My Old School, a film by Jono McLeod

This 2022 film is a pastiche of animation and live action, telling the true story of a student entering the 5th form (junior in high school is the US equivalent) in a Glasgow school, Bearsden Academy, in 1993. Brandon Lee is an odd duck – he looks odd, he doesn’t seem to fit in, and for a sixteen-year-old he knows a great deal about many things. 

Through the course of the film we see interviews with his classmates, now adults, who express their recollections and opinions of him. I won’t say much about the story, because it would be a shame to spoil your discovery. Suffice it to say that Brandon Lee is not who he seems, and as the film progresses, we find out bit by bit who he really is. It’s a fascinating piece of cinema, playing with our perceptions even as Brandon’s fellow students learn more. 

The animated retelling of his 1993 school year adds an appropriate level of unreality to the whole thing. Alan Cumming plays adult Brandon, being interviewed about his stint as a student, and some of his fellow students and school administrators are played by actors as well. Others play themselves. There are funny moments, and surprises, and realizations that reverberate. 

This is a perfect summer movie – go see it!

The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss

In 2005, Nicole Krauss’s layered work The History of Love was published. As in Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s novel The Shadow of the Wind, we have an intergenerational mystery of lives in danger, at its heart a love story. 

In The History of Love, the mystery is about a book of that title being translated by a girl’s mother. Who actually wrote it, why is our young heroine, Alma, named after the girl in the book, what happened to the girl in the book? 

Krauss fully captures the voices of her three narrators: 

Leo Gursky (an old Jewish man, WWII refugee living in New York. We see a boy from a village in Poland, in love with a girl whom, in the chaos of the buildup to war, he lost track of): “Then one day I was looking out the window. Maybe I was contemplating the sky. Put even a fool in front of the window and you’ll get a Spinoza. The afternoon passed, darkness sifted down. I reached for the chain on the bulb and suddenly it was as if an elephant had stepped on my heart. I fell to my knees. I thought: I didn’t live forever. A minute passed. Another minute. Another. I clawed at the floor, pulling myself along toward the phone.” 

Alma Singer: “I WAS SIX WHEN MY FATHER WAS DIAGNOSED WITH PANCREATIC CANCER. That year my mother and I were driving together in the car. She asked me to pass her bag. ‘I don’t have it,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s in the back,’ she said. But it wasn’t in the back. She pulled over and searched the car, but the bag was nowhere to be found. She put her head in her hands and tried to remember where she’d left the bag. She was always losing things. ‘One of these days,’ she said, ‘I’m going to lose my head.’ I tried to picture what would happen if she lost her head. In the end, though, it was my father who lost everything: weight, his hair, various internal organs.” 

Bird Singer (Alma’s younger brother, who believes he is one of the 36 lamed vovniks, holy people on whom the existence of the world depends): “I have been a normal person for three days in a row. What this means is that I have not climbed on top of any buildings or written G-d’s name on anything that doesn’t belong to me or answered a perfectly normal question with a saying from the Torah. It also means I have not done anything where the answer would be NO to the question: WOULD A NORMAL PERSON DO THIS? So far it hasn’t been that hard.” 

Their stories are braided with misunderstandings and grief, resolving at last after many blind crossings. This novel is beautifully written, leavened with both humor and pathos as readers stumble alongside characters learning, being wrong, learning more, still wrong…

Summerlong, by Peter S. Beagle

Peter S. Beagle has been one of my favorite authors since I read The Last Unicorn decades ago. Every time I visit a bookstore, I check the Sci Fi/ Fantasy section to see if they have a book of his I haven't read yet. So I was delighted to find Summerlong, a new and lovely novel in which the mythic and the everyday bump up against each other.

A young woman named Lioness shows up on the Puget Sound island where Abe, a sixty-something scholar, toils over a book, visited often by his longtime inamorata Joanna, a flight attendant, and her daughter Lily. The visitor has an aura of spring, and the very earth responds - the air is gently warm, the soil and plants abundant, and around her people feel touched as if by magic. Though Lioness appears young, in her eyes are the memories of centuries, of aeons, and her voice and accent evoke Otherness.

In Beagle's stories, the world we're accustomed to and one with greater possibilities exist side by side, and one need only to turn a certain corner to move from our quotidian plane to one where myth and mystery are part of the landscape.

In a time when kindness seems in short supply, this writer offers a long view in which joy is contagious and even a god can be moved by what we do. Read him and smile!