The Swimmers, by Julie Otsuka

This 2022 novel is told in first person plural, an unusual choice, but in this case effective. A group of people who swim laps at a public pool give voice to their collective need to be there, to move and to immerse. One of the swimmers, Alice, a woman with dementia, gradually takes center stage, and the story moves into second person singular, chronicling her descent from function to institutionalization, her patchwork memory all too familiar to those of us who have witnessed this decay close up. 

I almost didn’t finish the book – my mom didn’t sink that far before she died but she was headed into the abyss of not knowing anyone, losing language, losing speech. I wrote a short story about her descent, and that was plenty long for me. To channel more of her failing mind would have ultimately seemed cruel – to expose a person whose wit and talents evaporated, must serve some greater purpose. Otherwise, it lays bare a terrible loss – to tell a story? To make her the star of a vortex? 

When I want to say more, I feel her in my heart, angry and bitter that I am using her to make my own point.

The Animal Dialogues - Uncommon Encounters in the Wild, by Craig Childs

These remarkable stories, published in this fine book in 1997, are as brief as three pages and as long as eighteen. Childs spends time in wild places, primarily the American Southwest, but also ranges from mountains in Mexico to Vancouver Island and the Yukon, writing about creatures as diverse as praying mantis, ravens, mountain goats, smelt, rattlesnakes… Every story has its context, the encounter (sometimes multiples), and opportunities for amazement or amusement. 

For example, he lived some time in a tipi in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado. Quickly his dwelling was overrun by mice. He obtained a cat, which ran away. He obtained another cat, which hunted mice prolifically in the area outside the tipi while steadfastly ignoring those inside, while Childs was at his wits’ end, astounded at all the places that are not mouse-proof whatever you do. 

Along the way he offers insights into the physical capacities, behaviors, and choices of wild creatures, his deep respect for them leading his curiosity. He writes about netting smelt in the tide off Vancouver Island with a group of Native Americans, realizing at some point that the couple hundred fish they have caught will all have to be cleaned. Sort of dampens the thrill of the catch. He writes about a red spotted toad an inch long, a water-loving creature he discovers in a desert canyon far from the nearest possibility of water – and yet, there it is, thriving. 

He writes about an epically-bad mosquito season in the Yukon, and makes this observation, “If a mosquito is released in still air, it will come directly to you even if you are standing one hundred feet away. Through the air, the mosquito senses the carbon dioxide of your breath, lactic acid from your skin, traces of acids emitted by skin bacteria, and the humidity and heat of your body. If there is a slight breeze, a mosquito may find you from across the length of a football field.” He respects the insect’s adaptations and its intricate neurons – by the time you finish this story you realize the mosquitoes are always going to win. 

If you have even the slightest interest in the natural world, you will discover wonders in these pages.

The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy

This lyrical novel, winner of the 1997 Booker Prize, explores love as an outpost in a hostile world, occupied in the understanding that it cannot survive the siege – of law, of hierarchy, of propriety, of obedience. The story is revealed slowly, descending through layers, in the eyes of twins, a boy, Estha, and a girl, Rahel, whose father is gone and whose mother, Ammu, lives at the mercy of in-laws who despise her. They live in a poor village in a poor province of India, and from the outset we know that something terrible – more than one thing – has occurred, scarring their lives. 

It takes till nearly the end to fully see those hateful and mournful ghosts, the love not permitted crushed under the bootheels of the intolerance that keeps society in order, order in society. In sensory detail, Roy offers the observations of children, true to their dramatic and playful sensibilities. When the twins are seven, their ten-year-old cousin, half-English, comes to visit with her English mother. During this short visit, the girl dies, though it takes most of the novel for us to find out the true circumstances. 

But in the opening chapter, we are with Rahel in church during the funeral, observing, “… Rahel watched a small black bat climb up Baby Kochamma’s expensive funeral sari with gently clinging curled claws. When it reached the place between her sari and her blouse, her roll of sadness, her bare midriff, Baby Kochamma screamed and hit the air with her hymnbook. The singing stopped for a ‘Whatisit? Whathappened?’ and for a Furrywhirring and a Sariflapping.” 

This book has made it onto Banned Book lists, not only for brief sexual content but also for the more explosive exploration of love between an Untouchable and a middle-caste woman. Roy deals frankly with social structures and the pull of desire, and it seems likely that the condemnation assailing this work has more to do with the violations of caste, than erotic content. 

