Marc Chagall Jewish Encounters, Jonathan Wilson

His style is not so simple and sentimental like it might look at the first sight. Reading “Marc Chagall Biography”, Jonathan Willson lets us notice that his painting is something more than just characteristic creatures, dreamy, soaring hills under the Jewish Witebsk sky – it’s the vast history of 20^th Century.

Being merely 13, with self-confidence he announced:”Mum, I’d like to become the greatest painter.” And so he became the greatest Jewish painter of 20^th Century, who captured the colorful world of the small towns buried by Nazis for good. But except houses` roofs, domed synagogues and the streets of native Witebsk, appears Jesus. Thanks to the painting “Dedicated to Christ”, exposed and making a huge impression during the Saloon of Independent in Berlin in 1913, Marc Chagall had started his international carrier.

Chagall knew form the very beginning how he wants to paint. Subsequent Petersburg schools, in which he was learning could not change or effect his visions or style. Copying classic masterpieces Chagall had found them tiring, full of boring decorativeness. That is why in 1910, thanks to Maxim Winawer`s scholarship, he turned up in the international capital of arts – Paris. France had became the artist’s motherland; here he had spent the most fruitful years of his lifetime.

There came out the paintings recognized by the critics as the most excellent works: “Self-portrait with seven fingers”, “Rain”, “Woman and donkey” or “Me and village” from 1911, where melancholic features mix with the spirit of surrealism. The creatures from his paintings do not respect and agree with gravity and their world is filled up with intensive, bright colors.

Not only as an artist but also as a man, Chagall wasn’t easily influenced by environment. He wasn’t part of the Parisian bohemia, hasn’t been drinking and sitting in coffee shops on Montparnasse, even though very often friends were trying to take him out of the studio. Most of the time he has been spending with poets or being on his own.

Showing suffering Jews by using Jesus as a simple Jewish boy (“Golgota” 1912) and Christian motives, rose controverersy in the Jewish community. Like decorating Christian churches, what often Chagall was doing in his late years.

It is out of discussion that he had been seduced by France. There he had been treated and respected as a great painter. It doesn’t surprise anybody that in 1948, after almost 10 years, he had left New York and settled down in Orgeval near Paris. He visited after 50 years his motherland, resurrected so many times in his paintings. After coming back he said that “Life goes on in France.” In the distance between the remembered world of province and the cultural center of the world lies the power of his paintings.

Hugo Claus has died. He was 78.

Belgium is mourning the death of Hugo Claus, the author of The Sorrow of Belgium, livre fondamental, indispensable says La Libre Belgique. Ayant vécu un temps à Paris, où il a été influencé par le mouvement surréaliste et Antonin Artaud, mais a choisi d’écrire en néerlandais, il s’était présenté avec son sens bien connu de la provocation comme “un flamingant francophone”. You can read both articles [in French] here and here.

La Vanguardia is stressing the fact that Hugo Claus, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease requested euthanasia, legal in his country, but is not mentioned if it was applied.

«J’aimerais assez qu’on dise, quand je ne serai plus là, que j’étais un grand peintre et que j’écrivais aussi des choses», says Hugo Claus. Taken from Le Temps.

The Death of a Giant, headlines Le Vif Belgique.

Read the news in other news editions: El Caraibe

Rats of Manhatan, Lech Majewski

„Nothing is constant” according to Socrates, who realized this fact a long time ago, so everything is in motion, if we believe in logic. Most probably he meant that everything is changing all the time, so it is the familiar that usually eludes us in life. What is before our nose is what we see last. But not least?

“For he led us, he said, to a joyous land…” promises Robert Browning in old story “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”. Young hero Chaim flees he’s town when a plague of rats attacked suddenly and unexpectedly. Seems like he’s exertion and strength is needed once again.

As long as you appear in the doorway of Waldorf Astoria hotel, you find out, that Neil Stainton, one of night doormen, has been fired. Customers were complaining about him: he dropped precious vase, came to work drunk… He will be gone while you are busy sorting things out while checking in, won’t even notice a man in expensive suit standing behind your front desk and holding a rat.

