Alec Nevala-Lee

On May 3, 2006, an unknown man in a blue blazer entered the crowded salesroom at Sotheby’s, one of the two great auction houses in New York, where he was handed a paddle and given a seat toward the rear of the floor. He sat quietly for the first part of the sale, then bought a Monet and a Chagall for a combined price of $7.5 million. Finally, to the surprise of the crowd, he began to bid on the most anticipated lot of the evening, the Picasso masterpiece Dora Maar au Chat. Bidding was intense, with at least five buyers competing fiercely, but the man at the rear of the room was relentless, waving his paddle as if trying to swat a fly. In the end, he won the painting for $95 million, the second-highest price ever paid at the time for any work of art. As the crowd erupted in applause, the buyer was surrounded at once by a circle of Sotheby’s staff. No one knew who he was or who his employer might be, but observers reported one tantalizing detail: based on his accent, he seemed to be Russian.

After the sale, there was intense speculation about the buyer’s identity, which remained shrouded in rumor and mystery. The truth may be somewhat more prosaic—it’s now widely believed that the bidder, although obviously inexperienced, was an agent for the oligarch Boris Ivanishvili—but the image of the unknown Russian, which I first encountered in a pair of articles in the New York Times and New York Magazine, sparked my imagination. At the time, as I mentioned yesterday, I looking for a story around which to structure a novel about the New York art world, and I knew at once that this incident would make for a sensational opening scene—and a fictionalized version does, in fact, appear as the first chapter of The Icon Thief. (As I’ve since discovered, there are two kinds of scenes that are impossible to mess up, no matter how hard a writer tries: an auction, and a jury delivering its verdict.) What I didn’t realize at the time was that this single story would determine the course of my life for the next four years, and shape my writing career forever.

I saw right away that the Russia angle would provide me with a vast amount of material, which is what every story idea needs in order to survive. Russian money had been driving prices in the art market for years, with oligarchs converting oil and gas dollars into Impressionists and Old Masters, so it would have been hard for any art novel to avoid dealing with the subject. Yet there was another aspect to this angle that was even more promising. As I explored the story’s potential, it gradually occurred to me that the art world, with its opacity and impenetrability to outsiders, provided an ideal setting for the kind of dense, layered conspiracy novel that I’d loved ever since reading Foucault’s Pendulum, and which I’d always wanted to write. And the history of Russia lends itself naturally to conspiracies, from the Oprichniki of Ivan the Great to the plots of Bakunin, from the Czarist Okhrana to the contemporary entanglements of politicians, oligarchs, intelligence officers, and organized crime. The figure of the unknown Russian buyer, I saw, gave me the entry point I needed.

I also discovered that even the most elaborate fictional inventions pale in comparison to the reality of Russia itself. Despite my background—I’m Finnish and Estonian on my mother’s side—I’d never given a lot of thought to Russia before, but I quickly found myself fascinated by its peculiar geographical and historical position. Russia, as Alexander Blok wrote, is a sphinx, with its head in Europe and its body in Asia, and the tension between these two halves of the Russian experience, which go a long way toward explaining the recurring role of conspiracies in Russian history, struck me as hugely important, as well as resonant with my own life. As a result, I’ve found myself thinking nonstop about Russia for years, over the course of three novels, all because of a single news story that caught my eye. And I’m nowhere near the end of it. As one of my characters says in City of Exiles: “If all you want are questions, then Russia is the country of your dreams. You never get to the bottom of it, no matter how much you try.”

At last, I had my subject—but to write a conspiracy novel, you need a suitable set of conspirators. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about how one particular secret society pressed itself on my attention.

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment. When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again.

—Carl Friedrich Gauss

I’m not sure when I first realized that I wanted to write a novel about art, but living in New York certainly had something to do with it. I spent my first few years out of college at a financial firm in Times Square, working with investors and researching ideas for new investment funds. This particular company had its origins as a quant shop, breaking markets down to raw numbers and crafting computer models to take positions and manage risk—an approach that, needless to say, would be sorely tested a few years later. Around the same time, several art funds were announced with great fanfare, buoyed by rising prices and demand from wealthy investors who saw art as just another asset class. Most of these funds would be hit hard by the downturn, with one of the most prominent launches going down in flames. But at the time, I was fascinated by the question of what would happen if you applied quantitative investment techniques to valuing, say, a Rembrandt or Van Gogh. (For what it’s worth, I soon concluded that art investment would be a great basis for a novel, but not a viable business.)

