2013-05-23T00:03:46-04:00 Lucy Popescu http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=lucy-popescu Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Lucy Popescu Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2852375 2013-03-11T09:10:42-04:00 2013-05-11T05:12:01-04:00

Lucy Popescu http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lucy-popescu/ Greek auteur Giorgos Lanthimos' latest venture, Alps, is out on DVD this week and proves as unsettling, bizarre and memorable as his acclaimed 2009 feature film Dogtooth.


A group of people hire themselves out to the newly bereaved. They are led by Aris Servetalis's paramedic who names the business after the mountain range because, he claims, it does not reveal exactly what they do and yet is symbolic. The Alps, he tells his three colleagues - a young gymnast, her male coach and a nurse - are so imposing that each of them could stand in for another mountain and yet they are irreplaceable. He names himself after the highest one, Mont Blanc. His rationale is as bizarre as his business plan. Mont Blanc's office is in a gym where he interviews perspective clients and introduces them to the members of the group who will enter their homes and take on the roles of the recently departed. Their intervention is meant to help the grief-stricken deal with loss until such time that they feel able to move on.

What makes Lanthimos's work so refreshing is his quirky, highly original storylines and audacious cinematography. Aggeliki Papoulia's hardworking nurse becomes so obsessed with her role playing that it begins to take over her life. The line between fiction and reality becomes increasingly blurred and she starts crossing boundaries with her clients. Gradually, we realise, she is herself struggling with loss and grief.

All the principle characters are, to some degree, damaged, but it is the women who suffer the most. The nurse and the gymnast are effectively controlled by the two men in the group. Mont Blanc proves cold and brutal when crossed, while the coach constantly undermines his young protégée's confidence and denies her the opportunity to make her own choices.

There is both humour and sadness in the way the characters rehearse their roles, delivering their lines in dead pan voices like bad actors or automatons, and their desire to fulfil their clients' demands, however bizarre. But their 'professional' empathy is empty and potentially damaging. The paramedic thinks nothing of grilling a young girl (a promising tennis player, bleeding profusely in his ambulance) for the name of her favourite actor after telling her that she probably won't make it. Later, when she does die, his two female colleagues vie for the opportunity to stand in for her.

Of course the whole premise is absurd. Members of Alps can never replace the real thing and everything they are involved in becomes devoid of meaning. This is driven home in the explicit sex scenes that are mechanical and unerotic. The headless shots and characters breaking in and out of frame give a vivid sense of fragmented lives.

It's intentionally disconcerting, but part of Lanthimos' skill as a filmmaker is that he constantly pushes boundaries both cinematically and in terms of narrative. He persuades us that the surreal could be real. The bereaved want to believe in the scenarios they create and we sympathise with their desperation.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2788048 2013-03-01T06:07:21-05:00 2013-05-01T05:12:01-04:00

Lucy Popescu http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lucy-popescu/


Newly returned from studying abroad, Ananda (Ananda Everingham) is filming on location in Thailand. He plays an amnesiac, trying to rebuild his memory and identity after having survived the 2004 tsunami. The setting is the ruin of an old hotel destroyed in the disaster. Ananda's good at his role but occasionally struggles with the correct Thai pronunciation, betraying his privileged background and an international education.

His American girlfriend Zoe (Cerise Leang) comes to visit and stays nearby in a five star beach resort. It's low season, there are no guests at the hotel, and Ananda is too busy shooting and learning his lines to pay her much attention. Alone, Zoe soon becomes listless. Bored in paradise and tired of hanging out on the film set, she befriends the hotel staff and even attends the maid's birthday party. When it comes time for Zoe to leave, the cracks in her relationship with Ananda have become crevasses.

After Zoe's departure, Ananda becomes involved with May (Sajee Apiwong) who is working on the production side of his film. Like Zoe, she is beautiful and intelligent. The action shifts to the city. May lives with Ananda in the luxury apartment block owned by his wealthy mother. One side, we discover, has been decimated by the tsunami and is only slowly being rebuilt. Another part of the ruined building has been sold off to developers.

