Remembering Mario Vargas Llosa

Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa died a few days ago. He was well-known at one time for both his novels and his probing intellect. As a journalist for the Atlantic put it in a recent obituary, “His style was urbane, his research encyclopedic. His language was beautifully elastic.”

I know nothing of Llosa’s novels, though I see one or two here on the shelf. And of his turbulent personal life I know only what I’ve gleaned online in the last twenty minutes. But I’ve enjoyed reading the man’s essays for years.

For the most part they were written for newspapers in Madrid and syndicated throughout the Spanish-speaking world. That’s a good thing, in so far as it makes it likely they'll be self-contained nuggets of reasoning and description written in an accessible style and directed toward a wide audience. Ortega y Gasset hoed that same row a few generations ago, and so did Javier Marias more recently.

Llosa’s essays have been collected in several volumes. The two that I own and return to fairly often are The Language of Passion and Making Waves. Dipping into these collections is like reliving the last half century of popular culture—personal, cultural, political, and even philosophical.

For example, in the piece called “My Son the Rastafarian” Llosa combines anecdotes about serving on the Berlin Film Festival jury under Liv Ullmann with a bemused fatherly description of the radical vegetarian views of his college-aged son who’s arrived in Berlin for a visit.

There’s an insightful description of his life as a student under Franco’s repressive regime when Madrid seemed to be hardly more than a provincial backwater, and a nostalgic sketch devoted to the many hours Llosa spent in the library of the British Museum before the books were moved (alas) to the new British Library.

An essay about Cuba or Nicaragua written in 1975 is likely to sound dated today, but it also reminds us how intensely concerns about communism, authoritarianism, and neo-colonialism colored political discourse half a century ago.

Llosa’s lengthy review of The Golden Notebooks is also redolent of any earlier age: “I do not know why this novel became a feminist bible. Read from that standpoint, its convulsions are so pessimistic that they bring one out in goosebumps.”

And when was the last time you thought about Albert Camus? Llosa considers the man’s career at some length, observing at one point: 

All his life he remained true to the conviction that man fulfills himself completely, lives a total reality, in so far as he is communion with the natural world and that the divorce between man and nature mutilates human existence.

On the strength of this remark, it occurred to me that I ought to take a closer look at Camus’ book Summer (1954), which I spotted just now in his collection Lyrical and Critical Essays. But I began to have second thoughts about that project when, a few paragraphs later, Llosa remarked that:

His is a statuesque style which, apart from its admirable conciseness and the effectiveness with which it expresses an idea, seems somewhat naif: it is a stuffy style, old fashioned, smelling of starch.

In the course of these essays Llosa returns repeatedly to the role played by irrationality in history and daily life. It has no place in the world of theory, which is always rational, by definition—even theories of irrationality. Yet in personal life—the aggregate of which, considered in retrospect, is history itself— “unreason, the unconscious and pure spontaneity will always play a part.”

I might delve here into an exploration of Llosa’s comparative analysis of the theories of Isaiah Berlin and George Bataille, but we’ll save that project for another time, and turn to his essay on the Madrid World Cup of 1982. He argues here that the appeal of soccer is rooted in the fact that it’s intense and absorbing … but also “ephemeral, non-transcendent, innocuous.” At another point he describes it as “exciting and empty.”

After devoting a few paragraphs to the appeal of the Argentine hero Maradona, he takes a step back—how can he resist?—to explore the deeper roots of the appeal:

People need contemporary heroes, beings that they can turn into gods. No country escapes this rule. Cultured or uncultured, rich or poor, capitalist or socialist, every society feels this irrational need to enthrone idols of flesh and blood and burn incense to them. Politicians, military men, film stars, sportsmen, crooks, playboys, saints and ferocious bandits have been elevated to the altars of popularity and turned into a collective cult, for which the French have a good image: they call them 'sacred monsters'. Well, footballers are the most inoffensive people on which one can confer this idolatrous function.

Llosa is well aware how dangerous the enthronement of a sacred monster can be. In an essay on Salman Rushdie that appeared in 1992 he writes, “One of the truths which remains unshakeable in these times when the hurricanes of history are sweeping everything away is that civilization is a very thin veneer that can crack on the first impact with the demons of faith. At the first onslaught of social outrage.”     

