Tag: Allen Kopp

Three Famous Short Novels ~ A Capsule Book Review

Three Famous Short Novels

Three Famous Short Novels ~ A  Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

William Faulkner (1897-1962) is arguably the greatest American writer of the twentieth century. He was a genius, a literary stylist and innovator; there has never been anybody else quite like him. While some of his books are more accessible than others (As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary), his work is notoriously challenging to read. It helps sometimes, when reading Faulkner, to have a “study guide” or at least a synopsis of the chapters to be able to keep up with what is going on. He switches around from one time period to another, and the relationships among his numerous characters are often difficult to keep straight. There might, at times, even be different characters with the same name or with very similar names.

In this volume are three of Faulkner’s shorter, standalone works: Spotted Horses, Old Man, and The Bear. Not much happens in Spotted Horses. It’s about poor country people at an auction of some very wild Texas horses in Mississippi. These people are so poor that buying a horse for five dollars places a terrible financial burden on them. The thing about the horses is that they are so wild they can’t be caught after they’re sold. You don’t want to spend your last five dollars in the world for a horse you can’t catch. “Give me back my money. I wasn’t able to find the horse I bought.” “The owner of the horses took your money and has gone back to Texas. Too bad.” A fool and his money are soon parted.

The “old man” in Old Man is the Mississippi River. This readable and entertaining short novel is set in the Mississippi Delta in 1927, during a terrible flood in which there is much destruction of property, loss of human and animal life. (Faulkner renders a wonderfully vivid and evocative description of the flood.) Local officials enlist the aid of prison labor to help with sandbagging. Enter a stolid convict whose name we never know, in prison for the old-fashioned (even in the 1920s) crime of train robbing. He is soon swept away in a small boat on rising flood waters. He wants to get back before they think he has escaped, but he is not in control of where he goes. Eventually he rescues a woman who—guess what?—is about to have a baby. He saves her life (and the life of her baby) and with his strength is able to keep the boat upright. The man, the woman, the baby, and the boat end up very far away from where they started out. The prisoner wants nothing more than to get back to the relative comfort of the prison to finish his term. The irony is that he gets ten additional years tacked on to his sentence for his adventuring. Talk about gratitude! After all he went through, he should have been released from prison as long he promised not to rob any more trains.

Then we come to the short novel The Bear, which is notoriously difficult reading, at least in the fourth and fifth sections of its five sections. The time is the 1880s, when the wounds of the Civil War and slavery are still felt in the South (more about that comes later in the story). Every November all the hunters track the legendary bear, Old Ben, but there seems to be kind of an unspoken agreement not to kill him. Old Ben has been shot many times but never brought down. Tracking him is a sort of sport, not unlike a boxing match or some other sporting event. Young hunter Isaac McCaslin (“Ike” for short) grows up in the woods, becoming a more accomplished woodsman and hunter than most grown men while still a child. He comes to revere Old Ben as a sort of god. In one fateful encounter with a “legendary” dog, however, Old Ben has met his match. When one of the hunters, Boon Hoggenbeck, sees that Old Ben is about to kill the dog, he steps in and kills the bear with a knife instead of a gun. So much for the unspoken pledge not to kill the bear.

The death of Old Ben comes at the end of the third section of the novel. For the next two sections, Faulkner switches gear for some reason, making the story seem uneven. (He must have had his reasons; after all, he was the genius.) Fast forward to 1888, when Ike is twenty-one. He and his cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, are in the plantation commissary, looking at some old ledgers in which Ike’s father and Ike’s father’s twin brother, McCaslin’s father, recorded some semi-literate entries about slaves they had bought and sold before the Civil War and Emancipation. Ike and McCaslin read the ledger entries and we (the reader) read them too. They go on and on and are not all that interesting. Ike and McCaslin then engage in a long and dense discussion of how wrong slavery was for the South and how the South and everybody in it is cursed because of it. There are some very long sentences here and some very long paragraphs (one single sentence is 1600 words). You have to be a dedicated reader to wade through all this.

