Latest news with #BytheSea
Miami Herald
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
Angelina Jolie's son warns her about mess before inviting her to his apartment
Angelina Jolie isn't just a mother to her six kids — she's also a landlord. The 49-year-old 'Maria' actress revealed in a new interview with The New York Times, published March 24, that one of her sons now lives in the New York apartment she purchased in her 20s. Jolie, who filed for divorce from fellow actor Brad Pitt in 2016, shares three sons — Maddox Chivan, 23, Pax Thien, 21, and Knox Léon, 16 — with her former 'By the Sea' co-star. The ex-couple, whose divorce was finalized in December, are also parents to three daughters — Zahara Marley, 20, Shiloh Nouvel, 18, and Vivienne Marcheline, 16. Jolie chose not to specify which of her sons is the tenant, but described the NYC apartment as a 'crash pad for his five siblings.' As for Jolie, The New York Times reports that she's welcome in the apartment 'sometimes.' 'The other day I said I was going to pop by, and he was like, 'can you just give me a day to clean?'' Jolie said in the interview. 'I thought, 'I appreciate that, you should clean up for your mother. But also, how bad is it?'' she joked. While her son lives in New York, Jolie spends most of her time in Los Angeles — where she grew up. The 'Tomb Raider' actress explained in an August 2024 interview with Hollywood Reporter that she is forced to live in LA as a result of her divorce from Pitt. 'But as soon as they're 18, I'll be able to leave,' Jolie said of her youngest kids Vivienne and Knox. When that day comes, Jolie says she'll 'spend a lot of time in Cambodia.' 'When you have a big family, you want them to have privacy, peace, safety,' Jolie explained. 'I have a house now to raise my children, but sometimes this place can be … that humanity that I found across the world is not what I grew up with here,' she continued. Vivienne and Knox turn 18 in July 2026, meaning Jolie has less than 16 months left in the City of Angels. In the meantime, Jolie is adding more of her roots in New York City in the form of an art community known as Atelier Jolie — a downtown creative space and gallery, per The New York Times. The Manhattan building, located at 57 Great Jones in NoHo, used to be the home and studio of famous artists Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, according to People. It has undergone a series of transformations through the years before Jolie bought the space in 2023. According to the Atelier Jolie website, 'the space was renovated and launched as a forum for the arts, encompassing classes, workshops, residencies and exhibitions,' in 2024. While speaking to The New York Times, Jolie explained what the property means to her — and her family. 'The act of creation should be accessible to everyone,' she said. 'It's what I need as an artist,' she continued. 'It's what I want for my children — to learn about other people and discover and connect and share and play.'
The Guardian
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah review – love and betrayal from the Nobel laureate
A storyteller of understated brilliance, Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the 2021 Nobel prize in literature for his 'uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents'. Born in Zanzibar, Gurnah, now 76, moved to Britain in 1968 as a refugee of the Zanzibar revolution. His books often feature people who leave what they know and arrive 'in strange places, carrying little bits of jumbled luggage and suppressing secret and garbled ambitions', to use the words of a character from his 2001 novel By the Sea. Theft, Gurnah's first book since his Nobel win, is in part a continued inquiry into familiar themes of exile and memory, home, longing and loneliness. It is also a poignant portrait of love, friendship and betrayal, set against Tanzania's tourism boom during the 1990s. The novel follows Karim, Fauzia and Badar, chronicling their uneasy passage into adulthood. Karim's story begins on Pemba Island, where his mother, Raya, leaves her joyless marriage while he's a toddler, first returning with him to her parents in Unguja and later relocating without him to Dar es Salaam, where she remarries. When Karim enrols for university in the city, he stays with her and her husband, Haji Othman. He returns to Zanzibar once he finishes his studies to take up a position in development. There, Karim crosses paths with Fauzia – once a sickly, epileptic child, now a confident young woman training to become a teacher. The two fall helplessly in love. Sometime during Karim's second year of university, 13-year-old Badar arrives at the Othmans' house, sent by his adopted parents as a servant ('There was to be no more school for him. There was no money'). Homesick and haunted by his abandonment, Badar gradually learns to adjust to his new life. While Raya, Haji and Karim are all kind to him, Haji's father appears to resent him. Badar senses that the hostility isn't exactly directed at him, but rather at his real father, 'a restless troublemaker', as he's often been told. It isn't until several years later, when he is accused of theft by the old man, that the reader is finally let in on the truth about Badar's father and his ties to the Othman family. The revelation is a modest development, only confirming Badar's suspicion that 'there was something degrading about his circumstances'. True intrigue begins when Karim, now married to Fauzia, invites Badar to start anew with them in Zanzibar, arranging a job for him at a boutique hotel: a gesture that leaves Badar profoundly, almost existentially, indebted to him. Debt, both as a real monetary burden and a symbolic relational pact, has been a recurring feature of Gurnah's writing. In his 1987 debut novel, Memory of Departure, impoverished Hassan Omar invites himself into his wealthy uncle's home in Nairobi, on the basis of an inheritance that is owed to his mother. By the Sea featured two Zanzibari migrants who reunite in an English seaside town, years after a loan gone awry had led one to lose his family home to the other. Paradise, shortlisted for the Booker prize, told the story of young Yusuf's quest for freedom after he is pawned to an ivory merchant by his parents. It is set in what is now Tanzania; then, at the turn of the 20th century, a beleaguered place on the verge of German colonisation. Theft is in dialogue with these books, with the motif of debt grounding wider ruminations: on hospitality, autonomy and servitude as well as the nuanced distinction between obligation and generosity. For Gurnah, the record-keeping principle underlying a ledger is also one that animates human exchange more broadly, corrupting even the most innocent of bonds. As the tale progresses, Karim increasingly hectors and dominates Badar, demanding gratitude, deference and eventually even subordination and silence, convinced that without his help, Badar 'would have ended up living on the streets as some kind of a criminal'. The final third is the novel's most compelling section. Karim's testiness with Badar takes a toll on their friendship, while his relationship with Fauzia is complicated by the arrival of a difficult baby and Karim's domineering mien. The island, meanwhile, is in the throes of profound change. Foreign exchange rules have been relaxed. More and more hotels dot the coast; houses once belonging to Omani sultans and Indian-owned buildings abandoned amid the post-independence exodus have been transformed into heritage retreats, while old premises, now in the hands of foreign investors, are 'gilded fantasies of oriental luxury'. Everywhere, European tourists with no Kiswahili and little regard for the locals 'went about their pleasures with frowning intensity'. The same holds for the EU-marshalled aid workers Badar encounters, volunteer tourists who journey 'all this way to do their good deeds', bringing condescension, 'such ill humour' and an insensitive spirit of adventure. Gurnah's sly pairing of volunteer tourism and the colonial enterprise, as when Badar muses on the kind of work one hotel guest, the director of an international relief exchange programme, would be doing if she was around 'during the old good times of the empire', hints at harms glossed over in the name of 'goodwill'. The idea of poisoned benevolence is picked up again when Karim becomes involved with a British volunteer, a software engineer bent on a local affair. 'Does beauty like hers make its own rules, disregarding responsibilities and duties?' Badar wonders. 'Or was it that coming to a place like theirs she felt entitled to please herself because in the end it was she that mattered?' Powerful, affecting and provocative, Theft is a vital addition to Gurnah's remarkable body of work; a novel steeped in heartbreak and loss but one that ultimately refuses despair. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah review is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
