Art Smitten

Hi, it's Adalya with my second review from this years Man Booker Prize shortlist. This week I'm looking at Deborah Levy's Hot Milk.

Hot Milk follows Sofia and her mother Rose as they travel from England to clinic of questionable merit in Spain, seeking answers to Rose's litany of mysterious ailments. Set in the searing heat of Southern Spain, Sofia undergoes a twisted iteration of the classic beach sexual awakening narrative while Rose undergoes Dr Gomez's treatment. As the reliability of the mother who so shapes Sofia's life and identity becomes shaky, the importance of her relationship to her father and his Greek heritage becomes a new fixation.

Levy's writing is lucid and evocative. Images recur, morph and intermingle in unexpected ways. Her exploration of what it means to form an identity around illness and what it means to form an identity in inverse to somebody else is arresting and important.

We are drawn immediately into Sofia's inner world, a stilted filter on reality. Even the dialogue felt unnatural, characters voices indistinguishable from Sofia's own. At times this claustrophobia was transfixing, but at times it felt like there were links we were missing.

Perhaps it was the many strengths of Levy's work that left me feeling so ambivalent towards the end product. Despite its compelling subjects and beautiful prose, Hot Milk lacked any real sense of cohesiveness. Ideas and narrative were not coherently woven together and the result was just a sense of loss at what could have been. The scenes in Greece, for example, could have occurred at almost any place in the book, so separate they were from any other element. Hot Milk is by no mean's Levy's first work, so I think these failures felt greater than they would have had it been a debut.

To be honest I am surprised and a little disappointed that Hot Milk made the shortlist. I haven't read the full longlist, but for me, The North Water and My Name is Lucy Barton at least were both stronger works than Hot Milk.

All that said, I know there are lots of people who have loved and will love this book. I think perhaps a difficulty in reviewing book and especially books nominated for a prize is that the craft of the work is placed on equal footing to that craft's effect, whereas I think when we read a book without this consideration the effect is our primary interest. Hot Milk did not come together for me, but perhaps it would have if I had not had reviewing it in the back of my mind as I read it.

With last years Booker for example, lots of writers I saw felt that, although they had been profoundly emotionally involved in Hanya Yanigihara's A Little Life, that the strings used to emotionally effect us were too present for Yanigihara to deserve the win. I think this is a reasonable and even important consideration to make, but I guess it does beg the question why or even whether it is worth paying attention to these awards at all if their priorities are so different to that of the average reader.

I guess the very fact that I've undertaken this project means that I must think they are, but I think it is important to act in dialogue with the institutions you give power to.

Please stick around next week as I continue to discuss the rest of the Man Booker shortlist and question the very premise of this project!

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Hosts Beth and Thierry interview Patrick Durnan Silva on his production, Cull in the 2016 Melbourne Fringe Festival. 

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Thursday, 1st September marked the seventh year for the Korean Film Festival In Australian (KOFFIA). ACMI hosted Melbourne’s festival and invited guests to share canapés of kimchi, cocktails and listen to traditional music on the Gayageum. This festival boasts twenty newly released and critically acclaimed Korean films, however it was the film titled 4th Place, written and directed by Jung Ji-woo, which opened the festival.

Commissioned by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, 4th Place delves into the brutal world of competitive sports and questions whether, in the pursuit of success, does the end ever justify the means.

Opening with a black-and-white prologue, we are introduced to fresh-faced competitive swimmer, Kim Gwang-su (Jung Ga-ram), who has been tipped as Korea’s future for Olympic success. After returning from practise and looking for dinner, he meets one of the swimming reporters Young-hoon (Choi Moo-sung) and they both partake in a night of heavy drinking. Despite this, Gwang-su swims exceptionally well the following morning and is on track to break records at the International Competitions in the next few weeks. Confident with his progress and times, Gwang-su cuts practise to gamble and drink, missing vital training sessions. His coaches eventually find and punish him for his recklessness, through the method of caning him with wooden pool brooms. After coping several lashes, he storms out of the complex and alerts Young-hoon to write a report about these acts of violence.

The storyline skips sixteen years on, now in colour, and focuses on eleven-year-old swimmer Joon-ho (Yoo Jae-sang). Despite high expectations placed on him by his mother, Jeong-ae (Lee Hang-na), he only seems to place fourth at junior competitions. Through the power of prayer and persuasive donations she tracks down a competent coach with unorthodox training methods. Enter Gwang-su (Park Hae-joon); a husk of the once professional swimmer, and now a worker at the local aquatic centre. It starts out with the common sports narrative; an apathetic coach, whose glory was snatched away prematurely during his youth, meets a competent underdog who has a chance at the success he missed out on. Gwang-su commits himself to the project and, as he becomes more desperate to win, his relationship with Joon-ho gradually becomes violent. He begins beating the boy in the same fashion that his coach did to him when he was a young swimmer. Gwang-su plays both the aggressor and consoler; comforting Joon-ho that it was for his own good and that he’s inspiring ambition.

