New York Times Obituary

José Saramago, the Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998 with novels that combine surrealist experimentation with a kind of sardonic peasant pragmatism, died on Friday at his home in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. He was 87.

The cause was multiple organ failure after a long illness, the José Saramago Foundation said in an announcement on its Web site, josesaramago.org.

A tall, commandingly austere man with a dry, schoolmasterly manner, Mr. Saramago gained international acclaim for novels like “Baltasar and Blimunda” and “Blindness.” (A film adaptation of “Blindness” by the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles was released in 2008.)

He was the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize, and more than two million copies of his books have been sold, his longtime friend and editor, Zeferino Coelho, said.

A novel by Mr. Saramago, “The Elephant’s Journey,” is to be published posthumously in English on Sept. 8 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Mr. Saramago was known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction. In later years he used his stature as a Nobel laureate to deliver lectures at international congresses around the world, accompanied by his wife, the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río. He described globalization as the new totalitarianism and lamented contemporary democracy’s failure to stem the increasing powers of multinational corporations.

To many Americans, Mr. Saramago’s name is associated with a statement he made while touring the West Bank in 2002, when he compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the Holocaust.

As a professional novelist, Mr. Saramago was a late bloomer. A first novel, published when he was 23, was followed by 30 years of silence. He became a full-time writer only in his late 50s, after working variously as a garage mechanic, a welfare agency bureaucrat, a printing production manager, a proofreader, a translator and a newspaper columnist.

In 1975, a countercoup overthrew Portugal’s Communist-led revolution of the previous year, and Mr. Saramago was fired as deputy editor of the Lisbon newspaper Diário de Noticias. Overnight, along with other prominent leftists, he became virtually unemployable.

“Being fired was the best luck of my life,” he said in an interview in The New York Times Magazine in 2007. “It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.”

His first major success was the rollicking love story “Baltasar and Blimunda.” Set in 18th-century Portugal, it portrays the misadventures of three eccentrics threatened by the Inquisition: a heretic priest who constructs a flying machine and the two lovers who help him, Baltasar, a one-handed ex-soldier, and Blimunda, a sorceress’s daughter who has X-ray vision.

At one point the couple decides to take refuge for the night in a hayloft. “There is no more satisfying smell than that of turned hay,” Mr. Saramago writes, “of bodies under a blanket, of oxen feeding at the trough, the scent of cold air filtering through the chinks in the hayloft, and perhaps the scent of the moon, for everyone knows that the night assumes a different smell when there is moonlight, and even a blind man, who is incapable of distinguishing night from day, will say, The moon is shining, St. Lucy is believed to have worked this miracle, so it is really only a question of inhaling, Yes, my friends, what a splendid moon this evening.”

The novel, published in an English translation in 1987, won Mr. Saramago a passionate international following. The critic Irving Howe, praising its union of “harsh realism” and “lyric fantasy,” described Mr. Saramago as “a voice of European skepticism, a connoisseur of ironies.”

“I think I hear in his prose echoes of Enlightenment sensibility, caustic and shrewd,” Mr. Howe wrote.

Asked by The New York Times in 2008 to assess Mr. Saramago’s achievement, the critic James Wood wrote: “José Saramago was both an avant-gardist and a traditionalist. His long blocks of unbroken prose, lacking conventional markers like paragraph breaks and quotation marks, could look forbidding and modernist; but his frequent habit of handing over the narration in his novels to a kind of ‘village chorus’ and what seem like peasant simplicities allowed Saramago great flexibility.”

On the one hand, Mr. Wood wrote, it allowed the writer to “revel in sheer storytelling,” and on the other to “undermine, ironically, the very ‘truths’ and simplicities his apparently unsophisticated narrators traded in.”

Paradox was Mr. Saramago’s stock in trade. A militant atheist who maintained that human history would have been a lot more peaceful if it weren’t for religion, his novels are still preoccupied with the question of God.

His novel “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” in which Jesus on the cross apologizes to mankind for God’s sins, was deemed blasphemous by some believers and deeply religious by others. When the Portuguese government, under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church, blocked its entry for a European Literary Prize in 1992, Mr. Saramago chose to go into exile in the Canary Islands, a Spanish possession.

Mr. Saramago’s hardscrabble origins did not seem to predestine him for a life of letters. Born in 1922 in the village of Azinhaga, 60 miles northeast of Lisbon, he was largely raised by his maternal grandparents while his parents sought work in the big city.

In his Nobel acceptance speech, Mr. Saramago spoke admiringly of these grandparents, illiterate peasants who, in the winter, slept in the same bed as their piglets yet who imparted to him a taste for fantasy and folklore as well as a respect for nature.

One of Mr. Saramago’s last books, and one of his most touching, was a childhood memoir titled “Small Memories.” In it, he recounts the trauma of being transplanted from his grandparents’ rural shack to Lisbon, where his father had joined the police force. Several months later, Francisco, his older brother and only sibling, died of pneumonia.

Mr. Saramago loved to tell a story of how he came by his surname. His real family name was de Sousa. But when, as a 7-year-old boy, he showed up for his first day of school and presented his birth certificate, it was discovered that the clerk in his home village had registered him as José Saramago. “Saramago,” which means “wild radish,” a green that country people were obliged to eat in hard times, was the insulting nickname by which the novelist’s father was known.

“My father wasn’t very happy, but if that was his son’s official name, well, then he too had to take it,” he recounted in the 2007 interview. The family remained so poor, Mr. Saramago recalled in his memoir, that every spring his mother pawned their blankets, hoping that she might be able to redeem them by the following winter.

Though he was a good student, his family’s financial straits compelled Mr. Saramago to drop out of grammar school at 12 and switch to a vocational school, where he was trained as a car mechanic.

The most oppressive influence on him, however, was one he rarely wrote about: the fascist regime that ruled Portugal from 1926 to 1974. “The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis,” regarded as his masterpiece, is his only novel to deal directly with the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar.

Set in 1936 in a Europe darkened by the ascendancy of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Salazar, the book tells the story of the title character, a doctor and poet living in Brazil who returns to fascist Lisbon when he hears of the death of his friend Fernando Pessoa, Portugal’s great modernist poet.

What gives the book its dreamlike blend of historical reality and illusion is the fact that Ricardo Reis was actually one of the aliases Fernando Pessoa used to publish much of his verse. The novel, consisting of increasingly macabre encounters between the ghost of Pessoa and his fictional alter ego is a delicate meditation on identity and nothingness, poetry and power.

In his later years, Mr. Saramago’s fiction became more starkly allegorical. In novels like “Blindness,” in which an entire city is struck by a plague of sightlessness that reduces most of its citizens to barbarism, readers have found a powerful parable about the fragility of human civilization...

“Saramago for the last 25 years stood his own with any novelist of the Western world,” the critic Harold Bloom said in an interview for this obituary in 2008. “He was the equal of Philip Roth, Gunther Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. His genius was remarkably versatile, he was at once a great comic and a writer of shocking earnestness and grim poignancy. It is hard to believe he will not survive.”

(New York Times)

NPR Book Review - Rabih Alameddin

I love eccentric writers whose neuroses make me seem well-adjusted in comparison, and no writer — not one — was more neurotic than Fernando Pessoa.

Pessoa's work The Book of Disquiet is one of life's great miracles.

Even though every edition of the book lists Pessoa as the author, he didn't write it — one of his creations did.

Pessoa invented numerous alter egos. Arguably, the four greatest poets in the Portuguese language were all Pessoa using different names. One invented writer was a doctor and classicist; a second was an unlettered genius, a paesano who lived in the country; a third was a naval engineer and bisexual dandy who traveled the world. The fourth was "Fernando Pessoa," another invention, according to the author.

Each of Pessoa's writers was distinctive and different. He created poets who wrote in French and in English, one of whom wrote sonnets that were described by the Times of London as more Shakespearean than Shakespeare.

Pessoa not only created poets; he also gave them their champions. He invented a prolific critic, whose writings in English promoted Portuguese literature. He didn't stop there. His creations critiqued each other. Pessoa invented short-story writers, translators, philosophers, an astrologer, a baron who committed suicide, and a hunchbacked, lovelorn woman by the name of Maria Jose — more than 72 creations, by some accounts.

The poets themselves may have been Pessoa's best creation, but his greatest literary achievement is The Book of Disquiet. It is a "factless" autobiography, filled with observations, aphorisms, ruminations, haphazard musings, dreams, moods and the keenest revelation of an artist's soul. What makes this book — this fictional diary — transcendent is that it deals with the eternal quests: the meaning of life, of death; the existence of God, good and evil; the questions of love, reality, consciousness; and the disquiet of the soul. It quenches the thirsty mind and floods the arid heart.

A book tells you quite a bit about its author; a great book tells you quite a bit about you. When I first encountered Disquiet, I felt like laundry — the book dunked me in pristine water, then battered and wrung me and hung me out to dry in sunshine, rejuvenated. I was forced to examine the choices I'd made, the beliefs I'd held, the loves I'd forsaken and the gods I'd worshipped.

The Book of Disquiet manuscript, as well as most of Pessoa's work, was found in a trunk after his death — he hardly published anything while alive.

Pessoa, the man, was a bookkeeper. A loner. He had no friends, no loves, no family. He lived most of his life in a single room in Lisbon; his literary alter egos, and their writings, his only companions. He died in obscurity, a recluse, in 1935.

The Book of Disquiet tells you the truth and comforts you. It enfolds you. Pessoa might have died a recluse, but if you read his book, he'll be your good friend. He certainly is mine. (NPR)

Eça de Queirós's novel The Crime of Father Amaro is a lurid satire of clerical corruption in a town in Portugal (Leira) during the period before and after the 1871 Paris Commune. At the start, a priest physically explodes after a fish supper while guests at a birthday celebration are "wildly dancing a polka." Young Father Amaro (whose name means "bitter" in Portuguese) arrives in Leira and soon lusts after―and is lusted after by―budding Amelia, dewy-lipped, devout daughter of Sao Joaneira who has taken in Father Amaro as a lodger. What ensues is a secret love affair amidst a host of compelling minor characters: Canon Dias, glutton and Sao Joaneira's lover; Dona Maria da Assuncao, a wealthy widow with a roomful of religious images, agog at any hint of sex; Joao Eduardo, repressed atheist, free-thinker and suitor to Amelia; Father Brito, "the strongest and most stupid priest in the diocese;" the administrator of the municipal council who spies at a neighbor's wife through binoculars for hours every day. Eça's incisive critique flies like a shattering mirror, jabbing everything from the hypocrisy of a rich and powerful Church, to the provincialism of men and women in Portuguese society of the time, to the ineptness of politics or science as antidotes to the town's ills. What lurks within Eça's narrative is a religion of tolerance, wisdom, and equality nearly forgotten. Margaret Jull Costa has rendered an exquisite translation and provides an informative introduction to a story that truly spans all ages. (Amazon)

A movie adaption of this book is available from Hoopla

There are many strange things about “Tabu,” but the tale it tells is not one of them. The basic contours of the love triangle at the heart of this Portuguese film are familiar: a married woman caught between her husband and another man. But the way filmmaker Miguel Gomes and his co-writer, Mariana Ricardo, lay out the details of that story — or, rather, the way they embed them within another, almost equally fascinating framework — is unexpected.

