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'Time of the Child' is a marvelous blend of despair and redemption

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'Time of the Child' is a marvelous blend of despair and redemption

A village “on the western edge of a wet nowhere” populated by men who drink too much and women who smile too little. Throw in cows, an addled priest, an abandoned baby and a thick cloud cover of shame and you have the elements for a quintessential Irish story.

So quintessential, in fact, I’ve held off reading Niall Williams for a long time, despite hearing raves about his work. My skepticism, it turns out, was misplaced. I’ve just emerged from a Niall Williams binge with a belated appreciation for his writing, which invests specificity and life in characters and places easily reduced to clichés.

Time of the Child is Williams’ latest novel, a companion piece, rather than a sequel to, his 2019 novel, This Is Happiness. Both books are set in the rural village of Faha — a town in the far west of Ireland whose inhabitants, we’re told, possess “the translucent flesh that came from living in an absolute humidity.”

Time of the Child takes place in the weeks leading up to Christmas 1962 and opens — and closes — on a set piece of Mass at the parish church, where most of the village gathers. In between lies a story that feels, at once, realistic in its rough and comic everyday unfolding and mythic in its riffs on the grand themes of despair and spiritual redemption.

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Jack Troy is the town doctor and central character here. He’s a melancholy contained man who, we’re told, “carrie[s] himself in a manner that [the townspeople of] Faha might have summarized as Not like us.” Dr. Troy lost his wife and then the older woman he unexpectedly fell in love with, who’s now also dead. Keeping house for him is his 29-year-old daughter, Ronnie, the eldest of three sisters; the one who remained at home.

Ronnie, too, is a semi-enigma to the townspeople: Our narrator tells us that “Added to [her] reserve was not only the screened lives of all women in the parish at the time, but the marginal natures of all writers, for Ronnie Troy’s closest companion was her notebook.”

Dr. Troy has become haunted by despair and by a particularly heartrending question: “Why does no one love my daughter?” The answer, he fears, is his own glowering presence that may have repelled one especially promising suitor.

Inspired by what we’re told is a “mixed fuel of … brandy … [and] a parent’s fear of the unmade world after them,” Dr. Troy, uncharacteristically, resolves on a bizarre scheme to make things right. As the saying goes: “Man plans, God laughs.”

Instead of unfolding the Troy family narrative chronologically, Williams layers it on top of other simultaneous storylines, all of which are graced with language as bracing as salt spray from the chill Atlantic. We follow, for instance, the wanderings of Jude Quinlan, a 12 year old “on the rope-bridge between man and boy.”

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Jude’s father drinks and gambles and his mother, Mamie, possesses “the anxious look of one married to an instability.” Listen to how Williams moves fluidly from the mundane to the wider lens of the numinous in these snippets from an extended passage where Jude helps to unload a van full of Christmas toys for the town fair:

There were toy soldiers, kits for flying gliders, … skittles in a net, balls, bats. … dolls of one expression but many dresses, …

For Jude, carrying everything from the van … was as close has he would get to handling any of these things. He had no resentment or bitterness . Rather, from nearness to the marvelous something rubbed off on him …

The other thing, the one that only occurred to him years later when he would recall what happened that day, was that what he was carrying out of the van that December morning was his childhood.

For those who believe in such phenomena, Jude will be the instrument for bringing a miracle — a Christmas miracle complete with a baby and a virginal mother, no less — into this story. The other miracle here is a literary one: Time of the Child itself, which gives readers that singular experience of nearness to the marvelous.

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The spies on TV this fall are juggling work and family – just like the rest of us

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The spies on TV this fall are juggling work and family – just like the rest of us

On the new Netflix series Black Doves, Keira Knightley plays the wife of a politician and a mom to cute kids. She’s also an undercover spy, secretly feeding a covert intelligence agency information about her husband’s job.

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Robert Ludovic/Netflix

In Netflix’s new spy series Black Doves, Keira Knightley’s character Helen Webb seems to be the perfect wife and partner for an up-and-coming official in the British government.

Beautiful and intelligent, she’s a warm mother to two cute kids, capable of hosting a holiday party for her husband’s staff in one moment and coercing the children to stop playing underneath a table in the next.

But Mrs. Webb is also a spy for a mysterious intelligence organization, feeding them information about her husband’s work all while managing the family’s affairs – and having an affair with another man. And when that affair is discovered by a “handler” from the organization – played with a matronly ruthlessness by Sarah Lancashire – she mostly has one question for Mrs. Webb:

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Why was she sleeping with this man?