Faulkner is Faulkner and he is the one and only. Nobody else even comes close. You either find his work rewarding or completely incomprehensible. After you’ve read one of his sentences or one of his paragraphs, you might have to go back and break the sentence or the paragraph down into its various parts to understand what he is saying. And, as wordy and dense as his work is, he is also the master of the unspoken. Read him and you’ll see what I mean.

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Conjuring 2 ~ A Capsule Movie Review

The Conjuring 2

The Conjuring 2 ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

If we are to believe the current spate of horror movies, there are many, many evil spirits (or demons) waiting to do bad things (or horrifying mischief) to ordinary people. In the movie The Conjuring (2013), based on a “true” story, a working class couple with a houseful of daughters buys a quaint old farmhouse in rural Rhode Island, not knowing that it’s the residence of a malevolent spirit from long ago who tries to make the mother kill her daughters. The family turns to Ed and Lorraine Warren for help. Lorraine is a psychic and her husband, Ed, is a sort of psychic investigator who assists people in ridding their homes of these spirits. Ed and Lorraine Warren are real-life people (not a handsome pair like Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson who play them onscreen) who travel around from place to place working on cases of various “hauntings.”

In the new movie The Conjuring 2, Ed and Lorraine Warren travel to England, to  the home of a beleaguered, divorced mother with four children in a dreary working-class neighborhood in northern London. The family’s name is Hodgson. Janet Hodgson is eleven years old. She’s been levitating, her bed shakes violently when she’s asleep and she hears and sees things (people) that apparently aren’t there. Finally, the spirit of an old man named Bill Wilkins who died in the house forty years earlier begins speaking through Janet Hodgson. (Or is he?) The house is his, he says, and he wants the current occupants to get out. After much investigating, it appears that eleven-year-old Janet is just faking the whole thing to get attention. Wait a minute! How can she have faked all the psychic occurrences that have been documented? It seems there are always those skeptics willing to find a “logical” explanation for any “proof” of ghosts or an afterlife. 

We learn finally that the spirit of Bill Wilkins is just a “pawn” for a really malevolent spirit named Valak, who manifests itself in the form of a horrifying nun. Janet Hodgson is being forced to appear to be faking the whole thing; if she doesn’t, the demon will kill her family. After many twists and turns, Ed and Lorraine learn the truth and then know how to counter the demon. 

The Conjuring 2 is formulaic, as these ghost stories usually are, but if you like well-made horror films (not slasher films) with a real plot, characters (not jiggling teenagers) and dialogue, this one is well worth your time. We are always left with the disquieting suggestion at the end that, although the living people may have won this round, the demons are only temporarily discommoded and will be back. As long as The Conjuring 2 makes money, there is bound to be The Conjuring 3. 

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp 

by allen0997

Genius ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Genius

Genius ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

Like other geniuses before him, American writer Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) flamed brightly for a time and then burned out. He lived life exuberantly and was bursting with talent and creativity. In New York in 1929 he was just another failed writer. His massive first novel, which he called Oh, Lost!, had been rejected by every publisher in New York. He had a patroness, though, a woman named Aline Bernstein, who, through her connections, arranged to have the novel brought to the attention of Maxwell Perkins, an editor at Charles Scribners publishing house. Perkins agreed to give the manuscript a “quick look,” even though he was told from the beginning it wasn’t any good.

Max Perkins “discovered” Tom Wolfe, the writer. He would do for Wolfe what he had done for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. As soon as he began reading Oh, Lost!, he knew that it was a unique work. He saw in it what other editors had failed to see, or, more likely, hadn’t taken the time to see. The book needed massive editing, but Perkins believed it was a work of genius that needed to be brought to the reading public. He contacted Tom Wolfe and gave him a check in advance of royalties for five hundred dollars. Wolfe wept.

Of course, Wolfe was reluctant to make any cuts to the book. He and Perkins spent months whipping the book into shape, which included a title change to Look Homeward, Angel. When the novel was published, it was a huge success and Wolfe was hailed as a genius. He knew he would never have been able to do it, though, without the help of Max Perkins.

