Working Knowledge: Král catalogues the quotidian

Petr Král, with Jana Bokova

It was something I’d been meaning to pick up for months, yet Petr Král’s Working Knowledge (Pushkin Press, $16.95) ultimately found me precisely when I most needed it, which was about ten days ago, just as I was settling into this large, half-empty, half-lived-in house in rural Saskatchewan, the semi-abandoned home of a friend, where some arguably misguided notion had prompted me to pass some weeks in solitude. The book was the last thing I bought before leaving Saskatoon, my last chance to soak up city life, and heading farther east. It’s been among the wettest Junes in provincial history, the house cold and damp, the surrounding fields too marshy for strolling, so I’ve spent many of these hours seated at this big wooden table, trying not to let my brain go completely soggy. I needed to try and remain alert to the world, to not retreat completely and morbidly inward, and Král’s eloquent, charming little book, his “strange and beautiful existential encyclopedia of the everyday,” as Milan Kundera describes it in his brief introduction, served to help me keep my focus.

Ranging in length from a few pages to a single sentence, Working Knowledge catalogues dozens of meditations on things known and most commonly taken for granted. Though I can hardly verify this, the translation sometimes strikes me as poor. Thankfully, Král’s is the sort of poetic yet mostly spare writing that can weather an awkward rendering or two. The book opens with ‘Coffee,’ immediately awakening our senses with its “residue of night,” before slipping into ‘The Shirt,’ considering ‘Dawn,’ that “washed-out, ashen period in which all things are reborn into doubt,” assessing the distinct values inherent in two kinds of breakfast, exploring the miniature offerings of self-recognition that lay waiting in every act of shaving, and reminding us to cherish the glaze of sleepy morning stasis: “…we are never closer to a state of grace than on those mornings when we lie in bed, half-awake, allowing ribbons of thought and itinerant dreams to drift idly through our minds. We are as yet no more than pure potential… sending out feelers and drawing them back again, between the shadows and the flares of light which occasionally reach us from between the closed curtains…”

Not all of these writings are so serene. One piece considers the unease raised by retrieving your luggage from the airport’s conveyor belt and wondering where it’s been or who’s been inside of it. Another is a strident defense of the word “cunt.” There are a number of rousing declarations threading through Working Knowledge, which sometimes read as so out of left field as to constitute enigmatic one-liners. “Only visiting mothers truly makes it possible to get to know a foreign city,” he writes at the top of ‘Mothers and Daughters.’ Yet as the book continues Král engages with his topics less as platforms for such pronouncements than as opportunities to ask the reader questions, as in his pages on laughter, where he wonders when did we first truly laugh, or whether true laughter is instinctive or learned. The prose seems cleanest when considering concrete items with a minimal number of words, yet I think the most wonderful passages are the longer ones which, while en route to some other assertion, pause to offer some tantalizing fragment of some other, larger story. These micro-narratives include references to ex-cons from Guyana who build their houses facing the prison as a reminder not to go back, to a mountaineering conductor who takes a catastrophic fall, to Lenin asking Trotsky for a cigarette even though he didn’t smoke, or to Luis Buñuel, who was hard of hearing, spending his final days rising at dawn to listen to the wind in the trees off his Mexico City terrace.

Like Kundera, Král, a poet, essayist and one-time surrealist, is a Czech living in France since fleeing his homeland back in 1968. It’s tempting to attribute his sensitivity to small things to the exile’s condition and its implied nostalgia—after all, there is in Working Knowledge a tribute to Czech Christmas fish soup that’s as brimming with affection as anything else in this book—but I’m fairly confident that Král would have written about such things anywhere and under any circumstance. Though often writing as though of universally shared experience, his perspective is unapologetically specific—male, white, heterosexual, European, art loving, and at times a little old-fashioned in his adoration of women and notions of gender roles—yet it’s this specificity that elevates Working Knowledge to something inspired, bold and funny, and necessarily particular, rather than aphoristic. I’m certain that this book is best read slowly, or even randomly, at one’s whim, but my present conditions compelled me to gobble it up over only a couple of sittings. It’s the sort of thing I read first for pleasure, secondly for work, and, perhaps thirdly, out of a lingering suspicion—or desire—that to live with a little more alertness to quotidian experience might make us better human beings, or at the very least slightly more pierced by the rush of living as it passes us by.