'Hi-So' is short for High Society. Ananda is certainly of that ilk; young, rich and aimless. Ananda and May laugh and play together but something fundamental is missing from their relationship - the nearest the couple come to properly connecting is when they adopt a stray dog. Like Zoe, May is unable to adapt to the culturally diverse worlds that Ananda drifts between and finds it hard to bond with his brash American friends.

Umpornpol Yugala's cinematography is impressive. Although Hi-So is lushly shot, and the Thai landscape (much of it devastated by the 2004 disaster) is as much a part of the film as the characters, Aditya Assarat's script may prove too ponderous for British audiences. He offers a vivid portrait of contemporary life in Thailand but female viewers, in particular, may be disappointed that Zoe and May are such disempowered characters. They are easily discarded by Ananda who seems incapable of settling down or offering his girlfriends more than a warm bed.

Consequently, it is hard to sympathise with Ananda's sense of alienation - a central theme of the film. He is not entirely at ease either in Thailand or amongst his American buddies. However, his feelings of cultural displacement are too superficial. Assarat never gets fully under his protagonist's skin and consequently Ananda feels sketchily drawn; like the film he is beautiful to watch but ultimately an empty vessel.

Dir: Aditya Assarat
102 minutes
In cinemas 1 March 2013]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2667946 2013-02-12T06:46:21-05:00 2013-04-14T05:12:01-04:00

Lucy Popescu http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lucy-popescu/

Ginger & Rosa received a mixed reception on its theatrical release last year. The DVD is out this week and I must admit to being pleasantly surprised. The film covers similar moral territory to Lone Scherfig's An Education (a teenage rites of passage/older man preying on young girl) and I found it as fascinating, less glossy and rather more poignant. At the heart of Sally Potter's sensitive portrait of teenagers growing up in London, during the onset of the Cold War, are two stunning performances from Elle Fanning as Ginger and Alice Englert as Rosa

The two girls are inseparable. Their mothers gave birth to them in the same hospital, on the day the Americans bombed Hiroshima, and they've been friends ever since. Now it is 1962, a transitional time, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis - London is not yet swinging and the sexual revolution is only just beginning. There is talk of nuclear war and Ginger is convinced that this might spell the end for them all.

Rosa comes from a broken home so likes to hang out in Ginger's bohemian household. Ginger's mother Natalie (Christina Hendricks) is a former artist, her father Roland (Alessandro Nivola) a pacifist, imprisoned during the war, and a writer. He's also somewhat pretentious - asking Ginger not to call him 'Dad', because he thinks it sounds bourgeois - but she adores him.

When Ginger's parents' marriage falls apart the girls find themselves increasingly left to their own devices. On the cusp of adulthood, they play truant, smoke cigarettes and tentatively explore their attraction to boys. They try to look similar, share clothes and obsessions - there are two lovely moments when they iron each other's hair (literally) and sit together in the bath to shrink their jeans. But as Rosa becomes more sexually precocious, Ginger turns towards politics and writing - she wants to be a poet. When Rosa becomes entwined with Ginger's raffish father, now separated from Nat, Ginger seeks solace in poetry and is increasingly involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Ginger feels the sense of betrayal acutely and it is her attempts to come to terms with their duplicity that propels the second half of the film. Roland's lack of remorse for his actions is all the more shocking given Rosa's age and the fact he's watched them grow up and blossom together.

The decision to use American actors may well have been to ensure box office appeal on both sides of the Atlantic but it pays off. Hendricks and Nivola make suitably glamorous, if troubled, parents and Fanning's emotional range on camera is stunning. There are memorable cameos from Timothy Spall and Annette Bening as Nat's concerned friends who offer Ginger advice about growing up. There's a wonderful moment when Spall's character, Mark, asks her sadly "Can't you be a girl for a moment or two longer? You'll be a woman soon enough." Later, Ginger demonstrates her conflicted state when she moves in with Roland and takes her two teddies with her.

