Tuesday 28 November 2023

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.



Friday 28 July 2023

Playing Barbie in Nasser’s Egypt

 Playing Barbie in Sixties Egypt



 

In the early Sixties, in Nasser’s “socialist” Egypt, you could not come by anything imported, and I absolutely longed for a Barbie doll. When an uncle went to the States, he brought back one for me. The stereotypical Barbie, of course, there was no other at the time, and she came with just the swimsuit she stood up in. Ordering additional outfits or accessories was out of the question, but that was not a problem. 

I was on the older side to be playing with dolls, anyway, and the pleasure, for me, was designing, cutting and sewing dresses for my Barbie. There were always plenty of fabric scraps left over from the summer frocks and nightgowns the “little dressmaker” ran up for me on a freestanding, iron Singer sewing machine that occupied most of a small room in our house. My mother could not sew to save her life, but it was common in those days to have a dressmaker come to one’s house to do the sewing, and I can still conjure the sound of that foot pedal running “drrrrrrrrr” from the sewing room, off and on for hours at the beginning of every season. 

For proper dresses the dressmaker often copied patterns from Burda, a German magazine, painstakingly expanding them to scale and size on butcher paper, and then cutting the fabric along the lines. Then came the lengthy process of fittings, which I hated, having to stand on a stool while having the dress carefully slipped over my head, first with the fabric held together with prickly pins, then very loosely stitched at the seams, then finally sewn up properly on the Singer sewing machine, the hems and linings finished by hand.

So I always had plenty of fabric scraps for my Barbie’s dresses: cotton lawn, silk chiffon, even upholstery velvet. I started with boat neck shifts, as they were the easiest style to cut, and stitched them up with a handheld sewing tool like a large stapler. It came in handy, since I was the despair of my governess, who had tried in vain to teach me the simplest of stem stitches. She herself truly had what she called in French “fairy hands,” but I was my mother’s daughter when faced with needle and thread.

Now that I look at my grandaughter’s generation, surrounded by multiple Barbies with closets full of ready-made Barbie clothes and accessories, their gigantic doll houses and Barbie cars and swimming pools, none of which seem to hold children’s attention for more than a couple of hours, it makes me wonder. I know I had endless hours of entertainment with the creative process of dressing up my mannequin doll.  It makes me wonder. Was I really so deprived in comparison, with my one Barbie and her homemade clothes in Sixties Egypt? 

Saturday 17 September 2022

Excited about my new podcast interview and reading “Post 9/11 in the Cul-de-sac.”

The September 15, 2022 episode of the new podcast “27 Views of Chapel Hill” features an interview with me and readings from my short story, Muslims in the Cul-de-sac, which originally was published in the collection Love is Like Water and was republished in the anthology 27 Views of Chapel Hill. 

On Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify and here: http://www.enopublishers.org/27-views




Sunday 28 August 2022

Remembering Michael Malone

 Remembering Michael Malone: in spite, or perhaps because, of his acclaimed success as a novelist and screenwriter, he was the easiest and least ego-invested of writers to edit, as I can testify as the editor for his essays in both Mothers and Strangers and the South Writ Large Anthology. As I quoted in the Acknowledgments to Mothers and Strangers, Michael called me a “horse whisperer for writers,” but that was just typical of his generosity; no one was less in need of a whisperer than Michael Malone. He shone equally as a reader. Here he is reading from his essay in the book, nearly a year ago, on September 20, 2021.



Sunday 7 August 2022

Our new issue of South Writ Large Magazine with Jill McCorkle

 I’m especially proud of our newest issue of South Writ Large Magazine, of which I am one of four editor/founders. It features, among other articles, one I curated: the synergy of an exceptional essay by Jill McCorkle and splendid photographs by Tom Rankin.





Tuesday 2 August 2022

The Russian Soul, Then and Now




 With Russia and the Ukraine in the news, and renewed discussion around Russian identity, the Russian soul, and the history of the region, who better to turn to than Russian authors themselves from Turgenev to Makine? But first let me posit that my own relationship with Russian authors is a complex one. I was introduced to the classics by an uncle who gave me a few books form his library that he thought age appropriate—I must have been around ten. I remember especially a beautifully illustrated book of folklore called The Malachite Maid, and also Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter. My uncle may have found a connection with Pushkin, also a member of a landowning family in a period of turmoil. 

When I was reading these classics, however, was in the sixties, the decade of Nasser’s pro-Soviet years, and I disassociated the Russians in the books from the real live Russians who roamed the streets of Cairo, representating as they did the “Socialist” system in the name of which my family had been stripped of its estates and possessions. But my own bias apart, in general they were not liked by Egyptians of all classes. I remember one afternoon coming upon our maid standing behind the window watching a young Russian across the street sitting on his balcony under the broiling summer sun, stripped to the waist, his skin strawberry-red and peeling, sweating and fanning himself with a newspaper.