In the new movie, Genius, Thomas Wolfe is played by Jude Law. He is loud, has a prodigious Southern accent (from Asheville, North Carolina), and isn’t interested in social conventions. He says what he thinks, does what he likes, and spends a lot of his time in a drunken state. He also has some domestic problems. Aline Bernstein (Nicole Kidman), his patroness, the “older” woman who left her husband, family, and respectability behind for him, is unstable and jealous. She is happy for Wolfe’s success, of course, but resents the many hours he spends on his writing. In one scene, she begins pouring pills into her mouth in the office of Max Perkins (Colin Firth) to get Wolfe to go home with her. She is a very unpleasant, bitter woman.

Wolfe’s next book, Of Time and the River, is even longer than the first. Perkins and Wolfe would spend many hours together, day and night, over two years or more, editing the book and getting it ready for publication. During this time, Perkins and Wolfe become close friends. Perkins comes to think of Wolfe almost as the son he never had (he has five daughters). The writer/publisher association develops into a close—at times volatile—friendship. Aline Bernstein tells Perkins that Wolfe will leave him as soon as he (Perkins) has served his purpose. She also threatens Perkins with a gun.

In 1938, at the age of 37, Tom Wolfe is stricken and taken to Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore (the same hospital where his father died). When an operation is performed, doctors discover he has a “myriad” of tumors in his brain. He dies soon after.

Genius is based on a nonfiction book by A. Scott Berg. It is an “art” film for a niche audience that won’t get much attention or make much money. Those of us who have read the great books of Thomas Wolfe and know something of his life will find the story fascinating. There aren’t many of us. At the showing I went to last night, there were three other people besides me in the audience. I walked a mile in the heat (I’d always rather walk than drive) to see it and a mile home. It was worth it.

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Alice Through the Looking Glass ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Alice Through the Looking Glass

Alice Through the Looking Glass ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

In Wonderland, Time is a “he” with electric blue eyes, a mustache, and an accent. He tells the Red Queen that her head is looking “wery, wery large today.” The Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), besides having an enormous head (out of all proportion to the rest of her body), has a tiny red heart painted in the middle of her lips (to show the smallness of her heart?) and a profusion of red hair. Nobody loves her, she says, but we know the reason for that is because she is so mean and loves to have people’s heads cut off. (“Off with his head!”, she shouts.) The White Queen, her fluttery sister, tells her that she loves her, if nobody else does, but the Red Queen isn’t having any of it. She hates being hugged.

The Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) also has a profusion of red hair and enormous eyes that change color with his mood. He is rather androgynous and speaks with a lisping accent that is at times indecipherable. His friends (the Cheshire Cat, who floats in the air and disappears and reappears at will; Tweedledum and Tweedledee, rotund male twins; a dormouse, a dog, and a rabbit, all of whom speak English) are worried about him and think he might be dying.

Absolem, a blue, sometime-caterpillar/sometime butterfly, shows Alice (Mia Wasikowska) the way to return to Wonderland through the large mirror over the mantel. She is needed back in Wonderland after her earlier adventures there because the Mad Hatter, her “best friend in the whole world,” is in trouble. When she visits Hatter in his house shaped exactly like a top hat, she finds him in a low state. He tells Alice he wants her help in getting his family back and, when she tells him that getting them back is impossible because they are dead, he orders her out of his house. The Alice he knows, he says, never believed that anything was impossible.

Alice agrees to at least try to get Hatter’s family back, but she knows it will be very difficult, if not downright impossible. She must first manipulate Time (Sacha Baron Cohen), to be able to travel back to an earlier period when Hatter’s family was still alive. When she is finally able to travel back in time, she meets the Red Queen and her sister, the White Queen, as children, before the Red Queen became so mean. She also meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee before they were grown up and also meets Hatter as a child. Of course, he doesn’t have any recollection of Alice at this time because he hasn’t met her yet.

Alice Through the Looking Glass is a sequel to 2010’s Alice in Wonderland, both of them based on literary classics by English author Lewis Carroll. It’s colorful, imaginative and whimsical, full of bizarre characters and fantastic settings. For the child in all of us.

