It begins as a shock. A hooded figure is seated in the dark, so close to us that he seems to be made of wood. The camera pulls back to disclose a single form kneeling against a bare wall. There’s no patter, no background music, very little movement: you’ve entered another country, in this silent, […]
Ronald Reagan was preparing an invasion that was going to rescue the whole island next week. Fidel was about to be airlifted out to a new home in Miami, the guest of his secret patrons and supporters, the U.S. government. The soldiers were already lining up for Bay of Pigs II and a new constitution […]
Michael Ondaatje’s novels are all about putting the pieces together. Quite literally, because they proceed through a series of exquisited shaped vignettes that the reader has to fit into a pattern in her head; but more deeply, too, because their structure invariably reflects their theme. Nearly always they are about attempting to suture things together, […]
Howard Norman’s novels are nearly all about hemmed-in, stifled people in the vast, silent spaces of the far north, whose quiet lives are thrown about by acts–or moments–of sudden violence. His characters are mostly shy eccentrics, engaged in occupations not so different from the private, controlling business of the novelist: in previous novels, they have […]
What I love about Kyoto is the night. Almost every visitor to the ancient Japanese capital, home of geisha and tea-ceremonies and kimono and 2000 temples–is shocked by the first view, as she steps out of Kyoto’s ultra-modern train station, with an eleven-storey department-store and a luxury hotel attached: the “City of Heavenly Peace,” the […]
I once drove one hour out of central Los Angeles, along the infamous 10 freeway, clogged with long-distance trucks and low-riding gang-mobiles as it moves into and through the dark industrial areas of East Los Angeles towards the desert, and turned off the barreling eight lanes at a small road in a college town. Following […]
Through the long hot nights of summer and early autumn I have been listening to the ten newest songs from Leonard Cohen, almost unbearably sad in their themes and beautiful in their bareness, yet turned sultry and smoky and rich with a full-bodied looseness thanks to his collaborator in life and in art, Anjani. The […]
The air, sultry, pulsing, hot even along the pitch-black streets, is redolent of Cuba. The two-storey gingerbread white houses, their leafy verandahs looking out on swampy gardens, hammocks swaying under Gothic extravagances, make you think you are in Haiti. On one car on sleepy Fleming Street, defiant outlaw legends painted all over it, one of […]
At night, every night, electrical storms broke across the bay, the mangrove trees in front of my little motel shaking in the wind, the clouds above the ocean lit up every few seconds by long, silent blasts of Turner-esque light, as if the heavens were receiving an X-ray. When I stepped out of my little […]
Suddenly, rising above the clumps of tea bushes that smother the rolling hills of central Sri Lanka–slight female Tamil workers moving up and down the slopes with baskets on their backs–a great forested outcropping appears. You pass a long flight of steps along the main road, leading up to a Hindu temple. A sign for […]
