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REVIEW:

There is an unsettling edge of nastiness just below the surface of Herman Koch’s Summer House with Swimming Pool, which is even more disquieting because it makes for a compulsively enjoyable novel. The novel’s only guide, Dr Marc Schlosser, quickly proves himself to be anything but trustworthy. He has developed his medical practice by satisfying the hypochondria, the prescription drug-addictions, and the egocentricity of his Dutch entertainment industry clients. Familiarity has bred his contempt with regard to their bodies, their vanity, and their fears. Schlosser has been charged with malpractice in the death of one of his celebrity clients, Ralph Meier, who had just had his big break playing the role of Tiberius in an HBO mini-series. Meier with his powerful bulk, sudden appetites and domineering personality, might have been a charismatic man, but at their first meeting he examined Schlosser’s wife as if she were a “tasty morsel … to wolf down in a few bites”.

Both Schlosser and Schlosser’s wife had been flattered by the famous actor’s attentions but they find themselves involved in ways they had not initially contemplated. The two families, both with teenage children, decide to share a holiday together at a Mediterranean resort but the sun-drenched days quickly reveal toxic shadows. Summer House with Swimming Pool is a novel of short stabbing glimpses. Things are seen with enough contextual information to enable an instant interpretation to be made, but as the novel progresses, alternative and increasingly unpleasant versions present themselves. The reader is made complicit very quickly. Despite his contempt for his patients, Marc Schlosser is oddly likable. The summer holiday in a beach villa promises great things in the same way as travel-agents sell packaged holidays. However, it doesn’t take long for the underside of paradise to make an appearance: too much alcohol, the failed camping-ground with neglected animals in a pet zoo, and family tensions rising in over-crowded accommodation. Koch has a knack of getting the vacation setting just right, but he is also a great master of unease. Sexual romances flare and flourish among the teenagers of the two families with the connivance and tolerance of adults who are blinded by their own infidelities. Beach parties and bars turn out to be anything but pleasurable interludes.

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Finally, complications over-balance the vacation setting. There are more volatile passions waiting underneath the commonplace, and a single spark ignites them when one of Schlosser’s daughters goes missing for a few hours. The novel is compulsive reading, not only for what will happen, but to discover what has already happened. The meaning of an incident is revised, and sometimes revised again. It’s a dramatic and gripping narrative and it is often staged in the reader’s thoughts.

Koch is the Dutch author of several books including the bestselling The Dinner. His skills are apparent in Summer House with Swimming Pool as layers are stripped from personalities and stories in an almost forensic fashion. Koch undercuts assumptions right to the unexpected conclusion, when it is hard to resist beginning the book all over again simply to see things with new eyes.

AT A GLANCE

SUMMER HOUSE WITH SWIMMING POOL

Herman Koch, $37

– Sunday Star Times

Joy Cowley is one of New Zealand’s most successful children’s authors and has recently written two books about that iconic insect, Buzzy Bee. Here are some of her favourite books:

THE STORY OF PING

Margery Flack and Kurt Weiss.

Almost nine, I was a struggling reader and this was the first book I read. I made two discoveries – that reading accessed a story, and that unlike an oral story, the printed telling didn’t change with the second reading.

THE GOSPEL OF ST JOHN

New Testament/Bible

My parents expected me to read the Bible right through every year. I didn’t quite manage that but was drawn to the St John Gospel, because of the poetic meaning and the music that took me to places beyond words. “The wind bloweth where it listeth and thou hearest the sound thereof but knoweth not whence it cometh or whither it goeth. So it is with everyone that is born of the spirit.” To read that was to become a wide open space for the wind of another realm.

SCENTED GARDENS FOR THE BLIND

Janet Frame

Writers tend to be plot driven or character driven. Janet Frame’s plots are small but her characters and their environment are always exquisitely drawn. My first Frame book was Scented Gardens for the Blind. Later I read her other books that were grounded in autobiographical detail, but I began with the most abstract and was enthralled with the imagery. To describe it as allegory is to belittle it. It’s a book that crosses the arts – painting, music, sculpture, poetry.