She also lays bare the privileges of patriarchy – the twins’ drunken grandfather who beats their grandmother daily with a brass candlestick, the assumptions of the local Marxist leader that his wife will clean him up and clean up after him, available whenever he wants her and out of sight when he doesn’t. 

As with Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, there’s a good chance those who seek to ban the book have never actually read it, they’ve just heard something about it, or seen a brief quote. I found the novel both honest about the harm we do to each other, and well-written. Read it then judge for yourself.

Samurai Trilogy, films by Hiroshi Inagaki

Before the Marvel Universe of superheroes, there were noble warriors in film. And the samurai of medieval Japan lend themselves particularly to the combination of physical skill, mental alertness, and spiritual centeredness that make an ordinary man heroic. The finest of these is the great actor Toshiro Mifune, who loves to embody penniless and slovenly characters who possess animal alertness, easily underestimated. 

Director Akira Kurosawa, who made Seven Samurai in 1954, also featured Mifune in later samurai epics: Yojimbo in 1961, Sanjuro in 1962. Between these, Inagaki made Samurai Trilogy, released in 1955. They’re all great for aficionados of the posturing, extended setup, and lightning fight scenes of swordsmen in action. 

Subplots aside, Part I broadly follows the development of a man (Mifune) who rejects his humble beginnings as a farmer and runs away to war, to win renown and to escape his extended family who despise him because he is savage, untamed and unrepentant. His physical prowess brings him to a certain point on his road to becoming a samurai, but as a Buddhist priest tells him, this strength is an obstacle to true development. 

Part II finds him, after three years locked in an attic with books, emerging as a more centered and learned man. He is now a respected and feared warrior, meeting the head of a famed samurai school in a duel. But he still has not learned to calm his spirit. 

In Part III, returning to his farming roots brings contentment – but his reputation has inspired a great young swordsman, played by Koji Tsuruta, to challenge him to a duel. They put off the fight while each develops his skills and fame, then at last they meet, in a memorable confrontation on the shore of an island. 

That’s the main story line, but this film is also shot beautifully: magnificent huge old pine trees, rolling fields, waterfalls, lush mountainsides, beautiful houses and castles, and hovels and inns full of flies and thieves, all form a compelling visual tapestry. When the plot bogs down in unrequited love, there’s still plenty to look at – your time is not wasted here despite melodramatic interludes. 

One might find oneself longing for a time when honor, courage, and dignity were cardinal virtues, and one needn’t resort to bullying to make one’s power felt. Those of us who love these films are grateful for the presence of Toshiro Mifune, playing the consummate outsider whose sword is, purportedly, for hire, but ultimately wielded in the service of justice.

The Zone of Interest, a film by Jonathan Glazer

The first thing that stood out to me about this movie is the Nazi officers’ haircuts. They are so very ugly, I have to wonder whether that was historically accurate, or a deliberate choice to make the Germans loathsome. I know tastes change, but even Moe, of The Three Stooges, has a better hairdo. Floppy on top, head close-shaved from above the ears down, and with a weird little wanna-be-ducktail point in the back, they’re too broadly hideous to be ignored. Not as hideous as the contrast between the little Eden of the Hoss family, and the back wall of their lovely garden, the razor-wire-topped boundary of Auschwitz death camp. 

This film is hard to write about – what can one say? The Obersturmfuhrer, Rudolph Hoss, played by Christian Friedel, occupies a lovely home (though his wife Hedwig, Sandra Huller, complains it’s not as big as it looks). This idyll is starkly opposed to the adjacent chimneys, barracks, the smoke the servants sometimes close the windows to keep out, the ashes that mulch the soil, the flames, the trains arriving at all hours. 

Hoss hosts the efficiency expert who proposes a design for the crematorium that will make possible continuous operation of the ovens – bodies (except they don’t call them bodies – “units”) go in, the 1000 plus degree heat does its work, then the load is moved to the next room where it cools, and the ashes are soon at 40 degrees, ready to be shoveled out. All that ingeniousness, turned to such a purpose. 

Occasionally the camp next door intrudes – Hoss goes fishing, and two of his children play in the river. He hooks a human jawbone, and suddenly barks at the kids to get out of the water. He hustles them home where they’re subjected to a sanitation treatment – a scrubbing with bleach perhaps, which has them screaming in pain – to expunge the contamination from those people, whose remains have the temerity to end up in the river where he loves to fish. 

