American grandchildren still have a chance at a better world. As my mother said: “You never know.”

 

The Elementary School Shooting in Minnesota

 Heartbroken, and terrified, about this elementary school shooting in Minnesota. The two children who died were exactly the age, 10 and 8, of my two elementary grades grandchildren. Like them, they must have been excited to start the first school week, planning the night before what to wear that first day, what lunch to pack, what accessories to attach to their backpack. I try not to imagine what their parents and grandparents are feeling right now, because I can imagine it all too well. I pray no one repeats in their presence the mantra “guns don’t kill people.”  Cars don’t kill people, and we regulate the hell out of them.

The thing is: guns are the weapon of cowards, the weapon of impulse. And especially and most dangerously, the weapon of our time. The weapon of the delusional loner who spends hours in front of violent video games and loses his sense of reality. Violence in our reality-bending age is disassociated from reality. The twenty-year-old who went to the school with murderous intent had a hand gun, a rifle, and a pistol. Could he have attacked seventeen children and killed two if he had only a weapon, like a knife, that required close body to body contact? 

Confessions of a Dante Dilettante

 Confessions of a Dante dilettante: I’ve dipped into Inferno over the years, fascinated to discover how Bosch’s triptych might have been influenced by Dante’s trilogy. But the awkward translations to English were discouraging, until I was recently introduced to a flowing, fluent verse translation that manages to preserve Dante’s terza rima. By Angelaurelio Soldi, a poet and native Italian speaker.

“Enemies of the People”

                    

“The Enemy Within.”

 “Enemies of the people.” When I hear these words I have an atavistic reaction. I grew up hearing those words applied to my family and others like them. At school, I had to study a textbook that mentioned my family, by name, as “feudalist, capitalist oppressors of the people.” I grew up in Nasser’s Egypt, where my family was targeted on account of its political prominence and large landholdings. President Nasser, faced with setbacks internally and internationally, followed the playbook of autocratic regimes throughout history around the world: he deflected public discontent by accusing “internal enemies” of being responsible for the failures of his own regime.

 The other imperative of such regimes is to silence dissent. That is done by installing a pervasive atmosphere of fear and distrust. In Nasser’s Egypt, even between parent and child in our own bedrooms, we whispered. People were arrested and disappeared into prison for years or months for a random remark. For fear to effectively paralyze dissent, for autocensorship to work, repression must be both ruthless and arbitrary. No one feels safe. No law can protect you. The power of the ruler is absolute.

It was Nasser’s Egypt that I fled at the age of twenty. Later, when I immigrated to the United States, over forty years ago, it was because my husband and I wanted to raise our children in a free country where they would never know that fear. For us, America was the land of freedom, of justice, of laws and due process.

Today in America, I cannot believe that I am hearing the same words, watching the same playbook. “The Enemy Within.” “The Deep State.” The xenophobia. The crackdown on dissent. The emasculation of the legislative and judiciary branches. The flaunting of the courts. The intimidation of the media and the persecution of universities, those two bastions of independent thought. Using the formidable powers of the government to concentrate all power and influence at the top, in the hands of of a handful of men.

How does ambient fear succeed in silencing dissent? Even someone who does not feel vulnerable in their own right might fear potential repercussions on a family member or friend, for example the son or daughter whose career might be negatively affected. No one feels safe. The secret to universalizing fear as a deterrent is arbitrarines in the application of repercussions: surely the young student at an elite school, a permanent resident who came to the U.S. from South Korea as a child of seven, surely she had every right not to expect to be arbitrarily hunted down by ICE for deportation simply because she participated—not even led—in an anti-war demonstration. The intention is to teach the lesson that no one is safe.

And today, just as it was with Nasser back then, as with any charismatic leader, there is an irreducible core of true believers who will see no evil, bear any price, countenance any outrage, because their leader can do no wrong in their eyes.

