Daily reminiscences of novels: oranges in 1930s Depression, onions during World War II, artificial flowers in a sci-fi future

I always enjoy small daily actions that remind me of some favourite scenes in great novels. The hero Rick Deckard in Phil K Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" in his apocaliptic future sees artificial life imitations all around him, from the electric sheep in his home to the frog he offers his wife at the end. It is a bit too bleak to own robot animals, but I am often pleased to have artificial flowers both at home (in picture) and in the office. Originally, the novel was supposed to be  in 1992 or 2021, but despite the pandemic we still have animals all around us. But I believe that actually my artificial flower vases are quite ecological and mood soothing, since they spend no water, unlike the robot animals of Deckard.

There is also the onions that I always eat plentiful in every salad buffet, which remind me of the scene when Bendrix first meets Sarah in The End of the Affair during the years just before World War II, "Is it possible to fall in love over a dish of onions? It seems improbable and yet I could swear it was just then that I fell in love."

But my favorite literary reference to a daily item or activity is in John Fante's book, where the young author Arturo Bandini living in poverty in his rented LA room has been eating oranges as meals for month, a sweet liquid sunlight that fills up his stomach, the cheapest food he can find. Orange peels pile up with cigarette ashes in his room. Other creative solutions for his poverty is to use the strings from the cereal boxes as a belt and shoe laces, then applying the carton box paper to fix up his shoe sole. Arturo reflects upon looking at the nice ladies arriving to the luxury hotels in LA that their shoes are worth more than everything he ever owned... But Arturo - despiste his rough philosophy - is in fact a soft-hearted boy and ends up using his first check as an author to pay a beef meal to a senior neighbor. Arturo also adds extra sugar to his coffee in order to get a bit more taste and calories. The same choice of taking several bags of sugar in a coffee cup is admitted by a character in John Steinbeck's novel "The winter of our discontent".

I just really love the Arturo Bandini character, because of his so many flaws and realism, his cowardice, made up lies even to himself, lack of success and inability to talk elegantly to people. Yet Arturo's deep honesty and resilience makes him rise up above the poverty around him. 

I have a great taste for sweet oranges and enjoy eating 2 per day in winter while looking at the city of Santiago in the mid-afternoon with its smog-filled horizon. In some ways it is a bit like the smoggy LA. That is why eating oranges - fortunately, for me a food choice - always makes me think of Bandini and his so many flaws, yet always painted with the colored sincerity of a good heart.

Roaring 20's and Great Depression novels: The Great Gatsby and its awkward opposite!

The characters in the Great Gatsby and Arturo Bandini novels are true opposites in wealth and sophistication. However, they share one trait: persisting in their romantic dreams until the end!

The Great Depression left a profound image on the memories of people. Until today, perhaps the strongest impression on people's minds is the contrast between great wealth and abject poverty from the mass unemployed living in big cities or wandering the countryside in search of work. It also captures the human spirit with irony by contrasting the golden years, peace and prosperity of the previous decade with the despair, misery and loneliness of the 1930s.

Los Angeles hill, a setting similar to Ask the Dust

One of the great literary pieces out of the Roaring Twenties is F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, as popular (or more) today as in its first 1925 edition. It touches so many enduring emotions. For the American soldiers in WW2 it probably reminded them that their girlfriends may not be waiting at the end of the war. For the younger generations that did not live a military conflict, it reflects that romantic ambitions are not always fulfilled even if someones gives it all its effort. The novel's unrequited love story also tells us about class and family origins. Talent, effort and merit do not always get recognized. The main character Jay Gatsby is ashamed of his family to the point of abandoning his loving father and changing his name. Finally, the story teaches us that great wealth and luxury only feed snobbism and vanity. Noisy parties do not buy us friends. The pursuit of happiness is as elusive now as it was for the great Greek-Roman philosophers like Aristotle or the emperor Marcus Aurelius. The novel already has four amazing movie adaptations, of which I only saw the Robert Redford's and Di Caprio's versions. These movies, obviously are not exactly similar to the book, but are faithful enough to preserve all of its main motives and even lots of the same phrases and dialogues.

To me the greatest contrast comes from comparing the Great Gatsby in relation to the novels of the Great Depression such as John Steinbeck's. One such novel is Ask the Dust by John Fante, a story of sticking to one's own values and dreams in the face of adversity. It is purported to be a fictional version of some autobiographical events in the author's own life and rightfully so. Historians often say that any human persons enjoys to make up sublime versions of himself (or herself), heroic interpretations of ourselves. However, admitting to our own faults and humilliations is much more difficult! And yet the faults and humilliations are much truer to life. Fante's novel is full of humilliations inflicted upon its main character, Arturo Bandini.