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Picture of Dorian Gray ~ A Capsule Book Review

The Picture of Dorian Gray cover

The Picture of Dorian Gray ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

London in the 1880s: Not only is Dorian Gray young, innocent, and fabulously wealthy (he doesn’t have to earn his daily bread), he is also extravagantly beautiful. When sometimes-mediocre painter Basil Hallward meets the beautiful young Dorian, he becomes obsessed and infatuated. “Gay attraction” and “love” are never mentioned, but isn’t that what we’re talking about here? After all, it’s Oscar Wilde.

Basil Hallward rises above his own mediocrity when he paints Dorian’s portrait. It is, everybody agrees, his masterpiece. He could sell it for a tidy sum but decides to give it to Dorian. Dorian mouths an innocent (or not so innocent) prayer to the effect that he wishes he could always remain young and beautiful, while his portrait would show the inevitable signs of aging and living. In a touch of “magic realism” (how else do you explain it?), he gets his wish.

Early in the story, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a character who could be Wilde himself. He’s worldly, cynical, intelligent, and in possession of a scathing wit. He speaks in epigrams (“The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”) and doesn’t believe in goodness or much of anything else. He becomes an important character in the story because he is a corrupting influence on Dorian in his youth. Dorian admires him and is drawn to him and seeks to emulate him, even though he has a lot of the devil in him.

Dorian begins to live recklessly. He “falls in love” (or believes he does) with a young Shakespearean actress named Sybil Vane. Sybil’s biggest failing is that she doesn’t know what Dorian is all about or what she is getting herself into. Dorian believes she is a divinely talented actress and says he wants to marry her. When he brings his friends to the theatre to see her in a performance of Romeo and Juliet, she is terrible. She disappoints Dorian and embarrasses him in front of his friends. When he sees her after the performance, he is cruel to her. He tells her she is not what he thought she was and he can’t marry her and doesn’t want to see her again, while she says that her happiness at being his betrothed has robbed her of her “art.” He leaves her heartbroken and the next day discovers that she has committed suicide.

From Sybil Vane’s suicide, Dorian goes on to do other bad deeds. People are naturally drawn to him because he’s so attractive, but he turns out to be poison to everybody who comes into his sphere, male and female alike. Several young men are “ruined” because they acquire the taint of scandal from being Dorian’s “intimates.” (Homosexuality is still a crime in England at this time.) There are ruined careers and other suicides. Dorian immerses himself in a world of vice and degradation, frequenting opium dens and other low places of ill repute. Eventually he commits murder.

While Dorian becomes more and more immersed in sin, he remains young-looking and beautiful. At age thirty-eight, he still looks the same as he did at twenty-three. We (the reader) know what his secret is if nobody else does. The portrait that Basil Hallward painted of him (which he keeps locked away in the attic of his house) bears his shame and the marks of his vice and sin. It becomes more and more hideous while Dorian himself remains unscathed. The painting is, in a way, his soul and his conscience. We know this isn’t going to end well for Dorian.

There are elements of Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in The Picture of Dorian Gray; also elements of Poe, although The Picture of Dorian Gray is generally easier reading than Poe. (We are told in the introduction that it started out as a shorter piece until Wilde expanded it into a novel.) It’s a readable classic, worth revisiting, if you read it once a long time ago, as I did, and want to experience it again now that you’re older and wiser. (If you’re interested in the life and too-early death of Oscar Wilde, the 1997 British movie, Wilde, makes for fascinating viewing.)

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Best Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe ~ A Capsule Book Review

The Best Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe

The Best Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

In this collection are twenty-eight short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, from the really well known (“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Fall of the House of Usher”) to the less well known (“A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” “The Sphinx,” “The Imp of the Perverse”). Poe’s best stories are the ones where he gets right to the story and doesn’t theorize or provide dry, unnecessary information, as in the first couple of pages of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a fine story if you start reading about the third page. And, no, there’s no morgue in this story where dead bodies are kept. The “Rue Morgue” is a street in Paris where two women, mother and daughter, are brutally murdered, stumping police, especially since the body of the daughter is stuffed up inside a chimney. The 1932 movie version of the story, a vehicle for Bela Lugosi, bears little or no resemblance to the original story. Yes, there’s a killer ape in the story and also in the movie, but that’s where the similarity ends.