THE BONE PEOPLE

Keri Hulme

I was on a long train ride and had a manuscript given to me by the Spiral Collective, a group of women who wanted to publish the story. This was my introduction to The Bone People and I have no memory of the train ride, because Keri Hulme’s manuscript became the journey. I felt tremendous excitement. The “great New Zealand novel” was about to arrive, but it would not be what anyone was expecting. The Bone People was stunningly original, it wedded us to the land and gave us our identity as tangata whenua and tangata whenua hou.

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– Sunday Star Times

“IT WAS 1995 and I had just turned seven. I started saving my pocket money religiously to make my first ever purchase. I cleaned up my room endlessly to buy Michael Jackson’s HIStory – 30 tracks from his solo career for fifty dollars.

“I played the discs until they were so scratched that the only song left playable now is his collaboration with Paul McCartney, The Girl Is Mine. Sadly, it is a godawful song. and even Quincy Jones’ production couldn’t have made this cheese-based dish any more palatable.

“Fast forward 20 years and I generally only listen to music in the hire car on tour. The last album I played to Compact Disc Death was XO by Elliott Smith.

As albums, both HIStory and XO will never let you down, particularly now that CDs are on the way out and it’s impossible for mp3s on an iPhone to fail from excessive listening.

“It doesn’t take imagination to subscribe to the idea that the songs to which you hold a strong affinity, you share similarities within your personality to that of the writer.

“Somehow, they express how you feel. I’m not interested intellectually as to why I am drawn to a song, album, artist. I just want to drink it dry until the dregs leave that bitter taste; that The Girl Is Mine moment, or just one line too many from Elliott. But those dregs have a different kind of satisfaction – it humanises the genius from the throne; those rare moments to peer over the fence and realise that these writers are really just the kids next door f…ing around with cheap instruments.

” The only difference between the suit and the songwriter is the songwriter is self-absorbed enough to breeze blissfully ignorant past their first few hundred horrible songs, then drive 10 keepers around the world, selling them to any sucker willing to believe the hype.

I’m a believer. And I can’t see myself ever throwing out HIStory or XO.

AT A GLANCE

Australian indie-folk artist Christopher Coleman tours New Zealand for the first time in July/August, supported by NZ singer, Monty Bevins.

Tour Dates: Wellington, Rogue & Vagabond, tonight; Masterton, King St Live, July 30; New Plymouth, Rhythm, July 31; Auckland, Wine Cellar, Aug 1; Tauranga, Major Tom’s, Aug 2; Auckland, Kingsland Folk Club, Aug 3.

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– Sunday Star Times

Like father, like son – two handsome men. On the left, Robert De Niro: one of the greatest actors of his generation, his career more recently tarnished by his perplexing decision to appear in all sorts of rubbish. On the right, his late father, Robert De Niro Sr: abstract expressionist painter, depressive dandy, closeted gay.

The latter was to die in obscurity, his art marginalised by changing tastes, while the former attempts to belatedly shine some light on his old man’s life and career in Remembering The Artist: Robert De Niro Sr, a short HBO doco which screens on the Arts Channel in August.

Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver – De Niro the younger has himself painted some of the most enduring cinematic portraits of our age, and here tries to give shape, texture and weight to the life of his father, another complex character who experienced more than his fair share of jealousy, disappointment and rage.

I’ve seen an advance screening, and it’s quite something to witness the artist’s only child and namesake at age 70, looking back over the life of his creatively thwarted father, choking up as he considers what it must be like to be gifted and hungry but to miss your moment.

“It’s a great show, isn’t it” says Chris De Bazin from a noisy corner of an open-plan office at Sky TV.

“But, of course, there’s nothing unusual in that. Our schedules are packed with great shows. We just need a few more people to find us and watch them.”

De Bazin has been general manager of Sky’s Arts Channel for the past seven years. Before he got into television, he was, I’m amazed to discover, an undercover cop. Did he inhale Of course. But smoking pot was all in the line of duty, and he says he never enjoyed the effect.

Less enjoyable still was the stress of living under an assumed identity, hanging out with drug dealers and gang members, terrified your cover could be blown at any time with potentially deadly consequences.

Thank heavens, then, for a chance meeting in the now-demolished Aurora Tavern opposite Sky City, once a favoured haunt of off-duty policemen and TVNZ workers, where De Bazin was offered an alternative career in television in 1989.