Potter also scripts and together with cinematographer Robbie Ryan creates a vivid sense of Britain, emerging from post-war austerity and facing another world crisis. I love the attention to period detail - the accents, clothes, hair, the poetry Ginger reads (TS Eliot), Roland's love of jazz and his boho, somewhat dingy, London flat. This is a moving coming of age tale where you feel both the mother and daughter's pain.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2251256 2012-12-09T19:00:00-05:00 2013-02-08T05:12:01-05:00

Lucy Popescu http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lucy-popescu/
Unbound Books offer readers the opportunity to participate in the publishing process. Authors pitch their book ideas on Unbound's website. Readers can then pledge an amount in order to support the book's publication. Effectively you become a patron of the book/s of your choice. If you back a project before it reaches its funding target, you get your name printed in the back of every copy and immediate behind-the-scenes access to the author's "shed" (This means you can read draft chapters and join discussions with the author. Essentially you get to comment on and contribute to a work in progress). If any project fails to reach its funding target, you are refunded in full. The higher your pledge, the greater the benefits including, in some cases, lunch with the author. If you introduce your friends to the site you earn "credits" when they support a project. Unbound has some big names on their list such as ex-Python Terry Jones and Peter Jukes', whose book The Fall of the House of Murdoch is particularly timely in the wake of Lord Leveson's report.

I am always amazed that we do not publish more literary fiction in translation in the UK. According to Literature Across Frontiers, translation makes up 2.5% of all publications; only 4.5% of fiction sales in the UK, compared with 30-40% in France or Spain. Publishing collective And Other Stories is subscription-based and most of its books so far have been translations. They publish four books a year and these are recommended by their network of readers, writers and translators. They have a diverse community of supporters and through online discussion subscribers can sway the choice of titles. Subscribers receive a limited-edition numbered copy and could find themselves backing a winner. In just two years, And Other Stories have seen Mexican Juan Pablo Villalobos' Down the Rabbit Hole - a nightmarish inversion of Alice in Wonderland - where absurd wishes are granted, giant cats are fed human corpses, and corrupt politicians come to lunch - nominated for the Guardian First Book Award 2011 and Deborah Levy's Swimming Home - a gem of a novel that confounds all expectations - shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize.

Then there is the wonderful Peirene Press who publish European literature of distinction in English translation. Their books are beautifully designed paperbacks and are always less than 200 pages "so you can read them in the same time it takes to watch a movie". Their books are all award-winners or best-sellers in their countries of origin and have enjoyed success over here too. Matthias Politicki's Next World Novella, an absorbing portrait of a marriage breakdown, made various literary editors' books of the year list and was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2012. Peirene curate their books according to themes and next year's series is entitled "Revolutionary Moments". In addition, they host a wide range of literary events for subscribers from informal coffee mornings to launches and literary salons.

Finally, another publisher of merit is Stork Press who specialise in translating exceptional new writing from Central and Eastern Europe. They are celebrating their first year of publishing this month. I was impressed with the two titles I've read: A.M. Bakalar's Madame Mephisto, a darkly-comic account of a Polish immigrant's experiences in London and Petra Procházková's assured debut, Freshta, a bitter-sweet hymn to Afghanistan told from an outsider's perspective.

Christmas is fast approaching and what better present could there be for book lovers than a subscription to one of these courageous publishing outfits or the gift of a pledge that helps get a book published? You'll be in for a treat and helping to support independent publishing. What's not to like?

]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2101453 2012-11-11T19:00:00-05:00 2013-01-11T05:12:01-05:00

Lucy Popescu http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lucy-popescu/ Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice (of which I am a co-director) launches a campaign aimed at promoting ethical tourism in Sri Lanka. The lobby group has recently uncovered evidence that a range of British tour operators are offering holiday packages that commercially benefit alleged perpetrators of human rights abuses.

