It’s a revelation, when you’re young, to find out that a book might not be exactly about the thing that it’s about. Or at least, not only: that with the right set of contextual keys (and yes, that “right” is highly specious), a story can be further unlocked. But it can also be a thrill to read a book about children, when you are one, that treats their interactions, however extreme the setting, with the same seriousness you do. “As far as I was concerned, the novel’s blaming finger was pointed at schoolboys like Jack, Piggy, Ralph and me,” wrote McEwan in 1986. “We were manifestly inadequate. We couldn’t think straight, and in sufficiently large groups we were capable of atrocities. In that I took it all so personally, I like to think that I was, in some sense, an ideal reader.” (I don’t have a son, but I gave my new copy to my 11-year-old daughter and, when she’d read it, asked her what she thought its message was. “Um,” she said, “that boys are idiots?”)
In some sense, yes, McEwan is right. In another sense, of course, he’s being facetious. (The same could be said, on both counts, of my daughter.) Describing the passage in which a forlorn Piggy, Ralph and Simon reflect on the mysterious sagacity of adults — “‘Grown-ups know things,’ said Piggy. ‘They ain’t afraid of the dark’” — McEwan writes: “At 13, I too had sufficient faith in adult life to be immune to Golding’s irony.” If you read Lord of the Flies again as an adult, however — and you must! — the irony, and its incumbent horror, are everything.
Racine’s version of the originally Scandinavian kringle is, at its best, numbingly sweet and astonishingly butter-forward. It takes three days to roll, fold, and rest the 36 layers of butter, margarine, and dough that make up its surprisingly low profile (it measures less than an inch between plate and icing). That super soft but dense puff pastry is then swaddled around your choice of sweet filling — classic flavors like almond and apple, or perhaps a more daring pumpkin caramel, a chocolatey-caramel pecan-stuffed turtle, or cherry cheese — and then finally spun into a large, flat ring, blanketed with a powdered sugar glaze.
It’s no surprise that in his new book, My Affair with Art House Cinema: Essays and Reviews, Lopate comes deliriously alive when its Antonioni on the big screen, likewise with other demanding international filmmakers, from Chantal Akerman to Marcel Ophuls. I have a similar impulse, always seeking out formally adventurous movies filled with moral complexity. We both opt for a properly framed long-held shot over fast cutting, mise-en-scène over montage. We both prefer a measured, unsentimental humanist cinema to facile and fashionable “edginess.” I endorse Lopate’s credo that the very best films will reveal some kind of “wisdom.” Clearly, entertainment and escapism are not ample reason for us to venture to the movies.
Saltwater Cure is a collection of stories by journalist Ali Gripper that explore the human affinity with the ocean and the transformative power it has on us. Gripper interviews a variety of people for whom the ocean gives meaning and purpose. Surfer Layne Beachley, author Tim Winton, sailor Jessica Watson and conservationist Valerie Taylor are the book’s most recognised contributors, but Saltwater Cure is best when it spends time with unsung heroes such as community advocate Yusra Metwally and First Nations scientist Dr Chels Marshall.