HollowCity/KarlMarx/Elles

Today I read the next fifty pages of Ransom Riggs’ Hollow City. Now that they peculiar children are in London, Riggs has a much bigger canvas to work with and it’s at this point that one realizes why he has chosen to set this part of the novel in 1940. Not only does Riggs use descriptions of the Blitz to provide context for the war between the Wights and the Peculiars, but he also has to children arrive in the city when hundreds of children are being sent out of London to the countryside to escape the bombing. The departure of these normal children accentuates how isolated the peculiar children are ever more. One also sees in this section of the novel how convenient the ‘loops’ are for Riggs—having the children pass through one allows him to change both the locale and the setting of the novel instantaneously. This is just one example of how the fantastical elements of the novel solve just as many challenges relating to plausibility as they raise.

I also read the next section of Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx. Beginning his story with an account of Marx’s early years, Sperber does an excellent job of recreating the historical, political, religious, and familial atmosphere that came together to shape Marx. One of the major challenges Sperber faces in this section is to account for the enormously complex influence of Hegel’s ideas on the young Marx in a way that doesn’t get bogged down in detail but is also not too glib. On the whole, I think Sperber meets the challenge well, partly by saving most of the detail for a discussion of Marx’s involvement with the Young Hegelians; in other words, by focusing on the intellectual and political activities of this group, Sperber is able to discuss Hegel’s ideas (and their influence) in context. The section finishes with a wonderful discussion of a major turning point in Marx’s life—when he abandoned his dreams of a legal or academic career (partly because of changing inclinations on his part but mostly out of necessity!) and instead became an editor and journalist.

I also watched Małgorzata Szumowska’s 2011 film Elles, which stars Juliette Binoche as Anne, a journalist who’s writing a story for the French Elle magazine about two students (Charlotte and Alicja) who work as prostitutes in order to support themselves financially. Prepared for stories of nothing but exploitation and degradation, Anne is surprised by how much freedom and empowerment (not to mention money) these young women have gained from their decision to work in the sex industry. Although there are a couple of references to the problems these women have to deal with (violent clients, suspicious boyfriends and relatives) on the whole Elles could be said to sugarcoat what it means to be a sex worker. This is not to say that a film based on Anne’s original assumptions would have been any better, it’s just that the balance swings too far in the other direction. The film is also preoccupied (rather predictably) with the impact these young women have on Anne, who becomes increasingly frustrated with her mundane bourgeois existence and her (apparently) sexless marriage. The only unpredictable (and therefore also the best) scene is the movie’s final tableau: Anne’s family happily having breakfast together runs contrary to everything we’ve learned about how this family functions in the rest of the film. The meaning of the scene is not that Anne has learned to (re)value her family as a result of her exposure to the young female prostitutes (what a conservative film that would be); it’s more (I think) that no one in this family (least of all Anne) has the courage to break it up.