The campaign is timely. Wednesday was Responsible Tourism Day at the London World Travel Market 2012 and, astonishingly, Lonely Planet recently listed Sri Lanka as its number one holiday destination in 2013.

A tropical island off the coast of India, Sri Lanka is a popular tourist destination with its stunning beaches, lush forests, tea-growing hills and many sites of historic and cultural interest. It was wracked by a bloody civil war for almost three decades. During the final stages of the conflict in 2009 an estimated 40,000 civilians were killed.

What many tourists do not know is that the new peace in Sri Lanka has come at a high cost to freedom of expression and the human rights of its citizens. The country is now rated the fourth most dangerous place in the world for journalists, higher even than Afghanistan. More than fifteen journalists are believed to have been killed since 2006.

At the end of the war 300,000 civilians were illegally detained in inhumane conditions likened to concentration camps. There were credible reports of coercive interrogation, torture, rape and extra-judicial killings. According to a United Nations panel: "The Government subjected victims and survivors of the conflict to further deprivation... some of those who were separated were summarily executed, and some of the women may have been raped... Some persons in the camps were interrogated and subjected to torture"

In the rush to smooth the way for tourism, the government started to bulldoze various Tamil Tiger landmark sites including cemeteries and the homes of Velupillai Prabhakaran and other LTTE leaders. The Thileepan memorial near the Nallur temple was also defaced apparently with the collusion of the Sri Lankan army. Enflaming local tensions, the authorities have proposed replacing the homes of LTTE leaders with hotels and resorts.

The presence of troops in the north and east, once Tamil dominated regions, has increased, with the military monitoring civilians and controlling many aspects of their lives. Non Sinhala communities are treated with distrust and civilians have to seek permission even to hold gatherings, including traditional religious events, sometimes resulting in the military attending private functions and taking pictures. Many of those released from camps have not been allowed to return home because land remains under military control.

The government has initiated land registration in the north and east, while prohibiting many Tamils from returning to their homes and thus making a legitimate claim. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre's most recent estimate is that around 125,000 civilians are still living in temporary accommodation. They live in tents surrounded by landmines and without access to basic services, food, jobs and money. Meanwhile, the military continue to confiscate private land and designate it part of a High Security Zone (HSZ) in order to build their own houses, farms and facilities - including tourist hotels - with impunity.

Last year, Tourism Concern reported that the government and large tourism developers had forcibly displaced fishermen from the waters around the 14 islands of Kalpitiya, destroying livelihoods, threatening food security, and wreaking havoc on the environment. Some were even forced off their land, and had to go to court to get it back. The fishing community, as well as farmers, small-scale tourism enterprises and traders, claim they were not sufficiently consulted about the Kalpitiya Integrated Tourism Resort Project - Sri Lanka's largest tourism development to date.

Many tourists never leave their hotel and most Sri Lankans are too frightened to speak about what is going on in the country. So visitors are unaware of a very different world outside the resorts where ordinary people continue to have their basic human rights trampled upon, sometimes involving violence and torture.

To find out more about Sri Lanka and how you can help go to: http://www.srilankacampaign.org/tourismdilemma.htm]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2082136 2012-11-06T10:23:23-05:00 2013-01-06T05:12:01-05:00

Lucy Popescu http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lucy-popescu/ In Mexico, El Día de Muertos (the Day of the Dead), is celebrated from 31 - 2 November. Although a mortuary ritual, the fiesta's light-heartedness is expressed through the sale of sugar skulls, sweet breads and skeletal figurines. A table of ofrendas (offerings) is prepared with various objects, sweets, and drinks that were once enjoyed by the departed. To tempt them to return, their favourite food is lovingly prepared and laid out each night. Aromatic copal is burned, candles are lit, and the vibrant marigold flowers, known as cempasúchil, decorate and brighten their way. Religious images are placed alongside tequila and sugared skulls. A poem or hymn may be composed and left for them. Mexicans do not believe that the departed souls will consume what they have prepared, merely that the aroma will attract their spiritual presence and serve to remind them that they are not forgotten.

