The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three KATs (for fiction), Anunobys (for essays), or Brunsons (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one KAT, Anunoby, or Brunson indicates a generally positive review.

🏀 Fiction

“A Very Safe Place” by Rachel Heng. No KATs. Not all fiction with child protagonists reads like Y.A, but this certainly does; Heng is so relentless in her signposting of psychology and symbol one can’t settle into the close-third perspective. Heng’s setup is compelling – a Singapore family find a man, presumably a migrant, on the beach; they take him home – but the characters maintain their initial stances with such rigidity the narrative can never really start. I was still basically along for the ride until the very end, when the over-explanation reaches a fever pitch, which I have to quote in full: “The dense blocks of flats… were no longer a comforting sight for him, as they had been in the past. He found himself wondering about all the secrets that were kept behind each closed door. The tidy nature of the buildings, which had once been a source of pride for Shawn, now appeared threatening in its precision. He had learned the cost of such order. There was no place for the stranger in their country, in their lives. What else was shut out of this safest country in the world?” Come on, now. Are we reading the story or the seventh grade essay analyzing the story? The latter option is, quite literally, the last thing I want to do with my spare time.

🏀 Weekend Essay

“The Constant Rediscovery of Barbara Trapido” by Sam Knight. One Anunoby. She seems nice! And the work sounds very interesting. Why this is a Weekend Essay and not a Books piece, I haven’t the foggiest; did the Fall Books edition run long, perhaps? I’d rather read the pure letter-of-recommendation version of this essay; the backstory and Knight’s appreciation of the novel are sweet, but I could do without all the famous writers gushing and proclaiming their fealty. A little of that goes a long way. And it’s rather strange how little interest Knight displays toward any of Trapido’s subsequent books. If I were Trapido, frankly, I’d be a bit miffed.

🏀 Random Pick

“Celestial Navigation” (The Current Cinema) by Terrence Rafferty. (June 16, 1997). No Brunsons. Rafferty, whose six-year tenure is an interlude between leviathans, is perhaps most famous for not being Pauline Kael. A regular reader can probably guess what I’ll say about this – there’s virtually no formal analysis of the films, and in fact Rafferty largely uses the films as a jumping-off point to talk about the careers of their stars. I’m glad film criticism is mostly less interested in that sort of thing lately. A byproduct of the fabled death of the Big Movie Star, a beast which once thundered across the American scene in mighty herds. Did you hear? They just shot the last one.

🏀 Something Extra

Verdi’s Macbeth at the Met Opera is a magnificent piece of production; an eerie shifting set, a chorus that crawls out of, into, and around the ground. Everyone complains about stagings that eclipse the music until the staging is really good, then they rave. Maybe the issue is not the excess? The performances were all technically superb (Kelsey was maybe a touch throaty) but surprisingly restrained, given that the director cofounded Heartbeat, a home of close-range, actorly opera. Mostly, my issues are just with the score itself, which is entirely devoid of eerieness and instead tends toward jaunty, even ironic tunes that strike me as totally wrong for the Shakespeare. Having seen two Verdis, I do not yet get his whole deal.

Sunday Song: