three little reviews

I’ve read a couple of good books – Love in Idleness by Charlotte Mendelson and Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban, and seen some interesting movies – What the bleep do we know?, My summer of love, and, on TV, The warrior and the princess.

The first three, briefly:

Love in idleness – quality writing, taut and bright, even if the world described struck me as stiflingly middle-class, and the young narrator as overly desperate to milk every ounce of meaning from stray glances and offhand remarks. She was an appealing character though, finely mixing astuteness and insight with innocence and vulnerability. And lots of good humour.
The book’s theme, if that matters, is family relations, sibling rivalries, desire and morality, all revolving around the narrator’s intrigued and timorous relationship with Stella, her mother’s younger sister, an apparently hard-hearted hedonist. She emerges well, though, and in spite of the sting in the tail, which sends her back into family intrigue, you just know she’s going to survive, and thrive.

Passage to Juneau – a real treasure, and I’ll certainly be looking out for more of Raban’s writings. A fellow loner, Raban uses this trip through the inside passage from Seattle to Juneau to reflect on history (the fat, fuming Captain Vancouver’s earlier voyage of discovery along the same route), romanticism (the Sublime and Beautiful nature of wild nature, as defined by Edmund Burke, and oceanwise as painted by Turner), the transformations of native culture, the shapes and colours of water and weather, the illusions and elusiveness of love, the patterns of family, and the consolations of literature. A book full of heart and spirit and stalwart individualism – a great read and a great companion.

What the bleep do we know? - behind all the talking head blahblah this was a simple feel-good, take-control-of-your-own-life movie. It was a mixture of documentary and narrative, the narrative following the day of a grumpy, harassed photographer, played by Marlee Matlin, whose narrow view of herself and her life is widened by strange ‘cosmic occurrences’ supposedly based on or inspired by the weirdness of quantum mechanics and molecular biology. This could all be easily dismissed as new age religion posing as science, and on some level I’ve done just that, but its religiosity has something of an appeal for me – rather surprisingly. It’s not really a religious sense at all, but a sense of the multi-dimensionality of the self, which you may or may not want to describe as spirituality. Yes I think more an inspirational film than a religious one, and the self-actualising message surely doesn’t deserve to be too harshly criticised.