“Do you like pets”? he’ll ask you. Pretending you’re busy you will ignore him. “Have you been to Venice?.. You must see this place. Especially with somebody you love. What a wonderful city!” Being about to leave, the man will lean back and mystically grin: “I see you’re suffering. Why won’t you get a rat? You’ll learn how to take care of it, love it. Nothing will bother you anymore. Rats are very intelligent.”

You fell like you’re dreaming one of your the worst nightmares – here, in the middle of Waldorf Astoria Hotel in the center of Manhattan in the heart of universe – in this state of mind there is only one step from going to Staten Island, to try to get closer to her. Desperately closer to Gaia…

Rats of Manhattan by Lech Majewski has remains, in a mysterious, surreal aura, the history of doorman’s loneliness, where states of emotions are getting materialized as animal anger: ache after braking up with beloved causes rat’s plague in Manhattan.

It looks like the only hope lays in Chaim. Like in old story from Hamelin… And standing on the top of the sky-scraper on New Year’s Eve you can feel that with tears, the sweat of fear and the dirt of gone days are falling down.

You will notice a love much stronger that the one which destroyed you. And you know, it won’t be a dream anymore…

On the Road, Jack Kerouac

The first person who reviewed Jack Kerouac’s novel was Gilbert Millstein – his review appeared in New York Times 4^th September 1957 and he had written: “On the Road” is the second novel by Kerouac and its publication is a historic occasion insofar as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in any age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlative of fashion.

On the Road is a novel of experience; it tells tales of madness played out by all kinds of strange characters, in settings as diverse as a Virginia small-town diner, a New York jazz-joint, and a Mexican whore-house. What connects these adventures is the characters’ refusal to miss out on life, and their determination to get the most out of now.

The novel is the most executed, the clearest and the most important utterance made by the generation of Kerouac, named years ago as “beat” and whose principal avatar he is.

It seems that the “beat generation” had an one and only ideology, and that was life. Kerouac himself sums it up as “everything belongs to me because I am poor”.

Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, a crazy youth “tremendously excited with life” are racing around America, testing the limits of the American Dream. It seems like both of them seize the day, live their life cause death might come too early – before they will be able to finish what they have started. The desperation and the lack of fulfillment made these youths feel that “the only thing to do was go”, searching for their personal freedom, and finding pleasure in sex, drugs, and jazz.

Summarized by Fushinha

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami

Nowadays, when the reader is flooded by an enormous number of books every day, is hard to tell a good piece of story from boring time killer. Haruki Murakami`s novels for sure are ones that a brilliant modern writer could have created. Kafka on the Shore is a very successful novel not only in Japan, where the writer comes from, but already translated in over one hundred languages.

One of the two central characters, the young Nakata, looses consciousness during a school trip to the forest, like all of his classmates. After a while all of them regain consciousness except Nakata, who spends few months in hospital and after coma remains mentally disadvantaged.

But he receives the ability to talk to cats, which in his later life, except humble subsidy from governor of Tokyo, gives him extra money from tracking lost cats. One ordinary day, he is taken by an eerie dog to a house of a man looking like Johnie Walker and finds out that this man is collecting cats` souls to build the most powerful flute. Not being able to look at Johnie Walker killing cats one by one Nakata stabs him with a knife and leaves Tokyo. His journey to accomplish a very important task just begins. From this moment his life changes drastically and nothing is how it seems to be anymore.

Lots of coincidental and unpredictable events put the 15 years old Kafka Tamura on the gripping way to unravel who his mother is and why she has left him with his sister 11 years ago. A legendary curse is put on him by his father, who doesn’t know any other way how to revenge, that he has to kill his father and sleep with mother and sister, according to the ancient Greek myth of Edype. After few days after his escape in Tokyo it turns out that his father, a famous sculptor, has been stabbed till death at his place at night.

A beautiful story of love, of questions, of what life really means, of completing each own history, written with reflective and brilliant language in respect of old legends and beliefs. Can be a wonderful and imaginative journey for everyone who accepts miracles and believes that the weirdest things happen to the most ordinary people.