The Paris Review

It is an indisputable fact that the memory of poet Richard Hugo haunts Missoula, Montana. This notion might first strike us as innocuous, obvious, falling within the simple domain of legacy. Thirty years after his death, he leaves equal endowments in Missoula, as the most important “Montana poet” and as a teacher of poetry: he was one of the first directors of the University of Montana’s renowned creative writing program and the author of a classic handbook on creative writing, The Triggering Town, that is filled with excellent, weird, and practical advice.

Further related to the activity of haunting: Hugo’s poems famously concern places. He is known primarily as a regional poet, and many of his most famous poems are named for Montana towns or landmarks, like “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” “The Milltown Union Bar,” and “The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir.” One can use his book of collected poems, Making Certain It Goes On, as a guidebook to Montana’s bleakest and loveliest destinations; titles of his poems will lead you to Garnet ghost town, St. Ignatius, Turtle Lake, Wisdom, and Fort Benton, finally winding back to what was once Hugo’s actual address in Missoula, 2433 Agnes Street. When Hugo wrote a poem about a place, he made the place a part of himself, and now that he’s gone, a part of him remains in those places.

Read More »

Literary tourism is as old as time (or at least as old as the Lake District), but, due to a combination of new technology and easy travel, we seem to be living in its Golden Age. Last year, Wendy McClure reported from the Little House pilgrim trail, and Oxford, Mississippi, has drawn fans of Southern Gothic since Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel. On this site, you’ll recall Margaret Eby's paeon to Eudora Welty’s Jackson garden. If you want to reenact The Canterbury Tales, well, you can.  In recent years, readers have flocked to the Pacific Northwest to get a taste of Twilight; lovers of The Help have tried to get a taste of the 1960s in Greenwood, MS; and now, you can even experience the survivalist thrill of The Hunger Games in North Carolina.

Over the weekend, the FT reported live from Germany’s “Fairy Tale Road,” on which one can walk in the steps of Pied Pipers (Hamlin), the Musicians of Bremen, and the sites where Grimm scholars believe Sleeping Beauty might have actually pricked her finger and Rapunzel let down her hair. (More easily verifiable are locales that figured in the brothers’ lives.) Of course, in real life, all is not fairy-tale perfect. Explains Günther Koseck, the German noble who inhabits Dornröschenschloss (“Sleeping Beauty’s castle”) during the castle’s weekly Sleeping Beauty reenactments, his enchanted princesses “have to always be young and beautiful, and that means they have to be replaced occasionally.”

My father-in-law, a fiercely intelligent Irishman in his late sixties, has just been diagnosed with cancer. As he is facing a long period of being confined to quarters, I'd like to send him some books to help pass the time. However, he has candidly admitted to me that his concentration is not what it once was, and he finds reading anything of extended length quite difficult. Would you have any suggestions—collections of short pieces of fiction, or tales, personal essays, travel memoirs, for example—that might be suitable? When he’s feeling like his usual self, he enjoys reading Brian Moore and John Banville, outsmarting Stephen Fry on reruns of Qi, and finishing the Irish Times cryptic crossword in half the time it takes me to struggle through the Simplex.

With thanks,
amrh

Your father-in-law sounds great. You might ask whether he’s read Brian Moore’s novella Catholics. It’s a very short read, recently back in print: he may have missed it the first time. It happens to have been a favorite of David Foster Wallace; from your description, I wonder if your father-in-law might enjoy Wallace’s essays (either A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again or Consider the Lobster) or my colleague John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead. (Read his recent essay on Ireland if you’d like a preview.) Or Geoff Dyer’s essays, as for example Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It. These are all witty essayists I read when my attention flickers low. Along the same lines, Sadie suggests Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia and Malachy McCourt’s very breezy but entertaining memoir A Monk Swimming.

Does your father-in-law have any interest in Russia? For sheer storytelling, I recommend Ken Kalfus’s PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies or any collection by Alice Munro (I won’t bother recommending William Trevor). You mention tales; it’s an obvious one, but I’ve found Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales good sickbed reading. For travel writing, maybe Richard Holmes’s Footsteps or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes?

We wish him a speedy recovery!

I’m looking for a couple of good books—novels or short stories—to read aloud with my boyfriend as we drive from Arizona up through the Badlands to a new start in New York. (We are not—not quite—as young and idealistic as that sentence makes us sound.) What would you recommend?

We like your style.

I suggest you keep a few books going at once, so you can switch around according to the driver’s—and the reader’s—mood. Thus, in no particular order, My Antonia, Denis Johnson’s Angels, True Grit, Last Evenings On Earth, American Purgatorio, any of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels, and The White Hotel. All have a good strong voice, requiring no acrobatics on the reader’s part, most have something to do with travel, and all of them clip along. Sadie points out that the Victorians tend to be good for reading aloud—maybe the Palliser series?—and suggests the stories in Daphne du Maurier’s Don't Look Now. (She also proposed Another Roadside Attraction—and collapsed in giggles, for reasons best known to herself.) Read More »

When you’re young—a child, a teenager, a twenty-something—it seems, as Elisabeth Eaves says, “like it will never end. You can do anything because time is limitless, it’s infinite.” You can move to a different state or a different country. You can buy a one-way plane ticket. You can go to graduate school. You can move in with your boyfriend and get engaged and buy a house; and then you can move out. You can sublet indefinitely.

