Antonio Lobo Antunes

Word by word, sentence by sentence, António Lobo Antunes is a great writer. He catches like no one else the flavour of the spoken word, his prose is full of gripping metaphors, he can be wonderfully funny and sardonic. And yet, I doubt whether he is great novelist. His novels lack structure and plot, the story line is weak and the unfortunate result is the reader's boredom. He seems to me a self-indulgent writer, who loses himself in the voluptuousness of style. His characters move in a haze of unbridled stream of consciousness from which an action rarely emerges. Although his vision of Portugal can be ferocious, his characters often seem oddly sentimental, especially when they are full of despair. It seems as if this scion of the "haute bourgeoisie" is endlessly fascinated by the "petite bourgeoisie". His whole novelistic world is made of bitterness and frustration, his characters are always constrained by a hostile, morose and petty social reality.  Is Portugal really like this?

Tristan and Isolde

My friend João Pedro Garcia, who is a devout opera buff and spends his weekends travelling the world to catch the very best performances, invited me and my wife, as a wedding present, to join him in Milan for Tristan and Isolde, with Daniel Barenboim in the podium and "mise en scène" by Patrice Chéreau. I, who like to spend my weekends at home, had often wondered how he could withstand the strain of so much travelling after a hard workweek. Now I think I understand a little better. Opera at this level is consoling, overwhelming, elating - I am short of adverbs for describing the deep emotional and artistic satisfaction I took in this show. For hours, I sat entranced, watching the slow build up of each act to its powerful climax, sometimes moved to tears by the drama. Everything fell together, the music and the action fused in a seamless whole, just as Wagner had intended it. This is, indeed, the only way to enjoy Wagner: in the theater. And as I left La Scala, it occurred to me that never since the Greeks invented the tragedy had anything been created for the stage  with the same capacity to move an audience as a Wagner opera.

Checking out Alban Berg

Driving back and forth between Vallvidrera and the Eixample, I listen to Alban Berg. Berg's lyricism, his anguished expressionism, put him squarely in the great German classical tradition, reinvented by the Viennese school. But this music does not renew this tradition. Rather it brings it to an end.  It is, literally, a dead end. There is no enjoyment here. There is beauty but no life. There is craft but no wit. The great master was Stravinsky, not Schoenberg.

Bauhaus in Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv, a city which never valued beauty, is revamping itself. Between Bograshov and Allenby, alongside Rothschild Blv, down in Neve Tzedek, the leafy boulevards, with pared down Bauhaus arquitecture, are regaining some of their old flavour. Gleaming white houses, small discreet cafés, little trendy shops amidst fragrant trees and  cool youngsters riding old fashioned bycicles create a relaxed mood which belies the atmosphere of tense expectation and brash invective normally associated with Israel. 

Roberto Bolaño

I bought "Los Detectives Salvages" more out of a feeling of dutifulness than of real interest. Bolaño is being touted as a canonical writer for my generation, especially in the USA, so it is only normal he should be approached with as much curiosity as apprehension and distrust. After letting the book rest for a few weeks, I opened it with diffidence. The first surprise was: Bolaño was... well, he was just plain fun. There was a feeling of recognition, too. I knew, without knowing, what he was talking about and I could touch feel and hear the world he was describing. This novel, set in 1975 Mexico, about a literary movement, called visceral realism, describes a "zeitgeist" that I recognize as my own. It reminds me of the atmosphere in Portugal, when the revolution was raging, both out on the street and inside our marijuana fuelled heads... But wait, this is fun, but it can also be moving. And, as it goes on and on, ever deeper into this aimless, random, intense world of obscure poets, it becomes ever more intriguing. What is going on here, one asks... What does this mean, in literary terms? Can the critics please decipher this and explain why it is great? It is a shimmering text, full of echoes and voices, rough and ready, tender and beautiful. So, one keeps reading, and reading...  

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. 

Siegfried at São Carlos

Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, Lisbon's wonderful XVIIIth century opera house, is staging a great new production of the Ring cycle by Graham Vick. This year it was Siegfried's turn. Graham Vick presents the Ring in a kind of comic book style which, at its best, is witty instead of silly something  seldom achieved by the numerous attempts to transfer to our day and age classic opera plots. (Peter Sellar's great D.Giovanni, set in the Bronx, is another exception). Personally, I found Siegfried himself, that curious mixture of adolescent bully and idealistic hero, not entirely convincing. But this is no more than a detail, albeit an important one, in what can be considered on the whole a triumph. A sure sign of success: the hours passed effortlessly and at the end the feeling was of anticipation for Gottardamerung.

Clive James' culture bath

"Il n'y a pas de genres, il n'y a que des talents". This quote by Jean François Revel is one of the many trufles to be found in "Cultural Amnesia", the great partial summation of a lifetime of reading and pontificating by Clive James, the Australian critic and TV personality. The quote and the book, which I spent a feverish summer day fevereshly reading in bed, make an implicit case for great journalism which I entirely subscribe and add to by arguing that newspaper and magazine writing provide a much better literary training than is to be found in academia. Endlessly entertaining and generally wise, even if occasionally corny, "Cultural Amnesia",a collection of "over a hundred essays", as the backpage helpfully points out, about cultural figures mainly from the XXth century, rescues from oblivion dozens of worthy writers. I found the book particularly illuminating on such topics as Vienese café society before the Anchluss, French collaborationists and the German intellectual scene after WWII. 

John Richardson's Picasso

Chatty, mischievious perceptive and thorough, John Richardson's biography of Picasso is a compulsive read. Richardson offers us not only the life of Picasso but also of its social setting. It makes for fascinating cultural history. But will it ever be finished? The third volume came out in 2007 and it only takes us to 1932. There are still another 40 years of life to be covered and Richardson is already 83 years old. It gives you a great urge to look and look again at the great mass of work left by Picasso. He covered and seemingly exhausted an enormous field. His presence in the history of art is daunting. Very few artists today seem to be grappling with his legacy. Hockney is an obvious exception. Check out Richardson's loft in lower Manhattan and his art collection in You Tube: At home with Charlie Rose: John Richardson