Tangerine's PoV

Lately I have heard lots of positive comments about Haruki Murakami so I decided to read some of his novels and I started with Kafka on the shore. I expected to encounter an impressive novel, one of those that you never forget but I found much more than that.

The novel is based on two different stories: the story of Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old boy trying to run away from his father and from the future that his father predicted for him (based on Oedipus myth), and also trying to find his mother and sister who left him when he was 4 years old. On the other side, Satoru Nakata, a sexagerian who lost most of his mental faculties when he was a young boy during a peculiar incident. Their stories are quite different but, at the same time, they seem to have much in common.

This novel can be considered a modern Greek tragedy, a manual for understanding Beethoven, a “how to communicate with cats”, a tribute to “mentally defective” people, a lesson on how to be the “toughest fifteen-years-old boy in the world”, a lesson of Japanese culture, or it can be considered a great novel which perfectly combines all of the above. I definitely choose the second option.

Quotes:

“…in everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward any more. And when we reach that point all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.”

“Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there – to the edge of the world. There’s something you can’t do unless you go there.”

I don’t know if it was because we saw this movie at the right moment or because it is really good, but we loved it. It taught us one more time that a movie is not about the story, is about how you tell that story. And there are many ways to tell a story: through pictures, through music, etc. Once is a musical, and even if the story is not brilliant the music makes the movie brilliant and very entertaining. There’s not much more to say, just take the time to feel this movie, because this is not a movie to be seen, it’s a movie to be felt.

Take this sinking boat,
And point it home
We’ve still got time…

Two years ago we created this little world of ours where we wanted to write some of our things. Bruno wrote the first post in Spanish and then we started to write in English so that my friends from Romania could understand our posts. Sometimes I used Mandarinux to communicate to my friends back home, and sometimes we just wrote impressions about what we saw, what we heard, what we read. Lately we did not post as often as before as we basically have no time for it, but we’ll find a way to solve this little issue.

All that being said, we have a present for Mandarinux, we bought it new clothes. I hope you like its new look. Enjoy.

Happy 2nd Anniversary! Here’s a song for you:

Today we entered the video club looking for a nice movie to see on a Sunday night but we could not decide on what movie to see. We finally saw one about the revolution that took place in 1989 in Bucharest. We were not very enthusiastic about this movie but we finally took it as nothing else seemed interesting.

The first image of the movie was the town hall of my home town. I could not believe my eyes, but yes, that movie was filmed in my home town, Vaslui. We saw other familiar places and we started to enjoy the movie much more than we thought we would. We spent a quite good time remembering Vaslui and trying to find out where the buildings in the movie were located. The strange thing is that Bruno told me that one of the character’s house was situated next to my parents’ house and I did not believe it until the end when a bridge which is situated right in front of my parents’ house shows up in the picture. I lived there for 18 years and Bruno who spent there two weeks knows it better than I. Shame on me.

The movie was really good, not because it was filmed in my home town, but because the actors were really good and the screenplay also. It’s much better if you understand Romanian and know some things about Romania and Romanians, but even if you don’t you will surely spend a good time seeing this movie.

I can say I have one more reason to be proud of my home town, and I am also proud that a movie produced with a very limited budget got to win so may prizes and nominations. Very good job!

More info on this movie here.

Alex is already 6 months old. I don’t know when all this time has passed, I still see myself back in Romania, going out with the girls with nothing to worry about. I feel like yesterday I was pregnant and I had that immense tummy, I think it was yesterday when I met Alex for the first time.

Finally I got the time to upload some photos on Flickr so that you can see the not so little baby. Here is the link: Alex. Enjoy!

This year has been an year of changes, and I really do not know how I could make time for reading but I eventually did so here’s the list of the books I’ve enjoyed reading this year:

1. The Divine Child, by Pascal Bruckner. Review here.

2. La Sombra del Viento (The Shadow of the Wind), by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I consider it a “must read”. I enjoyed every page of this book, I loved the main character. It’s a book where fiction meets reality in neutral territory. I’ve posted an opinion on my other blog in Spanish but Bruno somehow deleted the database user so I’ve lost it all. Anyway, I earnestly recommend this book.

3. Marina, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. One of the first books that Carlos Ruiz Zafón wrote, actually you can see clearly that The Shadow of the Wind was somehow based on this novel. Very good novel, not as good as The Shadow of the Wind, but much better than many bestsellers that we can see in the libraries nowadays.

4. The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka. The opinion about this book is also on my other blog, so, in other words, lost. This was a strange reading experience: this is a book that needs all of your attention, you have to read each page carefully 2 or 3 times, and you have to know some facts about Kafka’s life to really understand the book. Otherwise it will always be a book about a human turned into a bug, with no other implications. I don’t pretend that I have understood exactly what it is about. I think it’s about making an opinion on your own about the book as there is no “official position” regarding the true meanings of Kafka’s novel.

5. Figure Humane (Human Faces), by Giovanni Papini. A very human writing that shows persons we think that cannot exist, but I think that we all have inside pieces of these persons that we’d like to hide, or show, or improve, or forget.