Most unexpected of all is the way this cliche of forbidden love moves us, with a power that transcends the inherent melodrama. It takes a while to get to the meat of the movie, but it’s well worth the wait.

“Tabu” is basically divided into two almost equal chapters. After a short, fairy-talelike prologue, set roughly 100 years ago, about a man mourning his dead wife, the film jumps to “A Lost Paradise,” in which we’re introduced to Pilar (Teresa Madruga), a middle-aged woman in modern-day Lisbon, and her frail, elderly neighbor Aurora (Laura Soveral). Aurora, a widow with a grown daughter in Canada, is cantankerous to her caregiver, Santa (Isabel Cardoso). In her defense, Aurora appears to be suffering from incipient dementia. One early scene features the old woman sheepishly explaining to Pilar how she has just blown all of her money in a casino, motivated by a dream she had involving a figure who may or may not be a talking monkey.

At this point, your frustration level will be high, understandably. Little of it makes sense, and it’s not clear where exactly Gomes is going with all this. Is “Tabu” about the friendship between women from two different generations, or is it a movie about senility? Two additional subplots — one concerning a young Polish tourist who was supposed to be staying with Pilar, and another concerning Pilar’s friendship with an abstract painter — feel like distractions. Still, they do create the sensation that there is a rich life that exists off-screen, of which we are seeing only bits and pieces.

This is critical, since the film, shot in black-and-white, already looks more like an old movie than the real world. Gomes is signaling two contradictory things: a deep sense of artifice and a deep sense of verisimilitude. Oddly enough, it works.

Eventually, the second chapter kicks in.

Titled “Paradise,” it’s narrated by Ventura (Henrique Espirito Santo), a mysterious man who has been summoned from his nursing home to Aurora’s deathbed by the old woman. What follows in the last hour of “Tabu” unfolds like a silent melodrama, a pantomime enacting the romantic history that Ventura once shared with Aurora, many years ago, in colonial Africa.

Ana Moreira plays the young Aurora, with Carloto Cotta playing the younger version of Ventura. Ivo Muller plays Aurora’s late husband.

Now, it’s difficult to imagine any of this working. The film’s conclusion is essentially a protracted flashback, with no words coming out of the actors’ mouths.

The gimmick is, however, marvelously effective. Maybe that’s because the framing device makes the back story — which appears to be set in the early 1960s — feel less like conventional flashback than like genuine, if flawed, memory. At one point, a rock-and-roll band is shown performing the Ronettes’ 1963 hit “Baby, I Love You” — except it’s the Ramones’ 1980 cover version that we hear coming out of their mouths.

For these and other reasons, “Tabu” is mighty weird. But it’s also surprisingly mesmerizing. Once Ventura starts spinning his yarn to Pilar and Santa, they can’t help but sit, in rapt silence, swept away by the emotion.

You probably will be, too. (Washington Post)

Length: 119 minutes

Pedro Costa’s 1994 film Casa de Lava marked an immediate shift in style and approach from his debut, O Sangue. Where its 1989 predecessor was an exactingly detailed work made with rigidly controlled artificial lighting and interior sets, Casa de Lava heads out to the harsh, volcanic terrain of Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony off the coast of West Africa that was a staging post in the slave trade and exists even in independence as a source of underpaid, easily exploited labor. The lingering aftershocks of Portuguese colonialism are evident from the opening scene, set in a construction site in Lisbon, where one worker, Leão (Isaach De Bankolé), drifts off to the edge of a pit with a blank expression on his face. As he stands on the precipice of a skeletal building frame, the image cuts away, returning to the worker only after he’s fallen (or leaped) into the pit and lies comatose in a hospital.

Still unconscious, Leão is deported back to Cape Verde, dropped outside his hometown of Fogo. In tow is Mariana (Inês de Medeiros), a nurse who helplessly holds his IV bag as the plane that takes them to the island all but dumps the man’s stretcher onto a tarmac. Stranded on Cape Verde, Mariana becomes the film’s protagonist, navigating among the locals as she seeks to learn more about Leão, only to be met with silence and resistance at almost every turn. Indebted to I Walked with a Zombie, the film updates Jacques Tourneur’s postcolonial inquiries by framing them within a more socially contemporary form. Though Leão suggests a zombie in his catatonic state, for the most part Costa leans less on the eerie, supernatural vibe of Tourneur’s film for the more realistic silence of a close-knit community reacting against both an outsider and their own shared, barely restrained trauma.

Throughout Casa de Lava, the locals mill listlessly about Cape Verde, torn as they are between having no work at home and having to leave for Portugal to accept only underpaid, unsafe employment. At times it’s difficult to tell whether no one tells Mariana more about Leão out of their mistrust for her or simply because they’re so depleted by circumstance as to be unable to muster the energy to even speak to her. Apart from a few tracking shots of characters walking down Fogo’s streets, the film mostly consists of static, carefully composed images that use naturalistic lighting and location shooting with painterly precision. Mariana’s red dress is a rupture of color against the black soil of the volcanic landscape, her mere presence on the island rendered as an abnormality. Costa films humble, spartan domestic spaces as still lifes, most especially a worn dinner table (shades of John Ford) that functions as the locus of comfort and drama within a home.

Above all, though, it’s Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Brechtian deconstructions of both history and classic cinema that most inform Casa de Lava. A cornerstone of Straub-Huillet’s canon is the use of real landscapes shot in the present to evoke bloody histories of exploitation and conquest, and Costa uses the dark, bleak terrain of Cape Verde to suggest a long history of subjugation. The filmmaker is still finding his footing here, which may explain why he leans on the perspective of the Portuguese outsider, or that of Mariana’s aged foil, Edith (Édith Scob), a European woman who didn’t so much integrate into Cape Verde life so much as she became numb to her culture shock. Costa would gradually fine-tune his approach over his next few features, moving not only from formal 35mm compositions to the more abstract possibilities of video, but also from a white European point of view to that of Cape Verdean immigrants who fill his Fontainhas-set films. Even here, however, Costa’s gifts and ambition can be plainly seen, and the film’s enduring hypnotic power makes it a crucial entry in his filmography. (Slant Magazine)

Length: 106 minutes

NYT Critic's Pick 2010

What is the opposite of precocious? If no suitable word exists, somebody should invent one — in English, French or, ideally, Portuguese — to describe the 102-year-old filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira. He has completed a dozen features and a handful of shorts since 1998, which is to say since his 90th birthday. His latest feature, a tale of supernatural romance called “The Strange Case of Angelica,” arrives in New York on Wednesday, and while it is evidently the work of an artist with great stores of wisdom and a long view of history, it also has a playful, wry quality that can only be described as youthful.

Unfolding in a present that might easily be mistaken for an earlier century, “The Strange Case of Angelica” finds Mr. Oliveira casting his gaze both backward and forward. His setting, once again, is the landscape around the Douro Valley in northern Portugal, a region of vineyards and olive groves as well as old, aristocratic estates, and a familiar and beloved subject for his camera. (Among his first films was a documentary short called “Labor on the Douro River,” made in 1931.) And the story recycles and updates a never-completed project Mr. Oliveira worked on in the early 1950s.

But whatever nostalgia might hover around this movie is subverted by its mischievous, inventive and entirely appropriate use of digital special effects. A modern ghost story requires such tools, after all, and Mr. Oliveira deploys them with an elegant and judicious hand.

The coexistence of old and new ways of doing things is a motif that threads its way through this tale of unquenchable love and uncanny apparitions. The protagonist, a moody, faintly Dostoyevskyan intellectual named Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa), is a professional photographer who develops his prints in a darkroom and hangs them from a clothesline strung across his room. He takes pictures of agricultural workers plying their trade with picks and hoes and singing songs that sound as primal as the labor itself. His unsentimental landlady wonders why he bothers with them, since nowadays everything is done “with machines.” Mr. Oliveira appreciates both points of view, which is only fitting since the art of cinema, as he practices it, seems at once ancient and modern.

Isaac’s contemplation of agrarian toil is disrupted by a rather archaic commission from a wealthy local family. A young woman named Angelica (Pilar López de Ayala) has died, and her mother wants funerary portraits made. After a chilly welcome from the housekeeper and Angelica’s sister, a nun, the photographer sets to work and is jolted by what seems to be a hallucination. As he looks at her through his viewfinder, Angelica smiles and opens her eyes, something that happens again to one of the prints hanging in his room. Soon Isaac is visited by her ghost and begins to believe that he has been transported to a realm of “absolute love.”

The charm of “The Strange Case of Angelica” lies in the way it balances this mysticism with a thoroughly secular sense of the business of everyday life. Not that any of the nonsupernatural occurrences that surround Isaac — the Greek-chorus chitchat among his landlady and her friends; the steady work in the fields and olive groves; the rise and fall of empires and economies — are exactly banal. The world as seen through Mr. Oliveira’s lens is as fresh as if it had just been discovered and as thick with secrets as if it had always existed.

Of course, both things are more or less true, and Mr. Oliveira’s film has the added virtue of feeling entirely original even as it evokes a number of rich literary and cinematic traditions. As a ghost story, it owes more to Henry James’s psychological curiosity than to Edgar Allan Poe’s sensationalism, but it is also indebted to the various kinds of realism that flourished, in film and in novels, in the early and middle decades of the last century. Finally, though, it exhausts comparison, even to other films by this director, who has both done everything and is just getting started. (New York Times)

Length: 106 minutes

Vitorino Salomé Vieira or simply put, Vitorino, is a Portuguese singer-songwriter born in 1942, at the southern village of Redondo, that belongs to the Portugal's southern province known as Alentejo.

Vitorino belonged to the same "golden generation", which contained another great Portuguese musicians like José Afonso, Fausto and Sérgio Godinho, recovering the traditional styles and musical cultures of Portugal.

His first recording Menina estás à janela in 1975 entered easily in the portuguese colective, making his name known inside his country. Another greatist hits include Queda do Império, in collaboration with singer Filipa Pais, Marcha ingénua and Sul.

Belonging to family of musicians, his younger brother Janita Salomé, is also a renowned singer. (Radio King)

Albums

• Ninguém Nos Ganha Aos Matraquilhos

• Cantigas De Encantar

Listen: Xutos & Pontapes

Available on Hoopla

One of the surviving bands of the Portuguese rock explosion of the '80s, Xutos & Pontapés have a history of more than 20 years. Relaying on pure rock & roll creations and on melodic compositions spread through their songs, the band achieved a major following, not only in their home country, but also on other Portuguese speaking regions of the globe...(All Music)

Albums

• Xutos & Pontapés Ao Vivo Na Antena 3

• Nesta Cidade

• Circo De Feras

• Gritos Mudos

• 88

• Ao Vivo

• Dizer Não De Vez

• Direito Ao Deserto

• O Mundo Ao Contrário

• Dados Viciados

• Grandes Êxitos Vol. II

• 40 Anos A Dar No Duro

• Sei Onde Tu Estás! (Ao Vivo 2001)

NPR's All Things Considered 2010

Music has the power to take us to faraway places. Most of those places are only in our heads. But for me, the music of one singer had the power to take me all the way to the capital of Portugal.