After stints at TV3 and Prime, he took over the running of the Arts Channel, and estimates the audience has grown to around 20,000 pay-per-view subscribers under his watch.

“We’re doing all right, but I don’t think Sky will be buying new company cars on the back of the Arts Channel! It’s always good to attract more subscribers, and letting them know there’s more variety than they expected is a good way to do that.”

To that end, De Bazin is about to give his station an almighty kick up the arts with a new name, look and logo, and a content overhaul designed to attract a younger demographic. To entice this new audience, the first week in August (Aug 4-10) will be an open week – the newly renamed Sky Arts will be free to all SKY basic subscribers.

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“For the last seven years, we’ve focused on art, literature, opera, ballet, and there was a fear that we’d be rubbished as an arts channel if we broadened that out too much. But what’s become obvious from our research is that a lot of intelligent people who like art are really just curious in general, and they want a wider definition of what constitutes art programming.”

Coinciding with the open week, there are new shows aplenty, including a couple of series you might have previously expected to find on Rialto or SoHo. Reading the publicity blurb, Spanish period drama Grand Hotel (Thurs, Aug 7, 8.30pm) sounds like Downton Abbey with added chorizo, while Mammon (Sat Aug 9, 8.30pm) is frost-bitten Nordic noir in the vein of The Killing, Borgen and The Bridge.

De Bazin also mentions a musical profile of a Japanese punk-jazz flute player, and two top-shelf documentaries: Rich Hill – winner of this year’s US Grand Jury Prize at Sundance – and a brain-boggler called Passion and Power: The Technology of The Orgasm.

“Sadly, the commercial realities of free-to-air TV rule out a lot of arts shows, so it’s down to niche subscription channels like ours to cover this kind of cultural content. Some people probably dismiss us as elitist, but if they gave us a look, they’d find that’s not the case. If they’re interested in visual art, the humanities, books, jazz, architecture and indie music, they come to us.”

De Bazin is an artist himself, building fine furniture in his spare time. It runs in the family; his rellies carved the balustrades at Dunedin’s Larnach’s Castle. But he loves his day job as a television executive, not least because it beats the hell out of being an undercover cop.

REMEMBERING THE ARTIST: ROBERT DE NIRO SR airs on the Arts Channel August 5 at 8.30pm

– Sunday Star Times

REVIEW:

Known in its native France by far less depressing sounding Time for Adventure, this romantic-drama is a strange cross between Le Weekend and Before Sunset.

Forty-three-year-old struggling actress Alix (Coco Before Chanel’s Emmanuelle Devos) is travelling from Calais back to her native Paris when her eye catches that of sad-looking English literature professor Doug (Gabriel Byrne).

After giving him directions to the church he is seeking (and seemingly having missed her chance), she heads off to her flat and her audition without giving him another thought.

But when she can’t raise her boyfriend and her interview goes rather pear-shaped, Alix decides to head for the church to see what fate might bring her.

Writer-director Jerome Bonnell, whose other films have also looked at loneliness and love, here can’t quite seem to nail down a consistent tone.

Just a Sigh veers from slapstick comedy to domestic drama and slightly creepy stalking as Alix seems at a loss about what to do with her day.

Also, what made the seemingly similar-themed Before movies so good was the conversations and scenery, neither of which are present here, as Byrne (sporting a permanent hang-dog look) and Devos spend most of their time indoors and either staring at or fondling one another.

At times, the tale threatens to come to life, especially when opening out Alix’s back story, but for the most part this is 100 minutes spent in less than enthralling company.

Just a Sigh (M) 101 mins

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– Sunday Star Times

Shihad will donate their profit-share from New Zealand’s first ever pay-per-view music gig to the Christchurch Earthquake Recovery fund.

The one-off September 12 concert at Christchurch’s CBS Arena will showcase the veteran band’s ninth album, FVEY, with the 4000 tickets given away: but in a New Zealand first, television viewers will be asked to pay $19.95 to tune in live on TV channel Sky Arena. The broadcast would also cut live to pubs screening the show.

