July 16, 2010 Arts & Culture The Only Ones Left on the Island By Elif Batuman The final installment of a four-part review. 5:56 P.M. Another break. As sometimes happens with people under duress, our biological systems have warped into synch and pretty much all 400-odd culture lovers seem to have to pee this time. “Five-minute call!” I’m still in line on the trailer steps, where a faint but palpable ripple of panic passes through the crowd. 6:02 P.M. Back in the theater, I ask the LA Times critic how he is doing. “So-so,” he says. “Hanging in there.” He asks me whether anyone has ever tried to stage the dramatic poem written by Stepan Trofimovich in the first part of Demons. I don’t know that they have, but what a marvelous idea! The description of this lyrical drama is one of my favorite passages in Dostoevsky’s novel: It is some sort of allegory, in lyrical-dramatic form, resembling the second part of Faust. The scene opens with a chorus of women, then a chorus of men, then of some powers, and it all ends with a chorus of souls that have not lived yet but would very much like to live a little… Then suddenly the scene changes and some sort of “Festival of Life” begins, in which even insects sing, a turtle appears with some sort of sacramental Latin words, and, if I remember, a mineral—that is, an altogether inanimate object—also gets to sing about something… Finally, the scene changes again, and a wild place appears, where a civilized young man wanders among the rocks picking and sucking at some wild herbs, and when a fairy asks him why he is sucking these herbs, he responds that he feels an overabundance of life in himself, is seeking oblivion, and finds it in the juice of these herbs, but that his greatest desire is to lose his reason as quickly as possible (a perhaps superfluous desire). I am filled with a desire to see a turtle uttering sacramental the Latin words, and a mineral that somehow gets to sing about something. It strikes me as criminal that Peter Stein didn’t include these highlights in his performance. What excuse did he possibly have—there hadn’t been enough time? 6:05 P.M. I count seven empty seats behind me, and eleven to my right. 6:18 P.M. Nikolai has gone to confess to a monk that he once seduced a fourteen-year-old girl and drove her to suicide. This chapter was omitted from the first editions of Dostoevsky’s novels. 6:23 P.M. Nikolai confesses to the monk that he really did secretly marry the pretty retarded lame girl. The monk totally has Nikolai’s number. I hadn’t realized before how much this conversation resembles the exchange between Raskolnikov and the detective in Crime and Punishment. 6:40 P.M. Still confessing. “On my conscience is a premeditated poisoning that no one knows about.” 6:47 P.M. The confession shows no sign of ending. If this was a plane we would be in France by now. I glance at the program notes to see what else has to happen before the dinner break. The mayor has to explode in a fit of jealousy. I wonder how long that will take. 6:48 P.M. Nikolai is weeping in the monk’s lap. Read More
July 15, 2010 Arts & Culture Charlotte Strick, Paris Review’s Art Editor By Thessaly La Force In the middle of redesigning The Paris Review (stay tuned!) our new art editor, Charlotte Strick, takes time out to discuss how she got into the design business. (She’s also responsible for the gallery of book jackets you see above.) Read more on FSG’s new blog, Work in Progress. I’ve wanted to be a fashion designer since the age of three, because my mom had been a fashion designer in England. I grew up with her talking about what London was like after the war, how it was this burst of color after so much gray. Carnaby Street, and Mary Quant . . . I just thought, wow. That’s what I want to do. Of course, that scene had long since passed when I became an adult. But that was my dream, and I grew up drawing, making little fashion magazines. I made a logo for myself. And I grew up with my father pointing out typography to me, because he had been very involved in the Calligrapher’s Workshop that’s now part of the AIGA. I remember at the age of five, him pointing out, “Look at that sign! That’s a terrible letter j!” I got quite snobby about stuff like that. I wanted to go to art school, I wanted to go to RISD. But my family said, “Go to liberal arts school, be a fine arts major, but study all these other subjects. Then you can go to art school if you really want to.” I went sort of frustrated. I did a lot of painting, I took art history classes. All the time I was drawing and trying to teach myself to sew. I came out and I was working for Elie Tahari. At the time they were just branding Theory, which is huge now. There was a girl a few years older than me, who had gone to design school, and she was given the task of designing the Theory logo. I looked over her shoulder and thought, “What is she doing?” I hadn’t been on a computer much at that point . . . Read More