It was one of those random events. A friend gives you a CD, you pop it in the player, and your life changes. That's what happened to me the first time I heard the voice of the late, great Amalia Rodrigues.

I had never heard of Rodrigues, and didn't know much about the music she sang, either. But once I heard it, I knew I needed more. The music is called "fado." You can think of it as the Portuguese blues.

I was so addicted to Rodrigues and fado back then that I packed my bags for Portugal to spend my 40th birthday at a fado club in Lisbon. One of the singers I heard there was Ana Moura, now one of today's top fado artists. For her, Rodrigues had it all — the technique, the artistry and especially the heart.

"She had all the characteristics to be the perfect singer," Moura says. "She had a beautiful color to the voice. She had a huge range, and for me, most important, it was the soul."

Rodrigues' soul came from the gritty streets and docks of her native Lisbon. More about her classic rags-to-riches story in a moment, but Bruno de Almeida, who made a five-hour documentary about Rodrigues, says the striking thing about her voice is the intense emotion.

"It's like she could feel the sadness of the world," de Almeida says. "I mean, that's what fado music is all about; it's being able to go to places where one is afraid to go to."

Rodrigues wasn't afraid of going all the way. She didn't wear her heart on her sleeve; she put her entire soul out there. And she didn't mind wailing about it, either.

That song, about the pride of the poor, hits close to Rodrigues' heart. She was born into an impoverished family, and was selling lemons on the street as a teenager when she was chosen to sing with the local marching band. But she soon moved on to fado clubs, and by 1941, at age 21, she was the biggest fado singer in Portugal.

Beyond Tradition

Then came the recordings, the movies, the international career. And, eventually, Amalia Rodrigues the icon. De Almeida says that, along with her tremendous instinct for expression, part of Rodrigues' success internationally was that she absorbed music from outside Portugal.

"She incorporated traditions other than the traditional fado, de Almeida says. "There's some influence from Moroccan music. She also has a very strong Spanish influence, which she says she got from the Carlos Gardel movies when she was as a kid."

One of those nontraditional songs, de Almeida says, turned out to be one of Rodrigues' signature tunes. It's called "Black Boat." The roots of the song lie in Africa. The guitarists pluck and pound out the beat.

"The note where she says 'Sao loucas,' which means, 'They are crazy' — she extends the loooouuucaaas. The end of that word is incredible," de Almeida says. "It's an extension that is often studied, and no one knows how she gets those notes."

Portugal's best poets wrote for Rodrigues, which freed her up to push fado in new directions. Another one of her highly expressive innovations was a sort of melismatic ornamentation, usually on a single word or syllable, with a strong, almost Tarzan-like tremolo. It turns out they even have a name for that, according to Moura.

"We call it 'rodriguinos,' " Moura says, "because she introduced this to fado. It comes from her name, Amalia Rodrigues."

'Lost Among People'

Another thing Rodrigues introduced into fado was her own poems. In one of them, she sings, "What a strange way of life my heart has, living lost among people, stubbornly bleeding."

Moura says that Rodrigues' own songs are among the most mournful, because that's the way she lived her life.

"She felt so many things that sometimes she was tired of feelings," Moura says, "and she mentioned death like the 'resting' of everything."

Rodrigues did think about suicide once, when she was faced with a throat operation that might have altered her voice. But De Almeida says things didn't go quite as planned.

"Always with Amalia, things can turn funny at any moment," he says. "It's sort of a mixture of drama with comedy, really."

Rodrigues came to New York, armed with sleeping pills, but instead the Fred Astaire movies she watched in her hotel room cheered her up. After a successful operation, she returned to Lisbon's Coliseum to give what turned out to be one of her most legendary concerts.

I never got to see Amalia Rodrigues live. She died in 1999, and all of Portugal mourned. But somehow, it doesn't matter that I never got to see her; she left us with hundreds of recordings. But it only took one little CD to get me to Lisbon, and to set me on a musical journey that still rolls on. (NPR)

Albums

• Essential Fado Collection

• Live At Town Hall

There’s always a solid sense of history in Arnaldur Indridason’s moody Icelandic mysteries. Although set in present-day Reykjavik and featuring a retired cop named Konrad, THE SHADOW DISTRICT, translated by Victoria Cribb, looks back on World War II, when Iceland was “a poor farming community … torn up by its roots and dragged into the maelstrom of world events.” Newly independent in 1944, the republic was politically neutral during the war, although occupied by Allied troops, mainly Americans, who were warmly welcomed by some of the local women. But when one of them was strangled behind the National Theater, suspicion fell on an American soldier.

Konrad enters this story in modern times when he investigates the murder of a very old man who kept a horde of newspaper clippings about that wartime crime. With his usual delicate touch, Indridason weaves in just enough folklore about the huldufolk (elvish “hidden people” who create havoc when disturbed) to remind us that a nation can never live down its legends. (New York Times)

“One of the things that characterizes a bad relationship is when people start feeling an obligation to have a child together.” So says the unnamed narrator of Ólafsdótti’s...novel, a woman dumped twice in the same day: first by her lover, because she will not commit to him, and then by her husband, because she will not commit to domestic life—particularly the idea of having children. Luck answers her call for change when she wins the lottery. However, as soon as she plans an isolated vacation in a faraway bungalow, she ends up accepting temporary responsibility for her friend’s child, a four-year-old deaf-mute boy. She and the boy set off on a road trip through Iceland where they kill various animals; pass by a lava field, a cucumber farm, and a Wild West motel; and cross paths with a cow portraitist, an ex-lover, and, maybe, a future lover. Ólafsdótti’s novel is outlandish, yet the protagonist’s conviction is plausible enough for the circumstances to feel authentic. The story explores what freedom really means when romantic and familial bonds are pushed aside. (Publishers Weekly)

Originally published in 1946 and out of print for decades, this book by the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author is a huge, skaldic treat filled with satire, humor, pathos, cold weather and sheep. Gudbjartur Jonsson becomes Bjartur of Summerhouses when, after 18 years of service to the Bailiff of Myri, he is able to buy his own croft. Summerhouses is probably haunted and is certainly unprepossessing, but Bjartur is a stubborn, leathery old (whatever his age) coot, and he soon has his new bride and few head of sheep installed in a sod house. When his wife dies cold and alone giving birth to the daughter of the Bailiff's son, Bjartur takes the child on almost as another test of his independence. Bjartur survives another wife, three sons that lived and several dead ones, all with his ""armour of scepticism,"" which ""endowed him with greater moral fortitude than that possessed by the other men."" Through hard times (in the guises of worms and a cow that threaten his precious sheep), Bjartur maintains his ferocious and self-destructive independence, one aimed not so much at bettering his condition as being able to tell his former employer where to get off. Laxness is merciless with the hypocrisy of the upper classes, as exemplified by the Bailiff's poetess wife, who applauds the simple life of poor country people, or the Bailiff's son, whose social-welfare schemes help him but undermine the crofters. Laxness is not easy on Bjartur, who is bloody-minded in the extreme, but he is tender enough to compose a poem to his exiled adoptive daughter, and bold enough to engrave a simple marker in honor of the misunderstood ghoul who has haunted his farm and family. He's a figure that Snorri Sturluson would have recognized. (Publishers Weekly)

Of Horses and Men has achieved some level of cult status since its prize-winning debut at the San Sebastián Film Festival in 2013. It’s a darkly comic and seductively strange film that slyly weaves some serious questions into a series of idiosyncratic tales of love and death between man, woman and horse (with pretty much every permutation you can imagine) in a remote Icelandic community.

The human protagonists are smallholders and horse breeders who take a certain curtain-twitching interest in each other’s business. Their lives are deeply intertwined with those of their horses. And, although the film is not strictly told from the beasts’ points of view, they are the ever-present (mostly) silent spectators. Director Benedikt Erlingsson’s repeated focus on the horses’ demeanours, faces and ever-reflective eyes suggests their profound contemplation of the curious and at times barbaric behaviour of the men around them. And for those with a taste for the visceral there’s even a life-saving scene, which is surely a homage to The Empire Strikes Back (and now has further echoes in The Revenant). (The British Film Institute)

Length: 81 minutes

NYT Critic's Pick 2016

Even though they live in rural Iceland, thousands of miles from the Holy Land, and in a modern reality of computers and mechanized farm equipment, Gummi and Kiddi have a decidedly Old Testament vibe. It’s not just the untended beards and the well-tended sheep. The two men, who live on neighboring farms in a quiet valley, are feuding brothers, locked in a sibling rivalry that recalls Jacob and Esau or Cain and Abel. The sources of the bad blood are never specified, but it trickles though “Rams,” Grimur Hakonarson’s new film, like an icy stream.

Kiddi is larger, ruddier, drunker and luckier than Gummi, and maybe better at raising and breeding sheep. Neither brother seems to have any other family, but their isolation does not spark any desire for each other’s company. When Gummi’s best ram comes in second to Kiddi’s at an annual contest for local breeders, it’s clear that this is not his first such humiliation. His desire for revenge, which may be aided by something like divine intervention, gives this cleareyed and eccentric movie its plot.

Mr. Hakonarson’s patient attention to the brothers’ daily routines yields some low-key humor, and “Rams” is in some respects a familiar kind of Nordic comedy, deadpan and touched with melancholy, about stoical men with unusual jobs. There are simple, satisfying sight gags built around the clumsiness of farm machinery, the absurdity of sheep and the indignities of advancing age and cold weather. But despite its affection for the quirks of its characters and their milieu, the film is most memorable for its gravity, for the almost tragic nobility it finds in sad and silly circumstances.

An outbreak of scrapie, an ovine affliction similar to mad cow disease, brings havoc to the valley. Flocks are slaughtered, livelihoods are wiped out and an ancient way of life is threatened with ruin. Mr. Hakonarson observes the grief and the fatalism that the epidemic provokes in Gummi and Kiddi’s other neighbors, and at times “Rams” has the quiet specificity of a documentary. Government inspectors and veterinarians show up to monitor the killing of the animals and the cleaning of the barns, and their calm, implacable authority only increases the sense of helplessness and devastation.

