Beyond Selidor

In honour of the fact that I'm likely to be spending Saturday afternoon assembling the new futon sofabed, furniture — flatpack or otherwise — is the subject of this week's open thread:

What kind of furniture fills your living space?

For someone who has a seething hatred of flatpack self-assembled furniture (and generally finds new stuff to be of poor quality compared to secondhand), I sure seem to have acquired a lot of it! Our living room furniture (armchairs and couch), our bed, and now the furnishings of the spare room are all of this type. However, almost everything else is secondhand (acquired from Matthias's family, or from various Cambridge friends, plus some stuff picked up from charity shops), and it's so durable and well made. We're limited with the latter by whether it's possible for the items to be delivered, as we don't drive, which rules out several options when it comes to secondhand furniture.

The whole lot is a mishmash of styles — I don't have the patience or the money to furnish my house in a coherent, consistent design, and rely on things like throw rugs, string lights, bunches of dried flowers hanging from the ceiling, and endless rows of bookshelves to maintain any semblance of interior design.

I hope everyone's well on the way to enjoyable weekends! Tell me about your furniture!

My TV watching declined in the summer, which is not such a bad thing — I was out and about, travelling, doing things outdoors, and just away from the house in general. For this reason, I've skipped a couple of monthly TV round-ups, as I didn't feel the numbers justified a full post. Here, therefore, is everything I've finished watching in June, July and August of this year:

Widow's Bay, a fantastic comedy-horror miniseries in which Matthew Rhys is the mayor of a picturesque New England island village which hides some very strange secrets. His desire to transform the town into a tourist destination wars with all the various supernatural shenanigans bubbling up at inopportune moments, with each episode a pastiche of a different horror genre (slasher films, folk horror, and so on). I really enjoyed this.

The final season of Lidia Poët, an Italian series inspired by a real nineteenth-century figure who attempted to become Italy's first female lawyer. She was almost immediately foiled in the attempt by the authorities and the legal establishment (despite having graduated university with the appropriate credentials), and spent most of her life working as a legal assistant to her brother, before being granted the right to practice law many decades later. The show takes these basic facts, and hangs around them a case-of-the-week legal drama, plus an overarching mystery that unfolds over the course of each season, plus a lot of soap operatic interpersonal drama (I assume the real Lidia Poët was not embroiled in a love triangle with her brother-in-law and the prosecutor who is usually her brother's adversary in each of the cases-of-the-week, for example). Everyone's beautiful to look at, the costumes are incredible, and the whole thing is a lot of fun.

Prisoner, which is not really something I can entirely recommend, but it is absolutely my kind of nonsense. The premise of the show is that a prison transfer officer — on her first day returning to work after maternity leave — is assigned to transport a member of an organised crime gang to court, where he will give evidence that will convict the leader of the whole organisation. Almost immediately, this routine trip is thrown into chaos: they're attacked by members of the gang seeking to silence the prisoner, and the two of them have to go on the run, hunted relentlessly (with threats to both their families) until they can make it to court. Fictional situations in which two people with utterly opposing worldviews, values and motivations are temporarily thrown together and forced to depend on each other for survival are absolute catnip for me (all the better if the experience transforms them both so that they both come away at the end a little bit more like each other), and this one well and truly delivered. The characters even spent three out of six episodes literally handcuffed together, they had to pretend to be a couple holding hands to hide the handcuffs in multiple moments throughout the show — it was that tropey. All that said, there are several plot twists that rely on characters making utterly stupid decisions, and there are ludicrous moments that really strain belief, so take that into account and recognise that I'm somewhat blinded by the fact that the show's core is a specific fictional scenario that I am particularly drawn to. But I enjoyed this so much that I'm seriously considering requesting it for Yuletide!

Interview with the VampireThe Vampire Lestat, about which I don't have much more to say that hasn't already been said, except to add that I definitely enjoyed the continuation of this adaptation of a book series I adored in my late teens. It treats its ridiculous source material seriously, retains its histrionic heart, and weaves into it something new at the same time. It helps that all the actors are clearly having an absolute ball.

Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, a fantastic miniseries starring Tatiana Maslany as a woman who's found herself using the services of a camboy as something of a crutch to cope with her complicated life, when she witnesses (or does she) said camboy being attacked in his home. Her attempt to uncover the truth of what she saw on screen reveals scams within nesting scams, and throws her already chaotic life (she's in a custody battle with her ex-husband and his new wife, she works as a fact-checker for an online magazine — a profession the show acknowledges is on the way out as part of dying industry, which adds to the sense of precariousness — where she's trying unsuccessfully to obtain a promotion, and the everyday pressures of juggling work and motherhood themselves just add to the burden) into further disarray. Maslany absolutely excels at playing women whose lives are falling apart spectacularly, and she's fantastic here, alongside a great supporting cast. I'm so happy she was given better material to work with after the debacle that was She Hulk.

My Brilliant Career, an adaptation of Miles Franklin's classic Australian novel (which, although it's considered a sort of foundational work of Australian literature, I've never read) in which a young woman — who wants to live independently as a writer — is forced by the poverty of her immediate family to go and live with her wealthy maternal relatives in the hope that she'll make an advantageous marriage and relieve her family of their debts. Well aware of these schemes, and armed with the certainty of youth, she's determined to do nothing of the sort, and to find a way out that will not involve being shackled to a wealthy husband. Not having read the book, I can't speak to whether this is a good adaptation or not, but I found it a whole lot of fun, and a great portrait of a very specific time and place (immediately before and after federation in 1901), with a great cast of characters. I should take this as the inspiration to read Franklin's book at last!

Saturday was filled with the standard activities: gym, coffee, a few hours out under the sky in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar in town, black sesame gelato, elaborately complicated dinner (Iranian stuffed capsicum and two separate Georgian salads, covered with a veritable bouquet of fresh herbs), film night (the extremely forgettable third Enola Holmes film, whose beautiful setting of Malta couldn't make up for the fact that very little happened, and what did happen was hammered home endlessly through characters' exposition, as if in fear that distracted viewers looking at their phone screens might lose the thread of the narrative every five minutes without it being spelt out), etc.

Today, we took ourselves out on another August day trip: on the train into Cambridge, then out by bus to St Ives, and then a walk through the water meadow (which was of course parched and nothing like it looked during this soggy walk three years ago, nor when it was flooded in 2020, which was the last time we left our house/immediate surrounding area before the pandemic lockdown) to the village of Hemingford Grey. This is as picturesque as the name would suggest: thatched cottages, climbing roses and wisteria, and a lovely little village pub that was hosting a beer festival in its garden. We hung out under the trees for a few hours, surrounded by a varied crowd of multigenerational groups, and a cheerful array of dogs of all shapes and sizes. There was live music (the singer worked in the restaurant of the pub), there was food, and it was sunny but not boiling hot, and we had snagged the only table that remained in full shade for the entire time we were there, much to my delight.

The afternoon was aimless and rambly and serendipitous. We ambled back into St Ives to try a coffee/cocktail bar we'd spotted on our way out, which was fairly chill in the outdoor seating area, but was absolutely heaving indoors, with two leathery older men doing a DJ set, and a cacophonous crowd of people dancing — clearly the place to be in St Ives at 4pm on a Sunday! Matthias and I were close to the youngest people there — and we're in our forties. We spent a relaxed hour or so there, stretched our legs along the riverfront, and made it back to the bus stop ten minutes or so before our bus arrived, which connected nicely with our train home. All in all, a nice day out. I've stuck up a scattering of photos and videos on my stories ronnidolorosa which you should be able to see for the next twenty hours or so if you have an Instagram account, but after which point they will vanish; hopefully my words paint enough of a picture either way.

Reading-wise, I've started, but not finished Sense and Sensibility, which for the longest time has been the only Austen I've not read (although of course I saw the film adaptation in the 1990s). I felt it was time to rectify this, and I'm having a fantastic time. It's hilarious and relatable — 250 years may have passed, but the feeling of being trapped in social situations with people with whom you have nothing in common and whose conversational range is lacking remains awkward in exactly the same way (even more relatably, there's even a scene in which Elinor is elated at joining the only counter which has a single customer ahead of her, then being exasperated at being stuck behind this one customer for fifteen minutes as he appears to want to look at every expensive toothpick in the shop in minute detail before making a purchase). But above all, while of course treading ground familiar from Austen's other novels, it's about the excruciating awkwardness of being a teenage girl ('a guy was friendly to me at a social event, so clearly he wants to ask me to marry him'), and I recognise the emotions, and am fervently glad that I have several decades of distance from them.