July 15, 2010 Arts & Culture Back on Planet Dostoevsky By Elif Batuman Part three of a four-part review. Photograph by Stephanie Berger.3:15 P.M. “If you knew all the yams I have to tell them,” one character says, according to the supertitles. I am briefly interested, until I realize they are yarns and not yams. Pyotr is trying to recruit Nikolai to be part of his terrorist plot. This is such an amazing scene in the book. They’re saying practically the exact lines Dostoevsky wrote, and they aren’t bad actors, but somehow the effect isn’t there. It’s really weird. Maybe it is like the movie where the souls are put into storage. 3:31 P.M. Another great scene from the book—Shatov tells Nikolai Stavrogin, “Remember the importance you have had in my life, Stavrogin”—part of a sequence of scenes where Nikolai visits different people and they all project various completely demented fantasies onto him (because they are possessed). But I’m not feeling it. I like the actor who plays Shatov—he reminds me a bit of Oscar the Grouch. I feel affectionately every time he pops up again out of his depressing cell. But I don’t believe it when he says that he is a worm and Nikolai is the sun. The piano is punctuating every other line with ominous clunking sounds. Sometimes someone hits the strings with a hammer. It doesn’t help. 3:45 P.M. They are still introducing new characters. They only just got to Fedka the convict. 3:50 P.M. Neck and shoulder pain have set in. Captain Lebyadkin wants to write a will leaving his skeleton to students. A label on the skull will read: “A Repentant Freethinker.” “You’re getting rid of me like an old slipper?” Lebyadkin shouts to Nikolai. This sounds funny in Italian, because the word for slipper is ciabatta. 3:59 P.M. The lame retarded girl has been shrieking for four minutes now about a knife. 4:07 P.M. Nikolai and Gaganov are fighting a duel. It takes forever. The seconds are marking off the paces, putting up the barriers. I always wondered what the barriers in a duel looked like. In this case, they look like unpainted construction barriers. Kirilov looks kind of Jewish. 4:10 P.M. They are finally done choosing their weapons. 4:14 P.M. The first shots are finally fired. Gaganov shoots Nikolai in the hand, but Nikolai shoots in the air. The guns are really loud. A crazy-sounding old guy in the audience roars with laughter. I’ve been noticing for a while now in the audience: less knowing meta-theatrical laughter, and more random crazy-person laughter. Read More
July 14, 2010 Arts & Culture My 12-Hour Blind Date: The Play Begins By Elif Batuman Part two of a four-part review. Photograph by Stephanie Berger. 11:05 A.M. The play starts. I’m briefly excited. It’s strange to see Dostoevsky’s weird, garrulous narrator—weird, in the book, because he knows all this stuff he couldn’t possibly know, and narrates in first-person plural (“we”) from the perspective of the townspeople—represented by a slight bearded Italian, who appears playing the piano. He explains that the little piece he is playing is called “Franco-Prussian War,” and that he and his friends use it to cover up the sound of their discussion about freethinking. He’s a good actor and not bad at playing the piano. 11:20 A.M. The exposition is taking forever. The poor narrator. He has to introduce so many characters! First he sets up the friendship between Stepan Trofimovich and Varvara Petrovna (the older characters). Then he has to introduce the circle of freethinkers. There are like eight of them. Then there is the young generation: Stepan Trofimovich’s son, Pyotr, and Varvara Petrovna’s son, Nikolai, and Varvara Petrovna’s ward, Dasha, who is the sister of one of the freethinkers, and then Varvara Petrovna’s friend’s daughter, Liza. Liza and Nikolai and Dasha have been having a love triangle in Switzerland. 11:30 A.M. It’s interesting how important Switzerland is in the novel. You never actually see anything that happens there, but the characters talk about it. That works well in a play. 11:32 A.M. The eight freethinkers are having a reunion at Stepan Trofimovich’s house. They keep greeting each other by name, but it’s impossible to tell them apart, especially since there is a time lag with the supertitles. 11:37 A.M. When will these freethinkers stop reveling? And is the one with glasses Virginsky or Liputin? The narrator is playing an accordion. 11:45 A.M. The one with glasses is Shigalyov. Nikolai comes in. He’s just back from Switzerland. He’s supposed to be this charismatic demonic diabolically handsome character with an empty soul, who ruins everyone’s lives out of his spiritual emptiness. The actor is doing a good job of appearing empty, but that’s it. He looks like a skinny Brad Pitt, complete with the strange beard. I do not find him charismatic. 12:10 A.M. Varvara Petrovna is calling Dasha an idiot. “Crrretina! Crrretina!” she shouts. The seven-year-old girl in the audience is clinging to her mother’s neck and whispering something in her ear, very intently. The LA Times critic sighs and shifts his weight. I wince and try to scoot back in my chair, but collide with the knees of the person behind me (a man wearing shorts), probably causing him acute pain. I feel one with the awesome cycle of life. 12:20 P.M. “Captain Lebyadkin whips his pretty, lame, retarded younger sister,” someone remarks. Now that was an efficient sentence. 12:30 P.M. Stepan Trofimovich doesn’t want to marry Dasha, but the wedding is scheduled for Sunday. “Couldn’t there be a week with no Sunday? Couldn’t God cancel Sunday, just once, to prove to an atheist that he exists?” I think that was the first funny line. People have been laughing at every other line though. Whenever anyone mentions anything related to theater (like when Varvara Petrovna calls Stepan Trofimovich a “bad actor”), they chuckle knowingly. I find this annoying, even though I know it’s really just a form of politeness. Read More