I was also fascinated by the art world itself. Living in New York, you’re surrounded by contemporary art, and I spent a lot of my free time wandering through galleries and museums. (I became particularly intrigued by the figure of the gallerina, the sphinxlike female employee who occupies the front desk of most fashionable art galleries in Soho and Chelsea.) The art world, I began to realize, was nothing less than a point of collision between two very different kinds of people: those with the talent to make art, who are drawn to their work for anything but practical reasons, and those with the means to own it, who generally acquire their wealth in more pragmatic ways. Between the artists and collectors stands a third group, the art dealers and traders, who take their cues from both, and need to be especially smart, ambitious, and competitive. I’d already been intrigued by this dynamic at the company where I worked, which employed writers and artists—often in the mailroom—side by side with investment analysts. And it gradually occurred to me that there was a novel to be written about the tension between these two ways of seeing the world, which also seemed to dramatize some of the forces at play in my own life.

Of course, just because you have a general idea for a novel doesn’t mean you have a story yet. And I took a number of wrong turns before I figured out what my plot would be. Initially, I wanted to write a novel about an art critic, which I thought would fit nicely with my own background and interests as a writer. Along with my research on art investing, then, I read a lot of art history and criticism, and came up with a story about a critic who becomes obsessed with John Singer Sargent’s famous portrait of Madame X, and is drawn from there, inevitably, into a web of deception and intrigue. I spent a good six months on this project, repeatedly writing and revising the first fifty pages, before finally abandoning it as unworkable, leaving myself with a lot of raw material but nothing resembling a draft. Looking back, I don’t think that the story was a bad one: I simply lacked the necessary work habits—I didn’t know how to outline, for instance—as well as the time to devote to fiction. And it wasn’t until I finally quit my job that I really learned how to write a novel.

I didn’t return to my art world story right away. Instead, I spent two years writing a novel about India, which I still hope to publish one day, although it didn’t turn out quite the way I wanted. It was only then, as I began to look around for another project, that I remembered my earlier idea. I found that the Madame X plot no longer spoke to me, but the setting did: as I looked over my notes from several years before, I realized that the art world would provide the material for an infinite number of stories. All the themes I cared about as a writer were here: the tension between art and money, the limitations of the rational way of viewing the world, and above all, our need to find order and meaning where it may not exist. A work of art, after all, is only some paint on canvas: its value arises from the meaning that people attribute to it, turning it into an object with the potential to inspire love, hate, envy, and obsession.

I had my setting, but I still needed a story. Tomorrow, I’ll explain how the search for a story took me in directions I never could have expected, until I finally ended up, much to my surprise, in Russia.

Elegance is not a dispensable luxury, but a quality that decides between success and failure.

—Edsger W. Dijkstra

As the early reviews for The Icon Thief start to trickle in, with just one week left until publication, I’ve taken a certain delight in seeing how reviewers tend to approach the book as a list of arcane topics, apparently thrown together at random. Publishers Weekly calls it a book about “the Rosicrucians, composer Erik Satie, the Black Dahlia murder, occultist Aleister Crowley, chess, the Soviet secret service, Lenin, and several obscure secret societies.” To the Mystery Lovers Bookshop, which has a positive review of the novel in its latest newsletter, it’s “a vast conspiracy that includes Rosicrucians, Lenin, ballerinas, and assorted secret societies.” Meanwhile, over on Goodreads, depending on which reviewer you believe, it’s either about “the Rosicrucian Order (Order of the Rose Cross), Ordo Templi Orientis, Cabaret Voltaire, Dadaism, and even the Society of Pataphysics,” or “Russians, Armenians, stolen art, murder, intrigue, and…Marcel Duchamp.”