But this is the one optimistic note I will strike: as with Nasser, as with Stalin, as with all-powerful cult figures throughout history, the secret is that the emperor has no clothes. When Nasser died, it was all of a sudden as if a pall had been lifted, a strait jacket had been released. It took his successor Sadat only a couple of years to turn the ship of state around in the opposite direction and undo everything Nasser had done over nearly twenty years.

Trump has only been in power for two months. This is still America. There is still time, before fear is completely installed. There are still laws, there are still pockets of free speech. This is still America. Let’s act like it.

 

 

 

 

High Stake Election Strategy

 

How can a film about a fraught super-high stakes election help get you through the fraught supe-high stakes American election? My theory about uncertain, crucial outcomes is better to wait till the verdict is final and definite. If it’s good news, you’ll be relieved and overjoyed. If it’s bad news, at least you would have had a few extra hours, or days, to indulge in optimism. A case in point: a couple of years ago when I awaited a medical report that had the potential to be, at a minimum, life-changing, I didn’t look at it over the weekend. If it turned out to be good, great, and if on Monday it confirmed the worst, well, at least I had the weekend before the sky fell in.

On the night of November 8th, 2016, I went to bed certain, as everyone I knew seemed to be, that the morning would confirm Hilary Clinton as our next President. A disturbing dream woke me up in the middle of the night. My mother had died a few weeks earlier but in the dream I was hurrying to her sickbed, where I found her sitting up in bed and reassuring me: “It was just a cold.” I puzzled over the dream for a moment and then thought, since I was awake, I might as well turn on my cell phone and take a look at the election results. To my shock, Trump was winning. Now I wish I’d slept through till morning.

So this November 5th election night, I opted to go watch a film about another election where the global stakes are arguably at least as high: the election of a Pope in Rome. “Conclave” is a riveting story of intrigue and ambition, of Cardinal rivalries and cardinal sins, overlaid with gorgeous pomp and pageantry. Well worth the distraction from the news roller-coaster of doom-watching or irrational exuberance. Especially since this election promises to be a marathon, not a sprint, with final results taking days to certify, and then bracing for challenges and potential unrest. Be grateful for the calm before the storm.

 

The Paris Olympics Hot Air Balloon, Napoleon in Egypt, and the hero of The Naqib’s Daughter

 The Paris Olympics hot air balloon, Napoleon in Egypt, and the hero of The Naqib’s Daughter

 

Watching the hot air balloon that dominated the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, I immediately thought of the original Montgolfieres and their sensational use in Napoleon Bonaparte’s ill-fated Egyptian campaign in 1798. Nicolas Conte, the hero of my historical novel The Naqib’s Daughter, was the Chief Engineer of the Balloonist Corps in Napoleon’s army in Egypt.

Napoleon tasked Nicolas Conte with flying a manned hot air balloon over French-occupied Cairo, as a display of superior French military engineering intended to awe the local population. Conte’s objected that he could not answer for the safety of such a demonstration with inadequate resources and limited time, and prevailed on Bonaparte to at least let him attempt an unmanned Montgolfiere. The Cairene crowds gathered to witness this miracle of French invention, a formidable flying airship capable of transporting soldiers great distances. The enormous hot air balloon rose in the cloudless sky until it burst into flame and came down ignominiously in flaming tatters. Far from being impressed, the crowd dispersed in disgust, convinced, according to the scathing Egyptian historian El Jabarti, that “this was no more than a very large kite of the sort knaves at street fairs fly to entertain children.”

 

Françoise Hardy and the Yé Yé Era

 Françoise Hardy and I 

Nothing has the power to bounce you back to your teenage years like the music of that decade, and nothing sobers you up like learning of the passing of one of your adolescent icons. If you grew up in the 1960’s listening to the French pop singers of the decade, as I did, you had your favorite, just as you had your favorite Beatle. Sylvie Vartan, Chantal Goya, France Gall, Sheila, and Françoise Hardy, were everywhere, especially on the cover of Salut les Copains.

Although they were not a girl group, they were invariably swept together in press and publicity, emblematic of a fresh, upbeat yé yé generation, light years away from the moody chanteuses like Juliette Greco and Mireille Mathieu.    

