Less, by Andrew Sean Greer

I loved this book. Can't remember why I put it on my to read list a few months ago, probably because a review caught my attention, and by the time I ordered it I noticed it had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The writing is elegant, witty and joyful, the main character is extremely believable and loveable, the plot clever, ironic and healthily self-deprecating in the way it depicts, criticizes but also loves the modern literary milieu / establishment. All that, and lots of intelligent and witty reflections about reaching middle-age and what it means to be accomplished - something I particularly related to, being the adequate age - and about love and happiness. At a certain point, the character asks himself one of the most important questions about love - is it the good dear thing? or is it the lightning bolt? I think the story gives us his answer, and I absolutely agree with it.

I'm glad there are such good books being written, and think I will check other Andrew Sean Greer's books.

Beach Rats, by Eliza Hittman

This is a beautiful movie, that conveys its message - mostly about longing, coming of age and the wish to belong even when one does not know what to (and isn't that one of the main features of adolescence?) - in an extremely visual, almost voyeuristic, way. And simultaneously very emotional, once more in a mostly visual, wordless, way, by creating atmospheres with the camera eye. Isn't this what cinema is all about after all? It somehow reminded me of the art of silent movies, when they knew how to tell a story without any speech.

The performances are outstanding, especially the main character, the girlfriend and the mother. I was really impressed, it's a magnificent piece of cinema art.

Before My Feet Touch the Ground, a documentary by Daphni Leef

I just watched this documentary by the Israeli activist and filmmaker Daphni Leef, and I found it very interesting and great food for thought.
It’s a very accomplished documentary, in the way it depicts very vividly the 2011 protests in Israel against the housing prices, how they grew, and the emotional and political development of Daphni, one of its main organizers. She was at the session, and I was very positively impressed by her intelligence and articulate ideas, and how much she grew intellectually since those early days of notoriety. I congratulate her for that, and for the courage it took to expose her doubts, humanity and privacy so poignantly and honestly.

But then there are the questions raised by those street movements that took place in those years, what did they mean, what is the aftermath, now that 7 years have gone by?

I will not discuss here the movements of the Arab spring; even if they happened at the same time and maybe the momentum was related, in Egypt, Syria or Libya, they were true revolutions crushed by totalitarian regimes and military coups or civil war, they are wonderfully and painfully chronicled in books like The City Always Wins, Guapa or The Queue – and certainly in others I haven’t read – and they belong to a different category from the street movements that took place in Western and democratic countries like Israel, Spain or the US, and I think it would be unfair and wrong to group them together.

So I’ll focus on these movements – the Occupy movements in Spain and the US and the protests in Israel. And I’ll say that the question that I wish to ask basically is: what did they accomplish? What are the results, 7 years later? And the answer I give myself is pretty dire. In Spain, they had the appalling government of Rajoy until last week. We had Brexit, and Trump was elected as president in the US. I don’t know about the rents in Israel, but my friends there keep complaining about the cost of living in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu is still Prime Minister and that annoying Regev woman is minister of Culture, so I guess things probably didn’t change for the best.

So, what’s left? A sense of huge disappointment. So maybe we should look critically at those events to try to learn from them. Was it the right way to fight? In my opinion, supported by the aftermath, definitely not. Looking back, I see a lot of well intentioned and very naïve people, dreaming of the ‘60s protest movements, manifesting against what they call “the system”, that they feel it fails them – and it does, in many ways – and getting inebriated by their capacity to be visible, wishing to change the world because they feel it’s supposed to be changed – which I agree to. But, after all the marches, feelings of communion, partying to the sounds of Redemption Song or People Have the Power, what happened? They had their minutes – or weeks – of fame, and then people just got tired, changed the channel and everything went back to the same – or worse. “The system” didn’t even need to be violent, it just reaped the fruits of boredom and inertia. And things did not only change but actually worsened – vd Netanyahu, Trump, Rajoy, Brexit.