I'll close with a handful of links. I've really been enjoying Sacha Judd's newsletter, and the latest issue was filled with flashes of recognition in terms of its diagnosis of the problems of the current social internet. That said (and I would need to read the linked article and listen to the linked podcast to make up my mind conclusively), it all felt a little too neat, and I feel that if we're including cafes and video rental stores as 'third spaces,' that's stretching the definition too far. In any case, there's lots I agree with, and lots that made me want to think further on this topic, which is a sign to me of an interesting newsletter.

I also loved this piece on the revival of old folk harvest traditions, and it was a nice look back at the history behind them. It certainly felt timely as we sped home through fields shorn of their wheat sheaves, with only the dusty earth and bare stalks remaining.

The weekend began with oppressive, 38 degree heat that didn't really leave the air until after 9pm, and the fright of my life when I — along with other residents of England and Wales, received a government emergency alert on my phone blaring uncontrollably at 7pm on Friday. The alert was warning of a total fire ban; I, in an Australian manner, had been quietly horrified all summer that such a ban hadn't been in place, since water restrictions and total fire bans in times of extreme heat and drought have been a routine part of the summer since my childhood.

( Small rant )

Right, let's move on to nicer things. I spent a lot of time yesterday out in the garden, sweeping up the mulch (which the resident blackbirds immediately hurled all over the garden path again, as they do every day), pruning the lavender plants and bundling the dried flowers into bunches tied with string (I now have hooks in the kitchen skylights where I hang massive bunches of drying herbs, slowly creating the cosy plant-filled kitchen of my dreams), picking apples and tomatoes, and doing other bits and pieces that I'd been putting off due to the extreme heat. I need to ferment some more tomatoes, as we have far more ripe on the plants than we'll ever be able to eat.

On Saturday evening, Matthias and I headed out to Saffron Walden for one of the planned day trips that I mentioned in a previous post. This was made more complicated by our train terminating abruptly at Cambridge, with all further trains in that direction cancelled due to a problem with a level crossing, but astonishingly in such circumstances, the railway staff had everything in hand by the time we left the cancelled train, and we were whisked into a (free) taxi, along with four people travelling to Stansted, and dropped at Audley End station only about ten minutes later than planned. We then walked the forty minutes into Saffron Walden, along a winding country road, past bleached wheat fields, stands of ancient trees, and old stone walls, until we found ourselves on the approach to the town centre. We wandered around a bit, admiring the various independent shops and historic wood-framed houses, and ended the evening having a fantastic dinner at this place, which has only been operating for six weeks, and which was outstanding. It's a tiny little space (apparently it was a former hairdresser shop), and only seats about fifteen people, all along a bar where we could see the food being prepared and hear the chef talking us through everything. The whole ethos is foraged/local food (right down to the herbs and spices, which are all things found in England), minimum waste (almost everything got used multiple times, such as a cream cheese that was infused with a kind of flavouring made from the peelings and scraps of vegetables eaten in other courses; there was a lot of fermentation and pickling and fruit and vegetables infused in alcohol), and limited storage (they only have two tiny bar fridges). Absolutely incredible! Some of the other guests there had spent the whole day in Saffron Walden, visiting a local winery for lunch, and staying overnight in a little hotel in the town centre, and I think both Matthias and I were keen to do the same thing at a later point.

I haven't really made much progress with reading, in spite of having ample spare time. I'm making my way painstakingly through a reread of a six-book series of Celtic fantasy that I loved in my early twenties, and am feeling embarrassed on behalf of my younger self. I can totally see why these books were among my firm favourites, but they are really, really not good at all. But I will save a detailed accounting as to why until I've finished all six. Those are my current work commute and lunch break books — I usually have another book on the go as 'reading at home' material, but this weekend, I've been a bit distracted.

Beyond that, it's just been a lot of pottering around at home and wrestling with the rather confusing Bulgarian rail tickets website in advance of our holiday. We will succeed eventually!

This week's post is lazily inspired by the current batch of Friday Five questions, which I've seen floating around my reading page. All relate to vegetables. So:

What are your favourite vegetables and/or what are your least favourite vegetables?

( My answer )

I really must get an icon with tomatoes on it!

Today's open thread prompt is slightly complicated to explain, and is inspired by a conversation I was having with windancer in a previous post. In it, we were discussing the A Meal of Thorns podcast, which I'll let describe itself in its own words:

Each episode, we’ll be looking closely at works of speculative fiction, thinking about what they say and how they’ve influenced the field. We’ll be talking to critics, scholars, and other writers about what makes these books tick.

windancer's question was: If you could go on the podcast to talk about a book or series, which one would you pick?

