KING KONG

Cheap! The girl fell in love with King Kong. Period. We really don't need that pathetic Adrian Brody love affair! Alternative end : Naomi jumps after King Kong from the Empire State Building! Now that would have been true love!!

Sándor Márai

I have just finished another great work by the Hungarian author Sándor Márai. This largely forgotten writer has only recently been "rediscovered" when his wonderful book "Embers" from 1942 was republished in English and German in 2000 and became an international best-seller. Nothing much happens in this two hundred page novel but the duel of words and silences between two close friends who haven't seen each other for forty-one years provokes an inarticulate tension that is hard to beat. Márai is a true master in analysing the smouldering "embers" of feelings of lust, love, revenge and hate and this quality can be found throughout his complete works.

"Conversations in Bolzano" is a book set in 1758 and written in 1940 that was first translated in 2004, only the second of Márai's works to be brought to a wider audience. It tells the story of ten days or so in the life of a Venetian libertine, whom one might recognize as Giacomo Casanova. It's another fascinating tale of suppressed love & humiliation.

Profoundly antifascist, Márai survived World War II, but persecution by the Communists drove him from the country in 1948, first to Italy and then to the United States. "Memoir of Hungary, 1944-1948" provides one of the most poignant and human portraits of life in Hungary between the German occupation in 1944 and the solidification of communist power in 1948. Both a fervent anti-fascist and anti-communist, Márai draws a vivid portrait of these turbulent times, while delivering a telling indictment of the communist system from which he fled.

It is almost unbelievable that one of Márai's best works "Az Igazi/Judit" has not been translated into English or French yet. Fortunately, the Dutch translation "Kentering van een huwelijk" has just been issued and the book, originally published in 1978, confirms Márai's position as one of the most important authors of the twentieth-century. It tells the story of the deconstruction of a marriage, seen from 3 different points of view : a bourgeois man, his wife and the housemaid he later marries and divorces. The philosophical reflections on human nature, loneliness & betrayal are riveting personal reflections; pieces of wisdom from a true master that ask to be re-read. Somewhere in the book, the bourgeois man talks about the right to die in loneliness. After Sándor Márai's wife died, he himself retreated more and more into isolation and finally committed suicide in San Diego in 1989, completely ignored by the world. Not unlike Cesare Pavese's suicide, it makes the sincerity of his work even more heartfelt.

kazoo + jazz = no fun

I have just bought the THELONIOUS MONK QUARTET with JOHN COLTRANE at Carnegie Hall CD reissue on Blue Note Records and the kazoo-like humming, omnipresent on the last tracks, irritates me terribly. I have absolutely no clue where this disturbing background drone comes from. I first thought I had bought a defect copy but when I listen very closely, I realise it comes from one of the musicians. I tried to find info on the internet because no review mentions the annoying humming but the only relating thing I found was a sentence in a review of an old Art Tatum CD : "...and Slam Stewart turns in some of his patented bowed bass work with accompanying humming, creating the illusion of a low-pitched kazoo". Is Ahmed Abdul-Malik spoiling the fun?