Book: Alexandre Dumas, père - The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)

Ever since 1844, Edmond Dantès has become a figure of almost mythlike proportions. He is the archetype avenger. Everyone who ever felt the need to take revenge, be it a child who felt an injustice or a victim of serious wrongdoing, everyone has become, momentarily, Edmond Dantès. The Count invariably gets hinted at in every modern avenger tale, such as the extraordinary Korean movie Oldboy, because Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo is the ultimate, the blueprint tale.

Perhaps only one iconic image measures itself with Dantès: Captain Ahab and his mad search for Moby Dick, but whereas Ahab dissolves into madness and perishes, Dantès plans with care, takes his revenge over course of years, and even saves himself. For madness is the danger of vengeance. But the best part of the book is not the ending, but meticulous planning of revenge that Dantès savors and we with him.

The Count of Monte Cristo is an “epic” tale of adventure, action and drama, and it has remained so popular over the years that it has become iconic. It is quite old, yes, from 1844, but Dumas knew how to write a story. Every part of the story, the downfall of happy Edmond, his mysterious resurrection and entry into society, and the slow vengeance with countless sidestories and characters, is perfect and exciting. It is a book to lose yourself in.

Book: Oliver Sacks - The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (1985)

Neurologist Oliver Sacks presents 24 extraordinary stories about his patients. He tells their stories, how they deal with afflictions from Tourette to autism and beyond.

Most of us hold on to the idea that our body and our spirit are separated from eachother, and that our identity is an indivisible whole, but neurological diseases seriously question that assumption, and it makes neurology unnerving and fascinating at the same time. To read about people who have to fight to maintain their identity, their soul, against the most bizarre symptoms of a damaged brain; to read about those that do not even realize that something has gone wrong, strikes a deep chord.

Every case of neurological disease is a very personal one, because the very identity, the spirit, of the sick is at stake. In the 19th century it was common practise to present such a case as a life story, until the advent of the more cathegorical, distant neurology of the 20th century. Oliver Sacks means to bring the personal story back, to show how patients with neurological problems battle for their identity as heroes in a tale, and find their own ways of dealing with it.

Sacks as an observer is very thorough, human and sympathetic. His insights bring light in the worlds of his patients that are so difficult to understand. His stories are heartfelt, exciting and arresting for anyone who values his own mind, and for anyone who ever suspected that sanity is relative and self-identity can be a fleeting thing, easily lost.

Movie: Moon (2009)

There is something spooky about silent, empty space and the sterile corridors of space stations. It is a place where people or, occasionally, robots, loose their mind. Stanley Kubrick knew this, so did Stanislaw Lem, the author of Solaris. Moon is the latest movie that stands besides 2001: A Space Odyssee and Solaris as a quiet, chilly space tale that for all its sterileness is more human than action-packed, explosion-filled science fiction.

Sam Rockwell, better known perhaps from his other science fiction role as the loon Zaphod Beeblebrox, carries this film alone. He is an expressive actor and has no trouble to keep the film going as the plot moves from creepy to weird. Along the way we see echoes of older movies as Sam talks to his robot caretaker Gertie and sees occasional hallucinations. Things begin to go wrong, but when you are up there among computers in a bunker on the Moon you are not going anywhere.

There is a very telling image in the movie of Sam, sitting in his moonmobile in a grey expanse of rocky moondesert, sobbing that he just wants to go home, and the Earth hangs in beautiful blue and green in the black sky. Moon might not be as original and groundbreaking as its predecessors, but is it still a beautiful and thoughtful movie and definately one to remember.

IMDB: Moon

Movie: Burn After Reading (2008)

The Coen Brothers (Fargo, The Big Lebowsky, No Country For Old Men) are on a killing spree these last years. Burn After Reading is the Coen Brother’s take on special agent CIA Bourne Identity like thriller movies, but then, you know, the Coen way. The lazy way to summarize this movie is to say it is a story of morons with weird hairdos who do moronic stuff and the CIA is trying to figure out just what the hell is going on.

This movie takes some very charismatic actors, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and makes them look like suburban dorks. There is no a political dimension to this movie and there isn’t really a hero to this story. There is a sort of tragic character, played by John Malkovich who is so terrific at getting totally mad. He starts as a member of the CIA with a nice suit, the enlightened bunch that tries to make sense of everything, but falls from grace and becomes one of the morons, even as he doesn’t see it that way (but look how his clothing changes towards the end).