( My answer )

What book or series would you discuss in your hypothetical podcast, and why?

I've been away for longer than I've liked from these parts of the internet, and just managed to catch up with Dreamwidth over my lunch break today. I had to skip back by 200 posts!

My absence has all been due to good things — travel, my mum's visit, and so on — but it is nice to get back to something like regular daily normality. There's no open thread this week, but I'm hoping to get back into that from next Friday onwards.

Have a few bullet points to catch up:

I was in Glasgow a few weeks ago for a conference. It was my first time in the city, and I found it fantastic: gorgeous buildings, great places to eat (especially in the west end), wonderful art galleries and botanic garden. Matthias joined me for a long weekend holiday after the conference was over. The conference itself was fun, although a bit odd since it was the first time in years that I've attended a conference without presenting. Too much about generative AI — not uncritical, but operating under an assumption that it's ubiquitous and here to stay, and so we'd better find ways to make it useful — which was unsurprising, but mildly eyeroll-inducing. Hilariously, there was another woman at the conference with an identical book-themed handbag to mine, and we became conference buddies as a result.

I was having too much fun to take any photos, besides this set in Rennie Mackintosh House. What gorgeous design!

Mum left after two months in Europe (not all of them with me — she comes and goes on her visits, flitting back and forth between my place and trips to continental Europe) earlier this week, with a hellish flight back via Singapore in which the first leg was cancelled and all passengers had to stay overnight in an airport hotel, and then the second leg was delayed by three hours. She and my sister are now about to go on a skiing trip to New Zealand. Oh, to be a wealthy retired boomer!

The garden continues to heave with vegetables, in spite of the drought and the water restrictions. I'm drowning in pickling cucumbers and cherry tomatoes, plus zucchini, salad greens, and various herbs. Every corn plant has multiple ears of corn ripening.

Now for the links.

I've been enjoying the little flurry of discovery of Robin McKinley's Sunshine around these parts — if any beloved book of mine were due a renaissance, it's that one! I don't know how much of it is down to this thoughtful Ancillary Review of Books podcast (which I found via renay's newsletter), and how much of it is just organic internet word-of-mouth, but anyway, more of this! I was amused that Laura Zats said in the podcast that her experience of reading and enjoying Sunshine was such a solitary one, since for me it's been an extremely communal fannish thing from the beginning: I was introduced to the book by my closest friend from my MPhil year (we immediately clocked each other as being in fandom, we lent each other books, spent whole afternoons browsing the fantasy shelves of the now long-defunct Borders, and met up every few weeks to eat take-away and rewatch episodes of Buffy and Angel in her student accommodation; she's the person who made my default icon, using character art drawn by sophia.mcdougall), and Sunshine is probably my biggest (in the sense of most other people actually interested in reading and writing fic) fandom, even though it's Yuletide-only!

And yes, another thing that came through very strongly in the podcast is how incomplete the book feels — the worldbuilding is both sparse but abundant, with so many threads picked up and then never mentioned again — which is what makes it such a rich fanfic seam to mine.

All this is a convoluted way of saying that if you are part of the Sunshine renaissance, I have written fic for this fandom. But my favourite Sunshine fic of all, and which I wish I'd come up with myself (but never would have, because I can't write that character), is this one:

under our skins (1190 words) by Wildcard
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sunshine - Robin McKinley
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Mel (Sunshine)
Additional Tags: POV Outsider, Worldbuilding, Prequel, Magical Tattoos
Summary:

Mel during the Wars, told through the eyes of a tattoo artist.

Also via renay's newsletter, this perceptive, bittersweet piece about the slow, sad demise of what I have always thought of as the 'do it yourself internet.' (Spoiler alert: it's the AI and other tech companies' fault.)

How's everyone been these past few weeks?

This weekend was the summer solstice, and it's been sun-drenched, and bakingly hot. Our house isn't designed for such temperatures (our bedroom was 27 degrees last night when I was trying to sleep), but I've been coping the best I can. I bought a bunch of sunflowers, and another bunch of wildflowers, and filled the living room with colour. I've got two separate jugs of infused tap water chilling in the fridge (replacing the water every time I drink a glass): one with strawberry tops and mint from the garden, the other with cucumber and mint. The garden itself is a jungle of fresh herbs — bolting dill, giant flatleaf parsley, chaotic mint — with cucumber and tomato and radishes pushing their way up in between.