So my point is – this is not the way to make things better. How much flawed “the system” may be – and it is, in many ways, dominated by greedy and wealthy people and corporations – the way to change and make things better in Western democracies – and, however imperfect they may be, they’re still the best way of government we’ve achieved – is not by chanting and screaming, but by participating in politics in an educated and informed way, moving “the system” according to our ideas, putting aside petty disagreements and inflated egos, and creating honest and reliable political parties with honest and progressive ideas. I believe the way forward is to perfect “the system”, with trials and errors like the “geringonça” we’re experiencing in Portugal at the moment, that is working, and I hope they will try now in Spain. Less folklore and more efficacy. More education and responsibility and less demagogy.

La Nuit sera calme, par Romain Gary

It's always interesting how one comes across a book or an author. In the case of Romain Gary, I was curious about him after reading very flattering references in Pumpkinflowers, by Matti Friedman - he mentioned particularly Les Cerfs-Volants, so this was the first Romain Gary book I read, and I was hooked. He's a wonderful writer, and his book La Vie Devant Soi, written under the pseudonym Émile Ajar, is one of the books that moved me the most in the last few years.

La Nuit sera calme is a kind of a long interview, des entretiens, as they say in French, and in it Romain Gary comes across as an extremely intelligent, interesting and sensible man of the 20th century, from a time and place when French culture was still at its best. It shows how sound political thinking and honest morals are timeless, and it somehow gives us some hope - as long as there are intelligent and committed people there is still some hope...

La vraie valeur n’a jamais rien à craindre de ces mises à l’épreuve par le sarcasme et la parodie, par le défi et par l’acide, et toute personnalité politique qui a de la stature et de l’authenticité sort indemne de ces agressions. La vraie morale n’a rien à redouter de la pornographie – pas plus que les hommes politiques, qui ne sont pas des faux-monnayeurs, de Charlie Hebdo, du Canard enchaîné, de Daumier ou de Jean Yanne. Bien au contraire: s’ils sont vrais, cette mise à l’épreuve par l’acide leur est toujours favorable. La dignité n’est pas quelque chose qui interdit l’irrespect: elle a au contraire besoin de cet acide pour révéler son authenticité.

L’O.N.U. a été dévorée par le cancer nationaliste. Le nationalisme, surtout quand il est jeune, frais et pimpant, c’est d’abord le droit de disposer sans appel d’un peuple – par tyrannie intérieure – au nom du droit des peuples à disposer d’eux-mêmes. C’est le droit de couper les mains ou le clitoris des filles, de lapider les femmes adulteres, de fusiller, d’exterminer, de torturer, au nom du droit du peuple à disposer de lui-même. Tu peux faire tuer un million d’hommes à l’intérieur des frontières de ton pays et siéger aux Nations Unies à la Commission des Droits de l’homme, monter à la tribune de l’Assemblée générale et prononcer un discours sur la liberte, l’égalité et la fraternité et te faire acclamer, parce que les affaires intérieures d’un État, c’est sacré.

Sur le plan de la réalité seule, l’homme, enfin, c’est indiscernable, parce que toutes les notions de fraternité, de démocratie, de liberte, sont des valeurs de convention, on n eles reçoit pas de la nature, ce sont des décisions, des choix, des proclamations d’imaginaire auxquelles solvente on sacrifie sa vie pour leur donner vie.
Ces rapports “chien sans maître” avec Dieu ou avec l’absence de Dieu, que Dieu soit ressentit comme une préférence ou comme un manque, sont toujours des rapports avec un collier et une laisse qui me sont totalement étrangers.

Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Saadawi

I was really impressed by this book. It's a wonderfully written tale, between the fantastic / surrealistic and the factual depiction of a war torn city, where the surreal of the imagination blends smoothly with the surreal of life under those conditions, creating an atmosphere simultaneously dreamlike and starkly real. Adding to that masterly storytelling a touch of dark humour, the author creates a true masterpiece.

The human capacity to live under extreme circumstances always fascinates me, and it is extremely vivid in this book. I'm also always interested in reading about the present events and realities of the Middle Eastern turmoils, told by people who experience them, instead of the black-and-white pictures the news convey us. So, this book is one of several about this subject that I've greatly appreciated in the last year: Guapa, The City Always Wins, The Queue.

A beautiful, moving and disturbing book, I highly recommend it.

