It's not always easy being a film critic. Okay, you're right -- it is.
But some days are not as easy as others, like yesterday morning when I had to
slosh through a Nor'easter, destroying my umbrella and soaking myself from head
to foot, to join about 100 unamused children and their parents to watch "Planet
51," one of the worst movies of the year. Also: I lost my glasses.
On the bright side, though, I was pleasantly surprised to note
that the main character's name was "Lem."
Named after the great Polish science
fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, author
of the novel "Solaris," adapted into one of the strangest sci-fi epics of
all time by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 (and, with less success by, Steven
Soderbergh in 2002)?
Probably not. But any reference to Lem is worth noting. He's
mentioned, for example, in the new anthology "City Secrets Books: The Essential
Insider's Guide" where the screenwriter Buck Henry endorses Lem's 1971 opus "The
Futurological Congress,"
describing the author thusly:
"[I]f Jonathan Swift and Franz Kafka had a son (this surely will
be possible someday)and he fathered a child with the daughter of François
Rabelais and Jorge Luis Borges -- that person might sound like Lem."
I guess my point is that a far better way of spending a rainy
weekend than watching "Planet 51" or reading "Twilight: New Moon" (of which I
have 400 pages left to go) would be thumbing through this latest "City Secrets"
connoisseurs' guide to arts and letters (in the interests of full disclosure, I
contributed to the previous one, "The Ultimate Insider's Guide to Cinema's
Hidden Gems") It features some two hundred authors, academics and other experts offering
essays on their favorite undeservedly obscure books.
In addition to Henry, there's the playwright John Guare
on Hungarian novelist Miklos Banffy's "The Transylvanian Trilogy,"
written from 1934-40 ("the fastest 1700
pages you'll ever read"); writer Calvin Trillin
on Wayne Johnston's 1999 historical fiction "The Colony of Unrequited Dreams"
("the great American novel, except it happens to be about Newfoundland"); and the novelist Lore Segal on
Kevin Vennemann's 2005 novel "Close to Jedenew"
("Vennemann is taking on that inexplicable phenomenon: what has turned our old
neighbor and friend of decades into our sudden murderer?")
The selections go a far
back as Japanese writer Sei Shonagon's sui generis "The Pillow Book,"
(you're on your own with Peter Greenaway's 1996 "adaptation")
published in 1002, which consists in part, as novelist Carole Maso points out, of whimsical lists, including: "Things that fall from the Sky;
Pleasing Things; Things that give a pathetic impression...Things worth seeing."
This book provides a list of things worth reading. A list that
should include this book as well.
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