The preeminent Hong Kong actor of his generation and one of international cinema’s greatest stars, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, now 59, moves with the smoldering, understated charm of an old-world matinee idol. His performances often make his films feel like their own genre, whether they’re kung fu sagas, police dramas, or film noir love stories. And over the past four decades, he’s been a muse to some of Asia’s greatest directors, among them Ang Lee, John Woo, Andy Lau, and his friend and frequent collaborator Wong Kar Wai. Wong’s films, in particular, set the tone for Leung’s career; the pencil mustache and debonair personality he cultivated for a role in the filmmaker’s surreal epic 2046 earned him a nickname that tried to translate his charm for Western audiences: Asia’s Clark Gable.
Leung had always wanted to make a Hollywood movie—he dreamed of working with Martin Scorsese, or starring in an adaptation of a Lawrence Block crime novel. But he’d never been presented with the right opportunity. American film has traditionally had little to offer any Asian leading man, and Leung didn’t think there would ever be a role in a big-budget American movie for a Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong Chinese actor of his stature.
Perhaps the greatest pleasure of this novel is also its most subtle. Groff is a gifted writer capable of deft pyrotechnics and well up to the challenges she sets herself, including that of rendering feverish apparitions of the Virgin as recorded by a seminal poet of the Western canon. One senses she doesn’t so much struggle to create her vision but is borne aloft on it, which is the page-by-page pleasure as we soar with her.
To be free and to contribute meaningfully to society, it has long been held, we must sometimes be truly alone and know ourselves to be alone, as only then can we truly be ourselves. As societies, we have embarked on a strange experiment — one that sometimes seems self-obsessed, but, in another sense promotes self-annihilation, the cultivation of the public self over the private one. Boghosian’s work is a clear call to re-embrace our privacy and value its place both in our lives as individuals and in a free society.
Here, true to form, he tells us to abandon the impossible – “the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be”. Four Thousand Weeks is a time-unmanagement book, a pushback against what the American writer Marilynne Robinson calls the “joyless urgency” of our age.
I wanted to speak to the Ferryman.
I called directory inquiry, information,
on my smartphone. I was given a number,
a revelation. I swore to Hermes,