The relentless pressures to succeed bleed into Joon-ho’s dreams, and it becomes more apparent he only wants to win for the sake of others. His own drawing of a gold medal hanging on the wall above his bed is enough for him, but it cannot satisfy his mother or Gwang-su. Even after his mother discovers the bruises on his back, Joon-ho is pushed to continue training, in light of his recent second-place win. No one steps in until Joon-ho’s father accidentally learns about the coach’s brutality, and even then he only bribes the coach with money to stop caning their son. 

Jung’s artfully constructed film points to our performance-driven culture, unhappy with anything less than first place. Lee’s performance as Joon-ho’s mother perfectly embodies the overbearing and paradoxical weight of society’s expectations for each child to be a winner. Park Hae-joon, playing the older version of Gwang-su, is riveting to watch; he has the ability to both terrify and charm, a technique that works on Joon-ho and the audience.

A noteworthy scene from the film is where the mother is walking back from the church with her youngest son, Ki-ho (Suh Hwan-hee), and he asks what she prayed for for each family member. She prayed for Joon-ho to come first, and for Ki-ho to attend college when he’s older. When he asks about her own prayers she states she prayed for “nothing” for herself. Her children appear to be her biggest achievement and treats their achievements as her own.

Jung navigates the heavy topic of child abuse with sensitivity and grace. It is littered with light-hearted exchanges between all characters and captures the complexity of human nature. It is also beautifully shot, especially the underwater dreamscape scene where Joon-ho tumbles around the shimmering lights refracting underneath the surface of the water. My only criticism is that the relationship between Joon-ho’s father and coach was not fully explored, and as a result Gwang-su’s admission at the end of the film was a little underwhelming.

4th Place will screen in Adelaide’s Palace Nova Cinema on Thursday, 15th September and in Perth’s Event Cinema on Thursday 22nd of September.

Written by Erin Connellan

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On Tuesday, the Man Booker Prize Shortlist was announced. For those of you not in the know, the Man Booker is a prize given for what the judging panel deems to be the best novel written in English and published in the UK each year. For many including myself, the Booker is the Prize to watch, the AFL Grand Final for nerds.

This year's shortlist consists of:
Paul Beatty's The Sellout
Deborah Levy's Hot Milk
Graeme Macrae Burnet's His Bloody Project
Otessa Moshfegh's Eileen
David Szalay's All That Man Is
Madeline Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing

The Booker somewhat controversially opened the prize up to all english speaking countries in 2015 (previously only awarding the prize to those in the Commonwealth), and this years longlist contained notably more american authors than the one that preceded it.

For the next six weeks I'm going to be looking at each of the Man Booker Shortlist picks, with occasional help from some of your other favourite Smitteners, talking about why these might have made the shortlist and who might take out the final prize. I am excited and a little scared and I hope you all enjoy the journey.

 Now onto my first review.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing, by Madeline Thien, has somewhat cynically been described by many as the classic Man Booker pick, for its complex, political, intergenerational narrative.

 The novel begins in the voice of our youngest character, Marie:

 "In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life."

 From here, Thien takes us back to the start of the Chinese Communist Revolution, through the Cultural Revolution and up to the Tiananmen Square Riots.

 I think from the distance of the West, it is easy to lose the human impact of international tragedies, particularly when they star people of colour. I am one of few people I know who was presented a unit on modern Chinese History in high school, and even this had gaping holes in it. If you do not already know a little about the events Thien is describing you will not be completely lost, however you will probably find yourself compelled to seek further reading once you've put the book down.

Through Thien's characters, the widespread devastating personal impact of these events is impossible to miss. There is an almost folktale like character to the events of the distant past that is slowly stripped away as we are brought through the horrors that her characters sustain.

Thien explores characters that are often not wholly good or evil, but shaped by circumstance. She carefully examines those who are influenced into acts of violence and betrayal, treating them with care but without total forgiveness. Her characters cannot be completely redeemed from what their political context has condemned them to.

Music is heavily weaved through one generation of the families in particular. Studying classical music, I am often wary of novels that invest parts of their narratives in music. To me, it can often feel like pretentious name-dropping at best and often adds little to the story. To get a bit less literary, it sometimes feels like the scene in Pitch Perfect where Beca acts like David Guetta is some underground, unappreciated genius.