6. África Llora (Africa Cries), by Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa. This author is one of the authors that I don’t understand how they do it to write so many and so well-written books. He wrote more than 80 books, and what’s more impressive is that every book is very very well documented. I really don’t know how he does it. I enjoyed Africa Cries a lot, it shows Africa as it is, the story is based on a real story so it can give us a quite correct image of how life in Africa is.

7. Manet’s Painting, by Michel Foucault. Foucault is a philosopher that knows about art what his common sense tells him about art (of course, he has read about art and studied a little, but he is not an art professional, or a critic in the field). This book is based on a speech he gave on Manet’s art. His way of analyzing the paintings is just different from all we can read about Manet, or impressionism, but it is so obvious that you stop and think “how didn’t I see it?”. This speech was a great success for Foucault, and it is nowadays a very important reference in the study of art.

8. Laughable Loves, by Milan Kundera. I went to the library in search of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and as I did not find it I took this one. A very easy reading book, with ridiculous love stories that make you laugh and make you think that it can happen to you. Recommended.

9. El arte (The art), by Juanjo Saez. A peculiar interpretation of art, with sense of humor.

10. Maus, by Art Spiegelman. BRILLIANT!!! Just brilliant. Very very very recommended.

11. Anne Frank: The diary of a young girl. A moving story of a 13 years old Jewish girl who is forced to hide together with her family from the Nazis. I liked it a lot, but as I read it after reading Maus I liked more the story told by Artie. Just a personal opinion.

12. Why we love women, by Mircea Cartarescu. Maybe if I would have read it in Romanian I would have liked it more, but I read it in Spanish and the translation was lousy, very very lousy.

13. Mischiefs of the bad girl, Mario Vargas Llosa. Review here.

14. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was nice to meet with the little prince again. I always have a very pleasant experience when reading this book. I’ll teach Alex to love the little prince just as I do. I hope he eventually gets to love him.

15. Brooklyn Follies, by Paul Auster. I enjoyed it. I like Paul Auster’s style. Now I’ve just bought Travels in the Scriptorium. I hope it’s at least as good as Brooklyn Follies.

16. Todas Putas (All Bitches), by Hernán Migoya. I’ve been looking for this book in all libraries and I never saw it. I saw an interview with the author in a show that I use to watch, Noche sin tregua, and I thought it would be a good book. Finally I got it but it disappointed me a lot. The style is very exaggerated, he continuously try to surprise the reader, and this starts to annoy at a certain point. Also the stories told are not that interesting, at least I did not like them.

17. Putas es poco (Bitches is not enough), by Hernan Migoya. This is the book Migoya published after the controversy caused by the publication of his first book (Todas Putas). This is like a second part of the first book. I started to read it because I bought it and I wanted to know if it was better than the first one. It’s giving me a hard time, I don’t like it at all, the style is somewhat different but not my type either. Many errors and many stories that have no sense at all, and I like non-sense stories, but these ones…

This is by far the best movie I have ever seen. So perfectly done, the actors interpreted perfectly their roles, Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins are incredibly great. I won’t tell anything about the plot, just that when you first hear of it you might say “another movie abour prisons”, but this is not about life in prison, is much more than that, much more. Congratulations to all the persons that worked on this movie: you’ve all made a great work of art.

I never buy movies, I admit, but I will buy this one for sure.

And a brilliant quote:

Heywood: The Count of Monte Crisco…
Floyd: That’s “Cristo” you dumb shit.
Heywood: …by Alexandree Dumb-ass. Dumb-ass.
Andy Dufresne: Dumb-ass? “Dumas”. You know what it’s about? You’ll like it, it’s about a prison break.
Red: We oughta file that under “Educational” too, oughten we?

A few months ago I have posted this about Mac users. Why? Just because I was tired of hearing Bruno say that Apple was the best thing ever, etc etc. It’s not that I didn’t believe him, but I was tired to hear that everyday. And I know that many Mac users are just like him, cannot stop talking about Apple. This is why I said that I would never be a Mac user.

A few months later I have seen this speech that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford University and my opinion started to change a bit. I don’t care if what he says is true or not, the fact is that he is convincing and that when I listened to his speech I was in a moment of my life when I somehow needed to hear this speech. It made me work harder. It’s very motivating indeed.

Last week I was thinking about buying a new laptop. Bruno was insisting all day long “Come on, buy a Macbook, come on, come on”, and I always said no. I didn’t want a Macbook, I though that for that money I could find a much better laptop. I actually configured a very nice Dell laptop that costed less than the Macbook and was much better. Nevertheless, one day we went to K-tuin to look for a usb hub for Bruno. We entered the shop and I went to one of the shop assistants and told him to show me the offers that they had for the Macbook. In 5 minutes I made the reservation for the new Macbook. When we went out of the shop Bruno was quite surprised about my decision and of course, I told him “Don’t worry, as soon as I get it I will install Windows”. Yesterday we got the laptop and up to this moment it still has Leopard installed, and something tells me that this will not change. For the moment, I’ve got no reason to install Windows.

So, as a conclusion, I am now a Mac user so I take back what I said in that post. I recognize that the Macbooks are very nice to use and touch and that Leopard is a nice operating system, much easier to use than what I expected.

Sim iimashita.

Alex has a new favourite toy. It’s his first toy but he didn’t even look at it until now (he has it since he was 4 or 5 days old). Now it’s hard to separate him from the chicken. They are his first best friends!