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Winnipeg Free Press
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
An A-level account
What a gift — a book you feel is going to be perfunctory turns out to be deeply felt and revelatory. Veteran British writer Geoff Dyer's memoir of his working-class childhood in western England surprises you with its thoughtfulness, wit and vivid detail. Despite its trauma-free subject matter — a boy living with his dull parents in the small city of Cheltenham near the Welsh border — Homework contains passages that will have you laughing out loud, while others might bring you close to tears. Matt Stuart photo Geoff Dyer's memory for detail and humour helps his prose shine on every page. Presumably no relation to the Free Press's international affairs columnist Gwynne Dyer, the author is a literary and art critic, non-fiction writer and novelist. He is a prolific chap, having published almost 20 books. His most recent, 2023's The Last Days of Roger Federer, examines the later works of a variety of artists, writers, musicians and even athletes who have touched his own life. Dyer has lived in Los Angeles for a dozen years, where he teaches creative writing at UCLA. Being uprooted from his native soil, one suspects, and also the death of his parents a few years before that, must have got him thinking of who he is and where he comes from. He was born in 1958. He grew up as an only child when England had finally shed the deprivation resulting from two world wars and a punishing depression. Yet deprivation was all his parents had ever known in their formative years, and it marked them for life. His mother, the daughter of poor dairy farmers, expected nothing beyond subsistence. His father, meanwhile, a sheet-metal worker who had served his war years in India, made a religion out of thriftiness. In an early passage Dyer describes his dad's morning shaving ritual, which took place in the kitchen, 'the red washing-up bowl becoming grey with suds and tiny splinters of beard.' After the blades became too dull for him, he passed them to his wife 'to shave her shins, after which they were still not thrown out. 'Their functional life was ended but they had some as yet undiscovered use even if they were so blunt as to have rendered suicide almost impossible.' This combination of memory for detail and droll humour makes Dyer's prose shine on every page. The book is awash in Britishisms ('biro,' 'lollies,' 'O-levels' and 'A-levels'), which go undefined for North American readers. At one point Dyer applies his art-critic's skills to a brilliant exegesis of the book's cover photo. It shows him in a cowboy hat at age six, while his folks pose beside the symbol of their proudly attained affluence, a sky-blue 1963 Vauxhall Victor, 'looking like an American car but less elongated, as though a U.S. model had been shortened in order to better accommodate itself to our narrow island.' Homework Dyer relates his story chronologically. As a youngster he spends his weekends in the backseat of the Vauxhall on trips to the country to visit his Dickensian collection of grandparents, aunts and uncles. At age 11, he passes his '11-pluses,' England's national exams at the time which divided students into academic and vocational streams. His parents were chuffed that the fruit of their loins was going to 'grammar school,' in which he would learn to work with head rather than his hands, as did they. Ironically, however, this 'most momentous' event separated him from his parents. The attitudinal gulf widened as he grew into his teens, discovering music, tennis, beer and books. He was a lanky, good-looking youth who had his share of success with girls. Some of his erotic recollections verge on TMI, given the wholesomeness of the preceding pages. The story, you think, will conclude triumphantly with Dyer's admission to Oxford University. But there is a moving coda regarding his mother's background, which he foreshadows in his earlier analysis of the cover photo. One quibble. Homework is a terrible title. This memoir is not work at all. Morley Walker is a retired Free Press editor and writer.