Bring us your huddled masses: Emanuele Crialese ushers us toward the Golden Door

The original Italian title for writer/ director Emanuele Crialese’s most recent work was Nuovo- mondo, but the film began circulating festivals in 2006, only months after the release of Terrence Malick’s The New World. Presumably re-titled so as to avoid being confused with Malick’s atmospheric masterwork, Nuovomondo was ultimately released, in English-speaking countries at least, as Golden Door. The shift, however frustrating it may have been for the filmmakers, was ultimately fortuitous: Crialese’s follow-up to Respiro is a work at once grounded in carefully detailed history and strangely elevated by a sense of grand mystery. Its characters, most of them Italian peasants, embark on a journey to early 20th century America as pilgrims undertaking a journey of mystical significance. The New World they move toward, which is rumoured to yield vegetables the size of horses and trees that grow money, indeed beacons them like some utopian portal made of precious materials. And Crialese’s simultaneously beguiling and terrifying vision of their movement is suitably poetic, intoxicated with the immigrant’s persistent optimism.

With the exception of westerns and their later counterpart, the road movie, travel, the actual movement from one geographical space to another, has traditionally been compressed in movies, forsaken in favour of depicting the destination. But what was once conveyed through a fleeting image of a broken line working its way across a map is itself the very subject of much of Golden Door. Like millions of others, journeying to the New World for poor Sicilian farmer Salvatore Mancuso (Vincenzo Amato, nearly unrecognizable from his memorable turn in Respiro) and his family represents an act of faith and will ultimately result in their being basically torn apart. From the opening images of Salvatore and his eldest son climbing a rocky hillside with stones in their mouths, hoping to receive answers from God as to what to do with their frustrated lives, there’s an immediate sense that adventure and necessity collaborate in this realm, however uneasily. To dream of a new life in a new place requires tremendous sacrifice as well as tremendous imagination.

The themes of Golden Door might sound severe, even miserable, but Crialese’s approach to Salvatore’s story is in fact graceful, enigmatic, often warmly humorous and frequently spectacular. There’s a magnificent moment when we see masses of Italians huddled tightly from overhead before a great metallic groan begins to pull them apart, a widening stretch of sea water opening between them like an abyss. Once the ship Salvatore and his family boards sets sail, Crialese’s imagery becomes strikingly divided into smooth lateral pans aboveboard, where passengers in their finest suits attempt to maintain a civilized comportment, and unstable hand-held camerawork below, where the passengers are divided by gender and sleep in claustrophobic proximity to one and other. At the film’s mid-point, all of these passengers will be tossed about like fish in the belly of a giant steel whale and Crialese’s camera stays there with them, their cries of panic the only sounds to rise above the crashing of waves beyond.

Whatever mortal havoc the emigrants survive (and, sadly, some don’t) can hardly prepare them for what awaits once they reach the fog-enshrouded Ellis Island. US Immigration officials, considering themselves enlightened by the pseudo-science of Eugenics, run their applicants through countless inane tests to make sure that their citizenry will not suffer contamination from any sub-standard foreign genes. Single women meanwhile must undergo the sometimes humiliating, often surprising ritual of accepting marriage proposals from complete strangers hoping to purchase a wife. Some of these encounters are absolutely heartbreaking, yet others, like the contract agreed upon between Salvatore and the bewitchingly modern Englishwoman with the mysterious past he met onboard (Charlotte Gainsbourg, sporting a red mane that makes her look like an exotic bird), are utterly charming. Rife with anxiety, but charming nonetheless.

I won’t try to fool you into thinking Golden Door is action-packed. It moves with an almost hypnotic rhythm, its tone largely observational and unassuming, marked by occasional impressionistic spells characterized by the use of slow-motion and anachronistic but thematically appropriate music. (Curiously, it used for its finale Nina Simone’s driving rendition of ‘Sinnerman’ the same year that David Lynch used the song to back up the rousing closing credit sequence of Inland Empire.) There are also detours into complete fantasy, dreams where the Promised Land’s rivers of milk truly flow free and Salvatore must swim to reach some parcel of earth along with so man others. And it’s intriguing to me that Golden Door fuses planes of both grim realism and dreamy reverie. Perhaps Crialese really was channeling the same spirit as Malick when he came up with his own Nuovomondo –there’s a lot to be said for summoning up the past through such a rich lens of imagination.