As the crisis deepens, and as Gummi devises a devious, illegal response to it — one that will also settle scores once and for all with his brother — the film takes on a stark, elemental power. The landscape of snow and volcanic rock threatens to overwhelm the creatures that call it home, and the modern world recedes in the face of a primal story of kinship and survival. The last shot is especially hard to shake. Tender and poignant, it also has the haunting authority of an ancient stone carving, as if these brothers were ordinary flesh-and-blood creatures transformed into figures of myth. (New York Times)

Length: 93 minutes

Originally published in 1946 and out of print for decades, this book by the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author is a huge, skaldic treat filled with satire, humor, pathos, cold weather and sheep. Gudbjartur Jonsson becomes Bjartur of Summerhouses when, after 18 years of service to the Bailiff of Myri, he is able to buy his own croft. Summerhouses is probably haunted and is certainly unprepossessing, but Bjartur is a stubborn, leathery old (whatever his age) coot, and he soon has his new bride and few head of sheep installed in a sod house. When his wife dies cold and alone giving birth to the daughter of the Bailiff's son, Bjartur takes the child on almost as another test of his independence. Bjartur survives another wife, three sons that lived and several dead ones, all with his ""armour of scepticism,"" which ""endowed him with greater moral fortitude than that possessed by the other men."" Through hard times (in the guises of worms and a cow that threaten his precious sheep), Bjartur maintains his ferocious and self-destructive independence, one aimed not so much at bettering his condition as being able to tell his former employer where to get off. Laxness is merciless with the hypocrisy of the upper classes, as exemplified by the Bailiff's poetess wife, who applauds the simple life of poor country people, or the Bailiff's son, whose social-welfare schemes help him but undermine the crofters. Laxness is not easy on Bjartur, who is bloody-minded in the extreme, but he is tender enough to compose a poem to his exiled adoptive daughter, and bold enough to engrave a simple marker in honor of the misunderstood ghoul who has haunted his farm and family. He's a figure that Snorri Sturluson would have recognized. (Publishers Weekly)

Kalio hail from Mosfellsbær, Iceland, but you wouldn't know it by frontman JJ Julius Son's fine-tuned biker-soul growl or the overheated garage blues on the band's major-label debut. "No Good," which appears on the soundtrack to HBO's Vinyl, stomps like the Black Keys at their meatiest, and "Broken Bones" is an able idealization of devil-befriending Delta blues. There's a little more ice and snow on "Vor I Vaglaskogi," where Son sings in his native language and sounds like Chris Cornell on a sad Viking quest, and he really lets his folk flag fly on "All the Pretty Girls," a tender bit of Bon Iver-style falsetto bliss. (Rolling Stone)

If you thought folk-rock's resurgence in popularity had peaked over the past few years, you may need to rethink that notion. Icelandic sextet Of Monsters And Men broke into mainstream consciousness earlier this year, claiming Top 10 positions in the US and Canada before docking their knack for infectious campfire melodies on these shores.

Their folk-pop hoohah is perfectly captured on lead single 'Little Talks' where they sing subtly of human loss over buoyant and brassy foot-tapping beats, placing them somewhere between the free-spirited nature of Edward Sharpe, the Magnetic Zeros and the soulful roars of Mumford & Sons. What's more, it's this blend of fantastical imagery with undertones of stark realism that plays a fascinating role throughout the remainder of the record.

"The forest of talking trees" speak of the battle of the birds and the bees in 'Dirty Paws', while singer Ragnar ÃÃrhallsson threatens to "fight these animals alone" until he finds his way back home in 'Six Weeks'. Crowd-pleasing "la la la"s and pacing stomps enhance a fairytale narrative that explores the themes of growing up, heartbreak and getting caught up in life's conflicts with poetic charm. It's a mighty feat for a group of young musicians at the beginning of their career, but one that's executed with elegant conviction.

The earthy beats and haunting guitars echo through dream-like cut 'Slow And Steady', which drifts between Kate Bush and Arcade Fire, while an accordion aids their travels on 'From Finner'. "We are so far home, but we're so happy," they chant over a ship-rocking beat, which is lucky, because with this debut collection in their rucksack they'll be touring the world for years to come. (Digital Spy)

Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Singers of All Time

When you land in Iceland, you feel like you're somewhere a bit magical. Maybe it's the volcanic activity, maybe it's the dried fish, but something's going on: Everyone seems to be extraordinarily beautiful, and everyone appears to be able to sing. Their singers are so far ahead of everyone else — especially Björk. Her voice is so specific and such a new color. Now that she's been around for 20 years, everyone forgets quite how extraordinary she is. She could be singing the theme from Sesame Street, and it would sound completely different to how anyone else would do it, and completely magical.

She first crossed my radar on "Big Time Sensuality," from that video where she's on the back of a flatbed truck. I really got into her on Homogenic, largely because there's so much space left for the singing. On that album, there are strings and beats, but it isn't very full musically, so she has to do all the dynamics and everything. If you really want to hear what she can do, listen to "It's Oh So Quiet," from Post: She can go from zero to 60 faster than any other vehicle in terms of singing. And then to angry.

In the movie Dancer in the Dark, she's singing as a different person and it stills sounds completely genuine. She could be an opera singer or she could be a pop singer. Dulux Paint has a catalog that has all the colors you can buy of paint, right? That is how Björk's voice is. She can do anything. In our studio, there are pictures on the wall of our favorite artists. I can see Mozart, Jay-Z, Gershwin, PJ Harvey … and Björk. (Rolling Stone)

Available on Hoopla:

• Voltaic

• Voltaic: The Volta Mixes

• Medulla

• Greatest Hits

• Selmasongs: Music for the Motion Pictures "Dancer in the Dark"

• Biophilia

• Debut

• Telegram

• Homogenic

• Family Tree

• Vespertine

• Post

Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club Pick

A lively, sexy, and thought-provoking East-meets-West story about community, friendship, and women’s lives at all ages—a spicy and alluring mix of Together Tea and Calendar Girls.

Every woman has a secret life . . .

Nikki lives in cosmopolitan West London, where she tends bar at the local pub. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she’s spent most of her twenty-odd years distancing herself from the traditional Sikh community of her childhood, preferring a more independent (that is, Western) life. When her father’s death leaves the family financially strapped, Nikki, a law school dropout, impulsively takes a job teaching a "creative writing" course at the community center in the beating heart of London’s close-knit Punjabi community.

Because of a miscommunication, the proper Sikh widows who show up are expecting to learn basic English literacy, not the art of short-story writing. When one of the widows finds a book of sexy stories in English and shares it with the class, Nikki realizes that beneath their white dupattas, her students have a wealth of fantasies and memories. Eager to liberate these modest women, she teaches them how to express their untold stories, unleashing creativity of the most unexpected—and exciting—kind.

As more women are drawn to the class, Nikki warns her students to keep their work secret from the Brotherhood, a group of highly conservative young men who have appointed themselves the community’s "moral police." But when the widows’ gossip offers shocking insights into the death of a young wife—a modern woman like Nikki—and some of the class erotica is shared among friends, it sparks a scandal that threatens them all. (Amazon)

Time: 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time

In author Neon Yang’s The Black Tides of Heaven, twins Akeha and Mokoya are sent by their mother, the leader of the Protectorate, to be raised in a far-away monastery. Initially inseparable, the twins’ paths begin to diverge as they grow into their abilities—both are gifted in the art of Slackcraft, a magic system that allows them to manipulate the natural world—and their individual identities. (In the world of the Protectorate, it is customary for children to choose their gender before becoming adults—but the certainty with which Mokoya makes her choice takes Akeha, who will choose to be male, by surprise.) The Hugo and Nebula-nominated novella has all the weight of an epic without the page count, but it’s worth noting that it’s not the only entry point into Yang’s richly-envisioned Tensorate series: Its twin, The Red Threads of Fortune, was published on the same day in 2017, and the duo can be read in any order. (Time)

The Tensorate Series

1. The Black Tides of Heaven

2. The Red Threads of Fortune

3. The Descent of Monsters

The Tensorate Series Books #1 - 3 (One Volume)

All Audiobooks available on Hoopla

In a frighteningly plausible future, the economy revolves around the currency of health, life spans are potentially eternal, and the new have-nots are born with poverty encoded in their genes.

Lea Kirino is a career Lifer. At 100 years old, she is already high up the ladder at the Healthfin fund, where she spends her days working with clients whose fortunes are invested in the organ trade—mostly hearts, lungs, and livers. A stringent devotee of the shadowy Ministry’s recommendations for maximum life expectancy, Lea and her equally genetically pedigreed fiance, Todd, are perfectly poised to join the long-rumored Third Wave. If chosen to receive newly developed life-prolonging treatments, Lea’s expected life span of 300 years might be extended indefinitely through a combination of organ replacement, enhancements, nutrient and exercise regimes, and, of course, strict avoidance of cortisol-increasing activities like listening to music or looking at art. Yet, even with immortality at stake, Lea can’t let go of the complications of her past—her brother’s death, her own violent impulses, the disappearance of her “antisanct” father, Kaito, who turned his back on the family 88 years ago and hasn’t been seen since. When Kaito suddenly returns, his radical influence stirs up Lea’s own unruly impulses and exposes her to scrutiny from the Ministry. His presence also has the unintended consequence of introducing her into the inner circle of the Suicide Club—a group of well-connected rebels who choose the crime of death over the sentence of eternal life—forcing Lea to decide if living means the experience of life or adherence to the cult of immortality that has replaced all other forms of culture in this speculative New York of the future. Heng expertly threads a ribbon of dread through her glittering vistas and gleaming characters; however, the plot is so solidly foreshadowed that the climax, when it comes, feels almost preordained. This speaks to the intricacy of the world Heng has created and sets a dark mirror against the robotic bureaucracy of the Ministry's oversight that assigns at birth "an algorithm [that] decides who lives and who doesn't" so as not to waste resources on anyone with subpar genetic potential. Unfortunately, it also undercuts the author's considerable skill at rendering her characters in all their solid, bodily reality by making their actions seem less like startling acts of free will and more like functions of an overweening plot.

A complicated and promising debut that spoofs the current health culture craze even as it anticipates its appalling culmination. (Kirkus Review)

The Singapore edition of Harper´s BAZAAR brings style and substance to all aspects of contemporary life through a sophisticated and diverse array of articles, blending intelligent comment and stimulating features with outstanding photography, glamour and informed round-ups of the best in fashion, accessories, health and beauty, restaurants, travel, the arts and interior design.

Dining well is a luxury Singapore Tatler has long appreciated, and T.Dining by Singapore Tatler, a bi-annual publication, affirms its commitment to covering the city’s dynamic food scene. It also offers an insider’s look at the global culinary landscape, food and wine trends and the best gourmet experiences. Not only does it celebrate the evolutionary nature of the business, but also the creative energy that feed the voracious and seemingly tireless professionals who make dining well an indulgence we so passionately afford ourselves. The aim is to offer readers a discerning perspective of the world of food and drink, an appreciation of quality dining experiences, not labels or exclusivity.

Her World is Singapore's Number 1 women's magazine. It caters to the stylish achiever and is the authority on fashion, beauty and lifestyle trends. It offers empowering reads on women's issues, and covers them with depth and style. There are in-depth features, interviews and provocative reads on issues that matter to the modern woman.

Winner of the Camera d'Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Set in Singapore during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Ilo Ilo chronicles the day-to-day drama of the Lim family - troublesome grade-schooler Jiale and his overstressed parents, Heck and Leng.

Comfortably middleclass and with another baby on the way, they hire Teresa, a Filipino immigrant, as a live-in maid and nanny. An outsider in both the family and Singapore itself, Teresa initially struggles to manage Jiale's antics and find her footing in her new community. The two eventually form a unique bond, but just as Teresa becomes an unspoken part of the family, unforeseen circumstances in an uncertain economy will challenge the new normal yet again. (Kanopy)

Length: 100 minutes

NYT Critic's Pick 2017

The trick is to place the knot just behind the left ear and above the jaw.” Those instructions on how to carry out a “humane” hanging are given early in the Singaporean film “Apprentice” by Rahim, the chief executioner at a high-security prison, to his new assistant, Aiman . Rahim takes enormous pride in his work, which he has been doing for 30 years, and he, at least outwardly, exhibits no qualms about his profession. When their time comes, he boasts, the death-row prisoners feel no pain because they die instantly. Rahim assures one man before he’s hanged that he is being sent to “a better place.”