My two hours of classes in the gym were a challenge yesterday, after two weeks away, but the pool this morning was a dream, and a relief to plunge into the cold water for twenty-five minutes. I'm subsisting on infused water, iced coffee, and fresh strawberries.

Matthias went into London yesterday to watch the cricket with a friend of ours, and stayed overnight, but he's back now, and we're both vegetating in the house (him next to a whirring fan) and doing our best to keep cool. I'm really not looking forward to commuting back and forth to work next week, but at least my actual office is air-conditioned.

I haven't read much of note recently, apart from Vikram Seth's incredible family/historical saga (1500 pages long!), A Suitable Boy, which I picked up on the train out to Amsterdam and just finished this afternoon. Although I'd obviously heard of it, my mum was the one who inspired me to actually read it, having been put on to it herself by one of her closest friends (who incidentally was my editor during the ten years I worked as a professional newspaper book-reviewer, because Canberra is Like That, and the Australian media landscape is also Like That), who had read it and raved about it. Now my sister is also listening to the audiobook, and loving that as well.

The frame of this brick of a book is the eventual marriage (and choice of husband) of Lata, a young woman in newly independent India — the novel opens at her older sister's wedding with their mother, one daughter successfully married off, immediately turning her matchmaking attention to the next one — but it's also about their extended family and social circle as a whole, and about the newly independent Indian state. Chapters deal in turn with religions and religious practice, class and caste and economic relations, infrastructure, academia, post-partition tensions with the newly independent state of Pakistan, land rights, and more, and Seth deals equally deftly with fractious family meals, parliamentary debates, pompous faculty board meetings, and emotionally wrenching sectarian violence, and treats all with equal weight and sensitivity. It shows — through zooming in on this one fictional family and then zooming out at various points — newly independent India, and its citizens grappling with what they want their independent nation to look like. It resembles Jane Austen at times, and at others Dickens, and in other moments seems positively Shakespearean, but it's really its own unbelievably accomplished thing, all the more impressive due to Seth's ability to sustain everything for 1500 pages. At times, it skewers its own pretensions with self-aware self-deprecation, and there's a particular scene involving a poetry reading and audience Q&A that had me howling with laughter and which felt obviously inspired by many real-world literary events experienced by the author. The last 10 per cent was an absolutely wild ride, at turns melodramatic and tragic, culminating — as promised from the opening pages and in the traditions of all its various literary inspirations — with a massive wedding. Honestly, I'm in awe.

Friday open threads are back for now, and this week's one is inspired by a great Shetland fanfic I read recently. It's wonderful for many, many reasons, but one thing that I particularly enjoyed was its incredible specificity of place: having been to Shetland myself, it was like walking around Lerwick again. The crowning glory: it even managed to work in a reference to a specific waterfront cafe which (in my opinion) has the best coffee in town.

( Link to the fic behind the cut if you want to read it )

So, here is this week's prompt: what is your favourite tiny real-world detail in a work of fiction (original or transformative) that makes it clear the author has genuine experience of the place being depicted?

I just came back from an incredibly frustrating and stressful swim at the pool — so much so that I had to bow out after 750 metres rather than my usual 1km. However, my walk home featured not one, but two cats that wandered up to me and wanted to be stroked and snuggled, which did a lot to restore my mood!

It's a long weekend, and it's been absolutely baking. The temperature gauge in our bedroom said it was 27C last night when I was trying to get to sleep, and it's meant to be 32C today — pretty extreme given it's still May! I've coped with this in the usual way: chilled infused water in the fridge, lots of ice cubes and frozen grapes in the freezer, salads for lunch (using chives and bitter salad greens grown in the garden!), avoiding leaving the house for much other than swimming and buying iced coffee at the bakery down the road. While confined indoors, we did at least manage to book our accommodation for our holiday in September, which always feels very satisfying and efficient.

