Sunday, July 31, 2011
Don Giovanni - film from Glyndebourne
I hadn't realised how much humour this opera contains. Brilliant show, apart from one thing - it's a shame they had to break the atmosphere up with interviews at the beginning of the second half of the film - we went back, all ready and eager to be plunged into the story again - and lo! analysis and explanation . . . I thought these guys were supposed to know about dramatic tension.
Jean-Claude Izzo and food
A book about him and his relationship to Marseilles, its food etc.
Love death and basil - the Marseillais cooking of Jean-Claude Izzo, by Pierpaolo Pracca.
It includes lots of recipes (in Italian) at the end of the book.
Love death and basil - the Marseillais cooking of Jean-Claude Izzo, by Pierpaolo Pracca.
It includes lots of recipes (in Italian) at the end of the book.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Sunday, July 3, 2011
The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht
An absorbing book - with shades of magical realism in the way Obreht uses myths and stories to illuminate the narrator's own more down-to-earth approach to life in the Balkans just after the wars of the 1990s.
Another book in which the relationship between grandchild and grandparent is vital.
more to come
Another book in which the relationship between grandchild and grandparent is vital.
more to come
Saturday, June 25, 2011
La Maison sans Racines - Andrée Chedid
Andrée Chedid died in Paris in March 2011, aged 90. She was essentially a French writer, though her family is originally Lebanese, and Egyptian. She herself was born in Egypt, brought up to speak English and French and Arabic, but lived in France from 1946.
This novel is set just before the outbreak of the civil war in Lebanon in 1975, and is written around a single incident - two young women, one Christian, one Muslim wearing a yellow scarf to symbolise hope, meet in the centre of a square. A shot rings out - one of them falls to the ground, and Kalya, a grandmother, approaches the two of them. Intertwined with this key incident, which is told in short two or three page bursts, are two longer stories, which give it a factual and emotional context. The first, set in 1932, concerns a holiday Kalya spent as a child with her grandmother Nouza. In the second, Kalya, herself now a grandmother who lives in Paris, is spending a holiday in Beirut with her own (nine-year-old?) grand-daughter, Sybil, who lives in New York.
A mix of cultures, times and lives that encompasses much of the twentieth century Middle East, but through the close family relationships, and filtered through the cultures of the West as well.
The ending is shocking, but logical, and the book ends with a symbol of hope - the scarf floating.
(still in progress)
This novel is set just before the outbreak of the civil war in Lebanon in 1975, and is written around a single incident - two young women, one Christian, one Muslim wearing a yellow scarf to symbolise hope, meet in the centre of a square. A shot rings out - one of them falls to the ground, and Kalya, a grandmother, approaches the two of them. Intertwined with this key incident, which is told in short two or three page bursts, are two longer stories, which give it a factual and emotional context. The first, set in 1932, concerns a holiday Kalya spent as a child with her grandmother Nouza. In the second, Kalya, herself now a grandmother who lives in Paris, is spending a holiday in Beirut with her own (nine-year-old?) grand-daughter, Sybil, who lives in New York.
A mix of cultures, times and lives that encompasses much of the twentieth century Middle East, but through the close family relationships, and filtered through the cultures of the West as well.
The ending is shocking, but logical, and the book ends with a symbol of hope - the scarf floating.
(still in progress)
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