The tricky mentor-protégé relationship between Rahim and Aiman, who’s 28, is the heart of this moderately gripping film, directed by Boo Junfeng, that by its end tells you more than you want to know about this form of capital punishment. The two appear to bond early, as when Aiman guides Rahim to a store from which he can replenish his dwindling supply of rope. By then, we’ve learned that Aiman, a polite, handsome Malay, is the son of a killer executed by Rahim years earlier.

A former army officer who was involved in gang violence when he was younger but has since changed his ways, Aiman lives with his older sister Suhaila, with whom he has a tense relationship. The dour Suhaila, who raised her brother almost single-handedly, is about to leave Singapore to marry her Australian fiancé and is critical of her Aiman’s new job.

At first “Apprentice” seems to be a basic revenge film in which Aiman stalks the man who killed his father. But it becomes psychologically more complex as it reveals Rahim’s buried rage and guilt over his occupation and Aiman’s ambivalence when offered the chance to step into his new boss’s shoes. “Apprentice” largely skirts the issue of capital punishment while letting it be known that most of the other guards don’t want the job. Killing a fellow human being is not easy. (New York Times)

Length: 96 minutes

Winner of the Screenwriting Award for World Cinema - Dramatic at the Sundance Film Festival

Filmmaker Kirsten Tan riffs on the tropes of both the buddy film and the road trip movie in her absurd yet subtly observed feature debut “Pop Aye.” The writer and director sets a tragicomic tone early on, when the middle-aged architect Thana (Thaneth Warakulnukroh) wanders out of his Bangkok office and buys an elephant he’s convinced is his long-lost childhood pet, Popeye. (According to the director, the film’s title refers to the way Thais pronounce the name of the old cartoon, which Thana watched while growing up in rural Thailand).

This outlandish act of regression occurs after Thana learns that one of his first architectural projects — a now-outmoded, family-friendly shopping mall — will be demolished to make way for a sleek luxury tower called Eternity. As an expression of midlife angst, a sports car would fit more comfortably in his driveway — not to mention be less likely to barge into the house in the middle of the night and terrify his wife (Penpak Sirikul). But Thana is itching to upend his too-comfortable existence.

As he sets off on foot with Popeye, played by an elephant named Bong, for a visit to the home of his uncle (Narong Pongpag), Thana’s journey is less about where he’s going than what he’s leaving behind. As a dramatic device, the elephant provides the filmmaker with plenty of organic physical comedy. There aren’t many places in modern society where an elephant fits comfortably, but the same could be said of Thana, whose firm is now being run by a man half his age.

Thankfully, we’re spared a long monologue spelling this out.

That’s what makes “Pop Aye” the thinking person’s feel-good film of the summer: Much is communicated nonverbally (or, at most, with sparse dialogue). The palpable bromance — if that’s even the right word for this interspecies relationship — is visible in each trunk nuzzle. Thana never smiles as widely as he does when peering into Popeye’s large, dark eyes.

On their trek, they encounter a hopeless drifter, Dee (Chaiwat Khumdee), and a weathered transgender sex worker, Jenny (Yukontorn Sukkijja), each of whom gives Thana some perspective on his own predicament. Thana’s attempts to connect are only partly successful. If he can get Dee to reunite with his estranged wife, he believes, maybe he can find a path back home for himself. As Thana, Warakulnukroh radiates a sense of unadorned humanity, coupling a sense of being lost with the desire to be of service.

There’s a great twist when Thana arrives at his uncle’s house. Although it fits with the film’s overall tone, the film’s final moments tip the scale of sentimentality toward the saccharine, giving “Pop Aye” a resolution that’s too tidy for the wildly expansive journey that came before. (Washington Post)

NYT Critic's Pick 2011

The Atacama Desert in northern Chile — the setting of Patricio Guzmán’s transfixing cinematic essay “Nostalgia for the Light” — is a place where heaven and earth converge. Or some might say heaven and hell...

...The thin atmosphere and low humidity have made the desert a magnet for astronomers. Here their telescopes can gaze farther into the universe than from anywhere else in the world. The opening image is the interior of a radio telescope pointed to the stars, which are so bright and clear they seem to flare like miniature high-wattage light bulbs.

Because much of that incandescence emanates from thousands of light years away, the film emphasizes, astronomy is really a study of the past — eons of it — the better to discover who we are, where we came from and where we might be headed.

But the Atacama was also the site of a concentration camp created in the 1970s by the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet from the workers’ barracks in the abandoned 19th-century salt-mining town Chacabuco. Thousands of political prisoners, many of whom later “disappeared,” were kept there. Today their surviving relatives, carrying shovels, go to dig for their remains, most of which were very likely dumped into the ocean.

For Mr. Guzmán...the parallel searches for cosmic origins and for the disappeared people are interlocking metaphors for the human search for meaning and continuity. Astronomy and archaeology, he believes, are variations of the same quest, with one directed toward the sky and the other into the earth.

Mr. Guzmán’s quietly reflective narration (in subtitled Spanish) is a poetic meditation on time and distance. But it is also pointedly political in its focus on remembrance. On a personal level, “Nostalgia for the Light” is his “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” in its expression of his longing for a time when Chile was “a haven of peace, isolated from the world,” a place where “only the moment existed.”

Defining the moment, however, is tricky. We meet Gaspar Galaz, a young astronomer who theorizes that the present doesn’t exist because of the time it takes for light to reach a viewer...

...We meet two women in their 70s, Victoria and Violeta, who have spent the better part of three decades combing the landscape for the remains of their loved ones. Victoria found a foot with her husband’s shoe on it, and she takes comfort from the discovery. We also meet Miguel, a survivor of five concentration camps, who from memory drew precise layouts of each prison after his release.

The film’s passionate insistence on remembrance lends it a moral as well as a metaphysical weight. Mr. Guzmán’s belief in eternal memory is an astounding leap of faith. (New York Times)

Length: 90 minutes

NYT Critic's Pick 2014

...The great accomplishment of “Gloria,” the Chilean writer-director Sebastián Lelio’s astute, unpretentious and thrillingly humane new film, is that it acknowledges both sides of its heroine’s temperament without judgment or sentimentality. In a North American movie — a fizzy Hollywood comedy of empowerment or a glum indie kitchen-sink melodrama — a woman like Gloria would most likely invite either pity or condescending encouragement. But Gloria, played with dignity and gusto by Paulina García, is too complicated for such treatment.

Her life is a familiar jumble of pleasures and frustrations, her personality a weave of moods, foibles and admirable traits. She sometimes drinks too much, smokes more than she should and hovers needily around her two grown children. She endures a dull office job and the late-night ranting of a mentally unstable neighbor, whose hairless cat finds its way into Gloria’s apartment. The more we learn about Rodolfo (Sergio Hernández), the more we might question her taste in men — a judgment confirmed during a family dinner with her ex-husband — but there is no doubting her curiosity or her confidence. She is immune to self-pity and not averse to emotional risk, as her relationship with Rodolfo demonstrates.

He is recently divorced but still attached to his ex-wife and their two daughters, who have a habit of calling his cellphone at inconveniently intimate moments. But Gloria likes his company, likes having sex with him and is susceptible to his floridly sincere declarations of love. For all her practical good sense, she has a romantic side, most evident in her habit of singing along with pop songs on the radio.

Viewed from one angle, “Gloria” is a cautionary love story, a tale of weary resilience in the face of disappointment and loss. But Mr. Lelio enriches it with a combination of narrative expansiveness and filmmaking discipline. No aspect of Gloria’s experience is off limits for him, and some of the film’s most memorable moments are those a more plot-focused director might have omitted, like the party scene in which she listens to unidentified friends performing Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Waters of March,” one of the loveliest songs ever written.

Its blend of whimsy and wistfulness is echoed in the film’s deft counterpoint of humor and melancholy...

...One of the delights of “Gloria” is that its richly detailed realism is fuel for thought: about Chile, about men and women, about how the cycles of family life have and have not changed as a result of sexual liberation and consumer capitalism. But Mr. Lelio, who is closer in age to Gloria’s children than to their mother, is wise enough to avoid overthinking or didacticism. He is interested, above all, in showing Gloria exactly as she is, which is beautiful. (New York Times)

Length: 110 minutes

Sebastián Silva's film is an unexpected combination: a gripping psychological thriller, and also a poignant human drama. It really is edge-of-the-seat stuff, with a startling denouement, and an outstanding central performance from Catalina Saavedra. She plays Raquel, the live-in uniformed maid, working for a well-to-do family in Santiago, Chile, in a handsome house with a pool, attending to the needs of the master and mistress along with their lively teenage children. She must also show respect to the children's very haughty and patrician grandmother, who comes to visit and does not hesitate to give her views on how the household should be run.

Raquel is treated as one of the family – that is, like a tiresome, but affectionately regarded cousin or poor relation – and the film opens with an uneasy and embarrassing birthday celebration that the children's mother Pilar (Claudia Celedón) insists on organising for her. Poor Raquel is now 41, with no man or children of her own, and at an age at which she might be wondering if she has wasted her life in the service of people who don't care about her. Silva cranks up the tension as the atmosphere becomes more oppressive and dysfunctional. Raquel becomes more needy and resentful, more bad-tempered, affecting selective deafness when she does not want to hear an instruction. She has headaches and fainting spells, and when her employers timidly suggest a secondary maid to help her with the chores, Raquel begins a sociopathic guerrilla war against the unfortunate new arrival and against the family itself.

The maid, in her uniform, is traditionally an ambiguous figure: a key player in her own secret theatre of power. She is intimate with authority, but emphatically beneath it, yet also conversely capable, in her very silent submission, of accumulating unspoken grievances with years of service and so increasingly menacing her employer with suggestions of some imminent uprising or unthinkable transgression. Silva's movie draws on the dark, erotic language of Buñuel, Genet and Losey, and it has something of Hollywood thrillers such as The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Fatal Attraction, together with Michael Haneke's icily parodic slant on this genre. But there is another strand to The Maid: a gentler, unalienated strand that invites the audience to recognise the servant's vulnerability, and here The Maid reminded me of Fernando Meirelles's Domésticas (2001) and Enrique Rivero's Parque Vía (2008).

