Back on the Range

Hi all. My husband and I arrived back home in Canada this week after our long road trip from California. We stopped in Idaho on the way home to visit and ski/snowshoe with my sister and brother-in-law, which was fun. You might recall their dog Sadie is the younger half-sister of our dog Stella, so it’s nice to see them all together. The girls had a good time. Now I’m quickly trying to adapt to the colder temperatures as this weekend is in the single digits here, argh. It feels a bit wild to be back and I’m still adjusting, unpacking, and wondering a bit where we are after our long while in California.

Meanwhile over the past months we’ve been taking in some movies that could be up for Oscar nominations, which apparently will be announced on Jan. 23, if they decide to have the Academy Awards amid the fires and destruction. So here below are the movies we’ve seen. I tried to place them in order of the ones that I liked best. (I’ll leave out TV series for now but might talk about them next time.) 

*A Complete Unknown (5 stars! We loved this Bob Dylan bio film.)
*The Outrun (4 stars. Contemplative, a Scottish girl battles sobriety)
*The Return (4 stars, Homer’s Odyssey, both tough and compelling)
*Conclave (3.8 stars, weaved with intrigue inside the Vatican)
*Small Things Like These (3.4 stars, tale about the deeds of an Irish town’s convent)
*A Different Man (3.3 stars, a bit weird a story about a man with a disfigured face)
*Marie (movie) (3.3 stars, opera singer Marie Callas’s sad last week)
*Blitz (3.3 stars, the WWII bombing of London, full on)
*Juror #2 (3.3 stars, something felt a bit contrived but still worth a watch)
*Lee (3.3 biopic of WWII photographer Lee Miller played by Kate Winslet)

And here are other films we haven’t watch but might be on our list.

*A Real Pain
*The Brutalist
*Janet Planet
*His Three Daughters
*Nightbitch
*The Room Next Door
*September 5
*I’m Still Here (foreign, Brazil)
*All We Imagine as Light (foreign, India)
*Emilia Perez (foreign, musical, Mexico)
*Nickel Boys
*The Substance
*Wicked (musical)

What about you — have you seen any of these and what did you think? Admittedly I was sort of rooting for Timothee Chalamet to win Best Actor at the Golden Globes for his performance as Bob Dylan, but the field was pretty loaded and Adrien Brody won instead for The Brutalist. But it amazed me that Chalamet sang all the songs so convincingly in A Complete Unknown as well as the other actors in the film. Somewhere I read he had prepared for the role for like seven years, wow. Usually we are quite skeptical of biographical movies, so I didn’t expect much, but we both thought this one was fantastic.

And now I’ll leave you with a couple of reviews of books I finished lately. 

Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Cespedes / Astra House / 288 pages /translated by Ann Goldstein 2023 / originally published 1952

Thanks to Kathy at the blog Reading Matters for her favorable review of this novel last June, which I hadn’t know about before. The book reminded me quite a bit of the atmosphere of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend set in postwar Italy with its poverty and repression. Set in Rome, the novel’s protagonist is a 43-year-old Italian woman who buys and hides a notebook diary from her family of two teenage kids and her husband. As she begins to secretly write in it, she begins to observe things she hadn’t previously noticed … particularly how her ongoing servitude to her family has squashed her own self. 

This is a domestic story of a family that seems to be a bit on the brink … each member with stuff going on: the banker husband dreams of another career as a screenwriter; the daughter Mirella, a law student, falls for an older man; the idle son Riccardo gets a girl into a situation; and the mother (Valeria), a secretary, begins to have feelings for her boss. 

The mother, who narrates the story, is a bit of a complex character — both sympathetic but also annoying at times too. Around and around she goes with her thoughts and indecision whether to do this or that. As she manages the notebook in secret, she begins to transform and fight a bit for her own space and self, becoming a bit meaner, while still trying to hold the family’s outward respectability together. She harangues her daughter about her relationship with a man at work, while she is thinking of a dalliance with her boss. You have to stay tuned to the end to see if the mother succeeds in gaining a bit of independence and what will happen.

At the beginning I thought this book, which I listened to as an audio narrated by Cassandra Campbell, was nonfiction — it sounded so factual, but then as it went along I realized it was a novel. Apparently the author, who wrote about women’s subjugation and was imprisoned for her anti-fascist activities in 1935, was an influence on Elena Ferrante. Forbidden Notebook captured me especially in the later stages when it begins a bit to unravel. And that ending … felt like the air being siphoned out of a room.

The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance That Won the War by Giles Milton / Holt / 336 pages / 2024

This history kept us tuned in on the long road trip home as we listened to it as an audio, which was narrated by its British author. The book highlights the relations among the Big Three: Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt, which played out like a roller coaster of ups and downs and decided the world’s fate during WWII. Early in the war, Stalin was aligned with Hitler (as Germany and Russia invaded Poland) and probably would’ve remained so, except the Fuhrer decided to betray their alliance and invade the Soviet Union in June 1941. This upended things and soon Britain and the U.S. were supporting Russia with aid and supplies to wage war against the Nazis. 
 
Churchill first met with Stalin in Aug. 1942 but told him there’d be no allied invasion of Europe that year much to Stalin’s disapproval. Churchill and Stalin had very chilly relations at first, which later thawed and warmed but also at times seemed to hang precariously in the balance. Then Roosevelt met together with them at the Tehran Conference in Nov. 1943, where both Roosevelt and Churchill seemed to vie for Stalin’s favor, especially as Russia was turning the tide against Germany on the Eastern front. So much depended on the Big Three’s uneasy alliance to defeat Nazi Germany and their interpersonal relations seemed to play a large part of this, but unfortunately it didn’t last once the peace was signed in 1945 … as broken promises, hidden motives, and suspicions broke them apart.
 
Much of the book focuses on the various leaders’ meetings and conferences with the British Ambassador Archie Clark Kerr and American Ambassador Averell Harriman playing a large role in keeping the leaders and alliance on track time and again. Harriman, Roosevelt’s man in Moscow, thought Stalin was inscrutable and contradictory, but in some ways the most effective of the war leaders, while at the same time he was a murderous tyrant. And during the early part of the war when Harriman was in London, the book details Harriman’s secret affair with Churchill’s daughter-in-law Pamela, who was 28 years his junior and good friends with his own daughter Kathleen! (Neither Churchill or Kathleen led on whether they knew of this.) 
 
Kathleen Harriman plays a pretty big part in the book as she accompanied her father to London during the Blitz and to various meetings and conferences he had with Churchill and Stalin. Apparently it makes use of new papers and letters of Kathleen’s, which were given to the Library of Congress in 2022 and 2024 by her son. So with these additional documents and insights, fans of Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile, might want to check it out.
 
In various ways, the book is a bit of a juicy tale full of intrigue, war, booze, affairs, and big personalities that held things together when the world’s fate hung in the balance. Along with such great reads as The Daughters of Yalta by Catherine Grace Katz, which I reviewed in 2022, and The Churchill Sisters by Rachel Trethewey, which I read in 2023, it provided a glimpse into the dangerous days during WWII and the interpersonal relations among various key players.

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read any of these books mentioned, or seen these movies, and if so, what did you think?