If Jay Gatsby is elegant, sophisticated, wealthy, charming and a successful man, then Bandini is its very opposite. Arturo Bandini is a young and jobless writer in Los Angeles. The little money that he receives from his Mom is spent on oranges, the cheapest food he can afford, which he eats under a sorching heat while thinking that its sweet huices resembles liquid sunlight filling his empty belly. Gatsby has fame and money, but Bandini only gets a small check and his literary reputation only impresses a 14 year old neighbor and a divorced woman full of uneasy emotions. If Gatsby has the most expensive clothes, then Bandini uses the rope from cereal boxes as a belt and applies the box carton to repair his old shoes. Gatbsy throws money in luxurious parties, yet Bandini uses the little money he has to pay a steak to his neighbor. If Gatsby is the most admired person, then Bandini is utterly ignored and poor, something that he cruelly observes when he looks at the rich ladies arriving in limousines to LA's expensive hotels and then remarks that those beautiful women wear shoes that are more expensive than all the things he ever owned.

Even their personalities contrast, Gatsby being brave and noble, while Bandini is often rude and cowardly. Bandini flees from a prostitute after paying her because he feels the abject act would degrade his Christian faith. Bandini flees during the 1933 earthquake and afterwards feels so ashamed that he invents tales of brave acts and having rushed to save others, tall tales that lack such realism that none of his neighbors believe and just reveal his lack of courage more glaringly.

Yet Bandini's flaws always shine with the sincerity and simplicity of those who are poor, young, but with big dreams and loving intentions. Bandini is awkward and unable to play the seductor to his love interest, Camilla Lopez. Camilla is a waitress and a down to earth character, not at all like the attractive and dreamy socialite Daisy that is pursued by Gatsby. But Bandini shows great character and nobleness even in the most despairing situations. In fact, perhaps Bandini's lowest point is reached when Camilla reveals that she loves Sam, a waiter suffering badly from tuberculosis and a failed writer of western novels. Sam is rude, violent, and even poorer than Bandini is, yet he manages to capture Camilla's passion. Camilla tramples on Bandini's love with her feet, but Bandini is noble enough to ignore his own feelings and to be concerned for her situation. Bandini gives confort to the dying Sam, then searches the desert for Camilla and just leaves his new novel in the sand when the scorching heat forces him to give up hope.

Movie review: "Louder than bombs" versus "Rashomon"

Recently I saw a superb movie with French actress Isabelle Huppert, "Louder than bombs" (2015). It is about a deceased woman photojournalist who is remembered in very different ways by her widowed husband, her adult and recently married son, her shy teenage son, and her lover. It deals with memory, grief, identity, and with the different perspectives the same person can evoke in those around her, especially those who knew her well. Each one of us fights against one's own difficulties, believes in one's own hopes, and that clouds our remembrances of even the deepest relationships. The son may not understand a conflicted father who lived a problematic relationship with a disturbed person, the father may have not seen the depth of the love of his partner for the children. We do not know if each person's perspective is entirely true, only partially true or even a fantasized version of reality. Would a son actually prefer a make-belief story about a loving mother rather than face the truth about an uncaring one?

The movie immediately reminded me of "Rashomon" (1950) and how one can never know the truth about human relationships, perhaps we may not even know our true selves,  since we always embellish our thoughts about the role we have in the world and among others, afraid of the responsibilities we failed or the fact that we are all irrelevant or troublesome even to our relatives. Contradiction is an inevitable part of human being, because each one of us wants to draw a moral painting of our lives and how we lived.

I finish with some thoughts of Akira Kurosawa on the impact of the Rashomon script on his closest associates: "Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings–the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are. It even shows this sinful need for flattering falsehood going beyond the grave — even the character who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through a medium. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ego. You say that you can’t understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it."

Esperanza en Español / Portugués / Inglés

Rosseti's "Pandora"

Al mirar una película hoy me dé cuenta de algo cuando alguien dijo "I hope". En inglés hope es un sustantivo y un verbo/una acción, pero en portugués y español uno diría "tener esperanza" o "estar con esperanza" o quizá "esperar", lo que es una acción pasiva. "Esperar" es más próximo del verbo "to await" que del verbo/acción "to hope". Para los Anglo-saxónicos la esperanza es una acción. Uno puede actuar en el sentido de las realizar. Los Latinos tienen esperanza y esperan que se concretiza o no. Debería la cultura latina ser más pro-activa con la esperanza?

