Book Review: THE BROKEN ROAD (Book #3 of 3) by Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"One is only sometimes warned, when these processes begin, of their crucial importance: that certain poems, paintings, kinds of music, books, or ideas are going to change everything, or that one is going to fall in love or become friends for life; the many lengthening strands, in fact, which, plaited together, compose a lifetime... This journey was punctuated with these inaudible reports: daysprings veiled and epiphanies in plain clothes."

This third book in the trilogy was never completed nor polished the way the previous two books ("A Time of Gifts" and "Between the Woods and the Water") were, for Paddy Fermor died as the project neared completion. And what a project it was! The ambitious eighteen-year old's "Great Trudge" in 1933 was truly something only someone so young and idealistic would undertake: walk across Europe, from Holland all the way to Constantinople.

And here's the interesting thing: the book was published after he died as a 96-year-old, having accomplished so much more after his long walk. He became a war hero in World War II, and was the author of other delightful books, always a lover of all people from all cultures and faiths. Paddy speaks in this third and last volume with a voice so funny, so full of life, that it truly feels as if one was listening to a youthful Adonis in the prime of health and vigor.

I enjoyed this last book best of all the three. Always humorous, this one showed Fermor at his funniest, by far, and was also the one that seemed the least polished (although the sentences are still marvelously wrought). It also seemed the most realistic, somehow, because of the number of predicaments that he encountered, some of them life-threatening. I did wonder at how lucky and blessed he seemed in the previous two books, to encounter so few travelling headaches. In Book 3, he nearly lost life and limb, encountered a madman stalker, was threatened at knifepoint by a roommate, and nearly fell to his death as he scaled mountain ranges. Despite these events, the innocence of the times showed in the confusion and outrage he felt when he returned to a cafe, to find the bag he left behind had been stolen, or when some Bulgarian peasants charged him money for letting him travel in their wagons despite his obvious injury.

To read Fermor is to be his companion as he walks across mountains and plains, sleeping sometimes with less than savory characters (one of the funniest bits was when he innocently took shelter in a house of ill repute, thinking it was a clean inn!), sometimes amongst well-to-do pals.

I particularly enjoyed the last part, when he describes spending a night or two in seventeen (!!!) monasteries on Mount Athos, Greece. Despite the best of intentions of travelling every day, he would be "forced" to stay longer for one of two reasons: bad weather, but also endearingly, Fermor had the bad habit of reading Byron or Dostoevsky in bed until it was far too late in the day to travel safely.

What a beautiful series! And so fitting for year-end reveries. Fermor, after all, did all of this within a year.

He lived in one year more than many of us live in several decades. And this makes Fermor a must-read for everyone who wishes to drink deep of the sweet well of life's waters.

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Book Review: BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER (Book # 2 of 3) by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“It was a season of great delight; all seemed immeasurably old and at the same time brand new and totally unknown.”

I shall remember this book always for having a uniquely heartbreaking coda. After lavishly describing all the gorgeous places and people, in breathtaking detail, and ensuring that the readers have fallen in love as deeply as he did… Paddy breaks our hearts by telling us in the end that all that he had written of was now drowned in man-made dams. History and beauty wiped out en masse by economic demands.

“On Foot to Constantinople: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates” is volume two of Paddy Fermor’s “Great Trudge,” when, as a nineteen-year-old dropout, he sought meaning in life by going on an almost impossible trip: walking from Holland to Istanbul (which he determinedly called Constantinople.).

I read volume one (“A Time of Gifts”) a year ago, and it is not the sequence of events that stick to memory now, but an overwhelming impression of landscapes and vistas, leaving the reader a general feeling of mental refreshment without the physical punishment of actual travel. Book 2 echoes this feeling well.

There is also this bittersweet tang of nostalgia permeating both volumes, but especially pronounced in BTWATW.

For what can be sweeter to youth but to travel amongst beautiful new friends, and occasionally falling in love amidst the castles and plains of Hungary, Transylvania and Rumania (Fermor’s spelling)? The nostalgia is to be expected from a man writing this second volume in his seventies, of events half a century removed (he wrote Volume One only ten years earlier).

