What This Week #13

Oof. My suspicion last week that Monday’s alarm would feel very much the rude awakening from the cosy, liminal bubble we’d been in-holiday inhabiting proved painfully accurate.

Half the household started the week deeply disgruntled about the return of rigid routine, but ended it basking in the glow of growing independence after walking home from school solo for the first time.

The other half dived headlong into a new routine to move everything forward all at once and was too exhausted by the week’s end for any well-earned glow basking.

Thousands of words have been written this week—here and here (literally) and (whoop!) added to my novel. My WIP is IP once more and that feels so incredibly good.

So we’ll take a weekend-shaped pause for rest, reading and hoovering up the remaining Easter chocolate. Then on we go again.

Some extra enjoyable reading and watching to report. My eyes and ears have been particularly fortunate this week.

Watching:

Transatlantic (Netflix)—This new Netflix series has been an absolute joy to get lost in over the past week. Highly recommend it. It’s based on Julie Orringer’s novel, The Flight Portfolio (now sold as Transatlantic to tie-in), which I immediately added to my library list. Transatlantic centres around wartime Marseille (the location shots are stunning), where Americans Varian Fry and Mary Jayne Gold are trying to get fleeing Jewish refugees out of Europe to safety. Fry, under the auspices of the Emergency Rescue Committee, is there to get visas for the brightest and best; Gold is trying to help anyone the best way she can, by throwing money at the situation. This show is more than well-told historical fiction, many of the people they are trying to get out of the country are avant-garde creatives (including Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Mark Chagall), so there are beautiful and unexpected moments of quirky surrealism interspersed with the drama, which I really enjoyed—the end credits are fantastic. Excellent to see my favourite Bridgerton brother, Benedict (Luke Thompson). And interconnecting us to last week’s What This Week, Jodhi May, who was in The Scapegoat, makes an appearance as American art collector, Peggy Guggenheim.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the Making Transatlantic (Netflix) half-hour behind-the-scenes programme. Full of insight and interviews with cast and crew, and well worth a watch if you enjoy the series.

Mr Malcolm’s List (paid to stream on YouTube)—I really enjoyed this film. A well-delivered, modern take on an Austenesque love story (nearly a year on, I can still barely bring myself to talk about Netflix’s Persuasion, but rest assured this is not that). It’s smart and witty, with great actors, and looks wonderful. Mr Malcom (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, who I last saw as Donald in Mothering Sunday) is the most eligible bachelor in town, a string of disappointed and disgruntled women in his wake as he tries and fails to find a ‘perfect’ wife. After finding herself on the humiliating end of his disinterest, Julia Thistlewaite (imperiously played by Zawe Ashton) discovers Mr Malcolm’s exacting standards literally exist—he has an actual list of wifely requirements. She plots revenge aiming to get her friend to turn the tables on Mr Malcolm by ticking all his boxes and then rejecting him. The usual period rom-com missteps and misunderstandings throw her plan off course, naturally. I don’t know why I didn’t know about this film. I can only think that it perhaps clashed with the release of season 2 of Bridgerton last year (and there are definite plot and presentation similarities), and came off second best. If this is your kind of viewing too, then enjoy this hidden gem.

Reading:

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is widely considered an American classic. I added it to my library list because author, podcaster and all-round lovely human, Elizabeth Day mentioned it over on Instagram the same week one of the protagonists in a film I watched (Sharper, see WTW#6) said it was her favourite book. I like feeling led to things, so a library reservation was swiftly placed. And it is as brilliant and beautiful a book as I was hoping for. Hurston’s writing is magnificent. It’s lyrical, rhythmical and carries you along, mainly through dialectal dialogue, telling the story of Janie, a black woman whose life is shaped and shifted by three marriages.

Love is lak de sea. It’s uh moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.

It is a book about love, humanity and finding ourselves. It is also a book about social history, exploring the lives and expectations of and on black women in 1930s Florida. The edition I read included a foreword by Zadie Smith, which was a delight to read in itself. A wholehearted recommendation. A shelf copy to be purchased.

The Appeal by Janice Hallett has been on my radar for a while. Friends have loved it (Helen Redfern, in particular, is a huge Hallett fan) and I’ve even gifted her books, so it felt high time to borrow one from the library for myself. Less than 48 hours after the library bus had rolled into the village, I’d finished this 445 page book—the epitome of a page-turner. The Appeal centres around an amateur dramatics group putting on a play, a huge fundraising appeal for a sick child, and eventually a murder. The book is presented as the bundle of emails and message transcriptions that has been given to two legal students asked for an opinion on the case. Piecing together the story through this clever structure completely draws the reader in. Hallett’s ability to build characters through their email content and particularly ‘voice’ is excellent. As you’d perhaps expect there is a lot of passive-aggression and behind-back sniping to be found in the interactions of a drama group. A highly enjoyable read. I’ll definitely be getting my hands on her second book, The Twyford Code.

Honourable mention for The Persephone Biannually, the wonderful magazine from the much-loved publishers of ‘domestic feminism’. Sat in the late afternoon sunshine, cup of earl grey in hand, working my way through the insightful and interesting articles has been an absolute joy.

So what this week for you? Let me know any recommendations I can add to my watching and reading lists. They are genuinely always welcome.

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Extra credit

Sign up for a free copy of The Persephone Biannually here: https://persephonebooks.co.uk/products/persephone-biannually

Safe to say this Guardian reviewer didn’t enjoy Transatlantic as much as I did! Allo Allo comparisons? Ouch!: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/apr/07/transatlantic-review-netflix-gillian-jacobs-anna-winger

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