"The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity... The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope." Samuel Johnson

A Night Train to Lisbon, a House of Spirits and a Sailor between Chile and Portugal

As a Portuguese arriving to live in Chile seven years ago my first thoughts were entwined on the coincidences between both countries’ cultural, political and cinematic experiences. My embracing of this country was entirely unplanned and the result of a twist of fate (or “fado” as the Portuguese call it). As I was completing my studies in the United States, the economic crisis in Europe gave me the idea of looking at another continent for prospects. I and my Chilean supervisor thought “why not Chile” and a life changing project was born to answer such question. I had never been in Chile before, had met only three Chileans in my whole life until that moment, and I realized with some mixed feelings of anxiety and expectation that Chile is the farthest country on Earth from Portugal. I had no clue then that I would stay so many years in Chile, but afterwards each single second here inspired me with passion, serenity and an eagerness to embrace a new life born equally out of destiny, random chance and my deep inner self.

My airborne thoughts in that cloudy grey May morning as the plane descended over Santiago turned to the subtle links between Chile and my birth country. Both countries lie at the extremes of their continents, giving the feeling of lands at the end of the world, where poets contemplate the dark foamy sea and drown their thoughts in the sound of the waves. Interestingly, there is a very famous Chilean novelist, Luis Sepúlveda, who lives in Spain and sells millions of books in Portugal and Spain, and yet is completely unknown in Chile. Thinking about this I wondered if I too could be more successful in Chile than in Portugal. Want to listen to Fado/Destiny? My favorite place as a child - 8 to 12 years old - was the big supermarket Jumbo in Lisbon! I didn't know then it was a Chilean supermarket, but I was in love with its design, the elephant logo and its books section. One could say I loved Chilean grocery before I knew it.

Most strikingly, Chilean and Portuguese political culture were joined together four decades ago. In the early 1970s a Portuguese underground political movement flourished even under a brutal repression of a nationalistic right-wing regime. Two consecutive generations of Portuguese reached adulthood without a local model of what a democracy and its leaders should be. The oldest of the repressed generations had a cynical view that nothing would ever change, but the youngest – among them my parents and cousins – saw the world as a blank state where all kinds of communities and ideas were possible. Young people were fragmented in different political parties and groups. Many such groups sought inspiration from other political movements in the wider world, including Latin America. Chile was taken by some as a cultural model with songs borrowed from Víctor Jara, poems from Neruda and fiery speeches from Salvador Allende. Brigada Víctor Jara is of the most famous Portuguese folk music groups of the last 40 years and was directly inspired by Víctor Jara’s brave resistance and death. In 1973/74 Chile changed from a democratic regime to a dictatorship, while Portugal became a free nation, although one confused by the many possibilities offered by freedom. The Portuguese had to learn that not all free choices are good and that beautiful pipe dreams only flourish if sustained by hard reality.

However, even more surprising is that both countries are symbiotically linked through the cinema. Chilean director Raoul Ruiz used Lisbon to create Valparaiso in his movies, since his long political exile blocked him from filming in Chile. One example is the movie Three Crowns of the Sailor, where a drunken sailor in a ghostly ship travels from Valparaiso to other ports, living strange fantasies. Also, Ruiz' last movie "Mysteries of Lisbon" adapts a Portuguese novel by Camilo de Castelo Branco and again shows how much Portuguese culture impacts Chilean art.

Another movie on my mind that day was the celebrated adaptation of House of Spirits from Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, which was filmed in Lisbon and Alentejo in Portugal. Two generations of a Chilean family: one lives in a democracy plagued by wealth and land inequality, the second is crushed by a military coup. More recently, a movie by the same director Bille August adapts the novel “A Night Train to Lisbon” by Swiss author Pascal Mercier. The movie is about a Swiss literature professor who travels to Lisbon in search of a little known Portuguese writer and ends up finding how the Portuguese dictatorship broke his friendships apart. One of the major scenes in “A night train to Lisbon” shows a Portuguese communist activist, João Eça, being captured by the secret police at his home. João is forced to play the piano in front of his torturers, only to have his hands broken and his fingers smashed. I cannot remember such an incident being reported against a Portuguese musician during the dictatorship times, but it is quite possible that Bille August and Pascal Mercier may have been inspired by a similar incident which happened to Víctor Jara, who was forced to play and sing by his torturers after having his hands and finger nails broken. Again Portugal and Chile are united through dark political events and their experiences were mixed to form a great novel and cinematic piece.

Now Bille August is perhaps the only director who can claim to have made movies about both the Chilean and the Portuguese dictatorships, with both movies being filmed in Portugal. And both works feature a stellar acting by Jeremy Irons! Let’s hope Bille August and Jeremy Irons return to Portugal and film a third movie as passionate, enthralling and literary as these.