This second volume is less walkathon and more of “this is how my privileged friends” live, what with generous benefactors gifting horses (!!) and sponsoring car rides across Transylvania, with all manner of mischief known only by those privileged enough to afford these luxuries.

The best parts are the ones when Fermor is alone, walking through the Carpathian mountains and meeting gypsies and shepherds, sleeping under the stars and spying upon golden eagles and majestic deer. The wisdom of the elder merges with the sensual delight of the younger Fermor, and the result is page after page of luminous remembrances.

This delight makes Fermor an ideal vacation read, as each turn of the page is to be savored, passages read and reread for sheer pleasure.

Until he breaks your heart at the end. “Myths, lost voices, history and hearsay have all been put to rout, leaving nothing but this valley of the shadow.”

Nothing lasts, Fermor reminds us. So seize the memory of each day. Better yet, write them down. For all become lost, except when saved by resurrective words.


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Movie Review: MAESTRO

                                            (Movie poster borrowed off the Internet)

MAESTRO is a dragging mess of a few beautiful music-making scenes sprinkled with disjointed scenes showcasing skillful acting of two of the finest actors today.

The highs are truly high. No one can watch that Mahler scene in the cathedral and remain unmoved. “There is no hate in your heart,” Bernstein’s wife whispers in his ear after the performance, blessing and forgiving him for adultery done right in front of her, with lovers being brought in their home and introduced to their children. 

But the lows outnumber the highs.

Sadly, the overall message I got from the movie was that it was a defense for geniuses to spit in society’s rules, as if great gifts are any excuse for living beyond the pale.

It could have been so much more, indeed. There was no build up, no introduction of the main characters that mattered. It is as if the filmmakers assumed that the audiences already know who Bernstein is. We are told, not shown, that Bernstein and Felicia are talented individuals, but that Bernstein’s were by far the superior artistic gifts. The body language and smiles amid the chatter show the intimacy of lovers, but without giving the audience time to root for them. It’s almost a documentary in its quick succession of scenes and events. Fall in love. Raise a family. The challenge of infidelity. Sickness. Then Bernstein pulls through and cares for his ailing wife. As if caring for her at the end could make up for decades of sleeping around.

One of the last scenes shows Bernstein flirting with a man thirty? forty? years his junior in a disco club. And it struck this viewer as inexpressibly sad, especially when the end credits roll to the second movement of Chichester Psalms playing in the background and actual footage of the Maestro conducting near the end of his days. (By the way, don’t trust the Netflix captions! They said that at that point the overture of Candide starts playing, but no, it’s still Chichester.)

When we sang Chichester Psalms in college for Chorus class, what struck me was the purity of the soprano line (originally meant for a boy soprano, as there is no purer tone on earth as he sings “The Lord is my shepherd”) and how Bernstein’s infamous trademark leaps and minor sevenths seemed like someone reaching for heaven. And yes, there are parts in it that are truly of this earth (like when the male singers come roaring in, war-like, nearly shouting in the middle with “Why do the nations rage”), but then the boy soprano line returns and the choir echoes him, like souls who have lost their way but are ever straining to return to goodness. The sacred, and the profane. A fitting piece to end the film.

There are bits of the sacred in this movie, but sadly, the overall messaging belonged to the latter and not the former. 

I worry that the film will help Leonard Bernstein be remembered for the wrong reasons... or rather, for incomplete reasons. 

Book Review: THE METHOD - HOW THE TWENTIETH CENTURY LEARNED TO ACT by Isaac Butler

The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"To theorize about acting is to theorize about what a human being is and how a human being works. It is to theorize about what good art is and how good art is made."

I did not expect that this 2022 book on the history of Method Acting would end up becoming one of my favorite reads this 2023, or for that matter, for all time.

