annoyed

I'm tired and I'm angry and I feel importuned upon.

I also just saw Closer which has Julia Roberts,Jude Law, Natalie Portman (Queen Amidala) and Clive Owen (The Croupier) in it. It is an actors' play. It is very play-like and the end credits did, indeed, reveal that it is based on a play (which I hadn't known) by someone called Patrick Marber (English? AMerican?). I liked it a lot. It has the sort of stilted, artificial dialogue that I love and that you do get more often in plays than you do in films.

But when was the last time you saw a film in which Jude Law did not get punished for being so beautiful? In which Jude Law, at the end of the film, is beautiful, rich, happy and gets the girl? Except for Bosie (which was when he was baby!Jude), I can only remember him getting killed, tormented, losing out on love, being handicapped, being artificial -- you name it. It's as if he has to be punished for being so beautiful. It's always the other, less beautiful, guy who gets the girl.

I finished Tanizaki's Makioka Sisters. I loved it. It reminded me of A Suitable Boy and I'm sure that Vikram Seth must have read that novel. The ending of Makioka Sisters ranks for me among the top five best last lines in a novel I have read. Very similar in kind to Suitable Boy actually. It is much, much harder to do a good ending than it is to do a good beginning. It is a novel of manners, a novel where the dramatic action tends to happen off-screen, a novel where little is said and much inferred, with moving bits that made me cry and a very tough core. Also I learned a lot about Japan, and discovered the close relationship of Japanese to German culture, a new thing for me. So it did just what I like world literature to do for me!

T'h said, 'but is it true?' I said, 'of course it is true. All great literature is true, this is why I love it so much. If it weren't true, it would not be great literature, it would be bad (or good enough) literature.'