So what should a reader conclude, aside from the fact that, to misquote Umberto Eco, the Rosicrucians have something to do with everything? In a way, this is exactly the response I was hoping to get when I wrote The Icon Thief, which I conceived as a kind of catalog of mysteries that could be sliced in any number of possible ways. In this, I was inspired by one of my own favorite novels, Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, which is equally prone to being discussed in terms of wild lists. A glance at the reviews in the tattered paperback copy I’ve owned since I was thirteen reveals no fewer than three separate lists of subjects, all them strikingly different: the Philadelphia Inquirer mentions “pagan rituals, World War II nostalgia, Brazilian macumba religion,” while Publishers Weekly goes with “the Rosicrucians, the Jesuits, the Freemasons” and the Sunday Times rattles off “numerology, James Bond’s foes, and the construction of sewers.”

Of course, every conspiracy novel, from Gravity’s Rainbow to the Illuminatus trilogy, lends itself to obsessive list-making: one of the genre’s conventions is the paranoid accumulation of facts and stories until both reader and protagonist are overwhelmed by information. What fascinates me is how much freedom a reviewer has when picking which subjects to emphasize—how one critic can list Erik Satie, for instance, who is only mentioned twice in the entire book, next to the Rosicrucians, whose history occupies a good chunk of the novel’s four hundred pages. The process of selection says as much about the reader as it does about the story itself, and can result in an infinite number of different lists, as Borges notes in a somewhat different context. He cites Carlyle’s joke about a biography of Michelangelo that didn’t mention the works of Michelangelo, and then says:

Let us greatly simplify, and imagine that a life consists of 13,000 facts. One of the hypothetical biographies would record the series 11, 22, 33…; another, the series 9, 13, 17, 21…; another, the series 3, 12, 21, 30, 39…A history of a man’s dreams is not inconceivable; another, of the organs of his body; another, of the mistakes he made; another, of all the moments when he thought about the Pyramids; another, of his dealings with the night and with the dawn.

Replace “life” with “story” and “biographies” with “reviews,” and you have a sense of what every author must experience when regarding the lists that readers extract from his work. A novel, in particular, contains so much information that it’s remarkable that its reviews can have anything in common at all, and it’s especially interesting when all the reviews of a big book tend to zero in on the same sentence, as recently happened with Edward St. Aubyn’s lines on irony. I’ve seen this process so often from a distance that I’m delighted to see it happen to my own novel—and I’m also tempted to make a few lists of my own. Over the next week, then, as we count down the days until the novel’s official release, I’m going to talk about a handful of narrative strands that I find personally important, and explain how they came about, with an eye to the process of trial and error that underlies the origins of any novel. Tomorrow, I’ll start with the apparently innocent question that changed my writing life forever: how do you value a masterpiece?

But we must conquer the truth by guessing, or not at all.

—Charles S. Peirce

Comedy demonstrates that man is durable even though he may be weak, stupid, and undignified. As the tragic hero suffers or dies for his ideals, the comic hero survives without them. At the end of the tale he manages to marry his girl, evade his enemies, slip by the oppressive authorities, avoid drastic punishment, and to stay alive. His victories are all small, but he lives in a world where only small victories are possible…Comedy is careless of morality, goodness, truth, beauty, heroism, and all such abstract values men say they live by. Its only concern is to affirm man’s capacity for survival and to celebrate the continuity of life itself, despite all moralities. Comedy is a celebration, a ritual renewal of biological welfare as it persists in spite of the reasons there may be for metaphysical despair…Comedy muddles through, but seems to care little for such weighty matters as progress and perfection.

—Joseph W. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival

It’s the hardest addiction of all…Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.

—Edward St. Aubyn, At Last

5. Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol. A personal triumph for Tom Cruise the producer, if not the actor: when he isn’t hanging off the side of the Burj Khalifa, his presence onscreen is strangely detached, and much less interesting than that of Paula Patton, the movie’s real human star. Yet there’s no doubt that Cruise himself willed this movie into existence, assembling a creative team, headed by director Brad Bird, that delivered a film that comes close to the ideal modern blockbuster: sleek, totally impersonal, but so expertly crafted that it brushes our objections aside. The year’s most purely satisfying entertainment, and the ultimate advertising reel for IMAX.