If this was a play, then its spine (or supertask, to use the book's jargon) is simple enough. It tells the history of hallowed names in theater - those of Stanislavski, Strasberg, Adler, and Meisner - and how a cultural shift that began in Russia spread to America, and continues to impact how we view all acting in theater and film today.

To this reader, who experienced studying under different "theories" for different fields (in music, Kodaly and a smattering of Dalcroze ... in education, Montessori versus the traditional one... and in theater, the more traditional and strict style taught in universities versus the more easy-going, interior style in other workshops), the book was an utter revelation not merely of how impossible it is to safeguard a method against all other influences, but to what it says about human nature when people are passionately for or against one style of teaching as opposed to others.

Butler writes as a former actor does, infusing theory with practical examples that are nuggets of gold to any theater aficionado. He infuses cultural history writing with a dramatist's flair for conflict, making the historical figures come to life in a nonfiction book that was so exciting to read! It's quite possibly the best written nonfiction book I have ever read, never sacrificing academic rigor (the bibliography and notes alone took nearly half the volume) for artistry.

I put the book down with gratitude that it exists. It's a must-read for anyone teaching or involved in drama, for anyone who wants to give an intelligent response to the question "What IS good acting?"

But acting was never merely a form of entertainment.

Butler showed how actors, playwrights, in plays and films, crystallized and voiced the agonies of their current generation. Art as a mirror of its time. And thus, this fine book is more than the story of a pedagogical system. It is the story of humanity itself, and its struggle to overcome each decade's troubles.

And what about us humans, the audience of today? Butler writes:

"We live now in a Time of Performance. In this era, due in no small part to social media, we are more conscious than ever that we are performing for an audience of other people. We are also aware that we are the audience for everyone else’s performances, and we rate them, not with applause, but with hearts and thumbs-up, with emojis and retweets... it is unsettling to always be at least slightly aware that nothing is real, least of all ourselves... Today, the major challenge to an actor is not being heard, or seen, but seizing and holding an audience’s attention... Now acting and writing head instead toward clarity, worried that a surfeit of mystery and subtext risks committing the cardinal sin of art: boring the audience... This leads to the postmodern actor’s paradox: At a time when everything feels a little bit inauthentic, we crave simplified, clear acting that presents characters as coherent and easily knowable. We crave, in other words, a comforting lie about who we are."


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Book Review: A MEMOIR OF MY FORMER SELF by Hilary Mantel

A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"George Orwell (there’s a man who might interest you) said that every life, viewed from the inside, is a series of defeats. I would amplify that, say it is a series of enforced compromises, slippages from our own standard: shabby little sins."

Few authors are able to completely submerge readers into the Past. Mantel did so with her Wolf Hall trilogy and that unbelievable first book of hers on the French Revolution.

She lived to see her books reach Classic status, and proves with this last one (a collection of essays on different topics) that a great writer is not bound by small things like genre.

From academic ones describing her process and respect for history, to reflections on the nature of royalty and our fascination with it, to book reviews and movie reviews... she CAN write it all. And sustain the reader's attention all throughout. In these little pieces are "the great of the truths written on the bodies of the small."

Similar tomes had me skipping an essay here, focusing on a specific essay there. But one doesn't do that with Mantel. For with her gifted pen, no topic is too banal. All feed into the great theme of the past (ghosts in a secular sense) co-existing with us, the living.

She isn't perfect. The self confidence of the British intellectual will out, with statements like the one she wrote on Saudi Arabia: "When you come across an alien culture you must not automatically respect it. You must sometimes pay it the compliment of hating it." Or her point about a movie: "All in all, it provides a stimulating evening for those who can jettison the “cultural baggage”; and a pure delight for those of us who have never had any culture at all."

But then she also writes delightful funny phrases like "How nice, then, to go to Waterstones and not to have to disinfect yourself when you get home," comparing the luxury of a bookstore selling brand new books versus bookshops selling old books.

If the woman wasn't perfect, the writer nearly was. Such passion in her phrases, coming from a life filled with pain. Her beautiful books were her children, and they will live on in glorious testament to their mother for all time.