Mémoires de La Rochefoucauld

I first became acquainted with the duke de La Rochefoucauld through the books of Alexandre Dumas - La Guerre des Femmes and the Trois Mousquetaires series. These books, that I read in childhood, left me an indelible taste for everything regarding the Fronde and its troubles - later I read the Mémoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier, du cardinal de Retz, and there were still lots of references to that troubled period in Saint-Simon. So I guess it was just a matter of time until I read La Rochefoucauld. And I'm glad I did - the language is extremely elegant - and how I love that archaic French! - and the narrative reads like a Dumas novel - actually, it was from this book that Dumas took the idea for the diamonds jewels in Les Trois Mousquetaires. Never boring, it is extremely interesting in the way it shows how politics was done in those days, the Nobility privileges and what they considered their God-given rights, and all the petty intrigues that determined such important and fateful events as a Civil war. It sounds simultaneously familiar and remotely romantic.

I wonder what will be the next book I'll read about the Grand Siècle?

The Sparsholt Affair, by Alan Hollinghurst

Years ago, I loved The Line of Beauty, and then read Alan Hollinghurst's previous books and liked them extremely, especially The Swimming Pool Library and The Folding Star. Later, The Stranger's Child was a disappointment, and now I was curious about his latest book, The Sparsholt Affair.

I was glad it is a much better book than The Stranger's Child, but it still felt like a somehow failed book. It reminded me of Virginia Woolf's The Years - a good read, a clever period piece, elegantly written, but somewhat weak, falling short of the author's capacity, failing to achieve that sense of "yes, this is it" that a truly great book does, it leaves us with the feeling that its point was not quite made.

But it's still a good book, so I guess I'll wait for Hollinghurst's next work and read it.

A nice holiday in Portugal, Spain and Paris

I usually consider a holiday to be truly fulfilling when I leave my familiar surroundings, travel some place I've never been to, discover new sights (and, if I'm lucky, new people). But sometimes it feels just as good to revisit familiar places, especially in good company - the joy of seeing and experiencing again can be just as good as the pleasure of seeing anew. And that's what I did this time, the occasion was a visit from a dear Aussie friend - - someone who showed me his country in two fantastic and unforgettable roadtrips (and whose acquaintance is one of the many reasons I'll always be grateful to Facebook), and to whom I looked forward to share some of my Europe with.

So I started by playing the tourist in Lisbon, something I rarely do, numbed by the familiarity of driving through it every day. But it is really a beautiful city, especially under the clear spring light - the red roofs, the cobblestone streets, the lively squares with café terraces, the Baixa, Chiado, Belém, etc. And of course the tasty food and wine. I felt happy walking around my city, showing famous sights like Jerónimos, the Belém tower, the castle hill, the belvedere in Graça, the Gulbenkian museum, the modern architecture at the Expo 98 site - they have become very (sometimes too) touristic, but there are good reasons for that. I dislike the tacky shops that are taking over the Baixa and the crowds in Belém, but it's still a remarkable city, and I was proud of it.

The weather was beautiful, and then I showed him the Cascais line, Guincho, Azenhas-do-Mar and the Capuchos convent in Sintra; another day was spent visiting Cabo Espichel, Sesimbra and the Arrábida, where we had a great fish lunch at Portinho.

My friend is a great admirer of Islamic architecture (and a keen fan of Game of Thrones) so then we went on a roadtrip to Andalusia. We stopped in Évora, Monsaraz and the Alqueva, gloriously beautiful in spring, and stayed at Seville, where we visited the town and the Alcazar, the shooting place of Dorne in Game of Thrones. Ate a lot of calamares and oxtail, and enjoyed the lively sevillian street life.

From Seville we went to Granada, one of my favourite Spanish cities. The Albaicin, the walk by the Darro, the Alhambra at sunset, everything was as beautiful as I remembered it from my visit exactly 10 years ago. I hadn't visited the Realejo, the old Jewish quarter, before, and it was a joy to walk up its narrow and winding stairs.

After Granada, Cordoba. The city is beautiful, and the Great Mosque one of the most amazing buildings I ever saw, with its forest of columns and its unique bending of styles - Roman columns supporting Islamic arches and then Gothic reliefs. And we got a treat of a contest of Flamenco dances by young people at the Plaza de las Tendillas, lots of fun.