4. The Descendants. Watching this film makes me wish all the more that Alexander Payne had been making an annual movie for the past ten years: this is a beguiling family drama, shot through with moments of high and low comedy, and blessed with great local color and a sly supporting cast. As usual, Payne gives us characters who seem like caricatures and then edges them back toward humanity, but his touch has rarely been more assured than it is here, and he coaxes fine work from George Clooney (in his most moving performance), Shailene Woodley, and Judy Greer, whose expression of surprise at a crucial moment is one of my favorite movie memories of the year.

3. The Tree of Life. One of the strangest movies ever made, and certainly one of the most ambitious, The Tree of Life isn’t a complete success, but it’s hard to imagine how it could have done more: it’s one of those rare films whose reach exceeds its grasp only because of the grandeur of a great director’s dreams. Terrence Malick wants nothing less than to present us with a symphonic essay on man’s place in the universe, as seen through the lens of one family’s experience—and while the sequences in outer space, as conceived by the legendary Douglas Trumbull, are stunning, it’s in the evocation of a Texas childhood, anchored by Brad Pitt’s forbidding father, that the movie finally achieves the poetry it works so urgently to create.

2. Moneyball. A thrilling baseball movie with hardly any baseball, a heroic presentation of statistical analysis, and a great film starring Jonah Hill: the wonder isn’t so much that Moneyball achieves the impossible, but that it makes it look so easy. I wasn’t a fan of Bennett Miller’s Capote, which was so subdued that it almost faded from the screen as you watched it, but he emerges here as a director of considerable wit and intelligence, with a more relaxed and engaging way with actors and story, aided immeasurably by the work of Michael Lewis and screenwriters Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin. At the center, again, is Brad Pitt, this time with his stardom on full display: more than any actor in the world right now, he’s playing a grown man’s game.

1. Certified Copy. It’s beautiful and infuriating, frustrating and seductive, and although it initially looks like a more cerebral version of Before Sunrise, it’s really a work of stealth science fiction. The more I think about it, the more I doubt that there’s any one “solution” to the puzzle it presents, and I no longer care whether the characters played by William Shimell and Juliette Binoche are strangers, married, estranged, or living out one or more possibilities in converging timelines: all I know is that I like spending time with them in Tuscany, and that the problem that Abbas Kiarostami poses to us is less important than the picture of a marriage it creates. A modest, but hugely important, reminder of film’s possibilities.

Honorable Mention: Among the other films I wrote about at length this year, I also enjoyed Rise of the Planet of the Apes; Tabloid; Cave of Forgotten Dreams; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; and parts of Hugo, Bridesmaids, Midnight in Paris, Source Code, and Captain America, although my most memorable experience at the movies, as well as the longest, was the twenty-fifth anniversary release of Shoah.

You know, a playwright lives in an occupied country. He’s the enemy. And if you can’t live like that, you don’t stay. It’s tough. He’s got to be able to take a whack, and he’s got to swallow bicycles and digest them.

—Arthur Miller

10. Contagion. Steven Soderbergh’s intimate epic of paranoia, which was inexplicably overlooked throughout the recent awards season, benefits from one of the year’s richest original screenplays, by Scott Z. Burns, and fine contributions from editor Stephen Mirrione and a remarkably restrained cast. As we recently saw in Haywire, Soderbergh can be an erratic storyteller, but here, he delivers a big commercial entertainment that is also, surprisingly, the most effective example to date of the film of global intersection, a genre that includes Babel and Soderbergh’s own Traffic, but finds its most organic expression here, in a movie that demonstrates that we really are all connected, in the least reassuring way possible.

9. The Artist. For a movie that is routinely described as a crowd-pleaser, Michel Hazanavicius’s inspired homage to silent cinema has turned out to be surprisingly divisive, mostly among those who resist its blatant sentimentality and cheerful layers of artifice. It’s shallow, yes, but then, so is Citizen Kane, and Hazanavicius displays some of the same Wellesian willingness to try everything once—an instinct that one finds in all great con artists, parodists, and showmen. I’m still not sure whether its ruthlessly schematic story is intentional or not, but I can’t deny its ingenuity and relentless charm, and I’ll be perfectly happy if it takes home top honors on Sunday night.