Mexico's cemeteries also take on a carnivaleseque quality at this time. Mexicans visit their relatives' graves for a nightly vigil, bringing with them food and drink and decorating them with flowers. They may even be accompanied by a mariachi band.

Newspapers join in the fun by printing satirical images of politicians and celebrities, drawn as skeletons, carrying on a tradition begun in the 1890s by Jose Guadalupe Posada. An engraver, based in the old heart of Mexico City, Posada started his career as a political cartoonist before becoming a commercial illustrator, drawing sensational events for broadsheets as well as depicting the daily horrors, murders, and tragedies of city life.

Today, journalists who attempt to investigate or draw attention to corruption in Mexico - whether engineered by state officials or the notorious drug cartels - are more likely to find themselves threatened for their work or even killed.

In 2011, PEN, the international association of writers, marked the Day of the Dead by remembering those journalists and writers who had been murdered in Mexico. Since 2000, over 80 writers, journalists and bloggers have been killed and another 15 have disappeared. Most of these crimes have not been properly investigated and there have only ever been a handful of convictions.

This year alone, nine print journalists and writers have been murdered in Mexico. Drug-trafficking is blamed for many of Mexico's ills and while it is true that much of the violence against those journalists who attempt to investigate their crimes comes from these quarters, there is also corruption amongst state officials and powerful businessmen who have the money to buy complicity or silence. Another inherent failure of Mexico's justice system is the apparent inability to punish and prosecute those in positions of power who abuse their office.

This year, PEN International and its centres have extended their campaign against impunity by launching a literary protest aimed at highlighting the escalating violence against journalists, writers and bloggers in Latin America. Self-censorship is a growing trend in Mexico, Honduras and Brazil.

According to PEN, in the first six months of 2012, more reporters were murdered in Latin America than in any other region worldwide. Mexico was the second most dangerous country in the world in which to be a writer or journalist, with Honduras and Brazil coming close behind.

Over 50 writers, journalists, students and PEN members from across Latin America and the Caribbean sent in poetry and prose in support of the campaign and to commemorate their murdered colleagues in the region. James Tennant, PEN International's Literary Manager, said 'the huge interest in and support for this campaign, and the fact that writers the calibre of Luisa Valenzuela, Sergio Ramírez, Gioconda Belli and Ariel Dorfman have contributed new texts, only serves to highlight the seriousness of the situation of impunity in today's Latin America - a region that has become a vast burial ground for writers and journalists'.

You can support the campaign by reading the contributions to Write Against Impunity and spreading the word. PEN is publishing texts on their website every day until the anthology's official launch on 23 November, the International Day to End Impunity.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2079031 2012-11-05T16:41:32-05:00 2013-01-05T05:12:01-05:00

Lucy Popescu http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lucy-popescu/ Most of the refugee stories we read about in the media are negative. But many asylum seekers are torture survivors who have fled to the UK and live in a terrifying limbo - acutely aware that each morning they wake up could be their last day in safety. For some, if they are sent back they face the prospect of further torture and even death.

Khadija is 18 focuses on two teenage girls, living as refugees in east London. Khaidija (Aysha Kala) is originally from Afghanistan, although so anglicised that she speaks like any other streetwise teenager in London and has adopted many of the mannerisms and cultural codes of her Nigerian boyfriend Ade (Victor Alli). She lives in a hostel with Liza (Katherine Rose Morley), a young eastern European, and her baby who, we learn, is actually her sister.

The two girls await their eighteenth birthdays with trepidation. They arrived in the UK as children and were classified as "unaccompanied" by the state. On reaching adulthood they will receive a decision on their residence claims and both are terrified of being returned to their native countries.

Shamser Sinha writes from experience - he is a lecturer in Sociology and Youth Studies, and has spent the past ten years working with young asylum seekers and vulnerable teenagers in London. His play is also hugely topical. According to the Refugee Council, in 2011 17,700 children applied for asylum having arrived in the country of refuge alone, with no parent or guardian. 1,277 of these applications were made in the UK.