New Statesman
07-05-2025
- Sport
- New Statesman
Rafael Nadal: the king of Paris
The era of the so-called Big Three in men's tennis is finally ending. Roger Federer, winner of 20 Grand Slam titles, retired aged 41 in 2022. Rafael Nadal, the subject of this new book and winner of 22 Grand Slam titles, was forced through injury to retire at the age of 38 last autumn. But Novak Djokovic, aged 37 and winner of an unsurpassed 24 Grand Slams, grinds on even as a new generation of players, led pre-eminently by Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, has emerged to challenge and now supplant him at the apex of the game. There's something especially poignant about the last days of a tennis champion. The technical brilliance, discipline and will to win remain but the body is much less accommodating. In the end, no matter what you have achieved, as Geoff Dyer writes in The Last Days of Roger Federer, 'you run out of options'. The question, then, is how and when to depart. Do you stay on, as Andy Murray did after multiple surgeries and a hip replacement operation, to continue playing but as an imperfect facsimile of what you once were? The last days of Murray's career were defined by physical and psychological pain as he lost to players he would once have beaten routinely, and yet he felt compelled to go on. I was at Queen's in London last summer to see Murray's final game as a singles player. He carried yet another injury into the match and could scarcely move – the crowd collectively gasped as he hobbled towards the ball at the start – but tried to compete all the same before succumbing to the inevitable: it ended with Murray 4-1 down in the first set. Note that, somehow, he won a game. The Big Three – plus Murray, who won three Grand Slams and two Olympic gold medals – were intensely self-motivated but their rivalry powered their ambition and sustained them through the long years of gruelling competition and travel. 'Why are you even asking me this question about why I want to keep it up?' Federer once said. 'This is what we all love doing, and you want to prove to yourself you can do it over and over again. You can just never get enough until you hit the wall.' The tennis tour is truly global and the appeal of the four Grand Slams – the US Open, the Australian Open, Roland Garros, Wimbledon – is that they are played on different surfaces in different countries. But no player has dominated one Grand Slam as Nadal did Roland Garros on the red clay in Paris. He won 14 titles there and Christopher Clarey, who began work on The Warrior in 2022, must have hoped he would be playing at this year's tournament in Paris as the book came out. It was not to be. Nadal's last competitive match was to represent Spain in a Davis Cup tie against the Netherlands in November 2024. By which point, even the great Spaniard, the only male tennis player to rank No 1 in three different decades, had run out of options. He had hit Federer's wall. As tennis correspondent for the New York Times, Clarey followed the tour for more than three decades and what elevates the book above mere hagiography, or a fan's memoir, are the author's contacts in the game, the conversations he has had with players and coaches over the years and his technical analysis. The book has 20 chapters. Each has a two-word title, the first word being the definite article: The Monument, The Code, The Weapon, The Canvas, and so on. It's a formulaic approach but it enables Clarey to organise his material, and move fluidly back and forth in time without too much repetition as he charts the rise of Nadal, with each of his 14 triumphs at Roland Garros being the rope that tugs the narrative on. The courtside summaries of forgotten or nearly-forgotten matches are much less engaging than the digressions into tennis history and biography. I didn't know that the Roland Garros Stadium was used as an internment camp for 'foreign undesirables' at the start of the Second World War; the writer Arthur Koestler was among the detained. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe There is a good section on Björn Borg and Chris Evert, the premier players at Roland Garros in the 1970s, and a fascinatingly nerdish chapter on the origins of clay court tennis. The French for clay courts is terre battue, which literally means 'beaten earth'. Clarey, who married a French woman and lived in Paris, likes this detail and repeats it on numerous occasions. To excel on clay a player must learn to slide; Stan Smith, a former Wimbledon champion, equated playing on clay to 'running on marbles'. Nadal, with his 'deeply ingrained patterns and choreography', learned the game on clay courts at his local club in Manacor, on the island of Mallorca, where he still lives and in 2016 opened his own academy. Coached from a young age and for much of his career by his uncle Toni Nadal, Rafael was a teenage prodigy. Toni, a failed player, was relentlessly demanding of him: he knew his nephew had the potential to be a player for the ages and sought every competitive advantage. Rafael was naturally right-handed but ended up playing with his non-dominant hand. His power and athleticism were remarkable. 'I saw very quickly that he was an extraterrestrial,' Richard Gasquet, one of his talented teenage rivals, said of Nadal after losing to him. 