8. Kung Fu Panda 2. The year’s best family film is a masterpiece of story and production design, from a franchise that could have gone utterly wrong, in the usual DreamWorks mode of easy gags and pop culture references, but instead gets almost everything right. First-time director Jennifer Yuh Nelson—with able contributions from story consultant Guillermo Del Toro and uncredited script doctor Charlie Kaufman—gracefully walks a fine narrative line, arriving at a tone that gently mocks its own pretensions while still delivering genuine thrills and emotion. The result is a movie that stands on its own as pure storytelling, with nothing that will grow stale over time.

7. Drive. The coolest main titles of the year, and perhaps of the decade, are only the opening salvo from this suspenseful, violent, and strangely tender ode to the great action films of the ’80s. Nicholas Winding Refn delivers the year’s most fanatically designed movie, from Hossein Amini’s spare, almost abstract screenplay to the gorgeous cinematography by Newton Thomas Sigel, which sets out to make a pop icon of Ryan Gosling and brilliantly succeeds. The ending doesn’t quite live up to what comes before—as I’ve noted earlier, what it really needs is a closing rhapsody of violence on the level of Michael Mann’s Thief—but for most of its length, it’s a work of almost uncanny assurance, and the best argument imaginable for the complete elimination of backstory.

6. A Separation. The more I think about Asghar Farhadi’s powerful, understated melodrama, the more impressive it becomes: its control, its mastery of tone, its ability to evoke entire lives and relationships with a few perfect details, and its combination of intimacy and social expansiveness would be notable in any country, but are especially extraordinary given the constraints of film production in Iran. Details first seen in passing gradually gain in significance, and situations that initially seem remote feel more and more like our own, until, like all great works of art, it succeeds both as a document of a particular time and place and as a universal story.

Tomorrow: My top five movies of the year.

One way [to design something] is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

—C.A.R. Hoare, “The Emperor’s Old Clothes”

It’s Oscar week, and in anticipation of writing up my list of the ten best movies of the year, which I’m hoping to post in two parts tomorrow and Friday, I’ve been catching up on some of the notable movies I’ve missed, although not all of them. In fact, this will be the first year in a while in which I won’t see all of the Best Picture nominees, not so much out of a lack of time than because there are two I have no interest in watching—and you’re free to guess which ones. But of the remaining films, War Horse is one that I really wanted to see: as a director, Steven Spielberg, who for all his shortcomings remains the major Hollywood filmmaker of the past forty years, has been rather less prolific over the past decade, as his attention has shifted increasingly to producing, so his latest movie is always something of an event. And War Horse is undoubtedly worth seeing, as much for its final limitations as for its considerable strengths.

First, the good news. Spielberg’s eye, which I’ve written about at length before, is on full display, and it does marvelous things: the cinematography is gorgeous but only occasionally showy, and Spielberg’s longtime collaborator Janusz Kaminski offers up small wonders of subtle reveals in the visual play between foreground and background. A cavalry charge through a wheatfield is one of the most beautiful things Spielberg has ever done, and throughout the movie, we’re treated to the work of a director equally at home with intimate detail and epic scope. The occasional nods to David Lean and John Ford aren’t merely homage, but a nod from one legendary filmmaker to his peers. And for most of its first hour, aided by fluent editing from the great Michael Kahn, the film convinces us that we’re about to see something truly special.

Around the halfway point, however, doubts start to creep in, and by the end, although War Horse is never anything less than watchable, it starts to seem sentimental, contrived, and—most unforgivably—confused about its own intentions. Is this movie about a brave, beautiful horse, or is the horse simply a narrative device to introduce us to a series of human vignettes? If it’s the former, it just doesn’t work: the horse never emerges as a real personality, and it even disappears from the action for long stretches at a time. The clincher is the movie’s decision to have all characters, regardless of nationality, speak in accented English: I can understand the reasoning—otherwise, nearly half of the movie would be in subtitles—but it still strikes me as misguided. If the movie is really about this horse, it doesn’t matter if we can understand what the humans are saying, and perhaps even better if we can’t.

