Short Stories from Azerbaijan

Though V S Pritchett is widely acknowledged to be the doyen of short story writing, as a literary genre in Britain it is particularly favoured by women. It is something of a surprise, therefore, that only two stories included in this extensive collection of short stories from Azerbaijan (published in the UK by Hertfordshire Press) are from female hands. This tells us quite a lot about a society in which women writers have failed to make much impact. In fact, none of the writers is young, either; all are aged 50 or more. Indeed, most of the works chosen are by men firmly in and of the 20th century, at a time when Azerbaijan was still part of the Soviet Union. Politics, accordingly, does not rear its head.

Only three of the tales is set it the capital, Baku, so this is very much about the village. Where men (usually) are men, when they have not had too much vodka, where the women often get knocked about — yet they yearn for love from their mates. The best of all, in my view, is Elchin’s “The Death of Koschei the Deathless”, about a prize cock who loses all his bravado after a single defeat in a cockfight, though I also smiled at Anar’s “A Georgian Surname”. In her brief introduction, Elizabeth White, the British Council representative in Azerbaijan, says that this anthology lets us know about the people of that country and those who lived there. She is right.

Educating Rita (1983) *****

Julie Walters and Michael Caine

Michael Caine takes top billing in this comic drama by Lewis Gilbert, with screenplay by Willy Russell based on his stage play of the same name, and available on BBCiPlayer for the next four weeks. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? But the real joy of this film is the performance put in by Julie Walters as the eponymous Rita (actually Susan). Her transformation from streetwise Brummie hairdresser to sophisticated participant in a summer school in English literature, is appealingly Pygmalionesque, despite the worst efforts of her dipsomaniac Open University tutor, Dr Bryant (Michael Caine). The stately background of Trinity College, Dublin, has a nicely ironic twist, but his behaviour is outrageous even for there. At first in awe of him soon she sees through his weaknesses but her altruism is such that one realises that she is a thoroughly decent young woman. In his drunken haze, Dr Bryant oscillates between his midlife crisis (exacerbated by failed relationships) and his fascination with the new creature that has entered his world. Maureen Lipman has an enjoyable cameo role as an OTT arty landlady, passionate about Mahler. But it is really Julie Walters who makes this a film to remember and cherish. When he heads of Australia, banished for bad behaviour, one has little confidence he will turn his life around. But she has, triumphantly.

German Jerusalem

Rehavia was a garden suburb of West Jerusalem to which many German Jews migrated from 1933 onwards and immediately after the Second World War. Many of them were writers, academics, thinkers — intellectuals in a word. Not all were Zionists but many were, seeing the construction of a new country as going hand-in-hand with a new life, new chances.Some tried to recreate the freedom and vigour they had experienced in pre-Hitler Berlin, but it didn’t help that in the long, hot nights of summer that their deracination felt so strong. Being German and Jewish was not easy, particularly when more ignorant neighbours called you Nazis. One might expect that Thomas Sparr’s book would talk about the places in Rehavia — and indeed there is a nice pen portrait of a café where regulars could top up on coffee and cake — but he is much more interested in the people, not only the incomers but also the host community, including the novelist who adopted the name Amos Oz. This indeed a very literary work, quoting at length from not just the manuscripts of Germans in Jerusalem but also letters and diaries, which reveal as much about the angst often involved as much as the sense of escape. For many the contradictions of being both German and Jewish was very real, touching on their affection or otherwise for the German language, the attraction of English and the difficulties associated with modern Hebrew. One can laugh out loud at the effusive telegram sent during the War to Joseph Stalin by poet and playwright Else Lasker-Schüler while fully understanding where she was coming from, and one gets insights into arguments for or against Martin Buber. But inevitably one comes away from this book rather saddened, at the loss of a period and an extraordinary colony now gone forever.

News of the World ****

The year is 1870; the Civil War is over, but its scars remain. Some of the white settlers in Texas are still bitter about the abolition of slavery and consider Native Americans to be vermin. Across that uncompromising territory Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks) — who has lost his business to conflict and his wife to cholera — travels, providing light entertainment by myopically reading extracts from newspapers gathered along the way to scattered communities whose residents pay him a dime a time. But then he comes across a young, blonde German girl, Johanna (Helena Zengel), who had been kidnapped by “Indians” when an infant and speaks only Kiowa. He takes it upon himself to return her home –though her parents are also dead — encountering more unsavoury characters along the way. All too easily this film by Paul Greengrass (based on the novel by Paulette Jiles) could have been sentimental or, worse still, it could have fallen into the pattern of so many past Western movies. But thanks to Tom Hanks’s sensitive and credible performance — he is on screen almost the entire two hours — one is caught up in the story. The magnificent landscape of rural Texas and New Mexico undoubtedly helps, as does the realistic portrayal of the flotsam and jetsam making a living there. It’s an extraordinary tale, beautifully told, in which the lead character learn as much about himself as does the audience.

Adú *****

Every year, millions of impoverished Africans make their way slowly north towards the imagined Eldorado of life in Europe. About half of them are minors. Hundreds drown in the Mediterranean or else are caught trying to scale the fence of the Spanish North African enclave of Melilla. Countless migrants become victims of people traffickers, or else get stranded in Libya or elsewhere. The journey is fraught with dangers and success is by no means guaranteed. So when six-year-old Adú (Moustapha Oumarou) and his sister set off from their village in Cameroon they enter a nightmare world of uncertainty. She will fall to her death from the undercarriage of a plane, heading not to Paris, as they hoped, but to Senegal. At least there Adú finds a companion in an older youth from Somalia, Massar (Adam Nourou); together they press on through Mauritania into Morocco. In Salvador Calvo’s film Adú (in Spanish, with sub-titles, available on Netflix), there is a parallel story of a crusty, middle-aged Spaniard who has dedicated his life to saving elephants, who also makes the journey from Cameroon to Morocco, but in more comfortable style, with his semi-estranged daughter, spoilt, moody and resentful. They never actually meet Adú but unknowingly transport his sister’s bike. Even when the most sordid outskirts of African towns are shown the cinematography is superb. Much of West Africa’s beauty is prominent, too. But what really makes this film so gripping is the astonishingly performance of young Moutapha Oumarou as the little boy lost in a world that is so full of shocks and challenges, yet nothing dims his will to survive.

Edward Carson and the Fall of Oscar Wilde *****

BBC documentaries, when done well, are among the best in the world. And Jim Creagh’s take on the role that the prominent Ulster Unionist, Sir Edward Carson, played in the downfall of playwright Oscar Wilde (available until 20th February on BBCiPlayer) is a memorable example. Too often Edward Carson, who defended the Marquess of Queensberry in the criminal libel action Wilde had recklessly brought against him in 1895, is seen as being unredeemably on the wrong side of history, even vindictive in his demolition of a man then at the height of is social and literary success. But here he is rightly credited for lamenting to his wife that he had just destroyed a great talent and, more significantly, intervening with the relevant authorities urging them not to take the matter further, as Oscar Wilde had already suffered so much. But the Establishment — perhaps at Queensberry’s urging, with underlying threats — was determined that Wilde had to be made an example. He was sentenced at a later trial to two years with hard labour for the relatively new offence of gross indecency. Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, has devoted much of his adult life to finding every bit of historical and literary evidence about the playwright and he makes the perfect narrator for the film, interviewing Wilde aficianados such as Gyles Brandreth, Rupert Everett and Simon Callow, as well as pursuing new leads on his own. It is all beautifully done, low key but revelatory. One comes away from it aware of Oscar Wilde’s shortcomings as well as his brilliance and more sensitive towards Edward Carson’s true feelings than his often stern photographs intimate.