He woke up soaked with sweat, breathing stale and fetid air. A naked light bulb shone in his eyes and he found he was in a steel-framed bunk slung by chains from the wall, like a bunk in a troopship or a jail.

“. . . Everybody out,” a voice called, and there were other sounds: groans and curses, wretched coughing and hawking, a loud fart, the creak and bang of bunks being folded back and clamped against the wall. “Let’s go, let’s go. Everybody out.”

When he sat up a hand closed around his shoulder and rolled him onto the floor. He was wearing grey cotton pajamas that were much too big for him: the pants tripped his stumbling bare feet and the sleeves hung to his fingertips. Swaying and squinting under the lights, he rolled up the sleeves first, disclosing a loose plastic bracelet that read Wilder John C. He bent over to roll up the pants but was kicked from behind and fell to his hands, and he looked up frightened into the angry face of a Negro in pajamas like his own.

“Watch your ass, man. This here’s the corridor. You got no business hunkerin’ down playin’ with yourself; get up and walk.”

And he did. Steel-mesh panels were being drawn across the folded bunks to prevent anyone from using them: this was indeed the corridor, the place for walking. It was yellow and green and brown and black; it was neither very long nor very wide, but it was immensely crowded with men of all ages from adolescence to senility, whites and Negroes and Puerto Ricans, half of them walking one way and half in the other, the dismaying variety of their faces moving into the glare of lights and then into shadows and then into the lights again. Some were talking one another and some talked to themselves, but most were silent. He felt warm grit under his feet until he stepped on something slick; then he saw that the black floor ahead was scattered with gobs of phlegm. A few of the walking men wore dirty paper slippers, and he envied them; a few were smoking, with packs of cigarettes in their pajama-top pockets, which puckered the roof of his mouth. Then he saw that some weren’t wearing pajama tops but straightjackets, and he wanted to whimper like a child.

There were closed windows at both ends of the corridor, covered with steel mesh: the light outside was drab – either an early grey morning or a late grey afternoon – and there was nothing to see but air shafts and windowless walls.

Near the middle of the corridor stood a Negro orderly in hospital greens, and he hurried toward him with a mouthful of questions – Look: where’s my clothes? Where’s my money? Where’s a phone: What’s the deal here? – but when he confronted the man he felt small and shy and all he knew was that his bladder was about to burst.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Where’s the bathroom?”

“Over there.”

And he followed the pointed finger into a bright stinking latrine where men squatted on toilet bowls or stood jockeying for position at a long urinal trough.

John Wilder is going on forty with a successful career in sales and a stable family; and he’s increasingly irrational, paranoid, and monstrously self-obsessed.

Yates, who is remembered for writing about the mundane sadness of domestic life in a flat emotionless prose, tackles new territory here, and the result is probably the weakest of his novels.

The novel is disappointing but not without its peaks, and Yates reminds us from time to time that he speaks “for weakness, for neurasthenic darkness, for struggle without hope and for the self-defeating passions of ignorance.”

He concentrates on alcoholism and insanity in this unrelentingly realist novel, but I could only empathize with the main character in flashes and was left wondering if the story would have been better narrated through the eyes of John Wilder’s wife. Yates gives her the first and last chapters, but she has little to do with the main part of the narrative, which leaves us trapped in the disintegrating mind of her husband.

WERNER HERZOG: Adventure! I cannot stand the term “adventure” nowadays, – I lower my head and charge, – it has degenerated into such an obscenity that you can go to the travel agency and book an adventure trip to New Guinea, to the headhunters, to the cannibals. So I really do not like this anymore. Why did Petrarch climb a mountain, actually? He was looking more into the interior, he was stunned by what he saw, the first one in modern time who climbed up a mountain. And you gave me the translation today, I only knew the original, he wrote it in Latin, but I have a translation now. And it’s very interesting, I have the letter here because he quotes, he quotes something important. He had a little volume of Saint Augustine, Confessions, with him and he opens the book, and he opens it by—randomly, he claims it, he swears to God that he opened it randomly at one spot in St. Augustine and it’s a very, very interesting quote. And he opens it—oh yeah, he got severe, serious warnings by a shepherd, an old shepherd, don’t climb mountains, because fifty years ago, this shepherd had climbed the mountain as a young man, never remembered that anyone else ever climbed it and regretted it deeply that he did that as if it were a sin, and it was a sin, and Petrarch had a feeling of that. Once up on the summit, he opens Saint Augustine, and he quotes Saint Augustine and I’d like to read it, because it’s a very significant statement. St. Augustine says, “And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolutions of the stars, but themselves they consider not.” So this is a very, very significant moment in the history of humankind. Number one, he should not have climbed it, there was something, an arch sin in it in taking all mysteries away from our planet, and tourism is one of the consequences in the long run. Tourists and tourism has devastated cultures, it has had devastating effects.