To me, Thien was not too heavy handed. The pieces referenced were not the absolute standards and were described in terms of the emotions they induced rather than just as name-drops to remind the reader that the characters enjoyed music. Knowing the works was a bonus but not necessary to understand what she was trying to evoke in mentioning them. I will say some of these references went over even my head, as, as a self-centred violinist, I am less familiar with piano works that were often discussed.

The books one weakness was something common to many works coving such a large time period and cast. Although for the most part, Thien's characters felt remarkably well realised, Marie, whose voice starts and ends the book,  was not as strong as I would have liked. We see small snippets that are supposed to provide character—that she studies maths for instance—however we never truly get to understand her in the way we do her predecessors. When we start to delve well and truly into the past I was not quite content to leave the present, and whilst details of the dual narratives slowly serve to illuminate one another, I never felt like I was quite done witnessing Marie's own experiences.

I think it's also worth mentioning that Thien's prose is impeccable. Although she moves between different styles of story telling, no voice felt less powerful than any other and the choices made in differentiating them did not feel arbitrary. She pushes the narrative forward with a compelling lucidity that makes the book difficult to put down, no mean feat for such a complex work.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing is a powerful book on an important topic, however it is not for this reason along that I believe it has been shortlisted for the Booker. Weeks after reading it, I still feel profoundly affected by Thien's writing and characters in a way that is rare. Although I am a little disappointed Marie's character wasn't explored more deeply, I would still not be at all upset if this book ended up taking home the top prize.

Written by Adalya Hussein

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Rupert Burns is Kelvin Campervan. Or is Kelvin Campervan Rupert Burns? They seem to get along pretty well in the one body, but can never quite decide who is the artist and who the creation. The one man show explores the nature of a person's relationship with themselves and their history. It is set from the vantage point of mid life, but even at my age of 21 I was inspired to be existential about my own history of years and to ponder their value, as well as the missed opportunities I have already tasted.   

I would have to compare the performance, to any Harry Potter fans out there, to the 'ridikkulus' spell. This magic is designed to defend against the mysterious being called the 'boggart', that tends to hide under beds and in cupboards, and transforms into people's greatest fears when discovered. The spell 'ridikkulus' works by altering this fear, forcing the boggart to take on a ridiculous aspect. For example, if you are terrified of giant spiders, then the giant spider will now be wearing roller skates and slipping all over the place. The thing boggart's hate most is laughter, and when you laugh, it loses its power.

Burns hit flush those existential fears that will attend us all in our lives with his magic.  He has very successfully converted that profound unease at ageing, missed opportunities and faded dreams into  laughter and contentment. He shows us the other side of the abyss, which is still an abyss, as Kelvin reminds us - 'I learned that there was no ceiling to the universe...I also learnt there was no floor'. It is a very true sort of freedom he describes. Burns achieves his aims through the most unusual, hilarious and quietly beautiful ways.  

We witnessed Kelvin levitate before our eyes, contort his body into the most freakish positions, devour his own tongue and order a group of perfectly trained wonderdogs to literally jump through hoops as he willed it. I won't ruin the performance, but know that while these amazing feats are in one way completely flawed, for me, they emphasised a simple and elegant critique on our existence. Such amazing things we dare to aspire too in youth: I wanted to be an astronaut, for example, and an artist that was famous by the time they were eighteen, and also, an AFL star.

I didn't do those things, and yet, even though I essentially dreamed to levitate, as Kelvin does, I did something which was equally as funny, exciting, interesting an engaging for myself and those around me. And that is, as surprising as that is, sufficient. Things will get sad at times, as the best theatre and comedy does. For when Kelvin gets you laughing again, it is so much sweeter.

Kelvin Campervan's Mid-life Crescendo is playing until the 23rd of September showing every day except Monday between then and now. It's a short and highly palatable show at only 45 minutes long, so prepare for a wild and bright adventure that is guaranteed to please.

Written by Jim Thomas.

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Ebony interviews Georgia Symons, creator of Fringe 2016 show You Must Come Alone to Read the Last Book on Earth. 

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Hosts Beth and Thierry interview Assistant Director of the UHT production of Macbeth + Macdeath: a coda, Rachel Shrives. 

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Hosts Christian and Adalya interview Matthew Lutton about the Malthouse Theatre's 2017 Program.

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Christian speaks to writer/broadcaster Made Stuchbery, chatting about her ten part radio series Born to Die. 

It's available on soundcloud.

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Hosts Christian and Jim sit down with artists Alexia Brehas and Chanelle Nillson to discuss their upcoming joint exhibition 'Rave in Paradise', Off the Kerb Gallery and Studio. Showing from September 9 at 6pm.

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