Yesterday's swim was flawless: sun shining on the water, not a single other person in the lane for the entire 40 laps, and I just glided up and down the lane in pure, uncomplicated happiness, boundless in an unbounded world. It took me only 22 minutes to swim the entire kilometre. Today was pretty much the polar opposite. I'd seen when booking that only half the pool was going to be available to lap swimmers at the time I'd booked, but in that past when that's happened it's meant there is one fast lane, one medium lane, and one slow lane, and then the other half of the pool given over to lessons or free swimming. This time, two lanes were for lessons, two lanes were for free swimming, and then they'd widened the remainder into a double lane for medium speed lap swimmers, and another double lane for slow swimmers. Both were full with a scrum of people swimming up and down with almost no space in between each pair of swimmers. No fast lane at all. I attempted to swim up and down in the middle of the medium lane in between the other swimmers, but I was so much faster than everyone else that I basically overtook every single other swimmer every two lengths. Almost all of them were doing breaststroke, and I was kicked and hit repeatedly, including in the head and face, and including by someone wearing hand flipper things, which drew blood on my arm. I was so stressed that in the end I gave up. I could have been seriously injured.

I didn't expect them to rearrange the whole layout of the pool for one faster swimmer, but I do think it needed to be made clearer on the bookings website when 'half pool' specifically meant 'no fast lane,' and I'll be writing to the company that manages the sports centre and saying so!

Other than exercise (I also went to my two fitness classes, and I've been doing very slow, stretchy yoga classes in the shadiest part of the house), I've basically just been lounging around the house, reading, cooking, and eating.

I finished up Sister Wake (Dave Rudden), a standalone secondary world fantasy novel which essentially compresses 900 years of English colonisation of Ireland into 300. In the book, the Croí (the analogue for the Irish people) rise against their colonial rulers, against a chaotic backdrop in which the gods and supernatural beings of Irish mythology have burst forth to walk the island once more: gigantic, angry, animal-formed embodiments of sovereignty impossible to control and impossible to reason with. The book was packed with allusions to Lebor Gabála Érenn and other medieval pseudohistorical texts that I studied as part of my PhD, which I enjoyed immensely (I also enjoyed the fact that Rudden's use of Irish made semantic and grammatical sense, which is not always a given when authors decide to sprinkle it into their fantasy settings), but overall I struggled to get on with this book, for reasons on which I'm not entirely clear.

Yesterday, I gulped down Sunburn (Chloe Michell Howarth), an Irish novel of a very different kind. This is a coming-of-age story, set in a claustrophobically tiny rural Irish town (population around 300) in the early 1990s, with a teenage girl narrator who embarks on an all-consuming secret relationship with another girl from her friendship group. In the conservative environment of the village, any deviation from the expected path of graduation from secondary school, serious heterosexual relationship with another young person from the village, marriage, and stay-at-home motherhood is so outside the realms of possibility that it's not even contemplated, and Howarth's novel captures perfectly how horrific it is to be closeted in such a setting. It's the kind of story that brings the experience of adolescence crashing painfully back into focus: the repetitive limits of the world (school, home, chip shop, corner shop), the intense internal focus and (justified) sense that all your peers are observing and documenting your life, appearance, choice of clothes, and faults with journalistic rigour (as indeed you are doing of them), the anguish of every tiny thing taking on a significance of epic, life-altering proportions. Those more universal sensations take place in an exquisitely specific temporal and physical space, and Howarth's portrayal of this slice of her characters' lives is the richer for it. I thought this was fantastically done: earnest, painful, and rich.

(My one issue with the book was its choice to render dialogue like this:
'Blah blah blah.'
He says.

'More dialogue.'
Says Susannah.

And so on, always with that full stop and line break. It was wildly distracting.)

I'm now about one hundred pages in to A Treachery of Swans (A.B. Poranek), with low expectations, and much trepidation. It's a Swan Lake retelling, and I've already been primed by chestnut_pod and others that it's not great!

Other than books, Matthias and I watched Sirat last night: a meandering, melancholy road trip by a Spanish father and his young son through the deserts of Morocco, accompanied by a quintet of quirky ravers en route to their next rave, where the Spanish pair hope they'll find their lost daughter/sister. This is not a feel-good roadtrip movie — there are a couple of truly horrific, shocking moments — and it reminded me very strongly of medieval voyage tales, in which saints, or figures otherwise rendered outside of society (criminals, outlaws, etc) embark on journeys that are part free roaming, part panicked flight from their problems, and very soon find themselves in strange, supernatural environs outside the ordinary human world, and the whole thing becomes a sort of psychological metaphor for the spiritual journey of the soul. There's nothing so redemptive in Sirat, but it's that same kind of wasteland wandering, through bleak, empty deserts fringed by spectacular mountains (with an incredible techno soundtrack), all the characters in search of something that none are fully able to put to words.