In her new book, Wanderlust, Eaves—a journalist and author who has worked for Forbes and previously published Bare: The Naked Truth About Stripping, about her time as an exotic dancer—does all of these things. Instead of making choices that follow neatly, one from the next—the job that brings you to a city where you meet the person you marry—the Eaves of Wanderlust makes decisions that consciously, thrillingly refuse to build on one another.

She travels to Cairo as a twenty-year-old college student. At twenty-three, she hikes the notoriously difficult Kokoda trail in Papua New Guinea. Fleeing the rekindling of her relationship with her ex-fiancé, Stu, she joins a husband and wife sailing from Whangarei to Tonga and nearly dies when their vessel is caught in a vicious storm on the open ocean. In person, Eaves may be slender and fair-haired, but she carries herself with a graceful, noticeable composure that makes it easy to imagine her haggling, at dusk, with a Jeep driver in Pakistan, trying to get him to lower the price of a ride she and her boyfriend desperately need. She maintains eye contact. She exudes competence.

And Wanderlust, though on the surface concerned with Eaves’s love of travel—a celebration of years spent indulging that love, moving from one town, one country to the next with little notice, living abroad for months and years at a time, cut off, in the days before e-mail, from family and friends—is also about the process by which she became the adult she is now. She doesn’t have regrets, though she would tell her twenty-year-old self to “spend more time trying to figure out what you want to do on your own. It’s easy to fall back on what somebody else wants to do.”

Read More »

Kurt Andersen had his list of “Words We Don’t Say.” As the editor of The Paris Review, what are some of yours? —Tom Michaels

Usage snobbery is a poor man’s snobbery. It has no place at The Paris Review. When Kurt Andersen compiled his list of peeves, he had the excuse of working at New York—a magazine that pretty much exists to market snootiness on a budget. You will notice that most of his verbotens come from the tabloids, the trades, or lifestyle magazines. (There is something, not just ironic, but deep about a lifestyle magazine banning the word lifestyle.) Which is to say, Andersen was doing his job. He was maintaining a tone.

Here at the Review we have no such excuse. All we’ve got are hang-ups. I blame mine on The Worth of Words, a late-Victorian usage manual that I picked up at a yard sale during high school and subsequently destroyed. It was too late. The Worth of Words had singed it onto my brain that the phrase due to should be used only in instances of someone actually incurring a debt of gratitude, that aggravate must never be used except in the sense of adding to, and that partially means only “with bias.” (Google Books has now reunited me with this manual and its insane author, Ralcy Halsted Bell. Entry one: “ABORTIVE means of untimely birth ... To speak of an abortive attempt or act is hardly short of the ridiculous.”

I do not recommend The Worth of Words, and I offer this tiny (partial) list of my own in a spirit of confession and contrition. Recently our managing editor, Nicole Rudick, cured me of an aversion to forthcoming (in the sense of “soon to be published”) with the help of the OED. Here, off the top of my head, are some more:

Home (for house)
Hopefully (for “I hope”)
Disinterest (for “lack of interest”—yes, even though I know it’s totally correct)
Delicious, Spicy, Tangy (used metaphorically)
Tasty (ever, but especially in reference to a “lick”)
Pleasantry (except in the sense of “joke”)
Following (to introduce a list: as in “the following”)
Contact (as a verb)
Relationship (ever, ever, even when it’s the mot juste)
Impact (unless we’re talking about, e.g., a car crash)

I could go on. (Couldn’t you?)

Read More »

DAY ONE

7:15 A.M. Istanbul. A bleary departure from the Pera Palace Hotel after three nights of its punctiliously restored Orient Express–era fineries. We own a sixth-floor walk-up nearby in Cihangir (an arty neighborhood dear to Orhan Pamuk), but my girlfriend Anya decided to rent it out. So we’ve stayed in a “Greta Garbo” suite here, with photos of GG on the wall and a view not of the Golden Horn but of a minor soccer stadium named for Tayyip Erdogan, the moderate Islamist prime minister, a former semipro football player from the poor neighborhood close by. “Footballer” on a politician’s CV is not to be slighted in soccer-mad Turkey. Hakan Sükür, the country’s iconic player, now retired, will run on Ergodan’s party ticket in the June elections.

Last night, döner and leg of lamb for au revoir dinner at Beyti, a sprawling palace of meat. Anya recounted dining beside Ralph Fiennes the night before. The ex–investment banker now at our table ("We like you anyway," I told him, grinning hostilely) told a cute story about Ralph’s cousin Ranulph Fiennes, the preposterously adventurous explorer. Some financial analysts were inspecting a Tesco supermarket in London, and in the main subzero storage freezer they came across a tent. Ranulph Feinnes was staying in it, prepping for the Antarctic. “Any pictures of Garbo?” I asked, to mostly puzzlement.

Pamuk’s name came up, with the inevitable Istanbul confidence-sharing about how admirable a writer he is, but such a tedious read.

Read More »