Saavedra's portrayal is scary yet subtle, nuanced, and she appears almost to change physically with shifts in her character's mood. We can see the old woman that she is growing into, together with the shy girlish figure who first entered the family's service. It is a great star performance, reason enough on its own for seeing this. (The Guardian)

Length: 97 minutes

To read Alejandro Zambra is to engage with someone who writes as though the burden of history were upon him and no one else — the history of his country of Chile, of literature, and of humanity's shared experience. You get it from his pages, a sense that a story must be told, intimately and without reservation......Zambra's books have long shown him to be a writer who, at the sentence level, is in a world all his own. His exacting eye, his crack comic timing, his ability to describe just enough to keep the reader interested; these traits do much to demonstrate his staying power as an architect of larger stories. In My Documents, each narrative flows seamlessly, one after the next a glass of cool water cleansing the palate. Zambra finds the foundations for his most enthralling work in the complex ties between fathers and sons, nations and their people, and especially hapless lovers. Despite their issues, his characters more often than not possess a deep capacity for feeling — and for leaving indelible marks on one another...As he often does, Zambra more than delivers with his latest. He's a thoughtful craftsman, brick by brick laying the foundation for works that transcend continents and labels. Let us now forget the smallness of simply spearheading a new Latin American fiction. My Documents goes beyond that, burning brighter than most anything we'd call exceptional, yesterday or today and in any language. (NPR)

Centered around the 1986 attempt on the life of Augusto Pinochet, an event that changed Chile forever, My Tender Matador is one of the most explosive, controversial, and popular novels to have been published in that country in decades. It is spring 1986 in the city of Santiago, and Augusto Pinochet is losing his grip on power. In one of the city's many poor neighborhoods works the Queen of the Corner, a hopeless and lonely romantic who embroiders linens for the wealthy and listens to boleros to drown out the gunshots and rioting in the streets. Along comes Carlos, a young, handsome man who befriends the aging homosexual and uses his house to store mysterious boxes and hold clandestine meetings. My Tender Matador is an extraordinary novel of revolution and forbidden love, and a stirring portrait of Chile at an historical crossroads. By turns funny and profoundly moving, Pedro Lemebel's lyrical prose offers an intimate window into the mind of Pinochet himself as the world of Carlos and the Queen prepares to collide with the dictator's own in a fantastic and unexpected way. (Hoopla)

Chilean American writer Isabel Allende is known for utilizing magical realism—a literary tool popularized by fellow Latin-American author Gabriel García Márquez —and making it her own. Allende's best-selling, award-winning work is brimming with lyrical sagas and whimsical twists on historical fiction that often center on strong, adventurous women. In 2014, President Obama honored Allende with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and [in 2018], she was awarded the National Book Foundation's medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters... (Oprah Daily)

• A Long Petal of the Sea (Ebook & Audiobook on Libby)

• The Soul of A Woman (Ebook & Audiobook on Libby)

• Island Beneath the Sea (Ebook & Audiobook on Hoopla and Libby)

• Paula: A Memoir (Ebook on Libby, Audiobook on Hoopla)

• Daughter of Fortune (Ebook on Libby, Audiobook on Hoopla)

From Concepción, Chile, Los Bunkers is an alternative rock band formed in 1999 by brothers Álvaro and Gonzalo López, Mauricio Basualto, and brothers Francisco and Mauricio Durán. Well known in their native country, the band incorporates rock influences like the Beatles and the Kinks with native folk music inspiration. (Business Wire)

Singer-songwriter, actress, political activist, cancer surviver, Mon Laferte already has one of the most interesting and closely followed musical careers in Chile. In 2007 she overcame thyroid cancer to become one of the most popular and listened to Chilean musicians in the world. In 2019 she made political protests at both the Latin Grammy’s as well as in Santiago, statements that led to public outcry as well as threats of prosecution from the police. All at the same time, she continues to top the Chilean charts while also receiving the most Grammy’s by a Chilean artist in history. (Expedia)

Luis Enrique Gatica Silva, better known as Lucho Gatica was a Chilean bolero singer, film actor, and television host known as "the King of Bolero." He is widely considered one of the greatest and most influential exponents of the bolero and one of the most popular of all time worldwide.

Tim Winton is widely considered one of the greatest living Australian writers. He has published numerous books, and his work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Since his first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the Australian/Vogel Award in 1981, he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times (for Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music, and Breath) and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for The Riders and Dirt Music)... (Macmillan Publishers)

Books on Libby

• Cloudstreet (Ebook)

Books on Hoopla

• The Shepherd's Hut (Audiobook)

• Breathe (Audiobook)

• Island Home (Ebook)

Richard Miller Flanagan is an Australian writer, "considered by many to be the finest Australian novelist of his generation", according to The Economist. Each of his novels has attracted major praise and received numerous awards and honours. He also has written and directed feature films. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

The New York Review of Books described Flanagan as "among the most versatile writers in the English language. That he is also an environmental activist and the author of numerous influential works of nonfiction makes his achievement all the more remarkable." (Wikipedia)

Books on Libby

• The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Ebook & Audiobook)

Books on Hoopla

• The Unknown Terrorist (Ebook)

• The Sound of One Hand Clapping (Ebook)

• Gould's Book of Fish (Ebook)

• Death of A River Guide (Ebook)

• Wanting (Ebook)

2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Geraldine Brooks is the author of the novels The Secret Chord, Caleb's Crossing, People of the Book, March (which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006) and Year of Wonders, recently optioned by Olivia Coleman.

She has also written three works of non-fiction: Nine Parts of Desire, based on her experiences among Muslim women in the mideast, Foreign Correspondence, a memoir about an Australian childhood enriched by penpals around the world and her adult quest to find them, and The Idea of Home: Boyer Lectures 2011.

Brooks started out as a reporter in her hometown, Sydney, and went on to cover conflicts as a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Bosnia, Somalia, and the Middle East. She now lives on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts with two sons, a horse named Valentine and a dog named Bear. (Amazon)

Books on Libby

• Years of Wonder (Ebook & Audiobook)

• People of the Book (Ebook & Audiobook)

• March

• The Secret Chord (Ebook & Audiobook)

• Caleb's Crossing (Ebook & Audiobook)

• Nine Parts of Desire (Ebook)

• Foreign Correspondence (Ebook)

• The Idea of Home (Ebook)

NYT Critic's Pick 2002

Rabbit-Proof Fence is a 2002 Australian drama film directed and produced by Phillip Noyce based on the 1996 book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara. It is loosely based on a true story concerning the author's mother Molly, as well as two other mixed-race Aboriginal girls, Daisy Kadibil and Gracie, who escape from the Moore River Native Settlement, north of Perth, Western Australia, to return to their Aboriginal families, after being placed there in 1931.

The film follows the Aboriginal girls as they walk for nine weeks along 1,500 miles (2,400 km) of the Australian rabbit-proof fence to return to their community at Jigalong, while being pursued by white law enforcement authorities and an Aboriginal tracker. The film illustrates the official child removal policy that existed in Australia between approximately 1905 and 1967. Its victims now are called the "Stolen Generations". (Wikipedia)

In 1994, writer-director Stephan Elliott created a pioneering LGBT gem with this funny, smart and intensely lovable road-trip comedy – an anti-Crocodile Dundee. It’s about Tick and Adam, Australian drag-queen short of cash who journey from Sydney to Alice Springs where Tick’s estranged straight wife, Marion, has got them a gig performing in a hotel lounge. This they do in a converted bus that they rename Priscilla and have to repaint, to cover the homophobic graffiti people have been spraying on it. But they must also do in the company of Bernadette...a trans woman and artiste who has just been widowed and needs a new life direction.

Our quarrelling trio set off and encounter all sorts of hilarious problems along the way, their only friends and allies being some amused Indigenous Australians and one straight bloke...

...It’s a tremendous film that was ahead of its time on LGBT issues and, in some ways, is ahead of ours. (The Guardian)

NYT Critic's Pick 2013

Cate Shortland’s "Lore" is not a fairy tale, but it feels like one: a dark, mysterious fable of hungry, frightened children making their way through a perilous enchanted forest inhabited by demons. The film sustains an air of overarching mystery in which the viewer, like the title character, is in the position of a sheltered child plunked into an alien environment and required to fend for herself without a map or compass.

A remarkable young actress, Saskia Rosendahl, plays this chilly, largely unsympathetic protagonist, a blond 14-year-old German girl nicknamed Lore who herds her siblings through the Bavarian woods in the spring of 1945. Hitler is dead, and German resistance to the Allied forces has collapsed...Their destination, 500 miles to the north, is the farm of their grandmother Omi.

In the opening scene, Lore and her parents, Vati, a Nazi S.S. officer, and Mutti, destroy incriminating papers and shoot the family dog...Their arrests imminent, Vati and Mutti must go their separate ways...

The movie’s most important relationship is Lore’s complicated connection to Thomas, an enigmatic man several years older who carries papers identifying him as Jewish, although he does not match the documents’ picture...

...It isn’t until the very end of the film that Lore registers the impact of what she has been through. Having lost her faith, this once obedient Aryan princess vents her rage. (New York Times)

Indigenous Art + Music is a ...wide-ranging survey of contemporary Indigenous Australian music. Released in conjunction with the Nation Gallery of Australia's acclaimed "Defying Empire" exhibition, this collection showcases some of Australia's finest, most respected artists.

Gurrumul is a multi-ARIA Award winning musician; an international star, capable of transcending cultural boundaries. However he is considered an enigma within the Australian music industry. Featured here are highlights from "His Life and Music", his groundbreaking collaboration with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

Shellie Morris is one of Australia's finest Indigenous singer songwriters. The selections here see her opera-trained voice alongside the choir of the Borroloola Songwomen, combining to create a naturally expressionistic beautiful body of work.

ARIA Award winning performer and composer William Barton crosses the divide between classical and traditional indigenous music. His unique, extended technique of the didgeridoo has resulted in an impressive career to date, including collaborations with traditional dance groups, fusion/rock jazz bands, orchestras, string quartets and mixed ensembles.

Warren H Williams is a veteran country music artist. He has recently teamed up with rising star Dani Young for a new album entitled "Desert Water", recorded in the world's country music capital, Nashville. (Cumberland Council Library Service)

...[H]ailed by the British music media as one of Australia's most influential bands.

Formed in Perth in 1978, the Triffids played covers before capitalising on lead singer David McComb's sumptuously resonant vocals and gift for lyrical imagery.

Their breakthrough album, 1986's Born Sandy Devotional, has rightly gone down as an Australian classic - majestic and melancholic, richly evocative and freighted with emotion, from the nostalgia of Estuary Bed to the high, wide, spacey sound of Wide Open Road. "If Bruce Springsteen had put out Wide Open Road, it would have been a monstrous hit," says the Church's Steve Kilbey. "To me, it's tantamount to an Australian Born to Run."

Tall and tousled, McComb was a complex character, less concerned with musical details than with images and feelings, of conjuring longing and desire in a single, well-placed chord. The album cemented their band's legacy, but more than 10 years on the road took their toll, with McComb dying in Melbourne in 1999. (The Sydney Morning Herald)

For their 10th album – and follow-up to the cheery Murder Ballads – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds explored more redemptive qualities.

Originally released in 1997, gone were the menacing, troubled tunes of yore; instead, here was a selection of graceful, minimal, melancholic numbers that saw Cave reflect on spirituality, loves past and present, and almost atoning for past indiscretions. These are your actual songs of faith and devotion, and by Cave’s own admission his most personal album to date.