Shihad singer Jon Toogood said they would open the show by playing FVEY in its entirety, an album he described as “blistering”, “intense” and their best work for 15 years, which had its genesis in his father’s death and the band’s observations of inequality.

In keeping with that theme, their profit – pay-per-view models usually split revenue 50-50 between broadcaster and talent – would go to the Earthquake Relief Fund.

“We’ve always had a really big following in Christchurch – they seemed to get Shihad early on and it’s been a good vibe between the two of us,” said Toogood. “We thought ‘here is a place where we usually play big shows and we want to pull off something big and do something really different.

“The material we are playing is based around the divide between rich and poor, so if we can help [Christchurch] in some way, it would be really good.” Toogood said the band originally thought the idea of pay-per-view gigs was “completely weird” but felt their new work suited the format: producer Jaz Coleman had told them to consider it not as a CD or even for radio airplay but as a “brand-new set to play live, ammunition to destroy any band” and “this is a great opportunity to record the band at the right time”.

Sky Arena director John McRae said he believed audiences were willing to pay for televised gigs: “Shihad fans are a generation who grew up from tapes to CDs and this is just another medium. They are not buying the music but the experience, and also the convenience.”

McRae said the gig was “proof of concept” to bands, labels and promoters that pay-per-view could work and was a real revenue stream: “This is another string to their bow and instead of playing to a room of 10,000 they play to a stadium of 4.3m people.”

There were some pay-per-view concerts in the early 1990s – one New Kids on the Block gig did 275,000 sales in 1990 – before it went into decline; a recent resurgence in the US saw the Rolling Stones sell the final show of their 2012 50th anniversary tour from New Jersey with guests Lady Gaga, Bruce Springsteen and the Black Keys for US$39.95.

For an industry which Recorded Music New Zealand chief executive Damian Vaughan says is in a state of “transition on transition on transition” (from declining physical record sales to the rise of downloads, and latterly, the increase in streaming services), this could be a useful new income stream.

“It’s great if it eventuates,” Vaughan says. “Artists are trying plenty of different ways to generate alternative revenue streams. This is another way. I like it.” Toogood, with the authority of an industry veteran, says: “One thing that hasn’t changed with all these changes is that if you do something of quality, people will come to see you.”

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He believes FVEY is just that. “There has never been a time in our career when we have been so in love with an album from start to finish that we would ever attempt to play a brand-new album [in full on stage].”

The work is partly inspired by how hardworking the nurses who cared for Toogood’s ailing father were and how poorly they were paid. The result is “big and heavy and it needed to be because the world is a pretty heavy place at the moment”.

Vaughan, meanwhile, should mean at least one sale. “It is hard to say [whether fans will pay] – I couldn’t tell you,” Vaughan says. “But I am a Shihad fan and now that I know about it, I might like that. I would be keen on checking it out.”

– Sunday Star Times

Madonna thinks her daughter Lourdes has what it takes to be the next big star.

The pop icon has her 17-year-old daughter with her ex-partner Carlos Leon. Lourdes has been attending the prestigious LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York City and has now graduated, with her mom apparently sure she has what it takes to follow in her footsteps.

“Madonna has always been an incredibly strict mother at home, but now Lourdes has finished high school Madonna’s already plotting for her to follow in her footsteps and become a pop star,” an insider told Best magazine.

Lourdes has already dipped her toe into the showbiz pond having created a clothing line with her mother called Material Girl. She’s also been on tour with Madonna in the past, with the singer showing her the ropes even more as she’s got older.

“She has been learning from the best, and since she graduated has been accompanying Madonna to the studio and taking everything in,” the source said.

“At one point Madonna was even thinking of retiring and letting her daughter take over. But she decided Lourdes has to prove herself, to see if she really has got what it takes to compete in the pop world.”

Last year, Lourdes blogged about her experiences on tour with her mother. She worked with Madonna during her MDNA series of shows, helping in the wardrobe department after realising that she wanted a summer job just like her friends.

“Being in the wardrobe department meant me and a few other girls dressed the dancers during the show when they had quick changes,” she said.

“Thirty seconds to totally dress a sweaty dancer can be insane and provoke mucho anxiety. Doing this night after night was pretty cray, but I loved every minute of it.”

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– Cover Media