A portrait of Gregorio Fuentes in 2001. Fuentes was captain, cook and friend to Ernest Hemingway and many say he was the inspiration for the protagonist in The Old Man and the Sea. Photograph: Jose Goitia/AP 6. King Lear by William Shakespeare (circa 1606) The inevitable template for all stories of aged fathers dealing with selfish children, from Balzac and Mauriac to Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) and Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991). Recent speculation puts Lear’s difficulties down to Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia. But his problems didn’t begin with age, and his senility – such as it might be – is hardly his defining trait (and, tellingly, it’s not deployed by either Kurosawa or Smiley). As Goneril and Regan pointedly note, their father was always a bit bonkers at the best of times and old age has only exacerbated “the imperfections of long-engrafted condition”. 7. Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac (1835) Goriot is fond and foolish like Lear, but endlessly patient and loving. He impoverishes himself to help out his two greedy, frivolous daughters, Anastasie and Delphine, who almost make Goneril and Regan look like paragons of filial gratitude. Balzac lays it on thick in the deathbed and funeral scenes, giving us (like Mauriac) a bleak view of a money- and status-obsessed society tragically adrift from its familial moorings. 8. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962) The poet John Shade is not exactly old: he has died, we learn from the “Foreword”, a few weeks past his 61st birthday. But his 999-line poem is an eloquent and moving meditation on death, loss, age (including the logistics of shaving a dewlap) and the afterlife. The fantastical and famously baffling commentary – with its obsessions with political machinations in faraway Zembla – tends to make readers overlook the dastardly brilliance of the Shade/Nabokov poem. Here’s Shade on 40 years of marriage: “Four hundred thousand times/The tall clock with the hoarse Westminster chimes/Has marked our common hour. How many more/Free calendars shall grace the kitchen door?” 9. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952) “Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same colour as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.” How can we not cheer on Santiago, the luckless fisherman, 84 days without a catch, who on day 85 hooks the huge marlin far off the coast of Cuba? Hemingway was only in his early 50s when he wrote the novel, but it’s tempting to read his own plight – poor health, writer’s block, a spate of vicious reviews – in to that of the struggling Santiago. Luckily, The Old Man and the Sea turned out to be Hemingway’s literary marlin. He then landed the Pulitzer and, in 1954, the Nobel prize. 10. Old Filth by Jane Gardam (2004) The first in a wonderful trilogy (with The Man in the Wooden Hat and Last Friends) about the courteous but astringent Sir Edward Feathers. Gardam gives a pitch-perfect portrait of this long-time expat, retired QC, and bravely grieving widower whose shoes “shone like conkers”. His white-knuckle motorway odyssey to Teesside in his Mercedes in the wake of his wife’s death is a hilarious, poignant and impeccably unsentimental portrait of discombobulation, loss and unbowing determination. Don’t Hide the Madness: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg is the result, and it is a charming, often funny, read. While Ginsberg and Burroughs are famous for their often incendiary literary efforts, this conversation sees them in very different form – as forgetful old men discussing their health problems and sharing old memories. The book is highly intimate in that it is very definitely unstructured, with the conversation going around and around in circles, coming back to the same topics, as they reminisce about the past and discuss books they’ve read and movies they’ve watched. Burroughs in particular seems very softened, a far cry from his public persona – and indeed, probably his private one – of previous decades. While he still has the occasional obscene tale to tell, and brings up his old favourite topic of viruses, he is more interested in talking about his beloved cats, which often interrupt the conversation. This is the Burroughs readers would know from his later – lesser-known – work, The Cat Inside. He is an old man by now, and it is not hard to tell. He often seems not to hear or follow the conversation, and sometimes just chips in with a “hmm”. Yet in some ways it is the same old Burroughs, replete with odd theories, wild stories, and guns. Although his passion for firearms remains strong, Burroughs is utterly appalled by the thought of ever shooting an animal: “I like to shoot, but I could never kill an animal… and a deer, good heavens, never.” Perhaps this sounds surprising to those who know Burroughs as the man who shot his wife, Joan Vollmer, dead in Mexico City. They would surely be even less comfortable with another quote from later in the book, when Burroughs tells Ginsberg, with no apparent trace of irony, “I’m very careful with weapons.” Readers might be even more surprised to see Ginsberg – who calls himself an “old hippie” – join his friend for a spot of shooting. The image of Allen with a weapon seems as outlandish and incongruous as any Burroughsian routine, but perhaps he was hurting from recent movie depictions of him as “a wimp.” In any case, during one long section of the book, Burroughs and Ginsberg fire various guns at homemade targets. Ginsberg turns out to be quite adept at firing a gun, and happily shoots a picture of the Buddha through the heart. There is a lot of talk of movies, as the interview was intended to tie in with the release of David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch adaptation. Ginsberg has a lot of criticisms about it, but Burroughs seems very happy with how it was done. On the matter of turning a book into a movie, he denies that the two can be compared: “…there’s no point trying to be faithful to the book because film and writing are just two completely different mediums… Any film stands on its own apart from whether it’s based on a novel.” They also discuss the movie Heart Beat, and other possible future adaptations of Beat stories. The book even includes some photos of Burroughs and Ginsberg. In my recent review of a Burroughs book, I observed that he was somewhat prescient – something that has been noted about his works since Naked Lunch. This interview, too, raises subjects that are on our minds today more than ever. One subject that is repeatedly raised (and there is a lot of repetition in this book) is that of the fatwa against author Salman Rushdie. Both writers are disgusted by this, and they discuss why Burroughs was not targeted for his depictions of Islam in Naked Lunch. He concludes that it is because he was never a Muslim. Elsewhere they talk about guns in schools, and Ginsberg repeatedly attempts to bring up the subject of memes, long before they had entered popular consciousness. He also takes a subtle dig at political correctness. It is funny to hear the two men discuss old stories from Beat history, which are included in dozens of different books. Often Burroughs fails to recall an important event, or they remember things happening differently. This of course is common, and human memories indeed change the more we attempt to recall them. However, it makes one wonder how much of recorded Beat history was true – or rather, how much of it came from Allen Ginsberg’s sometimes fanciful imagination. Or maybe it’s just that, fifty years after the fact, memories fade… In any case, this is a deeply personal and beautiful book. It seems a tad repetitive in places, and the tapes occasionally cut, leaving gaps in the conversation, but all the little imperfections make it more real, more pleasant. Ginsberg famously edited his interviews and treated them as an art just like his poems, and to read his words unabridged – indeed, as interviewer more than interviewee – is refreshing, and fun. What is the plot of the 100 year old man who climbed out the window and disappeared?Allan Karlsson is a 100-year-old explosives expert who is so bored in a retirement home that he jumps out of a window. As he begins an unexpected adventure, he reminisces about key moments in his life which were also key moments in world history.The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared / Film synopsisnull Is the old man book a series?Television adaptation The novel was developed into a television series of the same name by Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine, with Jeff Bridges starring as the lead. The series premiered in the U.S. on FX on Hulu on June 16, 2022. |
