Philip Roth's last novel

Philip Roth's last novel, Indignation, is, as usual, seamless, fluid, perfectly accomplished. The setting is familiar and so are the themes - sexual transgression, individual freedom set against social constraints, coming of age, the emancipation of american jews in the 1950's -  but Roth manages nevertheless to captivate and hold the reader's attention with his perfect technique and his continuing capacity for ferocity. 

French cuisine on the skids

A recent weekend in Paris with my son David confirmed certain dismal impressions that previous visits to France had produced. Paris still looks great, the museums and the shops are wonderful but gone are the days when one went to France to eat well and shop for books. Unless you go to the very posh restaurants, the food now in Paris is tired and expensive fare, poorly done and poorly presented. Nothing is new or exciting: everywhere you find the same old recipes indifferently done. Forget the bookshops, too. I spent two nights carefully combing "l´Écume des Pages" and "la Hune" in the Boulevard St-Germain, two fashionable bookstores next to Café de Flore and Deux Magots, that are open until midnight. Quite apart from the tiresome presentation of french books, which has not changed in several generations - white and only white covers - nothing seems to catch one's eye or arouse one's interest. Foucault, Barthes, Lévy Strauss, to name just some my favorites, are gone and no one seems to have taken their place. Not to speak, of course, of the newspapers: flimsy Libération, dour Le Figaro, and of course, Le Monde, easily the most boring newspaper in the world.

Body of Lies

Body of Lies, the new film by Riddley Scott, a spy thriller set in the Middle East, is aptly titled: it does not contain a grain of truth. It rings false at every turn, except when it shows the smart new technology that allows the CIA to peep down from the skies into the dingiest holes. There are no thrills and no emotions in this movie. Everything seems packaged for an american audience and the politically correct lessons conveyed are obvious and trite. It's expensive, it's slick, it's shot in great locations, but it's eminently forgettable. 

GF Ballard

I took a break from the financial crisis to read JG Ballard's autobiography, "Miracles of Life", a recommendation from my friend Victor Pimstein. Who is JG Ballard? American, so I thought, or British, as it turned out? Young or old? What else had he written? I approached the book with a blank mind and proceeded to race through it, totally caught up in his story, which starts in Shangai in 1930, proceeds to England in the grim afterwar years and ends now, in the hospital ward. With deft touches and sly humour, in a wonderfully direct and unaffected style, Ballard brings to life cosmopolitan Shangai before the war ("a city 90% chinese and 100% americanized"), the internment camp where he spent part of his adolescence, where he was close to his parents as never before and  yet drifted away from them, his return to England, where "everything was rationed", including "hope itself", his career as a writer, which he approached from a slightly weird angle which brought him eventual success.  Writing of the 1950's, he says: "already I sensed that a new kind of popular culture was emerging that played on the latent psychopathy of its audiences, and in fact needed to elicit that strain of psychopathy if it was to work". Hence Crash, the Atrocity Exhibition, the Drowned World, some of the books that made his reputation. At 77, saner than any of us, Ballard tells his story as he prepares to die. It's moving, it's enthralling, it's great.