The movies have not been kind to the works of Edgar Allan Poe. His stories just aren’t cinematic. Maybe some day somebody will make a movie from one of his stories that is faithful to the original story. In the 1960s, somebody thought it would be a good idea to make a series of movies based on the works of Poe starring that master of horror, Vincent Price. These movies were not serious attempts to translate the works of Poe to the screen but were mostly a way for filmmakers to make money, and I’m sure they succeeded in this goal, or there wouldn’t have been so many of them. To know what the stories of Poe are really like, you have to read them in their original form and not watch cheesy “B” movies.

Poe wrote on subjects that probably most other writers of his generation would have found too distasteful: mutilation murder, lunacy, drug addiction, being interred alive, being closed up in a wall to die, rotting corpses, rats, catacombs, disease, jealousy, revenge, etc. He was preoccupied with dying and death and the dark side of things; he probably suffered from some sort of undiagnosed mental illness. He didn’t write about monsters from another realm as H. P. Lovecraft did, but about monsters that exist right here on earth that you might just bring upon yourself if you’re not careful. In “The Imp of the Perverse,” a man commits a successful murder and has an easy life living on the money from the person he killed. Everything is going well for him, but he just can’t keep from confessing the murder and he ends up on the gallows. In “The Premature Burial,” a man who experiences catalepsy (trances that resemble death) has a morbid fear of being buried alive. In “The Black Cat,” an alcoholic who loves animals begins to have a consuming hatred for, and fear of, a certain black cat. In “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” a “Mesmerist” hypnotizes a man who is on the brink of death from tuberculosis. As an experiment, he keeps the dying man in a state of suspended, hypnotic animation, neither alive or dead, for a period of seven months. “The Pit and the Pendulum” is about a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition being tortured in a fiendish and cruel way. In “Hop-Frog,” one of Poe’s best stories, a dwarf who is court jester for a cruel king exacts his revenge in the most dramatic way possible.

Poe elevated and legitimized the short story. In some ways, he is the father of the American short story. If you read his stories now, you will see why he endures. The best of his stories are the best ever written.     

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp 

by allen0997

Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood ~ A Capsule Book Review

Tinseltown cover

Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp 

In the early 1920s sound was still several years off, but the movies didn’t need sound; they were more popular than ever after the First World War. Even without sound, movies were becoming more technically advanced and were evolving into a truly American art form. Every town in America had its own movie theatre. Every movie-goer had his or her favorite star and was willing to plunk down hard cash to see them on the screen. Stars made huge sums of money and their movies reaped enormous profits for the movie studios. Overseas markets held huge potential for additional profits. What a business!

All was not sunny in sunny Hollywood, however. Movie stars lived extravagantly and were often seen by the world at large as unprincipled and immoral. Then, as now, everybody loved a juicy scandal. Just a hint of scandal involving a famous person elicited sensational headlines. Mabel Normand, for example, was a huge comedic star at the top of her game, but she was also a notorious party girl who became as well known for her appetites for booze and cocaine as for her screen performances. Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was a popular comedic actor even more famous than Mabel Normand. He hosted a wild party that didn’t turn out so well. A young starlet named Virginia Rappé was seriously injured at the party and later died. There were those who said Fatty Arbuckle raped her, although he vehemently denied it. Popular star Wallace Reid, known for his wholesome good looks, developed a morphine habit. He had morphine delivered to his home every day and died at a tragically young age in a sanatorium. Beautiful young star Olive Thomas died of an accidental poisoning in Paris after an evening of drug- and booze-fueled partying in Paris nightclubs. The effect of all these scandals was to galvanize reformers and do-gooders into calling for censorship and stringent regulation of the movie industry by the government.