Each cultivated her own style. Sylvie Vartan, the cute bleached blonde in glamorous outfits, Johnny Halliday’s girlfriend. France Gall and Chantal Goya with their identical page boy bangs, one blonde, one dark, like negative images of each other. Sheila, with whom I empathized, because she seemed more awkward than the others, as if, secretly, she sometimes had to struggle with her hair or her weight.

Françoise Hardy, on the other hand, was the epitome of cool. She stood out from the others with her tall, lean, slightly androgynous figure and style, akin to her contemporary Jane Birkin. One suspected there were darker depths to Francoise Hardy. You could say she was the George Harrison of the group. She is also the one whose classic style and thoughtful lyrics have survived the test of time. How fitting today to listen to her “Mon Amie la Rose,” with its intimations of mortality, inviting the listener to contemplate the short, lovely life of the rose. The beauty of the garden today, withered and denuded the next. “On est bien peu de chose….” Or, as Shakespeare put it: “We are such stuff as dreams are made of.” So true. RIP Françoise Hardy.

The Beauty and Menace of Spring in Carolina

 Today the roses are in glorious full bloom for the first time this Spring. But so is the kudzu, its malignant vines obliterating entire banks of trees seemingly overnight, as if a sorcerer had turned them into humpbacked monsters that would not be free of his spell till Fall. Beauty and menace, cultivation and wilderness, it is with Nature as with Life. Today on the trials the brand new crop of babies were jogged along in their prams by the yummy mummies, and elderly couples aimed their binoculars at the trees and turned to smile at each other as if to say, we made it, we’re here for one more Spring.  

Napoleon: the many wrongs and one right of the new biopic

 Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is baffling. From the get go, the miscasting of Joaquin Phoenix as the eponymous antihero is fatal. The actor looks every day of his fifty years, and yet he plays Napoleon from the age of 27, when he first made his mark on the bloody post-Revolution scene of a France in the throes of the Terror. Phoenix’s Napoleon mumbles unintelligibly throughout the film, and is as stripped of charisma as he is of energy, which flies in the face of the historical record of a dynamic leader who commanded the loyalty of his armies and the adulation of the masses of his countrymen. Scott’s Napoleon is a caricature, petulant, childish, boorish, besotted with Josephine and putty in her hands. 

The historical Josephine was a few years older and more worldly than the young Bonaparte, whereas Vanessa Kirby, who plays her, is decades younger than Phoenix, which changes the whole dynamic of the onscreen relationship. Kirby does not seem to have a grip on her role, playing Josephine as mindlessly promiscuous, unfaithful, and alternately Napoleon’s muse and his victim. The sex scenes between them are so joyless and off putting that it is hard to believe in a grand passion. 

I was particularly attentive to the brief scenes set during Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt, having studied it extensively for my historical novel The Naqib’s Daughter. There is no record of Bonaparte firing a cannon at the top of the Cheops Pyramid. Moreover, it is hard to believe that he left his army stranded in Egypt and escaped back to France because he heard that Josephine had taken a lover, rather than because, supremely ambitious as he was, he realized that his mission in Egypt had failed and history would pass him by while the real action was taking place on European soil. 

Rupert Everett’s cameo as Napoleon’s nemesis the Duke of Wellington is equally one-note, a permanent curled lip of aristocratic disdain and an apocryphal sense of English fair play, a portrayal that reminds the viewer that Ridley Scott is an Englishman. 

So, to sum up, why should a prospective viewer watch this two and a half hour film, but only on the widest possible screen in a theatre ? Because of the gorgeously reproduced landscapes of the battle scenes, familiar paintings come to life, history unfolding, Austerlitz, the march on Moscow. That is Ridley Scott’s forte. That is where we get a glimpse of the military genius behind the historic victories and the ultimately arrogant overreach of the Corsican who came from nothing and conquered Europe before he lost everything. 

The closing credits enumerate the hundreds of thousands who died in battle in the Napoleonic wars. But if Scott’s intention is to condemn wars of ambition, why then are the battle scenes rendered so glamorously? Baffling.