Month: November 2023

Tan Twan Eng: The Garden of Evening Mists

Audio book

It is impossible to resist the opening sentence of this sumptuously produced, Booker-longlisted novel: “On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan.” As with Tan Twan Eng’s first novel, The Gift of Rain, in a setting of quasi-mythical lushness a refined, patrician character must come to terms with a painful history. Amid “the stillness of the mountains” and “the depth of the silence”, a story slowly unfolds. Very, very slowly.

The narrator is the austere Supreme Court judge Teoh Yun Ling, who has retired from public service in Kuala Lumpur to return to the Cameron Highlands, where she has unfinished business: her past and that of her country. As Yun-Ling reconnects with old friends at the hill station and the tone becomes contemplative, we slip into chronologically complex flashbacks. Slowly, the narrative turns to the main dramatic event: the fascinating relationship between Yun Ling and gardener Nakamura Aritomo.

Self-exiled from imperial Japan after a dispute with his employer Emperor Hirohito, Aritomo settles in the hilltops of Malaya and begins to build Yugiri, a “garden of evening mists”. Into his life comes independent Yun Ling, daughter of a prosperous Chinese Malaysian family, and the sole survivor of a prisoner-of-war camp. It is 1951, and she is a prosecutor of war criminals and a hater of all things Japanese – except one. Her request to Aritomo is simple: build a garden for her sister who perished in the camp, and who loved the gardens of Kyoto. The taciturn Aritomo is not in the habit of pleasing anyone or apologising for his country’s crimes. Instead he offers to teach Yun Ling the art of Japanese gardening, for two years. Almost against herself, she becomes his apprentice, then his lover, and finally, the canvas for his masterpiece: horimono, a full-body Japanese tattoo. The chapters in which this redemptive relationship unfolds through the rich metaphors of gardening, tattooing, tea-ceremonies, and Zen philosophy are the psychological core of the novel.

Meanwhile, we learn about existential gardening concepts such as shakkei, “borrowed scenery”; that “every aspect of gardening is a form of deception”; that the “Art of Setting Stones” is back-breaking; that a garden is the expression of spiritual states. We learn about archery, which Aritomo practices as a form of meditation. We learn about tea-growing, and about the sexually charged practice of horimono (did you know that the subject becomes addicted to the pain?), and chilling details about Japanese war-camps where those such as Yun Ling were “guests of the Emperor”, as the obscene term went.

This is a novel that overflows with historical and specialist information, and like The Gift of Rain, it showcases Tan Twan Eng as a master of cultural complexities. The secondary character, Magnus, is a South African whose heart is in Malaya, and who – like Yun Ling – becomes entangled in the pre-independence turmoil of the 1950s. Indeed, all the characters, including the righteous Yun Ling and the wise Aritomo, are slowly revealed to be morally ambiguous, compromised by actions that haunt them. The theme here is remembering and forgetting, illustrated by a suitable double metaphor: there is a Mnemosyne garden statue, and Yun Ling suffers from aphasia.

This novel ticks many boxes: its themes are serious, its historic grounding solid, its structure careful, its old-fashioned ornamentalism respectable. The reason I found it impossible to love is the quality of the writing. There is no discernible personality in the dutiful, dull voice of Yun Ling, and non-events stalk us on every page: “for a timeless moment I looked straight into his eyes”; “For a long while he does not say anything. Finally he begins to speak in a slow, steady voice.” The self-conscious dialogue resembles a history lesson collated for the benefit of the western reader, and everything is ponderously “like” something else, so it takes twice as long: “We were like two moths around a candle, circling closer and closer to the flames, waiting to see whose wings would catch fire first.” Despite the dramatic events, the overall effect is one of surprising blandness, like something you’ve read before.

Kapka Kassabova in The Guardian

My Policeman

Michael Grandage’s new film has been coolly received by some, but I found it an interestingly fragile and Rattiganesque melodrama of repression and regret. It is set on a gloomy English seafront and intercuts between the buttoned-up 1950s and the late 1990s. As an earnestly intended drama I can imagine it being performed on stage at a weekday matinee, the climactic speeches echoing wanly around the auditorium. But in its contrived way, it conjures a very English sort of shame.

Screenwriter Ron Nyswaner has adapted the novel by Bethan Roberts, itself inspired by the famous ménage between novelist EM Forster, Forster’s policeman lover Bob Buckingham and Bob’s wife, May. Linus Roache and Gina McKee play ageing married couple Tom and Marion, respectively a former police offer and retired schoolteacher. To Tom’s dismay, Marion has taken a local resident into their home to be cared for by her as part of a volunteer outreach programme: cantankerous stroke survivor Patrick, played by Rupert Everett.

But Patrick is no stranger: 40 years previously, he was the elegant museum curator and gay man (in an age when homosexuality was a criminal offence) who fell passionately in love with Tom and began a secret relationship with him, just as poor, shy, muddled Tom was courting Marion, hardly understanding anything about his own sexuality and certainly nothing about Marion’s, whose motives for taking him in now are fraught with guilt. Young Patrick is played in flashback by David Dawson, young Marion by Emma Corrin and young Tom by Harry Styles – who is not at all a bad actor, better than he was in Don’t Worry Darling, with a rather assured on-camera presence. His line-readings are a bit decelerated, perhaps as a result of coaching, but he has an interestingly melodious delivery. It reminds me a little of Mick Jagger’s movie acting.