The biggest scandal of them all, however, was the murder, in early 1922, of distinguished movie director William Desmond Taylor in his own home. People outside of Hollywood had never heard of William Desmond Taylor, but after he was murdered everybody heard of him. His murder and its solution became a national obsession. This scandal was just one more reason, reformers said, for measures to be taken to “clean up” Hollywood. If the things actors did on the screen weren’t bad enough, their own private lives were ten times worse.

The murder of William Desmond Taylor is the scandal at the center of Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William Mann. All the other scandals paled in comparison. What made the Taylor scandal so sensational and so intriguing to so many people was that it was all but insoluble. Did Mable Normand kill Taylor? She was his “best friend.” Because she was the last to see him alive, she immediately became a suspect. Or could it have been Mary Miles Minter, the little blonde star not yet twenty who was obsessed with Taylor and believed herself in love with him, even though he was almost thirty years older? More likely than not, it was Charlotte Shelby, Minter’s mother. She was known to have a raging temper and was vehemently against her daughter’s association with the much older man. How about light-fingered Edward Sands, Taylor’s former valet, who had a criminal past? Or maybe it was Henry Peavey, Taylor’s swishy valet at the time of his death. If he had a reason for killing Taylor, what might it have been?

And then there was Hollywood bottom feeder Margaret “Gibby” Gibson (otherwise known as Patricia Palmer), a would-be actress who struggled for years to become a star and never made it. She seemed to be willing to do almost anything to get ahead and was known to associate with low-life “bunco” artists who made a living by “shaking down” millionaires. (Just mention the Mann Act and they were almost certainly willing to pay any amount to stay out of trouble.) Did she kill Taylor as part of a scheme hatched by one of her nefarious friends?

Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood is a fascinating true crime story with a rich cast of real-life characters. For those interested in the dazzled and dazzling 1920s (before the bad old Depression) and specifically in the still-young movie industry, this book is going to be hard to resist. I could hardly put it down and that’s something I can’t say about very many of the thousands of books I’ve read in my lifetime. It’s not great literature, but it will transport you to another time and place for a while and there’s a lot to be said for that.

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Sympathizer ~ A Capsule Book Review

The Sympathizer cover

The Sympathizer ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

The Sympathizer by first-time novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen is this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction. It’s about the Vietnam War, the Vietnam era and, in particular, one man’s role in the whole mess. (What ever happened to the rule about novels having to be about American life to be considered for a Pulitzer Prize?) It’s 400 (almost) densely packed pages (no quotation marks; the dialogue is blended in here and there wherever it occurs). The Vietnam War and the Vietnam era would not be on my list of favorite subjects for fiction, but, for me, the saving grace of The Sympathizer is that it’s so good and such accessible, interesting reading.

The story of The Sympathizer is being told in the first-person by a narrator whose name we never know. We learn toward the end of the book that he is writing this whole thing as a confession while in solitary confinement as part of his “re-education” (another word for torture) at the hands of the communists. He is the bastard son of an illiterate Vietnamese woman and a French priest. Since he has spent part of his youth in America, he is “Americanized” and knows English well, but, in spite of that, he never feels like an American but always a bastard, the unwanted foreigner. After the fall of Vietnam and his narrow escape, along with many others, to America, he and many of his fellow countrymen want only to return to help liberate their country. What is more important that freedom and independence? The answer is nothing. (Nothing becomes a very important word to him at the end of the book.) Wait a minute, though! There’s something funny about this man. He claims to be on the side of the anticommunists, but the truth is he’s a secret communist agent. Where is he going with that? Is it safe to say he is conflicted? In the interview at the end of the novel, the author of the book, Viet Thanh Nguyen, says he deliberately wants to rattle the reader. I wouldn’t exactly say I was rattled, but only a little mystified.

