Short Fiction

Laura's Bio

Reading books and watching films are two of my favorite activities. Talking about books I've read and movies I've watched is another of my favorite activities! Yours, too, probably.

This page is where I recommend the good books I've read and good DVDs I've watched lately.

Online book shopping (I prefer Books-A-Million), online library reservations, audiobooks from Audible.com. and getting DVDs from Netflix.com have all changed my life so much, I sometimes think I've died and gone to heaven.

Then the bills come, and I realize, nope, I'm still in the real world...

Here are the books I particularly enjoyed this summer.

Nonfiction. Written by the author of the blockbuster-bestseller Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil, this is a more interesting book, in my opinion. Using the fire which devastated the Venice opera house a few years ago as the centerpiece of his exploration of Venice society, the author pursues and meets a colorful variety of people and gives us an engaging window into their world.

This is a novel about an Israeli-born student from Canada who, while studying in Jerusalem in the 1970s, falls in love with an army interrogator. I found this book so readable and compelling, I finished it in two sittings, which is fast for me.

On Royalty
by Jeremy Paxman

Nonfiction. This is an engaging look at the ongoing popularity, in the 21st century, of that most anachronistic of institutions in Europe: royalty. I particularly enjoyed the farcical saga of monarchy in Albania in the 20th century. And the author's in-person encounters with the British royals reveal an unenviable lifestyle in the House of Windsor, all things considered.

While awaiting the release of his next book (Oct/08), I decided to re-read Julian Fellowes' first novel, Snobs. Fellowes is the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Gosford Park (see below). Snobs is an amusing and insightful tale, primarily told through the point-of-view of a likeable narrator (whose life echoes Fellowes' own life), about a contemporary middle-class woman, whom the narrator knows, who marries an aristocrat, then finds it difficult to lie in the bed she has made. The plot is a tool for Fellowes to take us into the milieu, manners, and values of the modern-day English upper-classes, which world is still arcanely foreign at the close of the book, but somewhat better understood.

AudioBook

These are all available on DVD. Some of these are well-known big-budget movies, but I've mostly included films you may not have heard of before. In particular, as you'll see below, I watched a number of memorable Israeli films this summer.

Well-plotted drama in which an Egyptian businessman living in the US is arrested and interrogated under torture as a suspected terrorist while his American wife tries to find out what has happened to him. The film also follows the story of a radicalized young Muslim plotting a suicide bombing. Very absorbing film which tells its story through individual lives and consequences.

This shrewd Israeli comedy is in Hebrew with English subtitles. (However, on the DVD I watched, the menu was all in Hebrew, so I had to poke around a while to find the subtitles and start the movie.) A Russian girl's petition to bury her father's remains in Israel, as per his dying request, is repeatedly rejected, mostly because the girl is a Gentile (like me, she's born to a Jewish father and Christian mother). Meanwhile, an aimless but likeable young cantor, played by Yehuda Levi (who had to learn traditional prayer singing for this role), becomes besotted with the Russian girl, while his crazy settlement-building father is entering politics, and his determined grandmother is trying, with difficulty, to arrange to be buried beside her disgraced late husband. An enjoyable, ironic, sometimes sweet film, and reminiscient of various people, attitudes, and conflicts that I encountered in Jerusalem.

Gosford Park
(UK, 2001)

I found this film enjoyable but very confusing when I saw it in the cinema a few years ago, and I gather that was a pretty common reaction. However, it improves substantially with subsequent viewings on DVD. Once you understand who the gazillion characters are and how they're connected, there's a lot of irony, intrigue, and amusement in this elegant, well-written, and very well-acted film which whimiscally parodies the traditional "pre-WWII English upper-class house party murder mystery" format.

Tommy Lee Jones gives a quiet, compelling performance as the father of a son who's gone AWOL from his army base shortly after returning from active duty in Iraq. With the help of a small-town cop (convincingly played by Charlize Theron, despite her supermodel looks), Jones goes in search of his missing son... and gradually uncovers the tragic psychological effects of warfare. This powerful film conveys the human cost of war, even among war's supposed survivors, and it pays tribute to the people who make sacrifices in the service of their country—including those who wind up losing what they had never dreamed could be taken from them.

The Bubble
(Israel, 2006; in Hebrew, with English subtitles)

This is the first film I've seen by American-born Israeli director Eytan Fox. I liked it so much, I soon thereafter watched two more of his films (see below). Fox gives weighty topics a light-filled, accessible treatment, dealing with his subject matter in a resilient way that leaves the door open for humor to come and go as it likes. In The Bubble, a likeable, apolitical, gay Israeli (played by Ohad Knoller) in Tel Aviv's alternative community, a "bubble" which has an illusory air of being isolated from Middle Eastern politics and violence, falls in love with Ashraf, a gay Palestinian from Nablus (an outstanding performance by Israeli-born Arab actor Yousef Sweid). Before long, the realities of the Arab-Israeli conflict overwhelm their relationship and change the lives of everyone around the couple. Fearless performances, engaging secondary characters, surprising humor, an unusual love story, and a rare glimpse at being homosexual on the West Bank all make this a very memorable film.

Walk On Water
(Israel, 2004; in Hebrew, German, and English,
with English subtitles throughout )

This is the next Eytan Fox film I watched this summer. The story follows a ruthless Mossad field agent (played by Lior Ashkenazi, who has a cameo in The Bubble) who's on the edge after a personal tragedy. He's assigned to get close to a likeable young German whose Nazi grandfather disappeared decades ago, in hopes that contact with the young man can lead the Mossad to the elderly war criminal's hiding place. The film focuses on the friendship that gradually develops between the homophobic German-hating Mossad agent and the homosexual German peacenik he's shadowing, as well as the struggle of post-WWII generations to confront (or to avoid confronting) the Holocaust. At the climax of the story, each protagonist arrives at a surprising but well-developed decision that finally puts his own ghosts to rest.