"The point about our human nature is that we must go to work on it... The pen is in our hands. A happy ending is ours to write."

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Ballet Review: CARMEN AND OTHER SPIRITS by Alice Reyes Dance Philippines

 

Soaring leaps, and utterly fearless dives.

Those are the two overwhelming visceral images that this audience member clearly remembers from the evening watching Alice Reyes Dance Philippines’ CARMEN AND OTHER SPIRITS.

An evening with ARDP continues to be a cut above other ballet offerings, not just because of the high level of technical difficulty (such precision in the ensemble’s angles of raised legs), but mainly  because the dancers combine skill and grace with absolute fearlessness. When a dancer jumps without hesitation off the third rung of a bleacher (eliciting gasps from the audience), such confidence and trust is only possible because of countless hours spent at rehearsal with her fellow dancers. This visual placing of one’s life in the ensemble’s hands was the unforgettable starter in a four-course offering, done to mimic the dive of a swimmer.

In SWIMMING THE ILOG PASIG, choreographer Alden Lugnasig created a movement piece that seemed, to this former competitive swimmer, utterly authentic in its recreation of movements meant to propel our earthbound bodies through water. What struck me most, apart from the visceral shock of the life-defying leap at the beginning, was the celebration of the power of rippling muscle. There is grace, yes, but power above all. This is the resolution of human will made manifest through sinew as we defy land-bound constraints and forge our way through unfriendly water. It’s an artist’s bold vision of a possible future dependent on how much collective will we muster.

Reeling from the first dance, audiences were next treated to a pas de deux by Ronaldson Yadao accompanied by strains of Vivaldi, simply entitled TWO. Utterly lovely, it proves that one does not need grand sets nor dozens in the corps de ballet. All you need is two, if they’re this good, this true to the artist’s vision of going through life with an echo of one’s soul.

The third offering, for me, was the best jewel in the evening’s four-star collection. And it was a good thing that the intermission came afterwards, because Lester Reguindin’s NOW tore at our hearts and had many audience members frantically sniffing back tears. 

We’ve all seen and heard environmentalist Greta Thunberg, perhaps to the point of apathy because of so much exposure over the years.

But to hear her words again, played over the beautiful music by Olafur Arnalds and Luke Howard, and to see the visualization of one tiny girl against all those corporations and grown ups in suits, was to strip away the veneer of familiarization and experience them as if for the first time. To truly hear her passionate pleas is to feel them hit with all the force of a bullet, and to realize the urgency of acting now, to save this world with such glorious dance and art in it.

This third piece is what will linger in memory, for it showed the best of what art can be. This is art on a mission, art with a purpose. Art that truly touches hearts.

An intermission allowed us to discreetly dry our teardrops from the front of our LBD’s, and we were prepared to be impressed when the curtain rose with National Artist Salvador Bernal’s set. 

From the beginning, it was clear that this was markedly different from the more familiar Bizet opera. We begin in a dark prison cell. A despairing Don José starts to tell his story to a writer before his execution at dawn.

The set brightens to reveal sun-soaked Seville, and we see Carmen in flaming red dance brilliantly, all toned leg and wide hips, drawing all the males’ gazes (and the audiences’, as well).

Macel Dofitas truly was Carmen, as her beauty came from her power and essence, and less from superficial facial symmetry. This is a woman of fire, a woman who cannot be tamed (though Richardson Yadao as Don José tries). 

I was struck with the passionate elegance of the choreography. A lot of opera productions now show Carmen as vulgar and sensual. However, Macel Dofitas managed to portray the sensuality without coming off as cheap, still dignified despite her all-consuming free love. In her, Carmen is full of grace, her love adding to the sum of her being instead of cheapening her.

The familiar story then plays out like the opera, with the ballet ending a bit differently with an execution. This, then, is what it means to die for love.

