than past it (as they do in most other mov-
ies), does it follow that this technique makes
the viewer ‘involved like never before’? If
so, how to explain Brecht’s Verfremdungsef-
fekt? It works a similar trick, after all, with
the actors addressing their dialogue direct-
ly to the audience. Yet Brecht’s intention
was the precise opposite of what Wenders
claims Ozu was after – namely, disinvolving
you from the action the better for you to
think critically about it.
Might some of these problems be down
to Jen Calleja’s shaky translation? There
is no Mann movie called ‘Man from the
West’, though — as the rest of the essay
makes clear — there is one called Man of
the West. Even after the stroke that even-
tually killed him, Michelangelo Antonio-
ni would never have said ‘doppo’, though
he might have said dopo or, since he and
Wenders were in a restaurant together,
doppio. And while we no longer frown
upon sentences that end with a preposi-
tion, we can’t just dump any old preposi-
tion there. When Calleja has Wenders ask
himself ‘What’s happening to the people in
front of my camera? What does their dig-
nity consist of?’ she only confirms Werner
Herzog’s suspicion that ‘film is not the art
of scholars but illiterates’.
Incidentally, not all the quotations in
this review are laid out as they are in the
book. A great deal of The Pixels of Paul
Cézanne looks and reads like poetry —
lots of short lines, ranged left on the page,
Dennis Hopper in
The American Friend.
‘There’s a barely an image
in the film that doesn’t have
its origins in one of Edward
Hopper’s canvases’Crime
Death at close quarters
Jeff Noon
Alex Jackson is buried alive inside his own
body, a body which lies in a long-term coma
following a climbing accident. He can’t
see, he can’t move, he can’t speak. This is
the terrifying fate of the protagonist of
Emily Koch’s debut novel If I Die Before
I Wake (Harvill Secker, £12.99). The doc-
tors believe that Alex has no awareness of
his surroundings, but he can still think and
feel, and he can hear people speaking. His
family debate withdrawing life support,
and his friends talk about his girlfriend
Bea moving on, finding someone new. And
from these fragments of speech he starts to
piece together a shocking truth: that his fall
wasn’t in fact an accident. He needs to find
out who tried to kill him, and why, and to
protect the people he loves before they too
become victims.
Thankfully, Koch steers clear of senti-
ment and self-pity, allowing Alex to rel-ish his memories of climbing, and of being
in love, even if the urge to die takes him
over at times. Quite often, the words he says
to himself, the unheard words, are painful to
read. And yet the quest for truth energises
him. In the darkness of the stilled body, this
is a novel which glows with life.
A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window
(HarperCollins, £12.99) also deals with con-
finement, in this case, extreme agoraphobia.
Anna Fox hasn’t left her New York home
for ten months, fearful of taking a single
step outdoors. Instead, she sits by her win-
dow and watches the neighbours come and
go. She’s fascinated when the Russells move
in across the way, as they appear to be the
perfect family. And then one night Anna
hears a scream, and sees someone being
killed in the Russell household. But no one
believes her story, especially when there’s
no sign of a body.The story is written totally from the
inside of the character: we see and feel and
hear the world just as Anna experiences it,
feeling her sense of helplessness as her con-
dition worsens, and her fears grow. When
she’s forced to brave the outside world, even
for a few steps before collapsing, we feel her
desperation, every moment brought to pain-
ful life. There are echoes of Rear Window
and Vertigo, but Finn plots his own course
with a sure tread, and a tender heart.
Perhaps the most difficult fictional sub-
ject is the murder of children, a task that
Leïla Slimani takes on in Lullaby (Faber,
£12.99). Myriam is a successful French-
Moroccan lawyer, living in Paris. She and
her husband employ a nanny, Louise, to
look after their son and daughter. Louise
is quiet, polite and devoted: she loves the
children dearly, and they love her in turn.
It’s a perfect arrangement. But the family
and the nanny become overly dependent
on each other, and we see a hidden side
to Louise. Is she trying to take over from
Myriam, trying to control the children,
make them her own? Jealousy and sus-
picions increase, brimming over into vio-
lence, and tragedy strikes the family.
This is a book that draws no mercy.
There are no twists and turns in the plot, only
a sure appraisal of a situation that gradually
becomes worse and worse. The cold, calcu-
lated prose perfectly matches the nanny’s
personality. The tiniest events build up and
merge into one act of devastating cruelty.
This isn’t a pleasant read; more a forensic
examination of madness. Brilliant and hor-
rible at the same time.
On the level of style alone, James Lee
Burke is the greatest crime writer cur-
rently at work. His plotting doesn’t always
equal this style, but his descriptions of both
the Louisiana landscape and of the dark-
est aspects of human behaviour are without
parallel. His latest novel, Robicheaux (Orion,
£19.99) is well up to his standard. Ever since
Detective Robicheaux’s wife, Molly, was
killed in a car accident, he’s fallen back into
his old drunken ways. When the driver of the
car is found murdered, Robicheaux becomes
the chief suspect. And he can’t remember a
thing about that night, blacked out as he was
on booze. He can’t prove his whereabouts,
or give an alibi. And the suspicion of his own
guilt eats at his soul.
There are other tales wrapped around this
central dilemma, peopled by Burke’s usual
array of New Orleans criminals, prostitutes,
good old boys, rednecks and Southern belles.
The complications of the plot require a clear
head, or a page of notes by the reader. But
it’s all worth it: utterly convincing characters,
a unique atmosphere, and a whole parade of
ghosts haunting the land, and Robicheaux’s
skull. A deep romantic impulse burns away
like mist over the bayou, leaving only the
traces of hope. And in this writer’s hands,
that’s enough. We cling on.Lying in a coma, Alex starts to piece
together a shocking truth: that his fall
wa sn’t in fa ct an a ccid enttheir breaks contingent on nothing but the
need for white space or a pause in thought.
At one point Wenders tells us that he pre-
fers figuration to abstraction, and that ‘the
greatest art/ doesn’t refer to itself — /but to
the world, to reality’. I think he’s right. But
he might convince a few more people
were he telling them in straight prose and
not in a kind of mock verse whose one
certain result is the padding out of a pam-
phlet into something with the bulk of a
book proper.