“Death is the border of life. If it weren’t waiting for us there at the edge, we wouldn’t realize that we’re not just wandering around aimlessly but are heading somewhere. The border is what gives us directions. I see borders like that everywhere. They make us alert. They point to our limitations at the same time they show us all the marvelous possibilities within them.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (JUN 8, 2010)

Federico Fellini’s oeuvre is widely recognized as a major contribution to modern culture. Indeed, according to Wikipedia, his movie, 8 ½ is ranked the third best film of all time by the British Film Institute (2002). His last movie, made in 1990, three years before his death, was La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon). He was having trouble raising the funds for the movie and made a commercial for an Italian bank. The woman in the commercial bore a striking resemblance to his last lover, Rosita Steenbeek, a young Dutch actress. This period, leading to the end of his Fellini’s life is the story being told in Director’s Cut.

The story line is not complicated. A beautiful young Dutch girl, Gala Vandemberg, whom we meet in the early stages of adolescence, grows up and is befriended by Maxim, a fellow drama student. They form a unique Platonic relationship, Maxim protecting and lording over her; Gala offering companionship and the ever-present potential for something more. Leaving for Rome, her father, quite literally, hands her over to Maxim. With everything riding on Gala’s beauty they make a play for the attention of Rome’s most famous son, the acclaimed, and aging, film director, Snaporaz. (Snaporaz was the nickname Fellini had given to Marcell Mastroianni, his on-screen self.) Word on the street is that he is making another movie. Maxim, alas, is set adrift. Gala, her health precarious from youth, is fragile and troubled. She is easily swayed by the wiles of powerful and charismatic men. She breaks through Snaporaz’s inner-circle, eventually coming to his attention. She then does what she does best: beguiles him. He is smitten. His long-suffering wife, Gelsomina, looks on, used to the pattern. But Snaporaz suffers a stroke, just as Gala’s big break seems within her grasp and all is lost.

I found the character of Gala to be well-drawn and intriguing. She is mysterious, inviting, seemingly just attainable, a fragile vixen. She makes men yearn. But we know from the outset she is damaged, physically and emotionally. Her father schooled her on the classics and made her memorize passages from Virgil and Cicero, making her perform for important guests and academics in the hope of furthering his career. After she quotes Erasmus in Latin, a colleague declares, “A child of eight. Incredible! Jan, your daughter is a prodigy.” But it is just a parlor game and she cracks eventually, setting the pattern which will follow her into adulthood: she will perform for men who know they can use her, but she will eventually fail. Her character is particularly compelling. Here we find her, a young girl, happy and go-lucky, at a flower auction with her father. But disease is about to break over her:

“Something went badly wrong inside Gala’s head. She felt it happening while the big auction clock showed the flowers diminishing in value second by second. She listened to the water in the gutters. The words flowed together meaninglessly. They swirled around, then suddenly disappeared into the depths as if being sucked down a plug hole. She had no time to try to recapture the poems her father had drilled into her; it was all she could do to keep her own language under control.”

She is epileptic, we discover.

I was troubled by what seemed the cliché running throughout Director’s Cut: the attractive woman, drawn by men, used by men, falling into the snare of a wily famous older man, the faithful male companion of her youth cast aside. It felt like a rote premise, foisted upon a cultural icon for its form. But like so many clichés, it has a core truth. This, I discovered upon reading the author’s afterword:

“I’d met her in 1976 during the first rehearsal of The Mannequins’ Ball, when we were both studying Dutch literature in Amsterdam, fell in love with her, and have loved her ever since.

“I now believe that Fellini also genuinely loved her, but for a long time I didn’t want to see that. I was too young, too disappointed, or perhaps simply jealous. I especially blamed the famous director for taking the magnificent, strong, independent woman who taught me, as a young man, to live without caring in the least what other people thought, and slowly but entirely making her dependent on him, to the point that she finally was reduced to living in a tiny cell above a church in which he had installed her, doing nothing more than sitting by the phone, waiting for his call.”

I found the character of Maxim to thinly drawn and the least believable. His was the presence in the novel that worked the least well for me. Upon reading the afterward, I better understood. Maxim is, for lack of a more artful comparison, Japin, and the author, for some reason–I will resist the temptation to psychobabble–could not fully fill his own shadow. The curious thing about this discovery is, for me, how it enhanced the novel. The work appears more art-like when I understand the narration is pulled directly from the author’s experience–pulled directly being the key. That is to say, using the fabric of story telling, Japin has invited us to share a meaningful and direct personal experience. We walk with him through the analysis of experience. But he will not, perhaps cannot, fully reveal his profile. He himself, despite effort, remains slightly hidden and cloaked in his personal tale. It is a slight distinction, but a meaningful one; one which informs the novel in a most beautiful and telling way.