The only note that marred an otherwise perfect evening was the splicing of the different tracks for Carmen. To its credit, ARDP looked for arrangements of the familiar arias with Spanish guitar instead of the orchestral accompaniment, although there were still a few pieces from the opera itself. However, one could really hear the awkward and abrupt silences where tracks were cut, which temporarily distracted this viewer and brought me back to reality. This happened several times over the course of the evening. Still, this is easy enough to fix. 

Also I think I saw a male danseur stumble badly enough to be unable to disguise the pain. But this is a testament to the breathtaking stunt-level choreography, and ARDP’s dancers’ commitment to give their all.

CARMEN AND OTHER SPIRITS teach us audiences that ARDP performances are unmissable, as they combine a rare degree of technical near-perfection with the unmistakable brand of Filipino artists’ passion. Synchronicity is a given, as is the commitment to excellence we have learned to associate with National Artists like Alice Reyes. Brava, maestra! And bravi, ARDP!

Thank you so much to Theater Fans Manila for the ticket!

Book Review: THE SEVEN MOONS OF MAALI ALMEIDA by Shehan Karunatilaka

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“You know why the battle of good vs evil is so one-sided? Because evil is better organized, better equipped, and better paid. It is not monsters or yakas or demons we should fear. Organized collectives of evil doers who think they are performing the work of the righteous. That is what should make us shudder.”

In the Booker we trust.

THE SEVEN MOONS OF MAALI ALMEIDA, on its own, is something I would never have considered reading, if not for the fact that it won the Booker Prize in 2022. And I realize it comes across as snobbish, but honestly, it’s just a function of my limited teacher’s salary budget on books! It’s a huge help to have a trusted prize winning body like the Booker committee separate the kanin from the bigas, and say, this is worth your time and money.

Why would I have decided against reading TSMOMA if left to my own devices? In my ignorance, I thought it too foreign. The blurb told me the protagonist was a homosexual gambler involved in politics during the Sri Lankan Civil War. Sinhalese by blood, though neither Hindu nor Buddhist in practice, Maali Almeida describes himself on page 1 as “Photographer. Gambler. Slut.”

But the weight of the prize lent the book a golden hue, as well as my own many happy experiences with Booker winners past. And despite my thinking that I had nothing in common with this character, I opened the book and found myself moved to tears by its profound end hours later, my poor coffee left untouched as I was too rapt to drink.

For Maali Almeida was all these things, yes. But he was a war photographer on a mission. He took photos of atrocities committed in the name of peace. He took pictures that, when seen, would make his country burn.

“I was there to witness… All those sunrises and all those massacres existed because I filmed them.”

I read this on November 1, the day we remember our dead.

Almeida begins the novel as a spirit, freshly dead but unable to remember why and how. He realizes that the disorganized bureaucracy that haunted his native Colombo in life is still how it is (dis)organized in death, and tries to choose between those spirits egging him to find his killers and deal them justice from beyond the grave, and those who invite him to find the light.

He only has seven moons to solve his untimely murder at the age of 35, and make peace with his less-than-ideal life and loves left behind.

I would have been OK if I never read this book. But then, I wouldn’t have known the literary horizon that got extended because of this remarkable novel, and my life would have been the poorer for it.

If I hadn’t read this, I would never have been struck with awe by author Shehan Karunatilaka’s accomplishment: summarizing Sri Lanka’s violent and messy history in one book, making something so contemporary transcend the boundaries of time and place, striking deeply into the heart of our universal longing for life and death to have meaning.

It’s troubling yet transcendent, painful yet profoundly healing. And I’ve read enough crap to realize how rare this is, and what a blessing it is when such a book is found and read.

It offers answers to all people, of all faiths (or none). Despite its unflinching take on the horrors of modern murder and torture, the appalling truths of state-sponsored violence, it manages to show a way forward, without coming across as peddling religious panaceas to political upheaval.

The way forward, Karunatilaka seems to say, lies in our ability to choose. To forgive or to revenge. To enable or resist. To exist without a cause, or to live fighting for a righteous one.

But always, always, to choose life above all. To choose saving innocent lives above politics.

I’m glad the Booker chose this book, which led to me reading it. This was a November 1 to remember.

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