The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A picaresque novel about Allan Karlsson, who decided that he did not want to attend his hundredth birthday party at the old-age home where he was staying so he decided to leave, with no particular plan for what he was going to do.

He has various improbable adventures, and the story is told with a series of flashbacks to his life story. He was a self-taught explosives expert, and as such had played a minor but significant part in various world events, learning several languages along the way and earning the gratitude of several powerful politicians.

I read it mainly because I had seen a film based on the book which I had enjoyed, and from what I could remember of it the film seemed to adhere quite closely to the book.

While it is primarily a picaresque novel, the story seems to overlap several other genres. On one level it is a crime novel, a police procedural, though also with a lot of incompetent bumbling — in the film version it is more like The Lavender Hill Mob than a serious whodunit. But perhaps these are all part of the picaresque genre anyway.

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Pet Sematary

Pet Sematary by Stephen King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The other night they showed the film of Pet Sematary on TV, and I thought it was quite good, and stuck quite closely to the book. Well it would, since Stephen King wrote the screenplay. So after seeing the film, I thought it was time to reread the book, which I had last read about 25 years ago.

On rereading it I decided to up its rating to 5 stars. I really think it’s the best of Stephen King‘s books, and that was confirmed for me in rereading it after seeing the film. The difference in the number of stars is because I’ve come to think differently about his monsters since I first read it. I used to think that evil monsters in fiction should tell use something about the nature of evil. I suppose I was thinking that the protagonist, who is good, fights the monster, who is evil;. That, at least, is what happens in Dracula.

It was only afterwards that I really understood that in this book, as in some of other books, the monster just just a prompt to the battle of good and evil that takes place in the protagonist’s heart. I’ve written more about that in another blog post, dealing with another of Stephen King’s books that I have recently reread, here Danse Macabre: monsters in literature and life | Khanya.

That post also contains a review (with spoilers] of Pet Sematary, which doesn’t leave much to say about it here, other than a plot summary that doesn’t give away too much of the story.

Louis Creed, a medical doctor, gets a new job at a university clinic in Ludlow, Maine, and moves there with his wife Rachel and children Eileen aged 5 and Gage aged 18 months. They are happy in their new house, and their neighbours across the road, a retired couple, Jud and Norma Cranston, make them welcome. Behind the house is a wood, part of which is included in the Creeds’ property, but it goes on for 50 miles, and beyond the Creed land is a wilderness whose ownership is disputed between the US Federal Government, the State of Maine and the Micmac Indians. A path leads up into the woods to a pet cemetery, where generations of the children of the town have buried their pets.

Jud Cranston takes the family on a walk to the pet cemetery, and tells how he had buried his own pet dog there when he was a child. The path seems to go on beyond the cemetery, but the way is blocked by a fallen tree, and Jud Colston warns that it would be too dangerous to try to climb over it.

On his first day in his new job Louis Creed is faced with a badly injured student, who was knocked down by a car while jogging. The dying student apparently knows his name, and warns him to stay away from the pet cemetery, and above all not to go beyond it.

See also:

• Danse Macabre: monsters in literature and life | Khanya
• Stephen King is 70 | Khanya
• Fantasy, horror, science fiction and more | Khanya

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The Mandela effect

As a South African, I thought I knew what the Mandela Effect, also known as the Madiba factor, was.

It originated on the day Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa’s first democratically elected president on 10 May 1994. Having stood in the crowd at the Union Buildings and waved our flags, we returned home and sat down in front of the TV and watched an international football match — South Africa versus Zambia. And we won.

Nel;son Mandela had gone from the Union Buildings to the FNB Stadium by helicopter, and was watching the match in person.

The next year, 1995, South Africa won the Rugby World Cup, and Nelson Mandela’s role in that was documented and made known to world through the film Invictus.

In 1996 we made the trek to the FNB Stadium, and saw South Africa play Tunisia in the final of the CAF Africa Cup of Nations. Nelson Mandela was there, and South Africa won. The Mandela Effect was well established, especially when people noticed that when he wasn’t there, the South African team usually lost.