Scampering Toward Earth Day

It was Friday, and to be honest, I wasn't thinking of Earth Day when I decided to make a fire out of some grape vines I was extracting from the thicket beside our neighbor's fence. I was thinking of the French Riviera. 

Hilary had just pointed out that the vines were dead. They had been severed during some clean-up months ago and were now dangling in space. As I was pulling them away from the branches they were still fiercely clinging to, I was reminded of a morning we spent in Grasse--the world capital of perfume--decades ago. It was late March, and workers were pruning vines in the vineyards nearby and tossing them into wheelbarrows fashioned out of old oil drums, inside of which fires were smoldering. A haze of acrid smoke filled the air.

I liked that smell and was curious to find out if these vines would produce the same aroma. They didn't.  

Nor was I thinking of Earth Day on Easter when we gathered at Hilary's cousin's house, out in the country, to eat and chat and take part in the annual egg fight. It was a bubbly afternoon, with lots of food and an egg hunt for the kids. The talk ranging from Rory McIlroy's emotional win at the Masters to California redwoods, from Bruce's days as a racecar driver to the difference between the songs of the goldfinch and the indigo bunting.

At one point, dimly aware that some of the guests were too young to know who some of us old folks were talking about, I tried to explain to Missy who Cassie was. "Cassie is Ginny's daughter, you see. And Ginny was married to George. George was Skid's brother. Skid was married to Ollie. Ollie is Laura's mom, and also Dorothy's sister. Hence, Laura is Hilary's cousin. Got it?" 

Missy's thoughts seemed to have drifted elsewhere by that point, and I don't blame her.

* * *

We have the good fortune to live near a parkway. It runs for miles down the west side of Minneapolis and we’ve driven it countless times. This time of year—and especially after an overnight rain—a simple drive down the hill through the golf course and past the Quaking Bog and the Wildflower Garden will take us to the Chain of Lakes.

The sky is gray but the air is warm and people are out, biking and on foot. We haven’t reached that slice of the season when the leaves begin to appear en masse like a green mist, but it’s easy to enjoy the nascent efforts of the honeysuckles and the bright blue carpets of squills that are appearing here and there.

Today is Earth Day, and we’re on the way down the parkway to see how the ducks are faring. They pass through at about this time every year. A few days ago there were coots everywhere on the south end of Lake Harriet—cute, clumsy gallinules without much stature or cachet. This morning there are hundreds of them on Bde Maka Ska. Quite a few red-breasted mergansers—among the most striking and elegant of all the ducks—are swimming nearby. Ten or twelve bright white buffleheads have also joined the party. 

Everyone’s milling around. the mergansers occasionally perform their neck-craning ritual, and the coots, who have short necks, have come up with a feeble version of their own.

A few hundred yards south of Lake Street we pull over, park, and approach the shore, where thirty-six ruddy ducks—yes, we counted—are casually swimming together, off by themselves. This small creature, with a bright blue bill, compact body, and upturned tail, might almost be a Disney creation.

Lake Harriet is somewhat quieter, but down on the south end we meet up with a similar raft of waterfowl--coots and red-breasted mergansers, along with a few mallards and wood ducks, and two horned grebes!

From here it’s only a few minutes’ drive to Turtle Bakery. I don’t know the name of the flaky chocolaty pretzel-shaped thing they sell next to the caramel rolls and the croissants, but that’s what I got to go along with the coffee. Hilary picked out something that looked like a custardy caramel roll topped with raisins. Most of the tables and booths were filled with middle-aged women and men deep in morning conversation. On the bulletin board I saw a flyer proclaiming that 25 percent of Mayor John Frye’s campaign donations came from Republicans, and I thought to myself, “That’s a good thing. Right?”  '    

We drove back to Lake Harriet, past the newly resurfaced tennis courts at Beard's Plaisance that I haven’t gotten a chance to try out yet, and parked on the road overlooking the lake. 

Some Bach cantatas had been playing on the radio but we turned it off, the better to hear the chuckling and squawking of the coots.  

  

Film Fest Overview

The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film festival has largely run its course, for the 44^th time, and the Best of the Fest line-up has been announced. These are films that will be aired again because they were deemed the best by viewers, though I sometimes wonder if they’re simply the ones that are currently available to be shown again before moving on to festivals in Keokuk and Elephant Butte.

Hilary and I saw twelve films and we liked them all. Would we recommend them to friends? Maybe not.