Rather than focus on the girls' past and what led them to seek asylum, Sinha portrays their life in London. The two girls go to college, and Khaidija works, illegally as a cleaner to supplement her meagre benefits. Liza has to look after the baby and struggles to find the time to learn English. Both are desperate to assimilate and both bear the brunt of casual racism. They are often derided as "refs" and snide comments are made about Liza's ability to attract council housing because of her baby, despite the fact that she is living in a hostel.

Given Sinha's admirable credentials, I was surprised that he didn't paint a more positive portrait of asylum seekers. He concentrates instead on the girls' petty rivalries, their sexual experiences and their betrayals of one another. It is only in the play's heart-breaking and powerful ending that Sinha demonstrates Khadija's very real terror at the thought of being returned.

Nevertheless, there is much to recommend Khadija is 18. It raises important issues and Sinha has an excellent ear for teenagers' street-slang. Fly Davis's stark set - slate blocks and concrete slabs - gives a palpable sense of the bleaker side of London. Tim Stark gets the most out of his young cast, the performances are pitch-perfect, and his imaginative staging makes effective use of the Finborough's tiny space.


Khadija is 18 is running at the Finborough Theatre until 24 November 2012]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1947442 2012-10-08T05:30:08-04:00 2012-12-08T05:12:01-05:00

Lucy Popescu http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lucy-popescu/ Goodreads, the number of dystopian-themed books is currently at its highest since the 1960s. Women writers seem to be leading the way. Suzanne Collin's award-winning young adult novel, The Hunger Games, was released as a film earlier this year. Just a few months ago, I reviewed Julie Zeh's acclaimed political thriller, The Method, that plays on our current obsession with health and mass surveillance. Helen Smith's The Miracle Inspector, a disturbing portrait of England in the not too distant future, is just as memorable.

I first met Smith at Freedom from Torture (formerly The Medical Foundation) when she volunteered as a creative writing mentor. She told me that the experience of refugees was the inspiration behind The Miracle Inspector. She wanted to imagine what it was like to arrive somewhere as an asylum seeker. As she said in a recent interview: "I began to wonder what it would be like if I could no longer live in London and had to flee. What kind of reception would I get if I turned up in another place without money, and with little cultural understanding of the place where I was seeking sanctuary? What if I had led an insular, protected life and didn't know enough about how the world worked to know who to trust?"

Her protagonists are a young urban couple who long to escape London for Cornwall. But their dream holiday is not on hold because of a lack of funds or the inability to get time off at the same time. Lucas has a good job at "the Ministry" and, anyway, Angela is not allowed to work (women are confined to the house). The problem is that England has been partitioned. Trying to leave London is a criminal offence.

Intertwined with their story is that of a middle-aged poet known only as Jesmond. Poetry and theatre are banned and have been forced underground. Jesmond, who has the stature of a folk hero, continues to read from his works with fatal consequences. Astutely, Smith recognises that the suppression of free expression is the first act of tyrants and I found his tragic fate particularly resonant.

In its feminist angle, The Miracle Inspector is reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Smith draws attention to the subjugation of women in a repressive culture. Not only are her female characters banned from working, they can only leave their homes in a burka or by clandestinely dressing as men.

However, The Miracle Inspector is not all doom and gloom and is, at times, very funny. Smith pokes fun at the rule makers: "Lucas didn't like living in a dictatorship, as he did now, but he could see how democracy could be a bit of a burden when you were expected to obey the will of the people and the people turned out to be such a bunch of fools." Lucas's job is to 'investigate' claims of miracles, in fact "the right to believe in miracles was enshrined in the constitution." More often than not he is contacted by lonely women on their own all day, who are convinced that they can see human faces in their food.

