In the latest installment of our “Recommended Reads” series, Andrew Neylon, a senior literature major, recommends Blue Valentine, a film directed by Derek Cianfrance.
When I was a kindergartner in the mid 1990s, only one boy in our class had divorced parents. We were all made aware of this through monthly parent nights, and in the way that children often do, we summarily ostracized the boy for being, well, different.
In the latest installment of our “Recommended Reads” series, English Professor Amit Baishya recommends Incendies, a Denis Villeneuve film.
Based on Wajdi Mouawad’s play Scorched, the Canadian production Incendies (2010, directed by Dennis Villeneuve) is one of the best films I have seen in the last five years. The plot of Incendies moves back and forth between present-day Canada and Lebanon and the period of the civil war in Lebanon (while Canada is mentioned in the film, we don’t find a direct reference to Lebanon. However, we can infer the location from the textual details). With Oedipus the King and Antigone as its obvious subtexts, Incendies hauntingly explores how traumatic events endured during periods of war transmit themselves across generations. Incendies is, to use Marianne Hirsch’s term, a powerful exploration of “post-memory.” Like Oedipus, Incendies opens with a mystery that impels one of its primary protagonists to return to Lebanon and retrace the effaced signs of an unknown past. After the death of Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal) in Canada, her children, the twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette), learn of her “strange” last request. Nawal wants her body to be buried face down until her children deliver two letters—one to the father of the children and the other to their brother. Both Jeanne and Simon are shocked by these disclosures as they hadn’t heard of their father or their brother before.
Spoiler Alert: The rest of the post contains many plot-sensitive details.
This semester we are introducing Recommended Reads, a new segment in which Ball State students and faculty contribute a short review of a recommended piece of literature. Continue below to read our first installment in the series, Dr. Andrea Wolfe’s review of Room by Emma Donoghue. Be sure to check back for a new Recommended Reads post every Friday.
A thrilling and often heart-wrenching page-turner, Emma Donoghue’s Room also serves as a study of the stages of psychosexual development set out by Lacan and revised by later feminist psychoanalytic theorists. The novel is narrated by Jack, a seemingly contented boy of five who, at the beginning of the story, has never left the single-room apartment that he shares with his mother. The only person to enter and exit the room is Old Nick, who comes in the night after Jack is supposed to be asleep in the wardrobe where he sleeps. Ma eventually reveals to Jack that Nick abducted her seven years ago and that she and Jack are his captives. The two of them implement an escape plan, and the rest of the novel is about their adaptation to the outside world.