Part of the buzz comes from showing up day after day at the theater, which sits across the river from downtown Minneapolis. It’s a vibrant scene, and it’s not uncommon for us to run into longtime friends, casual acquaintances, and film buffs with whom we’ve chatted at some festival years ago without ever learning their names. That adds to the fun.

The five-screen theater complex is only fifteen minutes from our house, and we adopted a new parking strategy this year that made the approach even easier. Rather the wasting time scouring the neighborhood for an open spot on the street and worrying about the two-hour time limit, we took to parking on Marshall Avenue, where there was always a spot available, and setting off on the ten-minute walk to the theater.

Among the films we saw, several were expertly made and one was actually gripping. These films might do well in a normal first-run setting. Others were classic “film-fest” movies: slow to develop, set in exotic locales, giving you the time to soak up the atmosphere and listen to the crickets chirp. And then there were the bio-pics and documentaries.

In the first category I would place a Czech film, Waves. It depicts a few episodes during the Prague Spring of 1968 and the struggles of the employees of the “official” radio station to broadcast honest news under the scrutiny of government officials who are always asking themselves, “What will Moscow think about this?” I won’t be giving away any secrets if I remind you that five Warsaw Pact countries under Russian leadership invaded Czechoslovakia in the fall of that year. The film captures the décor of the era, and also the Western music that had become so popular—for example, the Shirelles “Be My Baby.” There are plot twists and Russian tanks, heroism and loyalty and defeat on the streets of Prague. It’s a great mix.

When we got home, we pulled out a copy of A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century,  by Richard Vinen, to fill in the details, but the focus wasn’t quite right. Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting offered fewer historical details but was much better suited to the mood and complexity of the film. And after all, Kundera was there.

In Meet the Barbarians, a French comedy/drama directed by Julie Delpy, a small town in Brittany that’s expecting to welcome a refugee Ukrainian family is surprised to discover that in fact the family that’s arriving from Syria. It’s a strangely light-hearted film, considering the context, but it works none the less. I couldn't help thinking of darker films like Green Border and The Old Oak here and there along the way.

A third film in the “polished and ready for prime time” category, Mistura, was less effective. Here the daughter of the French ambassador to Peru is humiliated when her husband runs off with a beauty queen. Facing disgrace and financial ruin, she vents her emotions on the only people still close at hand—her devoted servants. In the course of the film she recovers her self-esteem, if not her social status, by means of the one thing she loved to do before her marriage: cooking. She opens a restaurant with the help of her father’s former chef (Asian), her trusted chauffeur (black), and a maid (Latino) who’s served the family for decades.

It's a food movie, among other thing, and the close-ups are appetizing. It’s also a fairy tale of ethnic sharing and cooperation, which is fine by me. But I didn’t get the sense that our protagonist had really changed all that much by the end of the film. She had cut back on the stylish clothes and the heavy make-up, but she was still the boss, and they were the servants.

We'd run into an old friend while waiting in line, and in the lobby after the film she told us, "I lived in Peru for three months when I was in college back in the 70s. It was really like that! Everyone was thinking all the time about what they wore, and what so-and-so would say if they did this or that. You can do this; you can't do that or be seen there."

One thing the chauffeur and the ambassador's daughter have in common is that they can both quote the poet Cesar Vallejo by heart. When we got home I pulled Trilce off the shelf and was soon fast asleep.

The Property follows an elderly woman and her granddaughter as they travel from Israel to Poland in hope of regaining ownership of an apartment that was confiscated during the war. Hidden at the root of this simple endeavor is a pre-war love affair between Jew and goy that everyone in the family knows about but no one talks about. The film consists of various appointments in Warsaw and also random meetings with strangers, some of whom become friends.

Grandmother and granddaughter are pursuing different strategies and are seldom in the same place at the same time, and their local cantor, who has ostensibly accompanied them to attend a conference, also figures in the plot. Several enigmatic elements come together nicely by the time we’re through. Do they get the apartment? I’m not telling.

The Last Journey details a son’s efforts to rekindle the spark in his aged father, who has somehow lost his “pep,” by taking him on a road trip from central Sweden to the French Riviera, where the family enjoyed some memorable holidays decades earlier. The father seems very feeble, but the son is bursting with energy and he recruits an old friend to help him make the trip memorable. Both of the younger men are highly skilled directors and producers in real life—a fact I only learned after seeing the film. That might explain how they succeed in cobbling together the funniest and most touching trip—and film—you can imagine, considering that the old man can hardly walk.