Instead, we’re implicitly told that our attention belongs on the human characters, even though none of them ever really repays our interest: for the most part, they’re symbolic figures, although a few—notably a French farmer played by Niels Arestrup—are given sporadic life by the actors involved. Spielberg remains our great visual storyteller, but here, as elsewhere, he displays an odd streak of timidity when it comes to constructing focused narratives. On his greatest achievement, the Indiana Jones trilogy, he evidently deferred to George Lucas, and many of his recent films, even ones I admire—Saving Private Ryan, A.I., Minority Report, War of the Worlds, Munich—suffer from a kind of ambivalence in the second half, as if he can’t decide what they’re about, even as individual scenes remain ravishing. Spielberg’s future depends, more than ever, on his choice of material and the quality of his scripts. And War Horse, for all its flaws, is only a reminder of how much is at stake.

Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.

—Jack London, “Getting Into Print”

Over the past few weeks, my wife and I finally caught up on DVD with the first season of Community, a show that absolutely lives up to its reputation—it’s the fastest, smartest, funniest television comedy I’ve seen since Arrested Development. There’s a lot to talk about here, and I hope to dig in more deeply as soon as we’ve finished the rest of the series, but today, I’d like to focus on just one element: the genius decision to confine the action, at least in the first season, to the campus of Greendale Community College. The vast majority of scenes take place in one of a handful of sets—the study room, the cafeteria, Señor Chang’s classroom—and far from limiting the stories the show can tell, it makes the world in which it takes place seem all the more real. After only a handful of episodes, Greendale becomes one of those places on television that you believe in, and want to visit yourself, like the bar on Cheers, the offices of Sterling Draper, or even Downton Abbey.

It’s a brilliant illustration of a powerful tool that I’ve wanted to talk about for a long time, which is the idea of a narrative home base. I can’t find the reference now, but I believe it was Terry Rossio who talks about how, in a screenplay, it’s nice to have a single set or location to which you return repeatedly over the course of the story: for one reason for another, the audience likes to find itself in a familiar place. This is obviously true in television, which often depends on a handful of standing sets, but it’s also true of works of art that aren’t necessarily limited by such constraints. Looking at my own favorite movies, it’s startling to realize how many are built around the repeated use of the same location, with dramatic variations: Rick’s Café Américain, Hannibal Lecter’s cell, the apartments in Chungking Express and Blue Velvet. Returning to the same place gives the action a fixed backdrop to play against over time, allowing the audience to get its bearings and ground itself in the story.

The same thing applies to literary works. The most famous address in all of literature is, of course, 221B Baker Street, but it’s instructive to stop and ask ourselves why. With a few exceptions, notably “The Adventure of the Empty House,” it’s rarely the setting for any dramatic incidents; it’s simply where Holmes and Watson hang out. Yet it’s impossible to imagine the stories without that drawing room, with its cigars in the coal scuttle and Persian slipper full of tobacco, and fans have imagined its location and furnishings with astonishing degrees of obsessiveness. Eventually, it comes to feel like home. And it took me far too long to understand how useful a home base can be for immersing the reader in the plot. The Icon Thief jumps from place to place, and I think it works, but I prefer the approach in City of Exiles, with its repeated use of several key locations. And it’s no accident that I learned this from Mad Men.

This may, in fact, be one of the two great lessons—along with the power of ensembles—that television has to teach us. Setting most of your action in a fixed number of places is a constraint, yes, but it also allows you to focus on what really matters, a form of writerly discipline that will hopefully pay off in the narrative itself. Imagine how much more interesting Smash would be, for instance, if it took place, like Community, entirely in a few locations—the theater, the dance studio, the writers’ office—with details about the characters’ offstage lives sketched in on the fly. That way, we’d pick up information in passing, instead of cutting away to tiresome subplots, and the focus of the series would stay where it belongs. Because focus is what the narrative home base is all about: storytelling is really about creating places to explore, so it’s all the more important, when possible, to stick to the places that count.

