The Nature of the Beast - Louise Penny

Latest mystery novel by Louise Penny.  Her best book yet from a structure and stylistics point of view.  She finds the most intriguing forgotten histories in the Eastern Townships to weave into the plots of her books.

Adrift on the Nile - Naguib Mahfouz

Another more political short novel.  Rather than being a larger chronicle of a vast array of characters, it is a deeper look at a small group of middle-class friends and how they go adrift after the Egyptian revolution tears up the former social fabric and accepted norms of life. An exploration of nihilism and social withdrawal through drugs, sex and social frivolity.

Karnak Cafe - Naguib Mahfouz

A short novel very different from Palace series - less human drama and more a novel of ideas.  And as such less of a compelling read.  Looks at the social and political changes and also the political repression after the Egypt revolution with Nasr.  It is partly an exploration of how the young middle class became disaffected through unjust repression and persecution of social and political groups.

Fifteen Dogs - Andre Alexis

An intriguing book on several levels.

First, the encounter between the modern world and the world of the Greek gods - a wonderful flight of imagination.

Second, the imagining of the life of dogs with a human intelligence.  It is interesting that self-consciousness is the primary effect, a disabling kind of self-consciousness.  Another primary effect is the development of trickery, deception and violence.  There is also the dog who becomes religious as he can imagine a great Pack Master in the sky mirroring his own role on earth.  Also, the dog who becomes a poet, who develops an self-conscious awareness of language as something to play with. Interesting mirror of early human development?  Also, the way he weaves language and consciousness into the the daily lives and activities of dogs.

There is also a lot of reflection on the nature of love and relationships.  Alexis uses this to pull us in finally at an emotional level in relationship to the character Majnoun (interesting choice of name - a Persian character in a love story who is driven divinely mad by thwarted love).

I must search out the rest of his "philosophical novel" series.

A Perfect Spy - John le Carre

A reread (multiple).  I wonder at le Carre's obsession with the duplicity of those who spy for our own good - the thin line between crime and spying for a higher cause.  Why does that theme pull him back again and again?

Orhan's Inheritance - Aline Ohanesian

A story set in the time of the Armenian genocide and also in modern L.A.  Interestingly, it is not just a compendium of the horrors of the genocide (though there is some).  It is actually a story of how the lives of the Turks, Armenians and Kurds were interwoven in complex and human ways, and how the genocide tore that interweaving apart.  A shift in perspective.

Umut Yarına Kaldı - Yavuz Özkan

A strange little film from Turkey made in the 80s.  An artsy film in the sense of Ingmar Berman - not much happens, lots of moody atmosphere - but a lot more awkward and a bit amateurish.
What is interesting about this film is you can see it as one of the last calls from a time and an era that has been lost in Istanbul, from a time before the Anatolian flood.
There is a level of sophistication, a sense of cultured people fallen on hard times.  All of the music is either European classical music or opera. The whole film takes place in a yali along the Bosphorus.  The owner, short of cash perhaps, and from an old moneyed family, rents out rooms in his yali to artists.  There are some lovely views out windows over the Bosphorus as ships and ferries glide by.  In the background there is also a continual symphony of boat horns, seagulls and waves.  There are several scenes in the yali garden right on the edge of the Bosphorus - quite charming.  The yali owner even swims in the Bosphorus!  From another time....

Unfortunately the sound is bad and the dialogue is very hard to follow.