The other engaging comedy we saw, Fun Raiser, is set half a world way from the Riviera in the depressed mining town of Chisolm, Minnesota. Crafted by local filmmakers Wyatt McDill (director) and Megan Huber (producer) and almost obeying Aristotle’s unities of time, place, and action, it takes place in a single afternoon and evening during which an odd collection of small-town folk attempt to host a fund-raising event to keep their fledging art school afloat. A media star with local roots will be arriving from L.A. for the event, but the money to rent the hall and pay the caterers has fallen through. If these hapless educators did succeed in holding the event, and they did raise some money, everything might turn out differently, of course. The result is a madcap succession of frenzied conversations as we get the know the characters, none of whom seems to be sure what anyone else is doing. It’s a rocky start, but (spoiler alert) once the event is moved to a dilapidated warehouse nearby and the wealthy guests start arriving, the film reaches what chemists call “activation energy” and (with the help of a gummy bear or two) it starts to hum with an accelerating rhythm of absurd gags, hilarious pratfalls, and touching testimonials to the importance of arts education and its power to unite and inspire even the most down-at-heal community.

Among the “third-world” films we saw, Regretfully at Dawn stands out. Set in rural Thailand, it tells the simple story of a girl who’s being raised by her grandfather on a farm of some sort. They enjoy being together and get along well. But she’s very bright, and her teacher at the local school is convinced she should continue her education abroad. Her grandfather, meanwhile, is ailing a bit, and seems to be enmeshed in memories of the time he spent in combat years ago—memories that he cherishes. It’s a gentle film, slow-moving, full of rural expanses, but also punctuated here and there by sudden explosions.

The most unusual film we saw, I think, was Grand Tour. The story-line isn’t much: British functionary stationed in Burma (or somewhere) flees fiancée; woman follows. The fleeing man says almost nothing and has virtually no distinguishing characteristics. He’s less than a cypher; he’s merely a prop. He serves the purpose of providing a narrative thread with which Portuguese director Miguel Gomes can string together exotic footage of the Far East taken at various times during the twentieth century along with footage he shot himself, much of it in black and white.

The fiancée shows up halfway through the film, and she’s much more dynamic. She gives the film a lift. But the entire work carries the flavor of an old silent film, where the fascinating imagery trumps the odd and sometimes arbitrary way it’s juxtaposed, like the phrases in a good surrealist poem. It reminded me of the recent Gods of Mexico, and also a black-and-white film from Russia that I saw years ago, Bag of Bones. Similarly odd, yet strangely refreshing.

There are times when a film fest comes to an end, and you find that you’ve seen three or four films about farming, or arctic exploration, for no particular reason. This year, we happened to see three biopics. All good.

I have never read anything by the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, but Hilary recently read The Country Girls, and friends told us Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story was well put together. It is. O’Brien comes across as sharp, honest, playful, curious. The men she associated with less so. Her two bright and articulate sons add a lot to the story. The petty and scathing remarks her husband wrote in her journal expose a narcissistic tyrant. In the course of the film we get to know her, and it’s fun to catch a few newsreel glimpses of the London party scene, but the film’s richness derives even more from the atmospheric home movies shot in Ireland.    

Flicka, a portrait of the opera singer Frederica von Stade, is hardly less appealing, and her life followed a similar trajectory, up to a point. She achieved surprising success at an early age, never took herself too seriously, and was capable of doing things for the sheer fun of it. The film takes us beyond the obvious talent and success to probe Flicka's irrepressible thoughtfulness and humanity.

Ai Wei Wei’s Turandot gave me a clearer idea of who this Chinese dissident is. It jumps back and forth from China, where Ai was imprisoned for his outspoken views, to Rome, where he’s been put in charge of designing a new production of Puccini’s opera Turandot. Wei envisions the work as a statement about free speech and repression, and there is undoubtedly an authoritarian element to the plot. Ai is in his element fashioning costumes of strange creatures to fill out the scenes, though he's never designed an opera before and admits that he doesn't really like opera. But I’m sure some viewers were eager to hear a bit more of the music. I know I was.    

