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Serpent's Tail
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This title introduces a film by Almodovar, based on Jonquet's novel, due on 18th November 2011, starring Antonio Banderas. Richard Lafargue is an eminent plastic surgeon haunted by dirty secrets. He has an operating theatre in the basement of his chateau and keeps his partner Eve imprisoned in her bedroom, a room he has equipped with an intercom and 300-watt speakers through which he bellows orders. Eve is only allowed out to be paraded at cocktail parties and on the last Sunday of each month, when the couple visit a young woman in a mental asylum. Following these outings, Lafargue humiliates Eve by forcing her to perform lewd sexual acts with strangers while he watches through a one-way mirror. In alternating chapters, Jonquet introduces seemingly unrelated characters — a criminal on the run after murdering a policeman, and an abducted young man who finds himself chained naked in a dark chamber, forced to endure all manner of physical torture at the hands of a mysterious stranger, whom he calls Mygale, after a type of tropical spider. All of these characters are caught in a deceitful web, waiting to meet their fate. |
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The aftermath of the fall of Paris, 1940. Hieronymus Falk, a rising star on the cabaret scene, is arrested in a cafe and never heard from again. He is twenty years old. A German citizen. And he is black.Fifty years later, Sid, Hiero's bandmate and the only witness that day, is going back to Berlin. Persuaded by his old friend Chip, Sid discovers there's more to the journey than he thought when Chip shares a mysterious letter, bringing to the surface secrets buried since Hiero's fate was settled. In Half Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan weaves the horror of betrayal, the burden of loyalty and the possibility that, if you don't tell your story, someone else might tell it for you. And they just might tell it wrong ... |
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A sad young woman boards a train in Moscow. Bound for Mongolia, she's trying to leave a broken relationship as far behind her as she can. Wanting to be alone, she chooses an empty compartment — No 6. Her solitude is soon shattered by the arrival of a fellow passenger: Vadim Nikolayevich Ivanov, a grizzled, opinionated and foul-mouthed ex-soldier, 'a cauliflower-eared man in a black workingman's overcoat and a white ermine hat'. Vadim fills the compartment with his long and colourful stories, recounting his sexual conquests and violent fights in lurid detail. At first, the young woman is not so much shocked as disgusted by him, and she stands up to him, throwing a boot at his head. But though Vadim may be crude, he isn't cruel, and he shares with her the sausage and black bread and tea he's brought for the journey, coaxing the girl out of her melancholy state. As their train cuts slowly across a wintery Russia, where 'everything is moving, snow, water, air, clouds, wind, towns, villages, people and ideas', a grudging kind of companionship grows between the two inhabitants of Compartment No 6 and the girl realises that if she works out how to listen, Vadim's stories may just contain lessons for her. Compartment No 6 is a wickedly mischievous, darkly imaginative and completely unforgettable ride. |
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This is an international First World War fiction, from the trenches to the home front. The Great War gave birth to some of the twentieth century's most celebrated writing; from Brooke to Sassoon, the poetry generated by the war is etched into collective memory. But it is in prose fiction that we find some of the most profound insights into the war's individual and communal tragedies, the horror of life in the trenches and the grand farce of the first industrial war. Featuring forty-seven writers from twenty different nations, representing all the main participants in the conflict, No Man's Land is a truly international anthology of First World War fiction. Work by Siegfried Sassoon, Erich Maria Remarque, Willa Cather and Rose Macaulay sits alongside forgotten masterpieces such as Stratis Myrivilis' Life in the Tomb, Raymond Escholier's Mahmadou Fofana and Mary Borden's The Forbidden Zone. No Man's Land is a brilliant memorial to the twentieth century's most cataclysmic event. |
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Now a Woman's Hour drama scheduled for 28th October, running every week day for 2 weeks. Mesdames et Messieurs, presenting La Petite Mort, or, A Little Death... A silent film, destroyed in a fire in 1913 at the Pathe studio, before it was seen even by its director. A lowly seamstress, who makes the costumes she should be wearing, but believes her talent — and the secret she keeps too — will soon get her a dressing room of her own. A famous — and dashing — creator of spectacular cinematic illusions, husband to a beautiful, volatile actress, the most adored icon of the Parisian studios. All fit together, like scenes in a movie. And as you will see, this plot has a twist we beg you not to disclose... |
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