Near Cordoba, we visited the castle of Almodóvar del Rio, Highgarden in Game of Thrones, a restored castle overlooking a beautiful Spanish landscape.

Then back to Portugal, driving by beautiful olive groves and vineyards. A visit to Sintra, the amazing National Palace (probably my favourite Portuguese palace) and the Quinta da Regaleira, an early 20th century folly with lovely gardens and the romantic well.

To end the holidays, nothing could be better than a few days in Paris, in a glorious spring weather. We stayed at he Marais, one of my favourite Parisian neighbourhoods, and walked miles and miles - along the Rive Gauche (Saint-Germain-des-Prés, etc), the Champs-Elysées, the Île Saint-Louis. I love Paris, and never get tired of it.

We visited the Musée Picasso, that had fascinated me some 20 years ago. It has been extensively renovated since, and I missed many of his '20s paintings and the Las Niñas studies that I had so much admired then, but I guess they haven't enough space to show their whole collection, and there was a very good exhibition about the Guernica.

Paris, Granada, Cordoba, Seville. Lisbon... and good company. Can one ask for something better?

Sleep Demons, an Insomniac Memoir, by Bill Hayes

Another very good book by Bill Hayes. I particularly love how he weaves his memoirs along with the depictions of sleep disturbances. And how moving and engaging his memoirs of the AIDS epidemic are. As is the narrative of his coming to terms with his sexuality and his life. And his writing is extremely elegant and intelligent. I highly recommend his books.

Albertine Disparue, par Marcel Proust

I enjoy so much rereading Proust, he's the best writer EVER. So insightful and clever, in the most beautiful and elegant prose. Albertine is the perfect embodiment of an object of desire and longing, and the author's depiction of mourning is just perfect. And then there are all the other perfect scenes, from the article in the Figaro to the gossip and considerations about the society weddings and homosexual husbands.

Proust is definitely the author whose books I would take to that desert island.

Rubicon, by Tom Holland

I always loved History, and always had a particularly soft spot for Ancient History - first through a fascination with archaeology, then the Greek myths, then the exciting perversity of the TV series I, Claudius, and so on. Later I read Suetonius, Tacitus, Cassius Dio, Edward Gibbon, and I still love to get my hands on a good book about Roman history; fortunately there are still people writing them. I enjoyed Tom Holland's Dynasty, so I now read this one, and it's also very good. Holland writes History like a novelist, sometimes like a thriller writer, and his books are a pleasure to read. What fiction drama could be more fetching than the turbulent last century of the Roman Republic? It would take a really imaginative mind to invent such characters and plot. From the Gracchi to Augustus, it's hard to imagine a more remarkable set of people, like Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, Clodius, Antony, Cleopatra. Some people can say this somewhat romanticised and fictionalised way of writing history is not serious enough, but I disagree - history writing is always a kind of fiction since it assumes a lot and weaves a more or less plausible explanation for the events, so as long as the facts are right (according to what we know for the moment, of course, which may change), it's perfectly legitimate to imagine what those people felt, and it's definitely a very engaging way to capture our interest and make us wonder about human nature and aspirations, not that different from our own whenever the epoch.

So I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes History in general and Roman history in particular.

Everyone is Watching, by Megan Bradbury

A lovely book about New York City, focused on its history through an artistic vantage point. Very well written, it has a certain dreamy character. And it makes one want to see the art works the author talks about, like the beautiful photos by Robert Mapplethorpe or Thomas Eakins.It's also about how cities change, the nostalgia for a lost past, and the bittersweet effects of gentryfication. A very good debut novel.

La Grande Illusion, de Jean Renoir

This is a wonderful movie - beautifully directed and acted, a strong story about war and changing times, solidarity and humanity in hard times. It's amazingly modern for the time when it was made (1937) - the use of different languages (something unthinkable in Hollywood until recently), the portrayal of Germans as men as humane as the French. All in all, a great French movie, on a par with others such as Jeux Interdits, Le Salaire de la Peur or Les Diaboliques.