For me the best parts of the book are the harrowing escape (by the narrator and his friends) from Saigon on the day it falls and the long section in the middle of the book where the narrator travels to the Philippines with an American movie crew to work as consultant on a movie that is being shot about the Vietnam War. (Ostensibly the movie is Apocalypse Now.) He wants to ensure that Vietnamese people are treated fairly in the movie but falls far short of that goal. There are a few lighter moments in The Sympathizer, as when the narrator is “dating” a much older Japanese woman who doesn’t care for him as much as he cares for her and, later, his infatuation with a beautiful Vietnamese girl named Lana (Lan); but there are also some horrible things, such as a couple of murders, a gang rape, people being dismembered by land mines, torture and other terrible things humans do to other humans in the name of some noble cause. This is a book, after all, about war. Did I need to read a book about Vietnam? Probably not, but now that I’ve read it through to the end, I’m glad to be done with it. If anybody ever asks me, I may be the only person in the room to have read it.

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp 

by allen0997

Penny Dreadful, Season 3 ~ A Capsule Review

Penny Dreadful poster

Penny Dreadful, Season 3 ~ A Capsule Review by Allen Kopp

Showtime’s gothic horror series set in Victorian London, Penny Dreadful, draws its inspiration from classic dark literature and horror films: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Wolf Man. If you think those themes have been done to death, well, Penny Dreadful puts a new spin on all of them.

Season three has shown the advent of a few new characters, namely Dracula, in the guise of a natural historian named Dr. Alexander Sweet; Dr. Henry Jekyll, a “wog” (half-caste Indian) who was Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s only friend going back to medical school; an “alienist” named Dr. Seward (played by Patti Lupone, forbidding but oddly comforting) who undertakes the job of “analyzing” and counseling Vanessa Ives with her many supernatural problems; a “girl of the streets” named Justine, taken up by Lily and Dorian as their new protégé in evil; and Mr. Renfield, a mousey young man who works as secretary for Dr. Seward and who is in thrall to Dracula. Mr. Renfield finds out all he can about Vanessa and reports back to Dracula. (Vanessa, if you will remember going back to the previous season, is much desired by the forces of darkness.) But, wait a minute, isn’t there something familiar about Dr. Seward? Didn’t Vanessa meet her in another place and another time and in a different persona? Vanessa is sure of it, no matter how much Dr. Seward denies it.

When season three begins, soulful, cleft-chinned Dr. Victor Frankenstein is still pining over Lily, who was Brona before she died of consumption and he “reanimated” her. When his old friend Dr. Henry Jekyll arrives on the scene again, Victor is in a bad way with his obsession over Lily and his addiction to morphine, which he injects into his arm. Dr. Jekyll works with dangerous mental patients in Bedlam hospital. After Victor tells him the story of Lily, he says he can help make Lily what Victor wants her to be, by using the treatment he uses on out-of-control insane people at Bedlam. They can help each other. Victor knows how to resurrect people from the dead and Henry can make them docile and amenable.

Ethan Chandler, the wolf man, has been extradited back to America by a one-armed Scotland Yard man named Bartholomew Rusk. (Ethan, you will remember, butchered several people in England, but didn’t they, as the saying goes, have it coming?) In the wild New Mexico Territory, on a train enroute to the place where justice will be administered, the party is waylaid by a band of men who kidnap Ethan because Ethan’s father sent them. Have they saved him or is there something more sinister afoot? But—wait one damn minute!—besides the party who kidnapped Ethan, two other men are on his trail: a mysterious Indian named Kaetenay and our old friend Sir Malcolm Murray who has been recruited by Kaetenay to, as he says, “save our son.” What does he mean by this?

And then there is our friend, “the creature,” whom we met almost all the way back at the beginning of the series. Dr. Frankenstein “created” him, unhappily it seems, and he has been constantly dogging Dr. Frankenstein to do something to help him. His original intention of wanting a mate seems to have been superseded by other, more pressing, desires. He loves poetry and he seems to only want to be loved, but he will rip your head off if you give him any reason to do so. In season three, we are finding out more about his origins and how he came to be changed from a “normal” man into a monster. There is some connection between him and poor, tormented Vanessa Ives. As season three progresses, we will learn more about this.

