December 2016 book and film review part 1

BOOKS

AN ATTEMPT AT EXHAUSTING A PLACE IN PARIS, by Georges Perec.
Over a three day period in October 1974, French writer Georges Perec sat in the window of 3 different cafes around the Place Saint-Sulpice and recorded everything of any interest that passed through his field of ken. In just 47 pages he gives us an absorbing, and ultimately almost hypnotic list of things and people he sees. I offer a brief extract:
"A baby in a baby carriage lets out a brief squawking. It looks like a bird: blue eyes, fixed, profoundly interested in what they take in.
A meter man with a bad cough puts a parking ticket on a green Morris.
A man wearing a Russian astrakhan fur hat. Then another."

This is the forerunner of his magnum opus: Life A Users manual, which he went on to write four years later. I'm reading that right now. Watch this space. But if you want a highly diverting hour or so, you could do a lot worse than be immersed in the fascinating mental world of Monsieur Perec.

99 WAYS TO TELL A STORY: EXERCISES IN STYLE, by Matt Madden.
A guy is working late one night when he goes downstairs to fetch something from the fridge. On the  way down his girlfriend asks what the time is. "1.15" he replies, but then when he reaches the fridge he's forgotten why he came downstairs. "What the hell was I looking for, anyway?"
End of story. But then, taking his cue from the French writer Raymond Queneau (a close friend of Georges Perec, as it happens, and co-member of the famous "Oumalou" school of surrealist writers) he then finds 99 different ways of telling this little vignette, in graphic form, each in 8 boxes.
           Past tense, present tense, passive form, active form, like a Superman comic, like a Garfield strip, in anagram form, in the style of a noir detective story, the list goes on. And what emerges is a deeply fascinating book, full of laughs and puzzles, and illustrating vividly the same thing Qeuneau did back in 1937, namely the fact that there indeed many ways to tell a story.

ALL FOR NOTHING, by Walter Kempowski.
It is January 1945 in east Prussia. A wealthy family lives in a large country house lying directly in the path of the invading Russian army, which as the book opens is less than a hundred miles from their little village. The patriarch is away in northern Italy, he has a cushy administrative job in the Wehrmacht. The lady of the house, beautiful, fey, seemingly uncaring of what lies ahead, prefers to smoke foreign cigarettes, sip sherry and cut silhouettes from coloured paper. The housekeeper, "Auntie", really runs the house with a team of servants under her. The son, twelve-year-ole Peter, has been given a small microscope for Christmas and spends most of his time staring down it. Luckily for him he is just to be young to be pressed into service with the Volksturm, the local home guard.
             The family are dimly aware that something bad may be going to happen soon, and tentative plans are laid for an escape to the West, especially when the front line draws near enough for them to hear the heavy guns in the far distance. So why don't they do anything?
              Walter Kempowski wrote an eight volume non-fiction account of the end of WW2 in Germany which he called "Swansong", and this is his fictional account in one quite short book, a book which brings home the horror of war as it affects one tiny community and one family in particular. With consummate skill and infinite compassion, Kempowski has created one of the finest books about war I have ever read. A work of genius.

FILMS

ETHEL AND ERNEST (2016) D- Roger Mainwood. Growing up in Edwardian Britain, Ernest Briggs meets Ethel, they fall in love, get married and buy a small home to live in. In 1936 they have a son, who they name Raymond. They live through the Blitz (narrowly avoiding being blown to Kingdom Come) but then have to come to terms with the fact that their only child doesn't want to work in an office, but wants to go to art college of all things!
              Brilliantly voiced by Brenda Blethyn and Jim Broadbent, andsuperbly animated (by hand, apparently) here is another sublime offering from one of our most talented writers. And I say writer, because although Raymond Brigs is best known for his delightful graphic books (The Snowman, Father Christmas etc) it is his story telling that always shines through. Many people voted this the best thing on television over the holiday period, which with the possible exception of Carry on Up the Jungle it was most definitely was.