Glazer makes clear that it’s possible to ignore something so horrific, so close by – just don’t think about what’s going on, or whether it’s right, or what it means to be on this side of such a wall not that side. It is a willed blindness humans suffer from, and perpetuate suffering through. The veil between what’s behind that wall, and places where we torment each other now, is almost nonexistent.

Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

My disintegrating paperback copy of this deceptively small novel was printed in 1970, though the copyright is 1963. It is Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s fifth published work. And it’s dynamite. Or, should I say, ice-nine, the substance that destroys life on earth. I like to give copies to friends and family as high school graduation gifts, because the book contains so many fundamental truths about life, all in one place. 

Vonnegut creates a scientist and his family, a destructive form of water, and a nihilist religion. In his deadpan way he describes the Hoenikker family – Dr. Felix, the father, genius with no moral compass whatever; his daughter Angela, a tall gawky woman with a gift for playing clarinet; his son Franklin who shuns nearly everyone, spending his time building a model railroad world; and young son Newt, a midget born at their mother’s death, cared for by Angela. Dr. Felix invents a substance the US Marines can use so they don’t have to slog through mud in their forays into battle. But that’s not all the substance does. 

Vonnegut introduces such ideas as one’s karass, the people with whom one is connected; granfalloons, people who imagine they are connected; wampeter, the purpose for which a karass exists; boko-maru, the ecstatic kneading of one another's feet; and foma – lies. He invents other terms too, but these are the most important. They’re delineated in the religion Bokononism, which is outlawed on the island where it is practiced. No one may be a Bokononist – lest they suffer a hideous death – and yet, they are all Bokononists. 

I’ve told too much – if you’ve never read this, you ought to find a copy – preferably a crumbling artifact on a used book store shelf – and collect some fundamental truths you might have overlooked thus far.

Maestro, a film by Bradley Cooper

This 2023 Oscar contender deals well for a while with the curse of biopics: life tends not to fit the narrative arc of a satisfying story. Leonard Bernstein was a colossus in music as in spirit, and as channeled by Bradley Cooper, he fills the screen. The first half is brilliant – one imaginative sequence, an exuberant dance by a trio of sailors, Leonard, and Felicia Montealegre, in a number from “On the Town” perfectly illustrates the attractions Bernstein has to his wife-to-be and to young men. They all dance together and apart, in this scene and in the rest of the movie. 

Bernstein is a man who leans into his appetites, at one point lamenting that his love of people prevents him from the level of composing he would otherwise achieve. The effervescent banter between Felicia (Carey Mulligan) and Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) is marvelous – we feel we are in a time when parties were populated by sophisticates who traded witticisms and opinions with confidence and a light touch. But the second half drags – not just the cigs (I hoped the credits would include Cigarette Wrangler, an essential crewmember for this pic – I looked in vain for a scene in which they weren’t smoking). We already know Bernstein swings both ways, and that despite being a loving husband and father, he is also unbridled in his appetite for men. But the music – the compositions, the conducting – the reason anyone would make or watch this movie – plays second fiddle (sorry!) to his fast living – booze, coke, young guys. 

And it’s here that Cooper and his co-writer Josh Singer fall into the biography trap: they feel compelled to tell more than we need to know (“Because it happened!”) to appreciate Bernstein’s prodigious talents. I would have cut twenty minutes. The fizz of the first half has gone flat, the story dutifully plods on. Between concerts and bouts at the keyboard, we have a lot of slack time filled with pickup scenes and parties. Cut! At Felicia’s command he lies to their oldest, their daughter Jamie (Maya Hawke) about rumors of his behavior at Tanglewood. Later, it’s clear she knows what is going on. Cut! 

Much has been made of Cooper’s prosthetic nose, created by the makeup artist Kazu Hiro. I don’t know what they are complaining about – I used to watch Bernstein’s Concerts for Young People, and Cooper channeled Bernstein brilliantly – I thought I was watching the man not the actor portraying him. If you’ve seen Frank Langella as Richard Nixon, or Liev Schreiber as Henry Kissinger, or, god forbid, John Wayne as Genghis Khan (in “The Conqueror,” best watched in an altered state), you would give Cooper very high marks. 

For me the actor who stole the show was Carey Mulligan, who deserves an Oscar. Understated vs. Cooper’s flamboyance, she holds her own without being pitiful.