It is all, as usual, paradox. I have to use what intellect I have in order to write books, but I write the kind of books I do in order that I may try to set down glimpses of things that are on the other side of the intellect. We do not go around and discard the intellect, but we must go through and beyond it.

—Madeline L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet

As the movie awards season winds to a close, I’ve been working to catch up on recent releases, in preparation for writing up my annual top ten list. Making such a list is always a pleasure, and I’ve done this every year for as long as I can remember, whether I’ve had anyone interested in reading it or not. One of the small pleasures of making this list is seeing patterns that might not have been otherwise obvious. This year, for instance, I’m a little surprised to discover that my two favorite American movies both starred Brad Pitt—which may not seem so surprising at first, but he’s so different in Moneyball and The Tree of Life that it’s hard to regard them as the work of the same actor, much less one of the world’s biggest movie stars. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, I’ve discovered that my two favorite foreign films this year were both made by directors from Iran, which is so striking a fact that it seems worthwhile to drill deeper.

On the surface, the two movies couldn’t feel more different. The first, the extraordinary Certified Copy, which I’ve written about here before, looks like a glossy international production, with director Abbas Kiarostami working in Tuscany with a cast that includes William Shimell and Juliette Binoche. While it’s certainly engaging, it’s also intensely cerebral, a puzzle box designed to frustrate the viewer’s expectations. The second film, A Separation, which I finally saw this weekend, is rooted in the culture of contemporary Iran, and draws more on the tradition of melodrama, presented with a scrupulous realism that sucks the audience in immediately. Yet both films have, at their core, a similar ambiguity, a refusal to provide easy answers, and a fascination with the complexities of our most intimate human relationships.

Of the two, A Separation is by far the more accessible, a layered, expertly paced story that spins alarming complications out of the seemingly simple decision of a married couple, played by Leila Hatami and Peyman Moaadi, to separate. The screenplay, by director Asghar Farhadi, is beautifully constructed, integrating a large cast in a web of misunderstanding that never seems contrived, even in its pointedly open ending. It’s one of the hardest kinds of stories to tell in any language: one in which there are no villains, and in which everyone’s motives are basically sound, but which nonetheless leads to tragedy. And while the story is universal, much of its interest for foreign audiences—who have made it the most critically acclaimed movie of the year—certainly lies in the view it affords of the particulars of its characters’ lives. (The glimpses we get of the Iranian legal system, as embodied by a harried but essentially fair judge played by Babak Karimi, are especially fascinating.)

It’s no secret that for a director in the Iranian film industry to make movies for an international audience requires uncanny degrees of skill, ingenuity, and good fortune, as well as a temperament that finds the silver lining in unwanted constraints. Farhadi is manifestly a writer and director of considerable talent, and in A Separation, he takes a story that is intensely focused, perhaps by necessity, on the sphere of domestic life and makes it feel remarkably expansive, taking in countless small stories on the margins without ever losing track of the main thread. Like many artists who have worked under similar circumstances, both he and Kiarostami finally plant their standards in the realm of ambiguity, in the insistence on seeing past normal ethical or narrative distinctions, which in itself can seem like a radical act. If Kiarostami does this mostly from the head, Farhadi does it from the heart—but clearly these two directors have a lot of both.

Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields.

—Robert Frost

In some of the great university towns such as New Haven, or Princeton, within the past decade, the last good bookstores have had to close, and what we have now are textbook emporia which are not bookstores, but store-houses bracketed according to set reading lists: in other words—where there is none of the genius of waste which a great bookstore has, where you cannot find what you are not looking for, which is the very essence of a bookstore.

—George Steiner, Do Books Matter?

I love what I do, but the screenplays don’t happen in the white heat of inspiration. It’s the oldest trick in the book. I get up at five o’clock every morning and I work flat out until I’m exhausted. I may not be the smartest guy on the block—but, goddamnit, I am the most tenacious!

—John Logan, to Vanity Fair