FQR Books III – John Malkovich

Fortunately for us, John Malkovich is an open book when asked to discuss his latest reading habits

Natsuo Kirino, a Japanese writer from the mid Fifties wrote disturbing mysteries – I would say murder mysteries – that are very creepy, mostly because she can make things up that are unimaginably violent or disturbing. She describes these murders in an almost hypernormal way. Out is probably my favourite book of hers. The other one I like is Grotesque, although it appeared to me that it suffered a little during its English translation. I’ve also just read Real World, which is, I think, her latest noir thriller.

I’m also just about done with a book by Robert Gellately. It’s a kind of compare and contrast called Lenin, Stalin and Hitler; The Age of Social Catastrophe. It’s very informative and quite well written, although it lacks the humour of, say, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar and it’s not as gossipy or fun, if one can really use this term to describe Stalin. Further, it doesn’t have the elegance of the Russian general Dmitri A Volkogonov’s great book entitled simply Stalin. It is very informative and disturbing. Probably the most interesting thing about it is the description of Lenin. Normally, Lenin is not pictured as someone who is dripping in other people’s blood but every page in this book brings to light that he was demanding terror. There is nothing positive to be said about Lenin – at least, not in my mind – except that he is dead. The Soviets were always great at spinning their own history – Anna Politkovskaya, who was critical of Putin and the Chechen wars, wrote A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya and she was murdered for her troubles.

On a lighter note, I’m not sure whether I ever mentioned the Dutch writer Arnon Grunberg. I have read his book The Story of My Baldness which is absolutely hilarious, very cruel and funny. It has an interesting, dark story to it: Grunberg had written a novel that won a prize in Holland for best début novel and then Marek van der Jagt, a critic, began slaughtering the book saying how untalented Grunberg was. He even went as far as calling him names such as “dirty Jew”. Van der Jagt then challenged himself to show Grunberg how to write a good novel, saying he would show him and the world how to do it. He wrote The Story of My Baldness, which then won him the prize of best début novel too. However, van der Jagt turned out to be Grunberg himself, who was pulling a prank and had written both novels himself. The other one I read is The Jewish Messiah. I read it before it was published in English, when Grunberg sent me a manuscript. It’s about a gay German who is the grandson of a kind of very staunch Nazi, one of the last true believers, who commences an affair with an Orthodox Jewish guy in Basel, Switzerland. It’s probably not a true story because I would be surprised if anything Grunberg said was true. He is an immensely clever and funny writer.

There is a book I saw on a movie set in Australia. It was in a library in the film of JM Coetzee’s Disgrace. It was a very interesting book that I started to look at between the shots called Transatlantic Manners: Social Patterns in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature, by Christopher Mulvey. It’s quite fun and interesting. It’s really about how we were told things were in the 19th century by people who had travelled – either by Americans who had travelled to England or by Englishmen who had travelled to America. It’s sort of professorial and a little bit dry but quite interesting.

There is also a really entertaining book written several years ago by David Edmonds and John Eidinow. I dug it out again the other day. I think they are trying to make it into a film. It’s called Bobby Fischer goes to War and it’s about the World Champion Chess careers of Bobby Fischer, who was raised by his mother in Manhattan, and Boris Spassky, who was raised in a Stalinist-ravaged Russia.

Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives is a fantastic piece of Chilean literature. The writer died quite young, aged 50. He was at one time a night watchman on a camping ground outside Barcelona. Nazi Literature in the Americas is another book he wrote which is extremely funny. Essentially, it’s a sort of fictional encyclopedia showing connections between various fascist writers in mainly South America and Mexico.

- John Malkovich is currently starring in Changeling

One Response

1. srini anumolu Says:
   April 7th, 2009 at 5:22 am

   John Malkovich is an absolutely top rate actor. Where does he find time to read so much? Who among the current crop of actors would actually read a book? Miley Cyrus reading Kafka?

   Out of pure selfishness, I would like him to do more movies and read less!

Would you like to comment on this article?

You must be logged in to post a comment.