Ultimately, the book escapes the potential of exploitation. Gala might, in less capable hands, be rendered a plaything, Snaporaz mean-spirited, and Maxim, impotent. That does not happen. To the contrary. The reader knows the author loves these characters and has the capacity to show us his affection. It is lovely, indeed.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from X readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; 1 edition (February 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Arthur Japin
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More tales of starlets: Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye by John O’Dowd The Song Is You by Megan Abbott

Bibliography:

• The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi (1997; 2000 in US)
• Director’s Cut (2002; February 2010) (Called The Lion Dreaming in UK in 2008)
• In Lucia’s Eyes (2003; 2005 in US)
• The Surrender (2007; not translated for US)

“Journalists were as touchy as cabaret performers and as stubborn as factory machinists.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (APR 6, 2010)

This debut novel is the memoir of a newspaper and the story of the people who work there. Formatted in much the same way as Olive Kitteridge, each chapter can stand on its own as a short story about one of the newspaper’s employees. Each chapter fits well into the whole and provides insight into the chapters that follow. Interspersed between the chapters about employees’ lives outside their time at the newspaper, is another story, the history of the newspaper itself and of the characters that both create and dismantle it. Tom Rachman writes with a sharp eye and a cunning wit. Often the chapters end with a sharp turn of events or a huge surprise. Because his writing is top-notch, I was surprised that this is a debut novel.

Each of the characters has their own personal issues and we get to see them in relationship to their jobs but outside of work. The newspaper is located in Rome and for those readers who have traveled there, the streets and communities will be familiar. Arthur Gopal is one of the newspaper’s employees. He is in charge of obituaries and some games and puzzles. He is the son of a famous journalist. He doesn’t care much about his job at all. He is asked to travel outside of Italy in order to write a memoir about an important feminist prior to her death so that the obituary will be ready when she dies. While he is in the process of interviewing her, a life-shattering event occurs which forever changes his attitude towards life and the newspaper.

Herman Cohen is very much the soul of the newspaper. He is the Corrections Editor and has a formidable “bible” of usage that he has created. God help the reporter who makes a mistake in usage or creates a typo. One of the reporters wrote about “Sadism Hussein” and Cohen made sure she suffered. Herman has a friend named Jimmy who he has adulated since childhood. He’s expected great things from Jimmy such as the authoring of a book. Maybe he’d even write a book about Jimmy some day. When Jimmy is 65 years old he visits Herman. With gradual awareness, Herman realizes that his expectations of Jimmy are mostly projections. Jimmy will always be a semi-loser, waxing philosophic but not an agent of action.

Ruby Zaga, Copy Editor, is one of my favorite unlikeable characters. She hates her job and her co-workers. She is a misanthrope who has been with the newspaper for 20 years. She’s now 47 years old with no friends, no significant other, and no real interests outside of work. The only thing she likes about her job is the special ergonomic chair that she has managed to attain. She dreams of being fired but can’t think of what she’d do if she wasn’t working. She does things to invoke her own firing and is generally self-destructive. She has an erotic delusion about a former co-worker. She calls him repeatedly and swashes his cologne scent all over herself before bed. Most of the time, she is drunk at night and calls her co-worker who does not know how to stop her. While she dreams of getting fired, it is also her worst nightmare and she obsesses the whole weekend that on Monday she will receive an e-mail that says she is being let go.

Craig Menzies is the News Editor. He lives with his partner, Annika. He hates his job and feels like he’s a “yes-man” to the Editor-in-Chief. Annika is 27 and Craig is 40. When they met in D.C., Annika was an aspiring photographer. However, since they’ve been in Rome she primarily keeps house for Craig and has not done any photography. Recently, Craig convinces Annika to take a yoga class. Annika meets a man in her yoga class with whom she has an affair. This man sends intimate pictures of their liaisons via e-mail to everyone on staff at the paper. Craig is appalled but he is not a strong man. He is afraid to be alone. What happens is a real mind-bender.

We meet Lloyd, a foreign correspondent who is down to his last dollar and is not beyond using his own son to get a scoop. There is Hardy, the Finance Editor, who lives with a young hippy who she’s met at the police station and may have even robbed her. There is Winston Cheung, an applicant for a stringer position in Egypt. He is used by two other applicants and ends up feeling like a sucker. We also get to know Ornella De Monterecchi who has read every copy of the newspaper that has ever been published. Her only problem is that she is ten years behind in her reading. Let me not forget Abbey Pinnola, Financial Officer, who finds herself on a transatlantic flight sitting next to a man she has fired. This chapter may have the strangest ending of any in the book. We meet Oliver Ott, current ineffective Publisher whose only friend is his basset hound. He is the last in the line of Ott’s that has created this paper as part of a grand corporate empire.

Most of the characters dislike or even hate their jobs. What the reader gets to see is a slice of their lives outside the newsroom. We are privy to their innermost feelings and the substance of their lives. We also get to see how the newspaper started as a grand enterprise and is now falling behind the times. There is no web presence, the budget keeps dwindling, staff are being let go, and the readership keeps decreasing. This is a fun book, sharp-edged and raw. It is a book about people doing things they’d only do when they think no one is looking – only this time, we are watching.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 489 readers
PUBLISHER:	The Dial Press (April 6, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Tom Rachman
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another take on the journalist: The Room and the Chair by Lorraine Adams Another strong debut collection: The Theory of Light and Matter by Andrew Porter

Bibliography:

• The Imperfectionists (2010)
• The Rise & Fall of Great Powers (May 2014)