A recurring theme in Penny Dreadful is the duality in human nature: every good that exists is counterbalanced by an equal or greater amount of bad; in every angel there’s a demon waiting to get out and in every demon an angel. It’s fantasy TV, not for everybody, of course, but for the thinking person who is fed up with raunchy sit-coms and mind-numbing commercials and drivel that TV serves up every minute of every day. It could have been schlock but it’s not. It’s intelligent and engaging, always a little surprising. (Some of the dialogue is brilliant, as in the exchanges between Dr. Seward and Vanessa.) Every episode is beautiful to look at, whether it’s the deserts of the American Southwest or the dreary, crowded streets of Victorian London. The acting is sincere; the actors never seem to think themselves superior to the material, even if it’s campy or overly familiar. I’m a big fan of Penny Dreadful and I have been since the very beginning. You can have Veep, Girls, and Game of Thrones. I’ll take Penny Dreadful.

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Woman in the Dunes ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Woman in the Dunes

Woman in the Dunes ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

I read the Japanese novel (in English translation, of course) Woman in the Dunes by Kôbô Abe in 1992, but had never seen the 1964 movie version of the novel until it was shown on “TCM Imports” on Sunday night. It’s a simple story with two principal characters and a handful of “villagers” that we never see for more than a minute or two at a time.

A young, child-like Japanese woman, whose name we never know, lives in a crude wooden shack at the bottom of a ravine from which there is no escape. It’s a barren, isolated place. Sand is all we ever see and the sand moves all the time (from wind and gravity), like a creepy, sinister entity, down into the ravine in which the woman lives. She must shovel the sand day and night to keep from being buried in it. (We learn after a while that her husband and daughter are both buried there.) She hoists the sand up to the villagers who sell it to be used in bricks or building materials. In return, they send her a scant amount of food and water. While most people would believe that the perpetual shoveling of sand is just another version of hell, the Japanese woman thinks of it as her life and the ravine as her home. She states at one point, “Nobody would even bother with me if it wasn’t for the sand.” She thinks it’s what she deserves.

A young man from Tokyo named Niki Jumpei is a teacher and entomologist. He is looking for a certain specimen of sand beetle and if he can find one that hasn’t been classified yet, he’ll get his name in the journals. When he misses the last bus home in the evening, he asks a villager if there is someplace nearby where he might stay for the night. The villager leads him to the ravine where the young woman lives. A rope ladder hangs there which he might easily climb down. The woman feeds him and he spends the night there. In the morning he prepares to leave but discovers that the rope ladder that he used to climb down into the ravine is gone. He is trapped in much the same way that he traps his insect specimens.

Niki Jumpei spends a lot of time calculating how he might get out of the ravine and go home, but the young woman is cheerful and unmoved. He begins to help her with the shoveling and she prepares his food. He tells himself that when he doesn’t return, the people at home will come looking for him. He tries everything he can think of to get out of the ravine, but nothing works. The one time he does get out, he loses his way, gets caught in quicksand, and the villagers find him and lower him back into the ravine.

In time, Niki Jumpei and the young woman are drawn to each other in a sexual way, as nature dictates when two heterosexual people of opposing genders are thrown together. She bathes him as he stands in the middle of the floor naked. She asks him how she compares with the girls in Tokyo. Does he have a wife? She is clearly delighted at his being there and horrified at the thought that he might get away.

For such a simple, stark story, there is a considerable amount of tension in Woman in the Dunes, accompanied by eerie (though appropriate) Japanese music and the perpetual effects of the sand closing in. What’s going to happen? Will Niki Jumpei kill the young woman? Will he be able to escape? Will he escape and take her with him? Will she finally relent and get the villagers to let him go? There are any number of possible outcomes and the way the story finally ends is something we didn’t see coming.

The “director’s cut” of Woman in the Dunes is almost two-and-a-half hours long. In Japanese with English subtitles, it’s not for everybody, of course, but it’s accessible and memorable for those willing to spend the time. Foreign movies, like grand opera, are an acquired taste. Some people will resist both as a matter of principle. It’s hard for some of us to overcome our hillbilly origins.

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997