You see this is what annoys me so much about grammar freaks. They act as if language is rendered completely incomprehensible by the odd misplaced apostrophe or semi-colon. But the things they get their knickers in a twist about are very rarely anything to do with actual meaning.

*

After Iraq, it is clear that American military might is no longer a sufficient gateway to power. America has to work with its allies. That is one of the great lessons of a post-neocon world. A few years ago, Condoleezza Rice said that in the Middle East, the Americans will do the cooking and the Europeans can do the dishes. Can you imagine the national shame for the French, who are so keen on gastronomy, to have America — the nation of McDonald’s — insist that they will do the cooking? That was hard to swallow. But in all seriousness, Europe needs to get back in the kitchen. America can’t do it alone anymore.

Gilles Kepel on the Future of the Middle East.

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How the mighty are fallen . . .

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Literary Kicks has a nice post about Francoise Sagan, her life, loves, her first novel and the movie of her life.

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“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”

Times Online reports from a paper published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal.

She is, perhaps understandably, withdrawn and reticent and does not seek out people or seem interested in deepening the relationship with her sister or her sister’s family. In spite of this attitude she is slowly drawn into the life of the family and into the lives of others in the neighbourhood.

The main interest here is Kristin Scott Thomas, who puts in what is quite probably her finest screen performance. She is one of those actresses who can tell a tale with a wrinkle of her forehead or the blink of an eye. The film itself is, above all, a vehicle for an actress, and Scott Thomas gives it everything she has, though in an understated, minimalist way. She is supported admirably by the direction of Claudel and the other actors, especially Elsa Zylberstein as her sister and Frédéric Pierrot as the policeman. I honestly do not expect to see a better performance from another actress this year, and if she is not recognised in the available honours she will have been robbed.

The film itself is something else. It begins as a moody piece, trembling with tension, and for three quarters of the time it is running I was completely spell-bound by the images and concepts it throws up. With the aid of Scott Thomas we are given a portrait of a woman without any usable inner animation, someone whose soul has been allowed to wither and die. An alienated being who mirrors many of our own individual horrors and suspicions about the true nature of being and identity.

And then, inexplicably, towards the end, Claudel seems to lose his courage, or perhaps find his own feet of clay, and the film dies as he allows predictability to claim the day and seeks out a wholly unworthy ‘closure’ for the Scott Thomas character, and the sense of a happy ending for everyone else involved.

Do see it, though, there is an enormous amount to enjoy. But you might get a better film if you can bear to live without the ending.

The first thing I should warn you about is that this book is not for the politically correct or the faint-hearted or those with Anglo-Saxon attitudes. It breaks down pretty much every social convention and taboo that we in the West have been raised to believe in, and turns them on their heads. Necrophilia turns out not to be dead boring after all, but more an act of an everlasting prayer to the creator. Devouring women, withered by age and time, on creaky beds and straw mattresses in dank stables reeking of animals is the order of the day; in fact the whole process brings you closer to God. You begin to see?

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When he was on the screen, it was hard to see anyone else . . .

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The Guardian reports on five Cuban men who were arrested for infiltrating groups in the US in 1998. It was alleged that they were plotting attacks on Cuba. They have not received a fair trial and two have not seen their families in the intervening ten years.

Nine Nobel laureates, including Desmond Tutu and the German novelist Günter Grass have joined forces with others to protest the US government’s detention of the so-called Miami Five.