Sardinia
28 June 2007
We had a great couple of weeks in Sardinia. It was very hot and we were staying in a fairly isolated hotel set in the middle of a pine forest near Arborea on the West coast – which allowed for plenty of relaxing days by the pool or on the beach. We also managed to explore quite a bit of the island including the main cities – Cagliari, Nuoro and Sassari – the picturesque towns of Bosa and Alghero (the only Catalan-speaking community outside Spain – Sardinia having been Spanish for three centuries), and several Roman and prehistoric (‘Nuraghi’) archeological sites. My highlight was the day we drove up a narrow winding road to the mountain village of Bitti, home to the famous singing shepherds, Tenores de Bitti. The Sardinian canto a tenore tradition is an amazing sound. For centuries shepherds have gathered in mountain huts at the end of the working day to sing to each other (and drink!) through the night. Standing in a circle facing each other, this is very much participatory music – not designed for an audience. The four-part unaccompanied close-harmony singing imitates natural sounds: the bass (‘bassu’) is the sound of a cow, the ‘contra’ is the sound of a sheep and the ‘mesu ‘oche’ is the sound of the wind. Above these the soloist (‘voche’ – the human voice) leads the song and carries the text. The result is harmonically scrunchy, with a very low growlly bass – hypnotically repetitive and remarkably catchy. After a lengthy search around the streets of Bitti we eventually found the tiny Museo Canto e Tenore and came away clutching heaps of CDs.
Labels: Holidays
'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid' by Bill Bryson
25 June 2007
About 15 years ago, my cynical friend Tony was uncharacteristically enthusiastic about a travel book he was reading by a then little-known American author called Bill Bryson. This guy, said Tony, had taken a road-trip across America and had written a hilarious account of the small towns he had encountered and their peculiar inhabitants. Bill Bryson was the American who understood irony - he was more cynical than my cynical friend Tony. I didn't actually read 'The Lost Continent' until years later. Tony couldn't let me read his copy because, typically, he had borrowed it from a girl he had been seeing but was no longer seeing but hoped he might see again in which case he would need to be able to return her book. When I finally got to read 'The Lost Continent' I loved it too - everybody loves Bill Bryson don't they? He has a great knack of capturing the absurdities of the places he visits and marveling at the ridiculousness of the people he meets without ever ridiculing them, and maintaining his own likeable persona through a healthy dollop of self-deprecation. I've read quite a few Bill Bryson books now and they are all extremely entertaining. I think his style works best when his descriptions of places are sprinkled with chance encounters with the strangest of strangers - for me his least successful book was 'Neither Here Nor There', his European journey where language barriers restricted those chance conversations. He also has a tendency to wear his research on his sleeve - sometimes bombarding you with too many interesting facts and statistics. I found his science book 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' a little hard-going - not because it wasn't constantly fascinating but there just seemed to be too much to take in. You do feel, though, that this is because Bryson is himself utterly fascinated and dying to tell you - and it is this raw enthusiasm that makes him so appealing. I've just finished reading his childhood reminiscences 'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid' which tells us what it was like growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, in the 1950s and thereby provides a comprehensive picture of fifties America. Extremely enjoyable and incredibly funny this was Bryson at his best - perhaps because this journey into the past covered a much longer period than his geographical journeys so there were many more bizarre encounters from which to cull his anecdotes - plus a highly entertaining new central character: the young Bill Bryson. Despite his familiarity with the territory, the usual Brysonic thoroughness of research is evident - with some great quotations from newspapers and magazines of the period opening each chapter. But above all you get a great sense of the affection Bryson feels for his family, friends and the place he grew up - despite, or perhaps because of, their baffling oddities.
Labels: Books
'The Kite Runner' by Khaled Hosseini
25 June 2007
My knowledge of the recent history of Afghanistan was fairly limited before reading 'The Kite Runner' by Khaled Hosseini - but I knew it hadn't been a good few decades. In Hosseini's impressive novel, the narrator looks back to his childhood in 1970s Kabul from the vantage point of present-day San Francisco. The early chapters, dealing with his privileged upbringing and his close friendship with his father's servant's son, have the same end-of-an-era feel as the Shanghai of JG Ballard's 'Empire of the Sun' or Kazuo Ishiguro's 'When We Were Orphans'. But here the comfortable childhood is shattered by the Russians rather than the Japanese and then things just get worse as the Russians are followed by the Northern Alliance and then the Taliban. 'The Kite Runner' is an old-fashioned epic novel - a family saga cataloguing dark years, tragedy and violence. It is a gripping, if sometimes disturbing, read - extremely well-written and intricately plotted with some great iconic characters. Occasionally Hosseini overdoes the neat little links - almost every significantly described item seems bound to make a crucial reappearance later in the story - but this is a minor criticism for a stunning debut novel which is crying out to be filmed.
Labels: Books
'A Spot of Bother' by Mark Haddon
25 June 2007
It wasn't to everyone's liking and was sometimes painfully honest to read but, for me, one of the best novels of recent years was 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen. This tale of two aging parents and their grown-up children impressively showed you the irresolvably opposing points of view of each of the main characters in a way that made you simultaneously sympathise with all of them - painfully demonstrating the irreconcilable tensions within families. Mark Haddon's new novel 'A Spot of Bother' pulls off a similar trick in a much lighter vein. Haddon was, rightly, much praised for his previous novel 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time' - a highly distinctive, wonderful book - if you haven't read it please do so now! It was always going to be difficult for him to follow this success and 'A Spot of Bother' had mixed reviews but I really enjoyed it. Inevitably, it is a very different - and much more conventional, novel, but it is extremely enjoyable and very funny. Like 'The Corrections', 'A Spot of Bother' deals with aging parents and their grown-up children. It is written in the third person but each chapter takes the point of view of one of the four principal characters - often showing us the same events from a different angle. But this is 'The Corrections' as it might have been written by Nick Hornby - an entertaining, page-turning, easy read in an English middle-class setting with some great comic set-pieces. Like Hornby or David Lodge, Mark Haddon has the ability to address difficult and complex subjects through deceptively 'lightweight' prose - never feeling the need to show-off its cleverness and dealing with dark subjects without making them unbearably bleak. And on top of all this the book is set in what is, for me, familiar territory. With Marina Lewycka's 'A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian', are we seeing the beginning of a new genre of 'Peterborough fiction'?
Labels: Books
Charles Hazlewood on BBC Radio 2
7 June 2007
I recently discovered the Charles Hazlewood show on BBC Radio 2 which is broadcast on Wednesday evenings at 10 pm. Hazlewood is a conductor and enthusiastic advocate of classical music. In his Radio 3 Saturday afternoon programme ‘Discovering Music’ he performs a fascinating and accessible dissection and analysis of popular orchestral works, finishing by conducting a full live performance of the work in question. Earlier this year his TV drama/documentaries on Tchaikowsky demonstrated his excitement and infectious enthusiasm in front of the camera. His weekly Radio 2 show is a wonderful example of breaking down genre barriers and appreciating good music without worrying about how it is labeled. From the barn at his home in Somerset he plays a variety of recordings from pop to country to contemporary classical to early music and discusses them with a guest musician. His guest then performs a couple of live numbers (often with Hazlewood accompanying or adding some percussion etc) before they improvise something completely new together. The result is intriguing, enjoyable and accessible whilst still resolutely musically serious – without a hint of ‘dumbing down’. Last week’s guest was Fyfe Dangerfield from The Guillemots – a band I’ve not listened to, but having heard his performances from Hazelwood’s barn I am keen to seek them out.
Labels: Music, Radio
