When I was in my twenties, I lived for a short time in D.C. with my then-fiance, who worked the night shift. I made a little over $20k/yr at the time working as a proofreader in Falls Church, where I commuted by bus every day. I had very little money to my name, not a friend to speak of there, and lived in a depressing high-rise with roaches. There was, however, one redeeming thing about it: it had a public library right across the street.
It was a small library branch, but I still ended up taking home armloads of books every week. I read a lot of the classics. I can remember getting home from work and spending hours at night reading Ulysses side-by-side with a reading guide, reading Don Quixote, Thomas Pynchon, all the big, difficult books. I’ve always had the ability to read for sustained periods of time without ever tiring of it, I guess it’s no wonder I became a librarian. I also remember reading this book.
Lanark immediately stood out to me as being authored by a singular voice. To this day, it is one of the most unique books I’ve ever read, and among my favorites. This signed, limited edition I have that some of my dear friends surprised me with as a gift is one of my most prized possessions. He did all the illustrations and it’s beautiful.
The “four books” thing is kind of a gimmick; the book isn’t very long, but it’s *epic*. It’s difficult to describe how seamlessly Alasdair Gray blends the surreal elements in the story with coming of age and trying to find your purpose as an artist in a society you don’t even want to understand.
I finally saw Poor Things, which is an adaptation of another Alasdair Gray novel, this weekend. I love the director Yorgos Lanthimos, who has similarly used sci-fi elements to explore mysteries of the human condition like family and couplehood.
I feel like Alasdair Gray and Yorgos Lanthimos are a perfect mesh of style and substance. This film is everything I love about both of them: a sort of epic bildungsroman replete with dazzling set design and costumes at every turn, richly imagined fantastic details and surprising dark humor, but still ultimately about finding your identity in a baffling universe that tries to stifle your voice at every turn. There’s no doubt that Emma Stone’s captivating performance absolutely carried this film. If it was someone any less committed to it, any less capable of delivering her absurdist lines with the pitch-perfect blend of naivete and evolving selfhood, less capable of speaking her own original language in its self-contained universe, even with the film’s visual mastery and its high concept, it could have faltered.
There was a line she delivered toward the end of the movie, to the man she calls “God” her creator, about how she was beginning to become fascinated by this life he had given her. It struck me that the whole film could be read as a metaphor for life itself: despite Bella’s unusual circumstances, we all have to try to come to that reckoning with our own lives, about what fascinates us, through exploration and experience. I had a thought once about the title “It’s A Wonderful Life,” and how I feel like that’s such an apt title—it’s not a perfect life, it’s maybe not even a good life—but it’s certainly full of wonder, of curiosity, of fascination.