But what I like best about Smith's writing is her sheer exuberance. She has an extraordinarily rich imagination that never fails to surprise and delight.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1915930 2012-09-27T19:00:00-04:00 2012-11-27T05:12:01-05:00

Lucy Popescu http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lucy-popescu/ European Literature Days always features a range of writers and encourages lively debates on a variety of literary subjects. This year's theme was "Europe: Fortress, Trauma, Dream", with a particular focus on how writers have responded to the financial crisis or 'trauma'.

Over two days, writers and other literary professionals explored the notion of 'Fortress Europe'. The negative connotation is that the European Union has drawn "a dividing line across this continent" that welcomes the wealthy nations and excludes the poorer states. Equally, European culture, it was suggested, is defined as "a variation of Anglo-American culture where exceptional individuals gain entry from other linguistic backgrounds". Despite these perceived inequities, many authors, particularly from Southeast Europe, retain faith in "the European dream". For them, Europe is synonymous with hope for a better future.

One of the most interesting debates was about how writers have responded to the global crisis. There have been several books written by economists that offer thoughtful analysis of, and even solutions to, the financial crash, but what about fiction? Two German names came up. Thomas von Steinäcker's Das Jahr, in dem ich aufhörte, mir Sorgen zu machen, und anfing zu träumen (The Year in which I Stopped Worrying and Started Dreaming) is set in an insurance firm at the height of the financial crisis. Kristof Magnusson's Das war ich nicht (It Wasn't Me) is about a German banker on a Chicago trading floor. Magnusson writes in German and translates from the Icelandic. Both received rave reviews and, regrettably, neither has been translated into English yet.

Some of the Eastern European delegates offered interesting perspectives. Jaroslav Balvin, editor of the multilingual Czech Literature Portal, asked dryly "crisis, which crisis?" Sreten Ugričić, former director of Serbia's national library, pointed out: "Humankind is always in some sort of crisis." Aleš Šteger, a Slovene poet and publisher, remarked that the financial newspapers in his country "serve as a platform for hidden messages between politicians, bankers and managers." The majority of people don't know how to read them and find the financial pages boring, he suggested, but the happy few who read between the lines can glean essential information. He compared this to the use of poetry in communist times that contained hidden allusions and metaphors.

When it comes to literary fiction, maybe the Germans are ahead of the game. As to British authors, rather feebly, I could only recall Alex Preston, a young city trader, and his debut novel This Bleeding City, which received mixed reviews. Theatre can react so much faster. I immediately thought of David Hare's piece of verbatim theatre, The Power of Yes (2009) Lucy Prebble's morality tale, Enron (also 2009) and Denis Kelly's The Gods Weep. (2010) Perhaps it is just too early for fiction writers to respond with anything meaningful and they have to gain the necessary perspective before delivering the definitive chronicles.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1673056 2012-07-14T06:17:44-04:00 2012-09-13T05:12:07-04:00

Lucy Popescu http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lucy-popescu/ Dancer in the Dark. His quirky, multi-layered approach to writing is evident in his previous books, The Blue Fox and From the Mouth of the Whale, translated by Victoria Cribb and published by Telegram.

In his latest novel to be translated into English, Sjón interweaves Greek and Norse myth to great effect and demonstrates the transformative power of storytelling. It's 1949 and Vladimar Haraldsson, an elderly Icelandic writer convinced that there is a link between the consumption of fish and the superiority of the Nordic race, has been invited on a cruise by a Danish shipping magnate.

On board the merchant ship, transporting raw paper to Turkey and Soviet Georgia, the second mate, Caeneus, entertains the crew and their guests with tales of the exploits of Jason and the Argonauts on their way to reclaim the Golden Fleece. For inspiration he listens to the "whispering" of "a rotten chip of wood...like a telephone receiver". Haraldsson is at first irritated by the seaman's storytelling and the rapt attention of his audience, until he discovers that the splinter of wood had been rescued from the derelict bow of the Argo.

According to Greek myth, Caeneus was once a beautiful young woman. After Poseidon had raped her, he offered to grant her anything she wished and she chose to become a man, so that the offence could not be repeated. On his death, Caeneus was transformed once again - this time into a bird.

For Haraldsson, compulsive and slightly pompous, the stories have a positive effect. Initially disappointed that more fish is not forthcoming at the captain's table, he starts catching his own. By the end he has almost forgotten his obsession and finds himself profoundly altered by the seaman's yarns and the strange, mystical power of the whispering muse.

The boundaries between fact and fiction, the surreal and the ordinary are deliberately blurred. Sjón delights in challenging his reader and seamlessly blends incidents from the present with tales from the past: an accident at the sawmill, resulting in the death of a worker, is swiftly followed by another tale from Caeneus who describes the Argonauts' stay on the island of Lemnos, inhabited solely by women. Here, a flaxen-haired poetess relates the gruesome Norse myth of Sigurd and his relationship with the sorceress Gudrun, paralleling Jason's own demise on his return to Corinth --"the hero who lost everything."

Sjón is a master at drawing contemporary resonance from ancient fables and highlights how mythology is still an integral part of a society's culture and can impact on the modern world, act as a moral compass, or can be used, as it was by the Nazis, to boost nationalism. It is no coincidence that the sea voyage takes place in the shadow of the Second World War.

Once again, Sjón has chosen an unusual subject, interwoven the fantastical with the ordinary, and produced a complex and strangely compelling work of fiction.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1664922 2012-07-11T11:09:53-04:00 2012-09-10T05:12:03-04:00

Lucy Popescu http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lucy-popescu/
Orphaned as a young child and a casualty of the Sri Lankan conflict, Ras arrived in England aged nineteen. His father had "disappeared", presumably abducted by government forces, and his mother was killed in an army bomb attack, "picked out by her Karma, to pay the price for the existence of the Tamil Tigers." After a number of dead-end jobs, Ras married young, had a child, Lola, drifted in and out of affairs and finally separated from his wife.

It is only when he becomes an attendant at London's National Gallery that Ras begins to indulge his love of painting. He finds himself strangely drawn to Piero's The Nativity, the "sense of dust and abandonment...the look on the young mother's face, the blue and the red of her dress, her lovely serenity", its colours reminding him of the home he fled. He meets the charismatic and kindly art historian, Charles Boyar, who, sharing his love of Piero, invites him on a tour of Urbino in Tuscany to see more of his paintings.

Running parallel to Ras's story is that of Alex, a self-centred writer who remains infatuated with his first love, Delia, now married to Boyar. His sense of loss mirrors Ras's own melancholy obsession with his estranged daughter. The two men's paths cross and become intertwined through Lola and their mutual friendship with Boyar.

Sri-Lankan born, Tearne evidently remains engaged with her native country's troubled past and its current unrest. One of her many strengths is the ability to interweave the political and personal in her fiction. By linking these disparate narratives and opposing cultures, she makes some interesting points. The Western reverence for art is contrasted with the indifference of those struggling to rebuild their lives in post-conflict Sri Lanka - where life and justice is precarious and its ancient artefacts have either been destroyed or stolen by army looters. Ras tells Elizabeth: "I stole a bit of Western History. I knew it would cause a stir."

War and its aftermath are underlying themes in the book. Delia continues to agonise over the fact that her grandfather had served as a Nazi officer. As a child her mother had warned her: "Memory can destroy. Those who cannot forget live in a twilight place, for remembered pain is the worst of all." It's a feeling Ras knows all too well. Tearne drives this point home when two fatal explosions in the novel, the result of different wars - one long past, the other more recent - shatter the characters' worlds and set them on different courses.

Tearne is also an acclaimed artist and her love of painting infuses the book. She draws a vivid portrait of Tuscany's landscape. Its light, colours and texture throw into sharp relief the drab grey of Ras's prison cell. As well as dwelling on love and loss, The Road to Urbino is about the redeeming power of art. As Ras wryly comments: "People come and go, they love you and leave you, but art lingers on with its peculiar invincibility. Only art lifts you away from the awfulness of life. Only art is able to transform it."]]>