Phillips/Perec/Medvedkin

Today I read the first 50 pages of Jayne Anne Phillips’ 2013 novel Quiet Dell, which is based on a series of murders committed by Harry Powers in West Virginia in 1931 http://jayneannephillips.com/quiet-dell/. The only other thing I’ve read by Phillips is her first novel Machine Dreams, but so far Quiet Dell is underwhelming by comparison. Part of the problem is that Phillips’ decision to keep all of the original participants’ names and the locations but to fictionalize everything else inevitably recalls Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. This is not an association that does Phillips any favors, especially as her prose style here resembles nothing as much as a tepid version of Edith Wharton—not a good thing. With all that said, the first fifty pages of the novel, dedicated as they are to delineating the lives of the family who would later be murdered by Powers, illustrates the power of fiction to do something that true crime rarely does, namely, to treat the victims as three dimensional characters in their own right. We’ll see if that changes once Powers enters the book. Coincidentally, I’m one of the talking heads in a documentary on the Powers case called Romeo Must Hang. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1512275/

I also read the first fifty pages of Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, a wonderful collection of nonfiction pieces by the late lamented French writer Georges Perec. http://www.drunkenboat.com/db8/oulipo/feature-oulipo/essays/magne/oulibio.html

For those who have never heard of Perec, or have heard of him and have been daunted by either the sheer size of Life: A User’s Manual, his magnum opus, or the weirdness of A Void, a 300-page+ novel written without using the letter ‘e,’ Species of Spaces is a great place to start. All of the hallmarks of the Perec style are here: the whimsical, fanciful humor; the obsession with classification, and the tendency to go off on so many tangents that one quickly (and delightfully) loses the distinction between the main path and the detour. After a useful introduction by John Sturrock, the first fifty pages of the book are taken up by the first parts of the title piece, Species of Spaces, which examines the various ways in which we occupy domestic and urban space. Moving from smaller to larger spaces, Perec begins with ‘the page’ before moving on to beds, bedrooms, apartments and apartment buildings. My favorite moment is when Perec tries to imagine a room in an apartment that would be “absolutely and intentionally useless." Perec takes this wonderful premise and runs with it as only he can.

I also watched Aleksandr Medvedkin’s first full-length film Happiness (1934). This is a satirical silent slapstick comedy with a highly stylized sets and characters meant to evoke an earlier tradition of Russian folk tales. Containing an unusual mixture of anti-Tsarist and anti-Bolshevik critique, the film follows the misadventures of a poor and lazy peasant who is exploited by a wonderful variety of villains large and small. Visually very inventive, what I enjoyed most about the film was Medvedkin’s facility with creating characterological types, especially religious types. It also contains some of the best beards I have ever seen in film and at least one character who bears a startling resemblance to Tolstoy. Here’s Medvedkin in his own words on the film’s meaning: “I'd like to tell you something that seems to have escaped the attention of the critics and journalists who've written about the film. I've never managed to ensure that people understood the real meaning of this film which is as follows. . . the peasant himself - and this is just not true of our country, it's part of the social psychology of mankind in all civilized nations - dreams of ownership. He wants a prosperous life to set himself apart from his thousands and millions of neighbors; he wants to creep ahead and have his own barn, his own horses, his own grain. In short he wants to be his own boss. Of course, for every 1,000, only one will manage it; the other 999 will remain farm-hands and starve, but this dream lives on among the peasants. So Happiness is a satirical picture. I made it as the nail in the coffin of this rosy dream. I ridiculed that dream because it's unrealistic; 999 people out of 1,000 get nothing from a dream like that." http://www.silentsaregolden.com/debartoloreviews/rdbhappiness.html

Sound familiar?!