Hillerman/Hobsbawm/SherlockHolmes2

Today I read the first section of Tony Hillerman’s 2006 novel The Shape Shifter, his eighteenth Chee/Leaphorn mystery and the last one Hillerman published before his death in 2008. Joe Leaphorn is now (unhappily) retired from the Navajo Tribal Police and one senses that it doesn’t take too much to get him involved in an investigation again, this time involving a one-of-a-kind Navajo rug that was supposed to have been destroyed in a fire years before but which has apparently turned up again in the possession of one Jason Delos. The plot thickens quickly when an old friend of Leaphorn’s, who is also looking into the mystery of the rug, first goes missing and then shows up dead, the victim of an apparent car crash. The rug is a tale-teller rug that tells the story of the Long Walk, a very dark episode in Navajo history. The rug therefore serves Hillerman well as a way to explore that history and the shadow it casts on the present.

I also read the next fifty pages of Eric Hobsbawm’s Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the 20^th Century. Leaving aside prognostications about cultural futures, in this section of the book, Hobsbawm returns to the past, first examining the contributions of Jews to European bourgeois culture, especially German culture. Hobsbawm looks in particular at the ways in which Jewish culture was transformed after 1800 from a predominantly inward-looking culture to one that was fully engaged with post-Enlightenment Europe, a development that, according to Hobsbawm, unleased a tidal wave of Jewish creativity that had previously been suppressed. Hobsbawm then goes on to examine the various fates of the concept of ‘Mitteleuropa,’ a term whose complex history is appealing to him for at least two reasons: first, it allows him to introduce elements of his personal and family history into the discussion; second, the ambiguity surrounding the geographical and terminological use of ‘Mitteleuropa’ is somehow exemplary of the complexity of European bourgeois culture as a whole.

I gave in to the inevitable and also watched Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), Guy Ritchie’s second film featuring Robert Downey, Jr., and I must confess that I thoroughly enjoyed it. Although I have the same objections as ever about turning Holmes into an action hero, this film is helped by an excellent cast (including Jared Harris as Moriarty, Noomi Rapace, and, in a stroke of casting genius, Stephen Fry as Mycroft Holmes) and an intriguing story that keeps the viewer guessing right up until the close of the film. I also liked the way the film includes elements of humor (such an important element of the original stories) and Downey and Jude Law seem to have much chemistry in this outing than in the previous film (and that chemistry, of course, is an equally important part of the impact of the original stories). I never thought I would find myself saying this, but I’m actually looking forward to the next film in the series.