“Doesn’t he have enough sense to get out of the sun at midday?” She shook her head. “Someone should warn him. He’s some mother’s son, after all, even if he’s Russian.” Then she sighed and drew the shutters closed. No one regretted the Russians when Sadat booted them unceremoniously out in the early seventies. 

Later I read Turgenev and Chekhov, but only dipped in and out of Tolstoy. I have yet to finish War and Peace.



Now though, rereading Turgenev, I am struck by turns of expression that did not arrest my thought before. For instance, a landowner’s estate was not expressed in terms of acreage, but by the number of “souls” he owned, that is serfs. One book I found invaluable in putting Russian literature of the 19th century in context is Amanda Brickell Bellows’s American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post Emancipation Imagination. She highlights the progressive landlords like Turgenev, but also the apologists for serfdom, as evidenced in the fictional and artistic representations of the period. As she pointed out to me—Amanda is a friend and fellow editor—when I mentioned the reference to “souls”, in the American context the word “souls” could not have been used for enslaved people as their possession of souls was controversial. Truly fascinating. 

 

Friday 22 July 2022

Variety is the Spice of Reading

 Variety is the spice of reading: always keep several books going at once, depending on one’s mood. Two authored by friends: Maureen Quilligan’s history of Renaissance queens and Redge Hanes’s novel of human trafficking. Turgenev, because a classic is always worth revisiting. And a contemporary French novelist, Nelly Alard, because variety…


Monday 11 July 2022

Abe’s Assassin and the Potala Palace, Tibet

 The alleged motive for Shinzo Abe’s assassination and the Potala Palace, the legendary winter palace of the Dalai Lamas in Lhasa, Tibet. What’s the connection? Bear with me. Ten years or so ago, I visited Tibet, and climbed to the top of the Potala Palace, taking two hours to climb the thousand steps to the top and twenty minutes to walk down—it’s that steep. Our guide throughout our stay in Tibet, a young native Tibetan, was, like all his ethnic countrymen, resentful of the Han Chinese who dominated the economy and looked down on the native population. But surprisingly, he did not attribute the backwardness of the region solely to the Chinese government’s promotion of the Han majority over the Tibetan minority. He attributed it partly to the legendary spirituality of the Tibetan Buddhists, so admired and exoticized by the West, that led them to donate their earthly wealth to the temple rather than focus on the education and advancement of their people. His own mother, according to our young guide, gave whatever she was able to save to buy gold leaf to gild the statues of the temple, while he and his siblings went without.

Fast forward to three days ago, when a gunman shot down Shinzo Abe, the former Japanese Prime Minister, because, he alleged, Abe had ties to a particular sect, the Unification Church, to which the assassin’s mother had belonged and given donations and went bankrupt. This motive initially seemed far fetched to me but then I remembered our young Tibetan guide and his resentment of his mother’s devotion to her temple at the expense of the future of her children. 






 

Monday 16 May 2022

South Writ Large Anthology Launch on Wednesday May 18th!

It’s exciting indeed to see our South Writ Large Anthology finally in print and on bookshelves wherever books are sold! Twenty-six splendid pieces selected to represent the hundreds of essays and art contributed by well over a hundred writers and artists featured over eleven years of quarterly publishing. Lavishly illustrated, it includes an Introduction by novelist Michael Malone. It has been seven years in the making, a labor of love on the part of all concerned, from contributors to editors, and all proceeds go to benefit the UNC Center for the Study of the American South. Our launch date is May 18th at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill. In addition to two of the anthology editors, Robin Muira and myself, several of the contributors will be reading excerpts from their pieces in the anthology, including NYT best-selling novelist Jill McCorkle and legendary Southern Cooking Chef and cookbook author Bill Smith. If you’re anywhere in the vicinity,  as they say here in the South, y’all come on down!




Book Review: Divining Women by Druscilla French

 Druscilla French’s Divining Women, the most recent in her Wheel of the Year series, takes place at a time of year when the harsh Colorado winter begins almost imperceptibly to turn the corner to Spring. The extended family at the heart of the novel, related by blood or friendship or need, struggle separately and together with their own demons and challenges, from matriarch grandmother Cate to implacable justice-seeking lawyer Mattie to gifted, brave but often ignored granddaughter Chrysaor. This youngest is the emotional locus of the story, heartbreaking in her valiant efforts to hold the family together and carry burdens far beyond her years. In keeping with the wheel of the year theme, the ending, without give away too much, closes on a note of plenty, a presage of the Spring that follows the barrenness of Winter. 

The writing is elegant and evocative throughout, and a palimpsest of sorts reminds the reader of the earlier two novels in the series, although this third book very much stands alone. By the time the last page is turned, the reader is left looking forward to following the fortunes of the family in the next book in the series.