What is quite unique about this movie is that all the main characters are unimportant, middle-aged people. They are all suffering from a personal crisis, whether it is unhappiness about their marriage or their aging bodies. All these crises describe their actions, which sort of collide at odd moments with disastrous results. The anguish and problems of the characters are very familiar and human and so there is a tragic undertone to the story, but at the same time it is a “light” tale and very humoristic.

IMDB: Burn After Reading

Book: Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004)

Not many authors present as their first publication such a big book as Susanna Clarke did. Big in wordcount and ambition, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell enters the field of literature as an immediate classic after Clarke had been working on it for a decade. At times, her book is alternate history in which England once had magical fairy-infused past, or an historical novel set at the time of the Napoleonic Wars.

Mr. Norrell, a grumpy, boring, serious man who reminds me of the actor that plays Mr Beckett in the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and his pupil Jonathan Strange, the typical English gentleman given by flights of fancy, are two talented magicians who, as the only real magicians of England, work to rediscover the workings of magic. In the process they become each others adversaries and in the ensuing battle for recognision the boundary between sanity and madness begins to shatter. Meanwhile, a gentleman with thistledown hair, brought into the world as the result of amoral use of magic by Mr. Norrell, begins to haunt their steps and the English societal landscape.

All this is an smashing counterpoint to proper English decency. Here is one of the main points of Clarke’s novel. The exploration of Victorian Englishness as a sort of comedy of manners. In this, and the elaborateness of her work, like the shimmering of a compendium of magical scholarship, her book has evoked many comparisons with J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, but Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is quite something else. It is a flowing patchwork of a wide variety of styles and moods, ranging from pure fantasy to military literature to gothic horror. Very entertaining and impressive.

Movie: District 9 (2009)

Science fiction has always been a problem child, both in movies and books. The special effects always seem to take the upper hand in science fiction movies as an irresistable force that in the end deprives the vitality of the story, much like candy in real life. Science fiction books are systematically ignored by critics who still carry an image in their mind of the pulp space opera of the 30s. But science fiction can be good (in books more often than in cinema) and on these occasions it can function as a mirror in which our image and our values of the world get transformed in the stirring threads of the possible future.

District 9 is such a film. Its power comes from the original ideas it presents and the gritty, down-to-earth (inside joke), realism of the way it is executed. So here we have a UFO that got stranded not above New York but above Johannesburg, South Africa. The humans break into the UFO and find lots of malnourished prawn-like aliens. This all happened 20 years ago. The aliens were unable to adapt to a human city and people just want to see them leave. They are living in a slum (district 9) at the edge of the city. The star of the movie is Wikus van de Merwe, who is in charge of relocating the aliens, but he finds out there are lots of secrets kept in District 9.

The movie starts out as a documentary. We see people commenting on the events that we are about to see unfolding. It slowly gathers momentum and in the final half an hour District 9 transforms itself into an exciting action movie in which special effects are used sparingly but very effectively. The special effects are generally used in a masterful way. The aliens are very realistic (think Gollum-like realism) and the UFO hangs ominously as a sword of Damocles above the scenes. It is the big unknown.

District 9 is a masterclass in storytelling and I can see this develop as a franchise and a future classic.

IMDB: District 9

Book: Tom Holland - Millennium (2008)

One way of storytelling that has become more and more popular is narrative history. It is not the dry educational highschool book that sums up the important parts and it is not historic fiction. Instead it is history told as a story. Tom Holland is one of the best selling authors in this field after his brilliant book Rubicon hit the scene, where he relates the final 100 years of the Roman Republic as a nailbiting story. His next book, Persian Fire, told us about the wars between the Persians and Sparta. Now his third book, Millennium, is in store.

Millennium tells about a fateful part of the Middle Ages. Around the 10th century, Europe is chaos. Holland shows us how, from the rubble and the vacuum left of the Roman Empire, modern Europe gradually shapes itself. It is an age of Franks, Saxons and Vikings. Of monks, knights and castles. It is a story of bitter yearning for the past, for the glory of the Roman Empire, by the desintegrating Byzantium and the western upstarts as Charlemagne who all see themselves as the heirs of the Romans and the last bullwark of young Christianity. Tom Holland has a brilliant flair for the dramatic and his tale is a gritty one.

Holland also wanted to suffuse his book with a statement for which is questionable proof. It is the idea that important revolutions in the order of the world came to pass partly because the year 1,000 was approaching fast, and many people therefore believed the End of the World was near and the Antichrist would arise. Bloodlusty pagans and the glorious expansion of Islam were to be omens of this. I think Holland occasionally tries to force the information we have too hard into this framework, but it does tie together this diverse and fascinating part of history.