Nelson Mandela
By Arquivo/ABr – Agência Brasil [1], CC BY 3.0 br, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2440492

More recently I began frequenting the Quora web site, where people ask questions and others answer. I found I could answer a few questions, and answered a couple about Nelson Mandela. Then I began seeing lots of questions about the Mandela Effect, but they were quite incomprehensible, as were the answers.

I asked about it on Quora, and got largely incomprehensible answers. One said it had something to do with lots of people forgetting or remembering things, but with no explanation of how Mandela came in to it. I wondered if it had anything to do with the film Invictus, as it seemed to be something spoken about mainly by people outside South Africa.

So can anyone explain to me how there came to be two Mandela factors, with completely different meanings, one known to people within South Africa, and one, apparently, known mainly to people outside? And what does it have to do with Madiba?

Everything is illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I saw the film, and so I read the book, and then, having finished the book, I watched the film again.

The story is funny and sad by turns. The film, which deals with only one dimension of the book starts by being funny, and ends by being sad. Because I’m interested in family history, at the surface level a young man’s search for his family history interests me. Jonathan Safran Foer knows his grandfather came from a village called Trachimbrod in Ukraine, and was saved from the Nazis by a woman called Augustine. Since this is also the name of the author, it seems that he is one of the characters in his own story.

The film deals mainly with the search, while the book deals more with what he found, or what he imagines he found. His guide and translator is Alex, and they are driven around by Alex’s grandfather (who claims to be blind, and has a seeing-eye bitch called Sammy Davis Junior Junior).

From the film: Alex, Jonathan, and Sammy Davis Junior Junior, the See4ing-Eye Bitch

Alex’s English leaves something to be desired, and he seems to have learnt it mainly from books. Finding too many synonyms in English, he fixes on one word, which he uses on all occasions. He picks words for their imagined denotations, regardless of the connotations. When he is angry with people, he “spleens” them, until Jonathan tries to explain that English doesn’t work like that, so Alex substitutes “wrathful” for spleening. He confesses to Jonathan that he has never been carnal with a girl, and is rather distressed to discover that when Jonathan writes the story he writes that his (Jonathan’s) grandfather has been carnal with many women, mainly widows, from an early age.

The story is told from different viewpoints. Alex writes letters to Jonathan, while Jonathan sends him currency for the research he does. Jonathan tries to reconstruct the story of Trachimbrod and its inhabitants. The village was obliterated by the Nazis during the Second World War, and there were very few survivors, one of whom salvaged what she could, and another was Jonathan’s grandfather.

The name of the village does not appear on any map, because it came from an incident when a wagon overturned in a flooded river. The wagon may or may not have belonged to a man named Trachim, who may or may not have drowned when the wagon overturned. A baby, who may or may not have been Trachim’s daughter survived the accident, and the village decided who should bring her up. She was called Brod, and was Jonathan’s great great great great great grandmother.

The story that Jonathan reconstructs has a kind of dreamlike quality, and though Trachimbrod was very good at keeping records, many of the records were destroyed when the village itself was destroyed by the Nazis. As they discover more, Alex’s grandfather is forced to confront his own past behaviour during the war.

It is a book about many things, and especially memory, and how we remember and interpret the past and the present in the light of the past.

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“Stranger Things” Live Video Chat with Dr. Corey Olsen (Signum Series)

A Pilgrim in Narnia

Stranger Things is one of the hottest new series on Netflix this year. My wife and I don’t always overlap in tastes, but this show drew us both in. We zoomed through the series in late night sittings, and I honestly can’t wait until my son is old enough to watch it with us. Even Stephen King, the childhood horror version of literary Wheaties for me growing up, thinks Stranger Things is worth some time:

Stevie, Kerry and I are not alone in loving this show. It has a Rotten Tomatoes ranking of 95%, and is the 3rd most watched series on Netflix behind Orange is the New Black and, well, I don’t know how to say this: Fuller House.

So it’s obvious that fan quality isn’t everything, there are a few reasons for its massive popularity, I think. The hero–I think she’s a hero though we won’t know…

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Star Wars: catching up with pop culture

Over the last few days I’ve been catching up on pop culture by watching all three original episodes of Star Wars.