2084, La Fin du Monde, par Boualem Sansal

A very good book; a novel set in a dystopian world ruled by radical Islam. It cleverly depicts the dangers of religion and theocracy, as Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale also did using radical Evangelical Christianism, and the corruption, hypocrisy and moral decadence so characteristic of any totalitarian regime. The writing is excellent, in a beautiful and elegant French.

La religion fait peut-être aimer Dieu mais rien n'est plus fort qu'elle pour faire détester l'homme et haïr l'humanité.

Depressingly true words.

The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis

A very interesting book, worth reading by its content if not by its writing, which is overall fairly poor. But the story is fascinating - it depicts the lives and work of the two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose collaboration produced the fundamental work about human bias in decision making, proving that we are not that rational in our choices after all and that our mistakes are actually systematic and so mostly predictable - and unavoidable? It's a knowledge relevant to all fields of work, including Medicine, and explains many of our mistakes in work and life - politics included. So, even if the writing is not that good (but an easy reading nonetheless), it's still worth reading.

The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin

A great book by Ursula K. Le Guin, from whom I had loved the first three books of the Earthsea series and the wonderful The Dispossessed, read many years ago. The recent death of the author made me wish to read more from her, and I'm happy I did - this book is intelligent, imaginative and beautiful.

Lady Bird, by Greta Gerwig

A very nice movie, that was a pleasant surprise. I had seen Greta Gerwig in her Noam Baumbach movie Frances Ha, which I didn't like that much - the kind of First World artsy problems that I find pretentious and leave me cold. But this one is quite different, so much better - a tender depiction of teenage growing pains, mother-daughter relationship, the sensitive young's yearn to escape the banal and find one's place in the world. The characters are believable and likeable, the performances are great. One cannot but love the moving character of Lady Bird - and even if later in New York City she will become a sort of annoying Frances Ha, that doesn't take away her freshness as a hopeful teenager. With Boyhood, one of the best coming of age movies from the last few years.

Orient, by Christopher Bollen

This is the second Christopher Bollen book I've read, after the very good The Destroyers. And I liked it very much - it's an excellent thriller, it reminded me of an Agatha Christie book for 21st century adults, also made me think of J.K. Rowlings' A Casual Vacancy for its convincing depiction of a small community, with all its petty secrets behind apparently normal and boring provincial lives. Bollen's writing is rich and beautiful, some scenes seem a little too long, because one wants to know what will happen next - the essence of a true page turner. There are some clever twists, and the scene on the ice near the end feels eerie, it reminded me of Peter Hoeg's Smilla.

A very good book, I recommend it.

The Post, by Steven Spielberg

This is a very nice movie, better than most of Spielberg's "grown-up" movies (I always thought he was much better with adventure "teenage" movies like Indiana Jones or ET, when he tries to be serious he tends to be too moralistic and becomes somewhat parochial, in a very American way). This one is a newspaper movie/thriller in the best tradition of All the President's Men, with great performances by Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks and, obviously, very relevant to the present American situation, when a constantly lying president declares war on the press. These were the values that truly made America great, and whose erosion is making it increasingly irrelevant. Unfortunately, Americans seem to be getting used and immune to their administration's lies and shamelessness.

Call me by your name, by Luca Guadagnino

I had seen so many good reviews of this movie that my expectations were pretty high - or not that much, since I usually get somewhat mistrustful when something is too praised. But it's actually a very good movie, a tender nostalgic evocation of the discovery of love and sexuality, in a beautiful setting, very well directed and with an outstanding performance by the young Timothée Chalamet. It somehow reminded me of Conte d'Été by Eric Rohmer, probably because of the european atmosphere, the depiction of long and lazy summer time and young people 's experiences of love.

I liked the movie more after I'd seen it, when I knew the Oliver character was 24 years old. Because, while watching it, I thought he should be about 30, and that bothered me a little, somehow it didn't ring true that, as much liberal minded as the parents could be, they should be comfortable with their 17 year-old son having a fling with a much older man; then everything fell into place when I realised he was only 24. Maybe Armie Hammer, handsome as he is, was not the perfect casting? Anyway, they had a great chemistry on screen.