The opener is a modern-day classic. Into My Arms is a love song so perfect you wonder why any other composition of its kind bothers to go up against a ballad that all others should rightfully refer to as ‘Sir’. Cave opens his heart from the outset, the song beginning with the stunning line of "I don't believe in an interventionist God / But I know, darling, that you do". It’s such a gorgeous song that Peaches Geldof even has its lyrics tattooed on her (but don’t let that put you off). It’s also the only Bad Seeds tune you’re likely to hear at a wedding.

His brief dalliance with Polly Harvey, whom he became infatuated with after their Henry Lee duet on Murder Ballads, is referenced on Green Eyes, Black Hair and the more direct West Country Girl. Comparisons with Dylan and – more on the money – Leonard Cohen are no bad things either. The religious motifs of Brompton Oratory, an album highlight, and There Is a Kingdom lend an air of a man coming to terms with his place in the world, with subtle churchy murmurs over drum machines. The Bad Seeds themselves play a blinder, with gentle and sympathetic elegance throughout.

It’s an audacious task trying to pin down the core essentials in The Bad Seeds’ catalogue, as there’s so much of it, but The Boatman’s Call would be labelled a classic in anyone’s canon. No band on their 10th album should have much more to say, but taking this turn for the reflective helped reignite The Bad Seeds and further secured their legacy. It is, in short, brilliant. (BBC)

The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as seven other awards, The Sympathizer is the breakthrough novel of the year. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.

Halfway through “The Mountains Sing,” the first novel in English by the Vietnamese poet Nguyen Phan Que Mai, a grandmother explains herself to the granddaughter she’s caring for in Hanoi in the early 1970s while American bombs rain around them. With the rest of their clan dead, missing or away fighting, and their home reduced to rubble, the grandmother has been entrusting to the child the story of her life, rendering in harrowing detail its half-century span of resistance and survival in the face of violent dispossession, colonization, foreign invasion and civil war...

...“The Mountains Sing” unfolds a narrative of 20th-century Vietnam — encompassing the land reforms of the ’50s as well as several turbulent decades before and after — through multiple generations of tenacious women in a single family...

Que Mai contains her saga with a poet’s discipline, crafting spare and unsparing sentences, and uplifts it with a poet’s antenna for beauty in the most desolate circumstances. She evokes the landscape hauntingly, as a site of loss so profound it assumes the quality of fable...

Que Mai has said that she chose to write “The Mountains Sing” in English to gain the distance a second language provides — a distance necessary to approach a disturbing history calmly. But writing in English also allows her to present to an audience in the United States a moving portrait of its former enemy, the North Vietnamese...(New York Times)

Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction

Poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.

An Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, Tran Anh Hung's "luxuriant, visually seductive debut" (New York Times) recreates antebellum Vietnam through both the wide eyes of childhood and the deep blush of first love. In 1951 Saigon, 10 year old Mui enters household service for an affluent but troubled Vietnamese family. Despite her servile role, Mui discovers beauty and epiphany in the lush physical details that envelope her, while earning the fragile affection of the household's grieving matriarch. As she comes of age, the now grown Mui finds her relationship with a handsome pianist she has admired since childhood growing in depth and complexity. Though steeped in writer-director Tran Anh Hung's southeast Asian heritage, The Scent of Green Papaya was realized entirely within a Parisian soundstage. The film's heady, scrupulously detailed and wholly authentic depiction of a society in decline, a family in quiet turmoil, and lovers on the threshold of romance earned the Camera D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. A timeless evocation of life's universal enchantment and a powerful portrait of a vanished world, The Scent of Green Papaya is "a film to cherish." (Roger Ebert)

Length: 104 minutes

Get ready for an action extravaganza like no other in the suspenseful, heart-pounding Clash. Stars of The Rebel, Johnny Tri Nguyen and Ngô Thanh Vân are powerful on-screen as mercenaries with the same goal but different motives. When Trinh’s daughter is kidnapped, she’s forced to recover a stolen hard drive with codes to Vietnam’s first satellite in order to save her. The only way to accomplish the top-secret task is to enlist the expertise of several other specialists, including Quan, a mysterious man with whom she becomes romantically involved. But with her daughter’s life on the line, whom can she really trust?

Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times proclaims, “Clash is a dazzling Vietnamese martial arts movie with a soul, a stylish, gorgeously photographed film.”

Length: 64 minutes

Vietnam’s official submission for Best Foreign Film at the 78th Academy Awards.

An oblique coming-of-ager set in French-occupied Vietnam, “Buffalo Boy” sports a stronger narrative spine than is usual in Vietnamese rural dramas and a less fragile tone in its deployment of landscape and character.

Largely set in a featureless waterworld punctuated by treetops and patches of dry land, this notable first film by onetime applied physics researcher Minh Nguyen-Vo has strong fest legs and specialized tube potential, with even some arthouse possibilities in Europe.

Based on a collection of short stories by a native of the region, [the picture] is set in the southernmost part of Vietnam, where lowlands elide into the sea. For six months of the year, during the rainy season, the area is heavily flooded, forcing inhabitants to take their water buffaloes to higher ground for pasture. (Variety)

Length: 102 minutes

Trinh Cong Son, an antiwar singer and songwriter whose melancholy music stirred Vietnamese on both sides of the war, died on Sunday and was buried today at a Buddhist temple near Ho Chi Minh City. He was 62.

His family said he had diabetes after years of periodic hospital visits. Residents said thousands of mourners thronged his home, piling bouquets around it.

With his focus on human emotions and his refusal to conform to official dogma, Mr. Son suffered pressure from both the government of South Vietnam, where he lived during the war, and the victorious Communists, who sentenced him to four years of farm labor and political education when the war ended.

But his popularity won out and his music endured; in the last years of his life he was tolerated and even embraced by the government. His songs are widely performed both in Vietnam and among Vietnamese overseas.

''Crying for Trinh Cong Son,'' read the headline over a full-page tribute in the daily youth newspaper Thanh Nien this week.

''Truth, innocence and beauty in Son's songs surpassed all hostility,'' the newspaper said.

In his last years he took up painting as well as songwriting and was a fixture, with his friends and his bottle of Scotch, at a cafe in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon.

''Now, really, I have nothing to protest,'' said Mr. Son in an interview last April on the 25th anniversary of end of the war. ''I continue to write songs, but they concern love, the human condition, nature. My songs have changed. They are more metaphysical now, because I am not young.''

Mr. Son's popularity was at its height during the war years in the 1960's and 1970's when his songs propelled the careers of some of the best-known South Vietnamese singers. He became known internationally as the Bob Dylan of Vietnam, singing of the sorrow of war and the longing for peace in a divided country.

Almost everybody knew the words to songs like ''Ngu Di Con'' (''Lullaby''), about the pain of a mother mourning her soldier son:

''Rest well my child, my child of the yellow race. Rock gently my child, I have done it twice. This body, which used to be so small, that I carried in my womb, that I held in my arms. Why do you rest at the age of 20 years?''

Because of what it called ''defeatist'' sentiments like these, the South Vietnamese government tried to suppress Mr. Son's music -- which flourished underground and was also listened to clandestinely in the North.

When the war ended in 1975, Mr. Son refused to flee like many other southern Vietnamese including most members of his family. Along with tens of thousands of other southern Vietnamese who remained, he was sentenced to a period of ''re-education.''

Born the eldest of seven children and trained as a teacher, Mr. Son never married. His siblings fled to Canada and the United States after the war, and since the death of his mother a few years ago he has been the only one of his family in Vietnam.

Vietnam is home to more than fifty different ethnic peoples and hundreds of styles of music. The Khac Chi Ensemble features numerous traditional instruments representing the country's rich diversity. These include the dan bau (one-string zither played in harmonic overtones), the ko ni (stick fiddle with a resonating disc held in the player's mouth), and the t'run (suspended bamboo xylophone). The ensemble is led by Khac Chi and Ngoc Bich, two of Vietnam's most innovative and influential musicians. Now based in Vancouver, Canada, they have toured internationally for fifteen years. Their virtuoso performances and unique arrangements have fostered new awarenesses of traditional instruments and styles, both inside and outside Vietnam. (Amazon)

Dong Nhi, 28, real name Mai Hong Ngoc, started her music career in 2007 and has won a number of awards since. She entered the dance-electronic genre in early 2014, and the music video Bad Boy was a hit.

In 2015 she was named among the ‘Best Asian Artists’ at South Korea's Mnet Asian Music Awards, and in 2016 won the Best Southeast Asian Act category at the MTV Europe Music Awards.

"Nhi is one of Vietnam’s most beloved stars, with 2.3 million followers on Instagram, 8.4 million on Facebook and 858,000 on TikTok," Forbes said.

"After failing an audition for Vietnam Idol in 2007, Nhi started posting songs to social media platforms until her boyfriend and now husband Ong Cao Thang became her manager and helped propel her to stardom." (VnExpress International)

This is the story of Louis, as told in his own words, of his journey through mortal and immortal life. Louis recounts how he became a vampire at the hands of the radiant and sinister Lestat and how he became indoctrinated, unwillingly, into the vampire way of life. His story ebbs and flows through the streets of New Orleans... (Goodreads)

The Big Easy is a 1986 American neo-noir comedy thriller film directed by Jim McBride and written by Daniel Petrie Jr. The film stars Dennis Quaid, Ellen Barkin, John Goodman, and Ned Beatty. The film was both set and shot on location in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Wikipedia)

Keith Richards thought the Neville Brothers' Fiyo on the Bayou was the best album of 1981...With Fiyo on the Bayou, the Neville Brothers — singer Aaron, keyboardist and singer Art, saxophonist Charles and percussionist Cyril — set out to capture their undisciplined sound, descended from New Orleans Mardi Gras music, while commercializing it enough to reach a broad audience. (Rolling Stone)

In Federico Fellini’s monumental landmark of Italian cinema, Mastroianni anchors an irresistible mélange of behind-the-scenes farce, marital tragicomedy, surrealist theological vignettes, poeticized flashbacks, and elaborate projections of private fantasies. Mastroianni plays hotshot filmmaker Guido Anselmi, struggling to get his latest passion project off the ground, while juggling relationships with various women. Notable for its bracing formal modernism and wry self-awareness, 8½ is at its heart a compassionate tribute to the wrenching aches and pains, and ephemeral ecstasies, of the creative process...(Film at Lincoln Center)

With chapters on twelve major cities along the Italian Riviera (including San Remo, Genova, Portofino, and Santa Margarita), each will feature unique cocktail recipes as well as regional appetizers traditionally served with cocktails, often as a beachside ritual. You'll also find sidebars offering detailed info about local distilleries, celebrity barmen, cultural idiosyncrasies of bar life, famous hotels, and much more...

Summery, beachy, and filled with beautiful photographs, Cocktail Italiano will excite readers who are drawn to the beauty and style of Italy, travel aficionados, cocktail lovers, photographers, and will offer the perfect inspiration to enjoy a bit of Italy at home (or, toss it in your bag and head to Milano!). (Google Books)

It is the fall of 1966. Florence has been devastated by floods. Margot Harrington, a book conservator from Illinois, joins the crowd of volunteers who descend upon the city to help rescue its art treasures...Forced to find her own way, Margot ends up working in the waterlogged library of a convent, falling in love with an older, married man and also coming, clandestinely, into possession of an extremely rare book, The Sixteen Pleasures, a volume of exquisite erotic drawings and sonnets from the 16th century... (Kirkus Review)

An acclaimed bestseller and international sensation, Patrick Suskind's classic novel provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man's indulgence in his greatest passion—his sense of smell—leads to murder.