Of course I knew some of the characters and their roles, because one could not avoid reading about them: Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, R2D2, Darth Vader — all were household names. The films had quite a pronounced influence on the way people talked, and there were all kinds of direct and indirect references to them. What I wasn’t sure of was their roles, or even, in some cases, how their names were pronounced.

One of the more memorable cultural references was back in 1980 when Gerhardus de Kock, the Governor of the South African Reserve Bank, was appointed “Director of Constellation Affairs”, a title which, the Natal Daily News pointed out in an editorial headed Star Flaws, would be the envy of Darth Vader, the villain of the movie. Other people referred to it more disrespectfully as “De Kock’s Cock-up”. For those too young to remember it, the “constellation of states” was the current euphemism for the government’s apartheid policy in the early 1980s.

The film series provided metaphors for theologians too. The missiologist Ralph Winter referred to the second film in the series (the 5th, once the prequel had been added), The Empire strikes back, and said that in that story it was referring to evil returning, but that in Christian theology one could use the phrase “the Kingdom strikes back” to tell how the good came back. As Winter put it,

,… the Bible consists of a single drama: the entrance of the Kingdom, the power and the glory of the living God in this enemy-occupied territory. From Genesis 12 to the end of the Bible, and indeed until the end of time, there unfolds the single, coherent drama of “the Kingdom strikes back.” This would make a good title for the Bible itself were it to be printed in modern dress (with Gen 1-11 as the introduction to the whole Bible). In this unfolding drama we see the gradual but irresistible power of God reconquering and redeeming His fallen creation through the giving of His own Son…

So there were all kinds of metaphors that had entered the English language in various fields, and I had only the vaguest idea of where they came from. When the first couple of films came out, we were living in Melmoth, in Zululand. There was no cinema anywhere near, and we didn’t have TV either, so Star Wars passed us by, except for oblique references. So now I’ve learnt something about the roles and the plot, and how to pronounce the names. For 30 years or so I had thought that “Jedi” was pronounced Yay-dee, and not Jed-eye. So now I’ve even got that straight. And it is now also clear to me that, like polar bears and penguins, wookiees and Klingons will never meet in the wild.

Out of touch with pop culture

In an online discussion the other day, people mentioned Martha Stewart. I thought I’d heard of her — there was a bit of a stir in the media because she went to jail, and so if you asked me, “What do you know about Martha Stewart?” I would say, “She went to jail.” I mean, that’s what she’s famous for, isn’t it?

But it turns out that I was wrong.

It seems she was famous before she went to jail, and that was why the media made a fuss about her going to jail. They just assumed that everyone knew who she was and what she was famous for, and that that would make them interested in reading about her going to jail.

So now I need to look up Martha Stewart, to discover her main claim to fame, apart from going to jail.

But it seems I’m not the only one. Someone else thought Martha Stewart was Martha Graham. I can’t say I’ve heard of Martha Graham either, but I don’t think I read about her going to jail.

Martha Stewart

A quick Google search tells me that Martha Stewart is an American businesswoman, writer, convicted felon, television personality, and former fashion model. So I’m not quite as out of touch as I thought I was. “Convicted felon” is up there with the rest of the stuff, it was just the only bit I knew about. And Martha Graham was an American modern dancer and choreographer whose influence on dance has been compared with the influence Picasso had on the modern visual arts, Stravinsky had on music, or Frank Lloyd Wright had on architecture. It seems that she was not a convicted felon, so perhaps that was why I hadn’t heard of her.

But that’s my problem. I just don’t do celebs, so I’m out of touch with pop culture.

That was rubbed in this week when I saw the name of Mark Driscoll all over the social media. There were Tweets about him, for and against him. There were numerous posts on Facebook, and numerous blog posts devoted to Mark Driscoll, and everybody seemed to know who he was. He seemed to be as famous as Roman Pope Francis, in all sorts of circles. Perhaps he was the Protestant Pope.

Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Churcfh

But it turns out that Mark A. Driscoll is an evangelical Christian pastor, author, and preaching pastor of Mars Hill Church, a megachurch in Seattle, Washington. Well, it seems that Mars Hill Church is a bit more than a big church in Seattle. It seems to be a new denomination that extends over 5 states in the US. Someone told me that he was well-known in neo-Calvinist circles. All I can say is that there must be an awful lot of crypto-neo-Calvinists among my Facebook friends, and people I follow on Twitter, and on my blogroll, because people who live half a world away from Seattle have been talking about him. Even some Orthodox Christians have mentioned is name in posts.

So, OK, he’s a celebrity pastor, and because I don’t do celebs, I’m surprised when people all over the world are talking about him, in a way that they have not, for example, talking about Fred Modise, whose church seems to have more followers than that of Mark Driscoll.

So, being so out of touch with pop culture, is there any hope of getting back in touch, and rectifying the deficiency?

Cultural catch-up films: Fantastic Mr Fox

And it seems yes, there is hope for people like me, who had a deprived childhood and youth. The answer lies here: The 55 Essential Movies Your Child Must See (Before Turning 13) | PopWatch | EW.com:

This isn’t a list of the 55 “best” kids movies, nor a compendium of hidden gems. Rather, it’s a survival-guide syllabus of films that we all need to know to be able to speak the same pop-cultural language, listed in order by when they might be best introduced. It starts with a film that is a perfect introduction to the cinematic universe and ends with one that is an ideal capper before graduating into the world of PG-13 and R movies—and the age when kids begin to make their own theater decisions.

It I watch one of those films every week, in a little over a year I should have caught up.

 

I’m going slightly mad

In 1966 I went to see two films in Croydon. One was Alfie, with Michael Caine in the title role. The other was Face of a stranger, about a released prisoner who impersonates his cellmate (still in prison) to his blind wife, in the hope of discovering where the loot from a robbery was hidden. To my recollection the part of the wife, Mary Bell, was played by Judi Dench, and it was the first film where I recalled seeing her name. Three years later I saw the film again, at the Missions to Seamen in Durban.

The name of Judi Dench came up in conversation, and I thought I would check to find out something about the film.

A Google search failed to find it.

It was as if  had completely vanished, and had never been made.

I tried other seach engines, and eventually found a couple of references to the film. But it said that the part of Mary Bell was played by Rosemary Leach, not Judi Dench.

So where did I get the idea that Judi Dench had a role in Face of a stranger?

Perhaps it was some other film that I saw, but which one?

Here are films I saw in 1966

Does anyone know if Judi Dench acted in any of them?

• 12-Feb-1966, Saturday        One spy too many.
• 16-Feb-1966, Wednesday       The flight of the phoenix.
• 27-Feb-1966, Sunday          A night to remember
• 3-Mar-1966, Thursday         Bunny Lake is missing
• 4-Mar-1966, Friday           The spy who came in from the cold.
• 12-Mar-1966, Saturday        Thunderball. James Bond spy movie.
• 14-Mar-1966, Monday          Rasputin the mad monk; The reptile.
• 26-Mar-1966, Saturday        Judith
• 28-Mar-1966, Monday          Our man Flint.
• 11-Apr-1966, Monday          The great St Trinian’s train robbery.
• 2-May-1966, Monday           633 Squadron; The world of Henry Orient.
• 8-May-1966, Sunday           Holly Communion; Fist in pocket.
• 21-May-1966, Saturday        Alfie; Face of a stranger.
• 22-May-1966, Sunday          Morgan, a suitable case for treatment
• 5-Jun-1966, Sunday           Round the bend; Modesty Blaise.
• 19-Jun-1966, Sunday          Tom Jones; Never on Sunday.
• 13-Jul-1966. Wednesday       The wrong box.
• 27-Aug-1966, Saturday        The great race
• 9-Sep-1966, Friday           A fine madness
• 11-Sep-1966, Sunday          Stage fright
• 12-Sep-1966, Monday          The war game; Four in the morning
• 1-Oct-1966, Saturday         Ten tall men
• 27-Oct-1966, Thursday        The innocent sorcerers.
• 28-Oct-1966, Friday          The seven samurai.
• 15-Nov-1966, Tuesday         Arabesque.
• 16-Nov-1966, Wednesday       Seven days in May.
• 8-Dec-1966, Thursday         The trap
• 9-Dec-1966, Friday           Viva Maria
• 26-Dec-1966, Monday          A journey to the centre of the earth
• 28-Dec-1966, Wednesday       Alice in wonderland

Cowboys & Aliens

I laughed when I saw the trailer of Cowboys & Aliens (2011) – IMDb the other night. It looked like yet an other B movie to watch for a few laughs when there is nothing else on TV.