July 13, 2010 Arts & Culture My 12-Hour Blind Date, With Dostoevsky By Elif Batuman A review in four parts. Photograph by Stephanie Berger. 9:15 A.M. Sitting in a taxi on the FDR Drive, I wonder how life has brought me to this point. I’m headed for a ferry to take me to a warehouse on Governor’s Island to watch a twelve-hour staging of Dostoevsky’s Demons, in Italian. How life brought me to this point is that I recently wrote a book called The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them ($10.20 on Amazon—I’m just saying), which includes a nonfictional retelling of Dostoevsky’s weirdest novel, The Demons (formerly translated as The Possessed), set in the Stanford comparative literature PhD program, where I was once a graduate student, and where we were all once possessed by a combination of dangerous literary-theoretical ideas and a demonic Nikolai Stavrogin-like classmate. 9:25 A.M. Disembarking at the Maritime Building, I look around for the Lincoln Center publicist, who told me she would be wearing a straw hat. Inconveniently, I forgot my ticket in San Francisco, which is where I live, and where it is currently 6:20 A.M. There are about five hundred women here wearing straw hats. I am both jet-lagged and hung over, having flown in thirty-six hours ago for my college roommate’s wedding. At 4:00 A.M. yesterday morning I was stuck with the bride’s little brother in a broken, vomit-filled elevator in Koreatown, trying to leave a karaoke bar which I believe shared its broken, vomit-filled elevator with a medium-end brothel. 9:27 A.M. Well, the ferry doesn’t actually leave until ten, so I decide I have time for a cigarette. A college-aged Lincoln Center employee in a yellow shirt is holding a yellow sign that says “DEMONS – SLIP 1.” An older man approaches this young person with a paternal chuckle. “That’s excellent, I have to say. Really very good,” he observes. “Thanks,” says the young man with the sign. 9:28 A.M. I have lit a cigarette and am staring at Staten Island, thinking about my problems, when I am approached by a tall, remarkably handsome young man wearing sunglasses, white pants, a polo shirt, trail-runners, and a safari hat. He is carrying a copy of the Times. He asks if I am Elif. I realize that this is my blind date. I had almost forgotten about my blind date! The thing is, a total stranger wrote to me in May, saying that he had bought two of the seven hundred tickets to this coveted performance on the morning they went on sale (“A 12-Hour Play, and Endless Bragging Rights,” read the Times headline), only to discover that none of his friends wanted to join him on Governors Island for a twelve-hour-long performance of The Demons scheduled to coincide with the World Cup finals. So, he thought of me! Needless to say I was enormously flattered, although at that point I already had a ticket from The Paris Review. “Maybe we can hang out on the ferry,” I suggested. After introducing himself (how did he recognize me?), my date announces that his pants have come unbuttoned. “This is not how I wanted to make a first impression,” he observed, buttoning his pants. Read More
July 1, 2010 Arts & Culture W. S. Merwin Named Poet Laureate By Lorin Stein We congratulate W. S. Merwin on being named Poet Laureate of the United States. Merwin published his first poem with the Review in 1955, and we have been proud to publish him ever since. Herewith, to celebrate his appointment (and for the pleasure of retyping it) one of his more recent contributions: To the Long Table The sun was touching the wet black shoulders of olives in a chipped dish descended from another century on that day I remember more than half my life ago and you had been covered with a tablecloth of worn damask for lunch out on the balcony overhanging the stream with the grapes still small among the vine leaves above us and near the olives a pitcher of thin black acrid wine from the cellar just below and an omelette on a cracked white platter a wheel of bread goat cheeses salad I forgot what else the ducks were asleep down on the far side of the green pond Jacques came and went babbling fussing making his bad jokes boasting about old days that nobody else remembered the lacquered carriages the plumes on the horses and what his mother had replied to the admiral whose attentions amused her all the castles they had lost before he had grown up and when the meal was over he said you too were for sale he had discovered you in a carpenter’s shop where you had been used as a workbench without regard for your true worth and the scars on you came from there your history without words upon which words have gathered