Mrs. Webb’s answer was a surprise, coming from an experienced spy. “I wasn’t working an angle,” she says through tears. “It was real. It wasn’t a job. It was…love.”

That’s right. After 10 years of marriage and two kids, Mrs. Webb fell in love with someone else while trying to decide if she still cares for her husband.

It’s a deliciously dramatic situation far different than the stories of detached, mostly loner spies like James Bond and Mission Impossible‘s Ethan Hunt.

Spies with families fill fall TV

Sure, there have been spy characters with families in films and TV before, from Harrison Ford’s turn as Jack Ryan in 1992’s Patriot Games to FX’s The Americans, which concluded in 2018.

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But this fall has seen a veritable flood of stories about spies with spouses and children, trying to hold onto their families while balancing the demands of brutal, often dehumanizing jobs.

In The Agency, Michael Fassbender plays Martian, a spy who returns home after a lengthy assignment.

In The Agency, Michael Fassbender plays Martian, a spy who returns home after a lengthy assignment.

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Luke Varley/Paramount+ and Showtime

There’s Michael Fassbender’s CIA case officer Martian — I know, that name seems a little odd — in Showtime’s new series The Agency. He’s trying to reconnect with a teen daughter named Poppy (India Fowler) who wants to know why he was gone so much during his last assignment.

She asks if he got information from people by making friends with them.

“Friends are people you like,” Martian replies, wryly. “[These are more like] acquaintances.”

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Poppy’s reply: “So you left us for six years to make…acquaintances?”

Ouch. Even bad guys have these issues. Like Eddie Redmayne’s character, an expert assassin in Peacock’s new series The Day of The Jackal. He’s married to a woman named Nuria (Úrsula Corberó) who suspects he’s having an affair because he’s so secretive. She has no idea her charming husband, who she knows as Charles, is actually a world-famous hitman.

By the time she’s discovered the secret room he built in their home for his disguises, multiple passports and assorted weapons, you’re left wondering why she doesn’t just run for the hills.

In The Day of the Jackal, Nuria (Úrsula Corberó) suspects her husband, who she knows as Charles (Eddie Redmayne), is having an affair. He's actually a world-famous hitman. In this photo still, he tries to reassure her.

In The Day of the Jackal, Nuria (Úrsula Corberó) suspects her husband, who she knows as Charles (Eddie Redmayne), is having an affair. He’s actually a world-famous hitman.

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Spies with families are popping up in lots of series: Paramount+’s Lioness. Apple TV+’s Slow Horses. And the trend makes sense; for TV series looking to stretch compelling ideas across eight or ten episodes, the plotlines generated by family conflict can add a wealth of new storylines.

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Each of these shows deftly uses spouses, children and loved ones to present a kind of spy thriller that feels different, with characters drawn so viewers can perhaps see a bit of themselves inside.

Everyday problems writ large

Their struggles can sometimes feel like ordinary challenges blown up into world-shaking espionage tales: spouses and children who don’t understand their demanding jobs, devotion to a vocation that damages them and their relationships, a growing sense of shame as their work keeps them from being present for the family.

These characters, even the villains, aren’t necessarily cold blooded killers. Nothing humanizes a character like seeing them care for someone they love. Indeed, that’s often the difference between anti-heroes and villains in such stories – the villains don’t really love anybody but themselves, while anti-heroes are driven by their connections to other people.

Even as you watch Redmayne’s The Jackal kill a gun maker to keep him from talking to the authorities, part of you is rooting for him to get back to Nuria and their son Carlito.

Particularly in the case of Black Doves, the romantic and family relationships add a significant layer to almost every major character’s arc – including Ben Whishaw, who plays a hitman acting as muscle for Knightley’s character Mrs. Webb. He also struggles with feelings about the family he could have shared with his own ex-boyfriend, who had a child.

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Sure, there are times when these setups seem preposterous or overwrought. But spies with families are also passionate and oh-so-human. Which, in the end, makes for the very best kind of spy story.

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L.A. Affairs: Our passion began in a mosque. Could our forbidden love last?

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L.A. Affairs: Our passion began in a mosque. Could our forbidden love last?

“Wait, you dated her? She’s basically royalty,” said an old schoolmate of my first love when we realized our mutual connection. It was nearly a year after the breakup, but even hearing her name made my heart beat in staccato.

I was in my sophomore year at Scripps College in Claremont when our paths crossed for the first time. Trump’s inauguration and an air of accompanying pessimism hung in the air, so I combated my own doom through volunteering for our college consortium’s refugee advocacy network. During my first tutoring assignment, I couldn’t have looked more out of place. I’d never met a Muslim person before coming to college, and here I was, walking into the mosque in my skinny jeans with a tiny silver cross hanging around my neck.