A Week on the Coast

During the last gray days of March we hopped a plane to San Francisco. A half hour after picking up our rental car at the off-site Fox Rental, we were descending the green hills of the central coast into Half Moon Bay, where the Pacific Ocean and a litany of familiar delights awaited. None of them would make a New York Times “36 Hours on the Coast” article, and with good reason, but that’s fine with us.

Our first stop was the Pillar Point State Marine Conservation Area, nestled in the reeds behind the Pilar Point Air Force Station, beyond which lies the famous Mavericks surfing zone made famous by teen surfer Jay Moriarity.  (Curtis Hanson’s last film, Chasing Mavericks (1992), isn’t great—it was made for teens—but it gets you in the mood.)  

We weren’t there to watch the surfers. We were there to see the ducks, and right on cue, we spotted seventeen cinnamon teal and six ruddy ducks out in the pond, with a lone snowy egret near shore for accent. As we climbed the hill to the ocean overlook a peregrine falcon flew by. Combine this with 60-degree sunshine, a cool ocean breeze, the smell of eucalyptus in the air, exotic flowers in bloom, and greenery everywhere, and it’s not hard to understand why we were elated.

After a late seafood lunch at Sam’s Chowder House we checked into our motel and then drove into town to wanderer the largely deserted streets of Half Moon Bay, an appealing mix of upscale, agricultural, and vacant buildings. I picked up a used paperback copy of William Matthews’ Selected Poems at the local bookstore, which was well-stocked and also featured fifty or sixty books wrapped in newsprint on sale for a dollar each. Take a chance!

The next morning we drove south a few miles along the coast, then up into the hills to the Purisima Creek Trailhead. We hiked up the canyon through the redwoods for a mile or two listening to the exotic chatter of the Pacific wrens as the filtered light of the rising sun warmed the air. We then returned north on highway 1 to the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, famous for its seals and its tidepools. We’ve been there several time but had never seen the place before at low tide. Nice!

I was also pleased to discover that Pilot Light, the café alongside the local airstrip, had reopened. It used to be called 3 Zero café; now under new management, it continues to serve great food in a wide-open and unusual airstrip location. We had the sunny outdoor terrace to ourselves.

Asilomar

A two-hour drive down the coast through the bottleneck of Santa Cruz and around the dunes of Monterey Bay brought us to Asilomar Conference Center. The first time we stayed here COVID restrictions had just been lifted and there were few people in sight. Now the lodge was buzzing with people. Two conferences were in session: one sponsored by the California Land Trust, and the other by a quilting organization. At first glance I saw men in green ball caps sitting around a huge fireplace and small groups of women at card tables playing bridge (I guess). A cash bar had been set up at the far side of the room. Children were playing pool—sort of—and a woman in white was sitting at a piano nearby singling Joni Mitchell songs.

I love conferences; it’s something about the relaxed combination of sociability and intellectual exploration. But I’ve been to only a few, and never one at which I felt I “belonged.” Not at this one, for sure. I asked the man at the desk what the program was for the land trust affair, but his answer was evasive. I don’t blame him.

We were pleased to learn that our room was of the same vintage and in the same location on the sprawling, pine-dotted campus as the one we’d stayed at during our first visit. The center’s original lodgings were designed by Julia Morgan in the 1920s as a YWCA camp. These rooms are referred to on the website as “historic.” Though I’ve never actually been in one, to judge from the photos I would refer to them as Gand Canyon rustic.

The room we got was equally “historic.” But it was built of redwood during the late 50s (I guess) with twenty-foot ceilings and sliding glass doors opening out onto a small private deck. The rug, the bedspread, the paintings on the wall, all dated from—or were reminiscent of—the post-war “mid-century modern” era in the midst of which Hilary and I, and many of our friends, were raised. We had stepped into a yellowed page of Sunset Magazine.

Once we’d hauled our luggage up to the room, we wasted little time wandering down the boardwalk across the white dunes of Asilomar Dunes Natural Preserve—the last 25 acres of native dunes habitat remaining in Pacific Grove—and across the road to the beach, where we scrutinized the gulls and picked up various unidentifiable things that had been washed in by the tide. A few surf scoters were bobbing confidently between the waves fifty feet off shore. A smattering of black turnstones arrived and flitted among the rocks. And a few minutes later a flock of whimbrels appeared on the open beach from out of nowhere.    

This was grand.