The film shows how much in this era depended on the importance of discretion, the grim hypocrisy dance of knowing and not knowing. And Patrick keeping a diary in which he swooningly refers to Tom as “my policeman” is indiscreet, as is his (absurdly) brazen decision to take Tom on a business trip with him to Venice.

The modern-day parts of the film are not fully realised: older Tom and Marion are too accustomed to a life of reticence to voice their feelings: stroke-patient Patrick cannot speak anyway, and the dissolve-fade transitions to their shared tremulous past are a bit on the nose. But even in this constraint there is a certain kind of poignancy. I would like, perhaps, to see Grandage dramatise the famously tragicomic final domestic set-up of the ageing Kingsley Amis, cared for by his first wife, Hilary, and her husband, Lord Kilmarnock.

Pete Bradshaw in The Guardian

Romáland

Onassis Stegi, Athens

Carefree nomads? Great artists? Victims of social structures, or dangerous and delinquent? What, after all, are Roma? And what are they not? According to historians, the community of Greek Roma can be traced back to the 15th century, making it one of the oldest in Europe. Based on the number of Greek words within the Romany language, linguistics studies reveal its historical connection to Byzantium and the Greek territory. Yet, until the end of the Greek dictatorship (1974), Greek Roma were stateless. Despite their naturalization in 1979 and the steps taken since then, a great part continues to live exposed to extreme poverty conditions and multiple vulnerabilities in ghettoized areas or camps, bearing the stigma of the dangerous “other/stranger,” forever condemned to an intermediate state, a constant “between real and unreal,” as the catchphrase with which the gypsy tales begin goes.During the past year, the killings of two young Roma following a police pursuit occupied public opinion and mass media: Nikos Sampanis in Athens and Kostas Fragoulis in Thessaloniki. The two cases will soon be tried by the Greek justice system, and together they form two iconic events with Roma as victims, who, however, are not the only ones.

The “Romáland” performance aspires to tell an inverted journey across Greece’s contemporary history through the perspective of Roma.

From the worker accident at the collapsed bridge in Patras to the eight-year-old Olga in Keratsini, who was trapped by a sliding factory gate and died helpless, monstrous incidents of violence and indifference reveal that the Roma lives in Greece are often treated as “lives not worth living.”*.

But, concurrently and in direct contrast with the actual incidents of racial violence, the public imaginary is keen to see Roma people as blithesome entertainers, children of nature who live outside norms and rules. However, is there such a vast difference between Roma and “Gadjo/Baleme”? Specifically, if we go back a few generations, we will find many men and women—among them our grandmothers and grandfathers—who didn’t even finish primary school, were married against their will, sacrificed their desires to follow their father’s profession, and even lived as wandering nomads who based their survival on constant movement. Why is it then that the lives of Roma seem so distant to us?

Following months of research from Zefyri and Aspropyrgos to Thessaloniki, Larissa, and Serres, the “Romáland” performance aspires to tell an inverted journey across Greece’s contemporary history through the perspective of Roma. Ascribing to the tradition of the documentary theater genre, the performance is shaped by the participation of Roma protagonists, who narrate their real stories live, and aims to highlight the multiple social exclusions they face as well as their daily efforts to overcome them.

Seven years after “Clean City,” the most-traveled theatrical production of Onassis Stegi in Europe, starring immigrant cleaning women in Greece, the two directors-dramaturges Anestis Azas and Prodromos Tsinikoris return, and this time they attempt to approach the lives of Greek Roma, looking back at facts, toying with stereotypes, and evading romanticization.

* A phrase used by the Nazi regime to describe people it considered to have no “right to life.”

https://www.onassis.org/whats-on/romaland-anestis-azas-prodromos-tsinikoris

Good Bye Lindita

National Theatre, Athens

How do we cope with the loss of a loved one? Do the rituals of mourning help? And is there any prospect of an afterlife? These questions were buzzing in my brain after seeing a wordless 70-minute show, Goodbye, Lindita, in a converted factory in Athens. Conceived and directed by Mario Banushi, the 24-year-old son of Albanian immigrants, the production was part of a five-day showcase organised by the National Theatre of Greece and I felt I was witnessing the emergence of an exciting new talent.

Banushi’s play is highly personal: it was prompted by the image of his dead stepmother “surrounded by people saying goodbye” and by the death of his father three days later. But what we see on stage is a strange mixture of the mundane and surreal.

One line in Kusher’s play resonated: ‘The dreams of the left are always beautiful’

The show starts with relatives tidying up old clothes while vacantly watching television. A chest of drawers then unfolds to reveal the stretched-out figure of a naked female corpse. The body is ceremonially bathed, adorned in a mask and sumptuous robes and placed on a flower-festooned bier. Meanwhile, the relatives, predominantly female, silently gather and slowly start to judder, shake and, in one extreme case, take balletic flight through an open window.

Grief has many different forms but what I took from the show was the idea that it will inevitably pierce the elaborate rituals that accompany death. At times I was reminded of the hyperrealism of the Bavarian dramatist, Franz Xaver Kroetz: Banushi makes great play of the way that families use telly-watching to nullify their emotions. At other moments Magritte came to mind: a door suddenly turns into a coffin, an arm miraculously appears from a wall as if the dead reach out to the living. We even get a strange final image of a corpse emerging from a dark tunnel to be greeted by a welcoming maternal figure.

(…)

Michael Billinton in The Guardian