Review Mania

Books

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1. Iacocca by Lee Iacocca

So I'm probably the last person in the universe to read it, but better late than never, eh? Easily the breeziest autobiography I've ever read (it's not like I've read too many, though).

Lee Iacocca (and you all know this, so feel free to skip the paragraph) was the brilliant son of Italian immigrants who worked his way up to the top of Ford Corp. from way down there. His was the genius behind the design and success of the Mustang - and several other Ford cars after that. And then, when he had finally reached the top and become the president of Ford, Henry Ford inexplicably (and according to Iacocca, for absolutely no reason) fired him. Instead of retiring to enjoy his already considerable wealth, Iacocca went on to head Chrysler Corp and save it from financial ruin. Clearly, there's a story worth reading here.

There were times in this book when I wished Iacocca would get off his pedestal and stop lecturing me about his politics already - but I did mostly agree with him, he's earned the stature to give lectures, and it is his autobiography, after all, so I guess he's allowed to indulge a bit. On top of that, it's all very engagingly written. It's fun and it's entertaining and if you want a good overview of how the car industry works, it's loads better to read this than Arthur Hailey's abominably boring Wheels.

2. Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov

It's been a long time since I read something that was a must-read, but this book is way up there on the list. It's difficult to overstate how important I think this book is, and if it were up to me, I'd make it compulsory reading in all schools.

Kolyma Tales is a collection of short stories by a Kolyma survivor - which was the harshest of the forced-labour camps that were collectively known as 'Gulag'. The original work in Russian wasn't published until long after the author died in 1982, and the version I read is a translation by John Glad (a professor of Russian literature in a university here in USA - I forget which one), who translated selected stories from smuggled copies of the original work. The book displays prominently a disclaimer: "This book has been translated and published without the author's knowledge or consent."

Even as a stand-alone work of literature, judged solely on its artistic merits, Kolyma Tales is awesome. Shalamov's style is sparse and non-judgemental, and I love his descriptions of the taiga (Kolyma was located in the far northeast of Siberia). Events of unspeakable horror are related with a detachment that is strangely appropriate to an inmate of these camps, whose plans and anxieties and hopes for the future extend to no longer than a couple of hours, and no higher than getting warm or managing to get an extra ration of bread.

In one story, Shalamov's wood-cutting partner is asked to stake his sweater in a game of cards, but he refuses. The bullies kill him and take the sweater. Shalamov turns and leaves, thinking that he'll have to find a new partner. In another story, a member of the author's party commits suicide by sticking his neck between two branches of a tree, and Shalamov is unable to tear his eyes away, fascinated by what he thinks is the most unusual means of suicide he's ever seen.

There are some stories in this book that will wake you up at night... but the author manages to find the lighter moments that inevitably crop up in anybody's life, no matter how wretched. Sometimes it's as simple as sharing a 'smoke' (just a rolled up leaf with nothing in it) with a work-partner, and sometimes a prisoner manages to lay his hands on unimaginable luxuries - in one case, a can of condensed milk, which he drinks and savours to the last drop in front of a crowd of prisoners who have gathered to watch him eat. By far the greatest compliment that I can give this work is that despite how absolutely sickening the subject of these stories is, it doesn't leave you depressed.

It leaves you marvelling that a talent like Shalamov's survived those seventeen years of hell in Kolyma.

3. A Short History of Nearly Everything, and African Diary by Bill Bryson

Bryson has to be the most engaging writer currently putting words down on paper. The questions he explores, the trivia he puts in... I'm always left wondering how on earth he knew that that was exactly what I wanted to know. And he does it all with a wit and charm and humour that leaves the reader mesmerised.

In A Short History, Bryson travels the road often taken by pop science writers, and turns his pen to the origins of the Universe, the Earth and us. Knowing Bryson, I expected fun stuff - all the little details that would make knowing the things he was writing about all the more interesting, and I wasn't disappointed. In this book, his genius lies in introducing us to the major characters who propelled our understanding of the world forward - eccentricities and quirks, to put it mildly, are so common among these people that I have no doubt now that genius and stark raving madness go quite hand in hand. Did you know that Newton was - there's no other word for it - crazy? This man once inserted a long needle into his eye sockets and scraped around enthusiastically at the "back of his head", "just to see what would happen".

Anyway, that's not even a tenth of the stuff you'll find in this very long (480 pages of the larger variety) book. I give it an easy 9 /10.

African Diary, in contrast, is a very short book I finished in about an hour. It's a book that Bryson has written for charity about his trip to eastern Africa to see the CARE refugee camps. Suffice to say, it doesn't disappoint any high expectations that you may have when you pick up a Bill Bryson book. One passage that describes an unsteady train journey, in particular, is sheer genius.

An extract from the book is available on the CARE International UK website: here.

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Movies

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1. Heavenly Creatures (Starring Kate Winslet, directed by Peter Jackson)

You'd probably guess this was a true story even if they didn't tell you. It's a weird, weird movie that is also very arty - always a bad combination, at least for me.

Two fourteen-year-old school girls in New Zealand become fast friends as soon as they meet, and start doing everything together. They're writing operas and books, they're building shrines to tenor singers, they're making clay figurines to inhabit an imaginary world that they've built for themselves.

The 'depth' of their friendship (to use a euphemism) quite justifiably alarms both sets of parents, and they decide very prudently to put a large geographical distance between the two girls by shipping one of them off to South Africa. Of course, the girls don't want this to happen... and together they conspire to kill off one of their mothers. (Don't ask me what they thought this would achieve.)

I quite like the direction, and the visual effects used in the movie are really very good. But that could just be the Peter Jackson fan in me speaking... Overall, it's a slightly disturbing, but mostly weird movie to watch.


2. LotR: The Return of the King, extended edition

I splurged for my first EE LotR DVD, and yes, it's soooo worth it. The extra footage, though not quite on par with some of the scenes that were added to TTT, was really good.

Not to put spoilers in this review, but I did think the Eowyn-Faramir romance was handled beautifully given the time they spent on it (though of course a 10-minute scene developing the whole thing would have been even more welcome). Actually, all the additional Faramir scenes were spectacular - Faramir talking to Denethor about Boromir and the Ring, Faramir in a gem of an interlude with Pippin, and Faramir in the Houses of Healing... all amazing. The Mouth of Sauron is very, very cool also. Really cool. They gave it a smarmy personality, man... it's genius!

I didn't like the extra Merry scenes - particularly the one with Merry and Eowyn. It was completely pointless and illogical to boot. The additional 'Paths of the Dead' footage was so-so, and did nothing to enhance the movie. And I have to say that even though Christopher Lee does a marvellous, marvellous job in the 'Voice of Saruman' , the scene itself wasn't nearly as satisfying as I expected it to be. Seven minutes of footage sounds like a lot, but the whole thing was very rushed, and very abbreviated.

The documentaries are great, if a tad self-indugent... but that's only to be expected, because this is the last of the movies and everyone's a little sentimental about saying tata. It's awe-inspiring, the amount of work and sheer effort that went into the making of these movies. The set of Minas Tirith - oh WOW. They actually built a scale model of four or five levels of Minas Tirith, complete with gates and houses and shops and pathways. I wish they'd left the structure right where they built it and turned it into a museum or something... sheesh. It looked so brilliant just on my TV screen.

Final verdict: why do you care? If you're a fan, you have gotten it already... and if you aren't, you're not going to be interested whether I recommend it or not. But for the record, I do.