One of the best books that I have read so far this year was a book that Martin gave me for my birthday: The Most Beatuiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu (available on Google Books here). The story is set here around Dupont Circle in DC (or rather Logan Circle which is a few blocks from here) and is about three men who all came from different parts of Africa when their were young and settled here in Washington. One of them, the narrator, develops a friendship with an American women who moves into his neighborhood with her little daughter. It is a beautiful story about a few people whose lives come to cross here in this city, but it is also about the class differences in Washington and about the gentrification of my neighborhood a few years ago (which is constantly on-going in different parts of this city). The story telling reminds me a little of that in Cannery Road, the only Steinbeck book I’ve ever read. I don’t know if Mengestu has written anything else, but he is a few years younger than I am so hopefully this is only the first of many books by him. Here is a passage that I found beautiful:

“I put my coat on quickly. How were we supposed to say goodbye now? With a hug or handshake or a quick wave like casual acquaintances? Judith settled the question by sticking her hand out. I took it, and in doing so learned what it meant to feel your heart break.”

I watched two more movies on the same topic that I wrote about a few days ago, namely Milk and Burn after Reading. Or one was about American modern political history and one was about Washington. “Milk”, the story about the first openly gay publicly elected official, was great. When seeing a movie like that, it is difficult not to adore Sean Penn and Gus van Sant.

“Burn after Reading” is a Coen brothers movie and just as messed up as Coen brother movies always are. It is not about politics, but it is set in DC, mainly in Georgetown (though the outdoor scenes from that part of the city are unfortunately filmed in Brooklyn, so you can’t see how it really looks there), with CIA involved in the background. It starts with one person desperately wanting a plastic surgery and two others having an affair, and ends with three people killed and one person shipped off to Venezuela by the CIA. Martin, who has some aversions against Georgetown, thinks it is very telling about the people who lives there and about Washington in general, since “this city is filled with professional incompetence combined with intellectual arrogance”. While I do think that DC is a little less loony than portrayed in the movie, I agree to a certain extent with Martin’s description of Washington careerists…

I recently got a membership with Blockbuster which I have been using frequently since. (One of their stores just around the corner from me.) In these past few weeks, I have been interested in films about Washington and American politics in modern history and watched three in a row: Frost vs. Nixon, W, and Bobby. Frost vs. Nixon was quite good, and the parts with Nixon were interesting, but overall, the movie was a bit too Hollywood for my taste. It was almost more interesting to watch the extra material about the story behind and to see the real interviews with Nixon, than watching the movie itself.

W, about George W. Bush, was better, though they needed more time to tell the story, especially that of him being elected president and what happened after in the administration. But I guess it is because it was a movie and not a documentary.

Bobby was the one that I can really recommend. It was not at all what I expected (I thought there would be much more focus on Bobby Kennedy himself, instead it is a story about the people who were in the Ambassador’s Hotel on the night when Kennedy was shot) but it was beautiful and it still managed to give you the impression that Bobby Kennedy truly was a great man. And as you might have seen on this page, my favorite quote is by him:

“There are those who look at things the way they are, and say why… I dream of things that never were and say why not?”

Here is the last part of the movie Bobby with one of his amazing speeches that is still too relevant.

Or am I following him? Regardless of which, he seems to be writing books about the cities that I live in. The Da Vinci Code was mainly set in Paris, Angels and Demons in Rome, and now The Lost Symbol is from what I understand set here in DC. The fun part about it is of course that when I read the first two books, I was able to picture exactly where Brown’s hero Professor Langdon was running/sneaking/crawling around, whether it was in the Louvre, in Saint Sulpice, in the Vatican, or on and around Via del Corso. The boring things is of course that only the city changes; his stories remain the same. More or less anyway. I have to admit that I was entertained when reading the Da Vinci Code, and I got a bit curious about the story of how Emperor Constantine supposedly shaped modern Christianity. I, however, quickly got  bored when I read the same story again in Angels and Demons (which I think was his first book). I will probably end up reading the Lost Symbol just because I live here in Washington and because I for the past year have walked around in the city staring at the statues and monuments, wondering how they came about, and been amazed by the Freemasonry Temples (I have one just across the street). I am not exactly running to the bookstore to buy the book though. I am however really looking forward to Brown’s next Langdon story that according to this pattern must be set in Chisinau!

SvD, DN