But actually it didn’t turn out to be quite as bad as that. District 9 it wasn’t, but it wasn’t bad as a piece of no-brain-strain entertainment. And in the end we didn’t even laugh at it. Though it was a blending of genres, unlike District 9 and Avatar, it didn’t satirise either genre. It just combined them.

And it was the combining of the genres that seemed to make it worth blogging about. When I saw the trailer it seemed as if it would be anachronistic and a kind of “jump the shark” thing. Westerns are set in the 19th century, and space aliens are set in the mid-20th century, and that’s where they belong, in human culture anyway. But if you think about it, if there are intelligent races from other planets or other galaxies, whiy should they visit Earth just at the time when we, or some of us, are culturally ready to think that they might? They could conceivably visit earth at any time. One could just as easily make a movie about Vikings and Aliens, or Aztecs and Aliens, or Julius Caesar’s Alien wars. And then there are people who are convinced that the prophet Ezekiel was describing an alien spacecraft in Ezekiel chapter 1.

District 9 versus Avatar

Last year I blogged about two science fiction films that had been nominated for Oscars: Oscar battle: District 9 versus Avatar |Khanya, though in the end neither of them won and the winner was a film that had a meaningless (to me) title The hurt locker.

I had seen District 9 when it was first released, and blogged about it here, but had not seen Avatar until it was shown on TV a couple of nights ago, so now, for the first time, I’m in a position to compare them, though I should probably watch District 9 again, as it’s 18 months since I saw it.

I hadn’t realised that Avatar was satire until I saw it. Most of the descriptions I’d read suggested it was a kind of parable of colonialism, and that while it was science fiction, and so broadly in the same genre as District 9 I didn’t realise how directly comparable they were.

I enjoyed Avatar, but I think District 9 was better.

In District 9 the satire works at multiple levels, not least because it satirises the genre itself. In one scene, where the protagonist Wikus van der Merwe is driving a robocop-type machine, it could even be satirising Avatar. In District 9 there are no good guys, there are wheels within wheels and plots within plots and the satire is liberally splashed on everyone.

Spoiler altert – if you haven’t seen Avatar, what follows gives away the plot

Avatar, by contrast, is much more simple. It is like an old-fashioned Western, where the white hats fight the black hats, and the white hats always win.

The plot can be summarised in one sentence: Redskins fight Palefaces; Redskins win and send Palefaces home.

Only in this case the redskins are blue, and “home” is another planet.

In District 9 the aliens are stranded on earth, in an anything but beautiful environment. In Avatar the earthlings themselves are the aliens, out to rape the planet of its mineral wealth and exterminate any natives that get in their way. The natives, Na’vi, live in a beautiful environment that the alien earthlings destroy, and it is an environment that earthlings cannot even live in. They can only enter it by creating remotely controlled avatars, using alien DNA – another parallel with District 9, where Wikus van der Merwe becomes contaminated with alien DNA, which makes him a desirable property to corporate and Nigerian gangsters.

On another level Avatar has parallels with C.S. Lewis’s novel Out of the silent planet, which has the same theme of science and high finance in an uneasy partnership to exploit another planet, Malacandra (Mars). In Lewis’s book the natives have a similar relationship to a planetary deity, the Oyarsa, as the Na’vi in Avatar have with their deity Eywa. But Out of the silent planet doesn’t end with the same shoot-’em-up scenes as Avatar.

Avatar is entertaining and has a moral message, and no doubt deserved the Oscar it got for special effects, but it falls a long way short of District 9