It didn’t take long to notice one of the other volunteers, with her dark curly hair and tie-dye. She looked so at ease, and she was, cracking jokes with the moms in her native language and letting the kids strum on her guitar.

I was so anxious that day as I approached her, emboldened by her direct eye contact and easy smile. I was too shy and inexperienced to really make my interest known (plus, we were in a mosque after all). Still, we struck up a conversation about psychology, the subject in which we were both majoring. She saw past my nervousness (and my silver cross) and asked me if I wanted to get lunch together sometime.

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What started as a casual invitation turned into a month of text-flirting during winter break across the ocean (me in my hometown on the East Coast, her on the other side of the world). When we returned to California, the mutual crush was in full force. We fell into quick love, the kind that led to us spending all of our spare time together. In a matter of a few weeks, plenty of my clothes were in her closet, and she was teaching me how to ride her longboard. She told me: “I know that I really like you because sometimes I forget how to speak English around you.”

That spring semester was one of all of my important firsts. First love, first relationship, first time exploring Southern California as an adult. Every so often, we would brave the traffic from the Inland Empire to West Hollywood in her Porsche SUV. It was with her that I first saw the sparkling lights of downtown Los Angeles from her family home in the Bird Streets neighborhood. Who wouldn’t be smitten?

Recreational weed had just been legalized, so we’d get takeout ramen and hotbox her room after she turned off all the cameras within the house (security that she assured me was to protect her and her family but that put me at unease nonetheless).

Adding to the thrill of first love was the fact that it was a somewhat hidden relationship. But secrets are only sexy until they’re not. Her family’s prominence in her home country, the illegality of her sexuality there, my own closeted status — they created invisible walls around and between us. I remember the night she pulled me behind her car on the way into a sushi restaurant, her face pale with fear at the sight of men who might know her father.

Despite the obstacles, we were still in love by the end of the academic year. She graduated, and we drove out to Los Angeles for our last few days together before she flew back home with her parents. We strolled along Venice Beach in the morning and ate lunch on the Santa Monica Pier. The Pacific stretched out before us, vast and indifferent. I wonder if it knew it was witnessing our penultimate act. When it was time for me to finally depart, she dropped me off at Los Angeles International Airport, and as I watched her disappear into the traffic, I felt part of myself disappearing too.

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The end, when it came, was both catastrophic and achingly mundane. Stuck back in her home country with no way to return once her student visa had expired, she decided that long distance just wouldn’t work. For months, I cried so hard that I had strangers approach me to tell me that they would pray for me.

Eventually our planets crossed into each other’s orbit again — two years later. She was in L.A. for work, and I had just graduated. Time had passed but little had changed. We hiked Runyon Canyon, and our flirty conversation felt as easy as breathing. Ex-lover, lover — the labels blurred and shifted — and I felt like I hadn’t grown at all, still that same girl standing at the airport, watching her drive away. I knew then that this was no way to live, forever chasing after the same first spark.

During the years after our breakup, I had refused to really move on, which was precisely why I had to. It was time to cut the strings holding us together. I texted her: “i guess i kind of realized that i was still using you as a source of validation because i’m still insecure about a lot of things and until i can stop doing that i don’t think it’s healthy to keep you in my life.” A few lines on a screen, inadequate to express the complexity of what I was feeling, but true nonetheless.

I’ve fallen in love and experienced heartbreak several times since then. But nothing compares to the innocence of first love, that raw, unguarded vulnerability that comes before you learn how to protect yourself. There’s something beautiful about it, almost mythic in nature. Long after the love is over, its echoes remain, a reminder of who we once were and how far we’ve come.

The author is a writer and journalist based in Paris (though her heart is still in L.A.). She’s on Instagram @alien_angelbaby and Substack @postcardsfromdreamland.

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L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. Editor’s note: L.A. Affairs won’t be published Dec. 13. You can find past columns here.

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Werner Herzog says it's not good to circle 'your own navel' but wrote a memoir anyway

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Werner Herzog says it's not good to circle 'your own navel' but wrote a memoir anyway

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Werner Herzog looks back in ‘Every Man for Himself and God Against All’ : NPR



Werner Herzog looks back in ‘Every Man for Himself and God Against All’ The German filmmaker reflects on his unusual life and the curiosity that has fueled his career in the memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All. Originally broadcast Oct. 25, 2023.

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