'When I came off court, I told my father, 'It's over, that's the new champion of Roland Garros.'' The young Nadal, who first won Roland Garros aged 19, was piratical in appearance, with flowing hair, bulging biceps and sleeveless shirts. He sweated profusely and would lose four litres of fluid every match; Nike developed fabrics that could better absorb his sweat. His forehand, hit with extraordinary speed and topspin, was his signature shot, and the more he played the faster it became. Clarey mentions that Nadal, because of his achievements, stamina and physique, was subject to much speculation, notably in France, about whether he took performance-enhancing drugs (he never failed a doping test). His obsessive and eccentric on-court rituals – meticulously lining up his water bottles, tugging at his shorts and shirt and touching his nose before each serve – only increased people's fascination in a player who seemed as shy and reserved off-court as he was compelling and flamboyant on it. Christopher Clarey doubts that another player will ever surpass Nadal's achievements at Roland Garros. But in sports, one can never predict who might come next or what the human athlete can achieve. Clarey was from the beginning watching with 'a growing sense of wonder' as Rafael Nadal set about conquering his kingdom of clay in Paris, and The Warrior is an absorbing tribute to the tournament's greatest champion. The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay Christopher Clarey John Murray, 320pp, £22 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Faith is a half-formed thing] Related
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Gene Hackman and Wife Betsy's Friends Remember Their Deep Connection: ‘She Just Adored Him'
Members of Gene Hackman and wife Betsy's community in Santa Fe, New Mexico are opening up about the couple, weeks after they were both found dead in their home on Feb. 26. In ABC News' special report The Last Days of Gene Hackman, which aired Tuesday, March 18, multiple people whom the network identified as friends of the couple spoke to their close relationship and warm personalities. "Gene was a real guy's guy. He was a gentle giant, very calm," Kevin Bobolosky, identified as the couple's real estate broker, said. "Betsy, I think, mostly did all the cooking and cleaning on this big estate, out of love. She just adored him. So they had everything they wanted." Stuart Ashman, a former director of Santa Fe's Museum of Fine Arts, recalled first meeting Hackman, who held a passion for painting outside of his film career, in the mid-1990s. "When he talked to you, nothing else existed," Ashman said of the two-time Academy Award winner. "He was only interested in you, and he was very generous with his time, with his storytelling and also with his finances." Related: Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa's Estates Share Update on Couple's Surviving Dogs: 'Both Are Safe' and 'Healthy' Another man whom ABC News identified as Gene and Betsy's friend, Stephan Marshall, described Betsy as "a lovely and charming woman." She and Gene first met in the late 1980s at a gym in California, where Betsy worked at the time, as the special reported. Gene and Betsy married in 1991; he shared three adult children — Christopher, 65, Elizabeth, 62, and Leslie, 58 — with his first wife Faye Maltese, whom he was married to from 1956 to 1986. Maltese died in 2017 at 88. Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. "She had been with Gene since she was pretty young," Marshall said of Betsy, who was a classically trained pianist and skilled musician. "He was very proud of her accomplishments; she had played with the Honolulu Philharmonic Orchestra." Related: Who Inherits Gene Hackman and Wife Betsy's Estate? Why It Matters Who Died First, According to a Legal Expert ABC News' special features interviews with Santa Fe sheriff Adan Mendoza and reporters and journalists who covered Gene's career in addition to those who said they were friends with the actor and Betsy. "That really struck home with me thinking about Betsy. I'm sure it just never occurred to anybody that she wouldn't outlast him," Marshall said, regarding officials' belief that Betsy died on Feb. 12, one week before her husband's death. A medical examiner found that the acting legend died from heart disease, high blood pressure and advanced Alzheimer's after Betsy died from hantavirus, a virus spread by rodents. Gene died at 95, while Betsy was 65 at the time of her death. ABC News' Last Days of Gene Hackman special airs Tuesday, March 18 Read the original article on People
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
How Keanu Reeves Rescued ‘Fast & Furious' Director's New Movie
Justin Lin needed saving when his new movie, Last Days, ran into serious financial trouble. Directed by Lin, the movie is based on a magazine article, 'The Last Days of John Allen Chau,' and follows a missionary trying to make contact with the Sentinelese, a secluded tribe living on an island in the Indian Ocean. Speaking at the Sundance Film Festival with The Wrap, Lin recounted how Keanu Reeves of all people brought his movie back from the brink. According to the director it 'fell apart' and then he received a call from the John Wick actor asking how he could be of service. 'It was this one moment when everything fell apart,' Lin said. 'I think with all independent experiences you just don't know. It's a roller coaster. At that point, I thought it was all going to be done. We have angels along the way that come really help us.'Turns out one of those angels for Lin was the star of The Matrix. 'I got a call from Keanu Reeves who heard that we were having some problems and he said, 'Look, I want to help,' and it was really inspiring,' he said. Reeves then proceeded to help get additional financing together to get the film finished. Despite his role, he won't have a producer credit on Last Days. 'I started meeting the best of humanity and all these people from around the world came and joined us,' Lin said. 'That's how we were able to get this film going.' The movie stars Naveen William Sidney Andrews, Ciara Bravo, Radhika Apte, Ken Leung, and Sky Yang.