In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift—an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume"—the scent of a beautiful young virgin... (Goodreads)

She is often called the German J.K. Rowling, but Cornelia Funke is a unique talent. In a short period, she has written her way into the hearts and imaginations of audiences worldwide.

Although her novels — which include The Thief Lord, Inkheart and Dragon Rider — are usually found in the children's section, she reaches adult readers too, drawing characters of every age and every shade of morality with equal care and empathy.

...By the end of Inkheart, her most elegant and accomplished work to date, we have experienced wonderments — but grief too. In that book, the first of a trilogy, Funke presents us with a simple but irresistible idea. She creates someone who can read characters off the page and into life. Think of it: you have all of literature in front of you and a tongue that can animate written souls. Who would you choose? (20015 Time 100 List)

Jan Ole Gerster’s wry and vibrant feature debut A Coffee in Berlin, which swept the 2013 German Oscar Awards, paints a day in the life of Niko, a twenty-something college dropout going nowhere fast. Niko lives for the moment as he drifts through the streets of Berlin, curiously observing everyone around him and oblivious to his growing status as an outsider. Then on one fateful day, through a series of absurdly amusing encounters, everything changes: his girlfriend rebuffs him, his father cuts off his allowance, and a strange psychiatrist dubiously confirms his ’emotional imbalance’. ..Shot in timeless black and white and enriched with a snappy jazz soundtrack, this slacker dramedy is a love letter to Berlin and the Generation Y experience. (Music Box Films)

Humor, Mark Twain said, is tragedy plus time. Surely no better line exists to explain Gina Apostol’s brilliant new novel, “Insurrecto,” a book haunted by a real episode of horrific wartime violence that is, nevertheless, relentlessly funny...

“Insurrecto” begins in the present-day Philippines, that of Rodrigo Duterte and his campaign of “extrajudicial horror.” We meet two characters: Chiara, an American filmmaker writing a script about the Balangiga massacre, who believes a trip to Samar is “necessary for her spiritual journey”; and Magsalin, the translator she recruits as a guide, who is herself writing a script to subvert the story cooked up by this interloper. Their pilgrimage, it quickly becomes clear, will be no straightforward road trip... (New York Times)

A woman discovers that, after 30 years in prison, her friend and fellow inmate committed the murder she was accused of, leading to her release and discovery of the man who framed her.

Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival... Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz’s Tolstoy-inspired epic is a story of revenge deferred, “a meditation on the nature of Goodness in a world of deceit and corruption” (Olaf Moller, Film Comment) that functions as a slow-build tale of urban theater and class warfare, and a sensitive expression of family and forgiveness. (Film at Lincoln Center)

Feeling stressed out? Close your eyes and let your mind drift away to this collection of instrumentals!

The second Mrs de Winter is the narrator of Du Maurier’s marvellously gothic tale about a young woman who replaces the deceased Rebecca as wife to the wealthy Maxim de Winter and mistress of the Manderley estate. There she meets the housekeeper Mrs Danvers, formerly devoted to Rebecca, who proceeds to torment her. As atmospheric, psychological horror it just gets darker and darker. (Independent)

A huge success in England, this marvelously funny debut novel had its genesis in a column Fielding writes for a London newspaper. It's the purported diary, complete with daily entries of calories consumed, cigarettes smoked, ""alcohol units"" imbibed and other unsuitable obsessions, of a year in the life of a bright London 30-something who deplores male ""fuckwittage"" while pining for a steady boyfriend. As dogged at making resolutions for self-improvement as she is irrepressibly irreverent, Bridget also would like to have someone to show the folks back home and their friends, who make ""tick-tock"" noises at her to evoke the motion of the biological clock... In any case, it's hard to imagine a funnier book appearing anywhere...(Publisher Weekly)

The Story of My Experiments with Truth is the autobiography of Mohandas K. Gandhi, covering his life from early childhood through to 1921. It was written in weekly installments and published in his journal Navjivan from 1925 to 1929. Its English translation also appeared in installments in his other journal Young India.^[1] It was initiated at the insistence of Swami Anand and other close co-workers of Gandhi, who encouraged him to explain the background of his public campaigns. In 1998, the book was designated as one of the "100 Best Spiritual Books of the 20th Century" by a committee of global spiritual and religious authorities. (Wikipedia)

There is no single tragedy at the heart of Arundhati Roy's devastating first novel. Although ''The God of Small Things'' opens with memories of a family grieving around a drowned child's coffin, there are plenty of other intimate horrors still to come, and they compete for the reader's sympathy with the furious energy of cats in a sack. Yet the quality of Ms. Roy's narration is so extraordinary -- at once so morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple -- that the reader remains enthralled all the way through to its agonizing finish.

Rahel has come back... not to see her great-aunt, however, but because she has heard that her twin brother, Estha, has unexpectedly returned. Estha and Rahel were once inseparable, but now they have been apart for almost 25 years -- ever since the winter of 1969, when their English cousin, Sophie Mol, drowned in the river with their grandmother's silver thimble in her fist. (New York Times)

Available on Hoopla

...With his latest project, Chants of India, Shankar has created a family affair of an extended sort-included in the ensemble are his 15-year-old daughter Anoushka, a fine sitarist in her own right, and Shankar’s old friend, George Harrison, who produced the album and also contributes vocal and instrumental parts. Basing the music on ancient Indian chants, in addition to his own original pieces, Shankar has produced a surprisingly colorful and accessible set of 16 pieces. Recorded in Madras and at Harrison’s studio in London, this is perhaps the most joyful celebration of ancient Sanskrit mantras around. (Jazz Magazine)

A beauty contest rivalry is the backdrop for Ravi Kapoor’s award-winning cross-cultural comedy.

...California high school valedictorian and all-around over-achiever Lily Prasad (Tiya Sircar) has never lacked for approval from her teachers, parents or friends. But then suddenly her longtime boyfriend Karim (Kunal Sharma) breaks up with her and starts dating an airhead beauty queen. Ever practical, Lily decides to tackle the issue head-on by registering for the Miss India Golden State pageant to win her own crown and regain Karim’s affection...

(The) Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival award-winning screenplay quickly establishes an authentic tone that pays respect to Indian cultural norms, while poking gentle fun at the often-divergent interpretations that these traditions receive in overseas communities. (The Hollywood Reporter)

Curry is vivid flavors, seasonal ingredients, a kaleidoscope of spices and unexpected combinations. And 660 Curries is the gateway to the world of Indian cooking, demystifying one of the world's great cuisines.

Presented by the IACP award–winning Cooking Teacher of the Year (2004), Raghavan Iyer, 660 Curries is a joyous food-lover's extravaganza. Mr. Iyer first grounds us in the building blocks of Indian flavors—the interplay of sour (like tomatoes or yogurt), salty, sweet, pungent (peppercorns, chiles), bitter, and the quality of unami (seeds, coconuts, and the like). Then, from this basic palette, he unveils an infinite art. There are appetizers...and main courses... bean dishes ...And hundreds of vegetable dishes... There are traditional, regional curries from around the subcontinent and contemporary curries. Plus all the extras: biryanis, breads, rice dishes, raitas, spice pastes and blends, and rubs. (Amazon.com)

Sanjeev Kapoor burst onto the scene in India with an easy, no-fuss cooking approach. More than a decade later, he is a global sensation with an international media empire that is rooted in this philosophy. In How to Cook Indian, Kapoor introduces American audiences to this simple cooking approach with a definitive book that is the only Indian cookbook you will ever need. His collection covers the depth and diversity of Indian recipes, including such favorites as butter chicken, palak paneer, and samosas, along with less-familiar dishes that are sure to become new favorites, including soups and shorbas; kebabs, snacks, and starters; main dishes; pickles and chutneys; breads; and more. The ingredients are easy to find, and suggested substitutions make these simple recipes even easier. (Amazon.com)

The Amelia Peabody series is a series of twenty historical mystery novels and one non-fiction companion volume written by Egyptologist Barbara Mertz (1927-2013) under the pen name Elizabeth Peters. The series is centered on the adventures of the unconventional female Egyptologist Amelia Peabody Emerson, for whom the series is named, and an ever-increasing number of family, friends, allies, and characters both fictional and based on historical figures. The novels blend mystery and romance with a wryly comic tone, and at times also parody Victorian-era adventure novels such as those written by H. Rider Haggard. The series was published between 1975 and 2010, with the final, posthumous novel (completed by Joan Hess) appearing in 2017. (Wikipedia)

Book Order

1. Crocodile on the Sandbank (Available on Libby and Hoopla)

2. The Curse of the Pharaohs (Available on Hoopla)

3. The Mummy Case (Available on Hoopla)

4. Lion in the Valley (Available on Hoopla)

5. The Deeds of the Disturber (Available on Libby and Hoopla)

6. The Last Camel Died at Noon (Available on Hoopla)

7. The Snake, The Crocodile and the Dog (Available on Libby)

8. The Hippopotamus Pool (Available on Libby)

9. Seeing a Large Cat (Available on Libby)

10. The Ape Who Guards The Balance (Available on Libby)

11. The Falcon at the Portal (Available on Libby)

12. Thunder in the Sky (Available on Libby)

13. Lord of the Silent (Available on Libby)

14. The Golden One (Available on Libby)

15. Children of the Storm (Available on Libby)

16. Guardian of the Horizon (Available on Hoopla)

17. The Serpent on the Crown (Available on Libby)

18. Tomb of the Golden Bird (Available on Libby)

19. A River in the Sky (Available on Libby and Hoopla)

20. The Painted Queen (Available on Libby)

For the last quarter-century, Egypt has been ruled by Hosni Mubarak, a president who has won elections by imprisoning his opponents and has presided over a ramshackle economy riddled with corruption. From this depressing landscape, Alaa Al Aswany has conjured a bewitching political novel of contemporary Cairo that is also an engagé novel about sex, a romantic novel about power and a comic yet sympathetic novel about the vagaries of the human heart. Even the least politically oriented reader will find it engrossing...

An actual downtown Cairo landmark called the Yacoubian Building is the book’s unifying element, housing all strata of Egyptian society; Aswany brings those who live and work there vibrantly alive...Aswany’s shifting searchlight brings out the far-reaching effects of abysmal governance on the most intimate corners of everyday life — for everyone. (New York Times)

How to find in Libby: Search for "The Cairo Trilogy" or by author "Naguib Mahfouz". All three books of the trilogy appear in the search result.

The Nobel Prize—winning writer's masterwork is the engrossing story of a Muslim family in Cairo during Britain's occupation of Egypt in the early decades of the twentieth century. The novels of The Cairo Trilogy trace three generations of the family of tyrannical patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who rules his household with a strict hand while living a secret life of self-indulgence...

Filled with compelling drama, earthy humor, and remarkable insight, The Cairo Trilogy is the achievement of a master storyteller. (Harvard Book Store)

Book Order

• Palace Walk

• Palace of Desire

• Sugar Street