Real Venice (2011-12)

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Watanabe: Marco Andreatta as Pulcinella

(Embankment Galleries, Somerset House, until 11 December)

I’ve already mentioned this exhibition in the context of the wonderful portraits of Pierre Gonnord, who is one of the photographers who’s donated his work to be sold in aid of Venice in Peril.  When I wrote about Pierre Gonnord, I hadn’t actually been to see the show and had fallen in love with his photographs via the rather less imposing medium of the internet.  However, last Saturday, after visiting the Leonardo exhibition and then managing to get caught up in the Lord Mayor’s Show (which was great!), I finally made it to Somerset House.

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The Night Circus (2011): Erin Morgenstern

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★★★★

I’m going to be completely honest. I bought The Night Circus for its cover: a whimsical gallery of swirling black-and-white silhouettes, enlivened with splashes of scarlet.  Call me superficial: but, in this case, judging a book by its cover was a very good idea. This is Morgenstern’s first novel, but her writing style is already deft and economic, and she creates a series of vivid scenes that unfurl one after the other like flowers within flowers.

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Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan (2011-12)

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Leonardo: Madonna and Child with St Anne

Yesterday morning, at 8:30am, a full hour and a half before the gallery opened, I joined the queue which was already snaking around the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing.  The hype in the press about this exhibition has been cranked up to fever-pitch and all advance tickets have now been sold.  The only way to get in to see it is to queue on a morning in the hope of getting one of 500 tickets released every day.  The anticipation and excitement in the queue were electric, and it was wonderful to be there with people who had gone to such great extremes to get tickets.  One woman had come down from Nottingham and had got up at 3:30am in order to get to London on time to queue.

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American Pastoral (1997): Philip Roth

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★★★★

Before American Pastoral, I’d never read any Philip Roth.  I’d only really heard about him through reviews of Everyman, which sounded so completely depressing and pessimistic that I was entirely put off.  However, since I’ve just joined a book club (very exciting!) and this was the first book to be read, I took a deep breath and jumped in.  And I enjoyed it far, far more than I expected to.

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Anonymous (2011)

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Anonymous

★½

(directed by Roland Emmerich, 2011)

One of my friends keeps saying that I should read Jasper Fforde‘s books, which are set in a world where people riot over the question of who wrote Shakespeare’s plays (he clearly thinks I’d have sympathy with such a cause). As such, how could I resist Roland Emmerich’s new film Anonymous? In retrospect, I really wish I had resisted it. But that is part of the purpose of this blog. I am here to suffer really, really silly film-making so that you don’t have to. Think of it as a noble sacrifice.

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As Meat Loves Salt (2001): Maria McCann

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★★★★½

A new edition of As Meat Loves Salt has just been published in paperback.  The cover, aimed at the burgeoning understated-historical-romance market, shows a close-up of a woman’s torso, her hands in her lap. This amuses me, because although there are certainly women in the book, this cover completely fails to convey any of the story’s spirit or major themes. It would be like putting a fin-de-siècle lady with a parasol on the cover of Death in Venice. I much prefer the cover of my edition, which I’ve used to illustrate this post. Here is darkness, brooding, and a fragment of a young man’s face looming out of the shadow.

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Artists in Focus: Pierre Gonnord

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Pierre Gonnord

I’ve just discovered the most wonderful photographer. It was one of those wonderful moments in which, browsing on the internet, you stumble across something and follow a thread which leads you to an entirely new talent. This photographer’s name is Pierre Gonnord: born in France, he now lives and works in Spain.  Choosing people with striking or interesting faces, he takes portrait photographs which, from a distance, could easily be paintings by Caravaggesque old masters. It’s no wonder they captivate me.

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Jane Eyre (2011)

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Jane Eyre

★★★★½

(directed by Cary Fukunaga, 2011)

This is a retrospective review, as I saw Jane Eyre a fortnight ago now. Having read glowing reports of the film, I was really looking forward to it, even though the story has had more than its fair share of adaptations (along with Emma and Pride and Prejudice). One might ask: do we need another version? However, Cary Fukunaga has done a great job and gives a much-loved classic the sensual film treatment it deserves.

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Troy: Fact and Fiction

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Troy

Imagine you’re at a party.  You’re in the middle of a crowded room with conversation going on all around you, but suddenly in the midst of the hubbub you hear a word which immediately makes your ears prick up.  What words or phrases would catch your ear like that?  I have a few, but one of them is ‘Troy’.  If I overheard someone talking about Troy, I’d be compelled to shuffle closer and eavesdrop quite shamelessly until they either changed the subject or let me into their conversation.  There’s a magic to the name, a grandeur, not unlike that conjured up by the word ‘Byzantium’.  Unfortunately, if you hear the word ‘Troy’ nowadays it’s most likely that people would be talking about the film.

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The Valleys of the Assassins (1934): Freya Stark

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★★★★

When planning my trip to Qatar, it was hard to decide on reading material.  If I go abroad I always try to find a book which matches the place I’m going, as far as possible: it’s like a game.  I’ve read The Three Musketeers in Paris and The Leopard beside the pool in Sorrento (Sicily itself is still on the ‘to-do’ list).  For the Middle East, the obvious book was Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which is one of the many books I’ve always meant to read. I bought it; but then began to worry that perhaps it might cause offence; I don’t know how T.E. Lawrence is perceived in the Middle East.

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