April 15, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Outer Space; Dad Books By Lorin Stein I’m having trouble finding nature poems that deal with outer space (planets, galaxies, and weird phenomena like black holes, and so on). Has a true artist ever written on this theme? It would have to be someone with intellect and sensibility, not just a pop sci-fi writer. Thanks so much for any suggestions. —Alex The book you are looking for—at least, one of them—is The Cosmos Poems, by Frederick Seidel. Weird phenomena abound. A sample: It is the invisible Dark matter we are not made of That I am afraid of. Most of the universe consists of this. I put a single normal ice cube In my drink. It weighs one hundred million tons. It is a sample from the densest star. I read my way across The awe I wrote That you are reading now. I can’t believe that you are there Except you are … Dear Mr. Stein, Recently my dear old dad has requested a “good book” for his sixty-first birthday. In the past, as far as fiction is concerned, he’s seemed especially drawn to the classics, such as Ulysses, Moby-Dick, the poetry of William Butler Yeats, and anything else one might read as an English-lit major. Understandably, he’s now going through a bit of a literary midlife crisis and is looking for some excitement. What contemporary works would you suggest to reawaken his intellectual spirit and introduce him to the fiction of the twenty-first century? Best Wishes, Jemima M. If we start with your father’s predilection for Ulysses and Moby-Dick, and if by “good book” we assume your father means a big, ambitious novel with what Alex calls “intellect and sensibility”—and a real story to tell—I suggest Hilary Mantel’s Booker winner Wolf Hall, a historical novel about the court of Henry VIII that makes brilliant use of old-fashioned modernist stream-of-consciousness and at the same time, in its handling of private life between the sexes, is very much of our century. I suspect your father might also like either of Jonathan Franzen’s last two novels, The Corrections or Freedom. Or Péter Nádas’s complex, tricky, very inward family saga of Hungarian intellectuals in the late twentieth century, A Book of Memories. (My mother loved this one.) At the very top of the list I’d put Norman Rush’s Mortals, the story of a middle-aged CIA agent, undercover as a Milton scholar at a university in Botswana, facing hard changes in his career and his marriage. Read a few pages of each; I bet one will have his name on it. Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.
April 8, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Reader’s Guilt; Toadstools By Lorin Stein I always tell people that my favorite book is Infinite Jest, and even though I haven’t gotten halfway through it, it’s still the best half of a book that I have ever read! Do you have any guilt from unread books floating around? Hmm. You mean books I’ve started that, if the title of one should happen to come up in conversation, I’d nod, implying—without ever explicitly stating—that I’d read the whole thing? I can think of one or two. The Man Without Qualities, The Magic Mountain, Ulysses, Blood Meridian, Molloy, Jane Eyre, Being and Nothingness, Being and Time, American Pastoral, The Recognitions, Gravity’s Rainbow, V., Vanity Fair, The Education of Henry Adams, The Beautiful and Damned, The Satanic Verses, Underworld, The World as Will and Representation, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Hopscotch, Tristram Shandy, The Long Goodbye, The Hobbit, Shikasta, Contempt, Scaramouche, Watership Down, The Three Musketeers, and William Faulkner (pretty much opera omnia) spring to mind. Dear Mr. Stein, I have lately searched in vain for the right collective noun for toadstools and, in the absence of any viable candidates, have opted for sect, e.g., “a sect of toadstools.” May I in good conscience proceed? I trust your judgment. Thank you. Yours sincerely, Angus Trumble We are not prescriptivists, here at The Paris Review. Over the years our house usage has wobbled between OK and okay, et cetera and its abbreviation—even (in the old, hot-type days) between one typeface and another … in the space of a single issue. If you want to call a bunch of fungus by your own private collective noun, who are we to say no? Go crazy with that! I only worry that the plural may cause confusion. Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.
April 1, 2011 Ask The Paris Review The Murakami Landscape; Your Inner Clown By Lorin Stein Dear Mr. Stein, I recently got back from Germany, where they’ve had Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 for months. After reading it (and already having read most of his other works several times), I’m interested in finding books by other authors that will create the odd, developed mental landscapes I experience when reading his. Do you have any suggestions? Thanks, Greg Smith We are Murakami fans, too. In fact his name came up several times this week at the office. One Paris Review contributor wrote in, comparing The Third Reich to Murakami’s work, suggesting that Bolaño and Murakami share “a reverence for mystery, the sense of another realm.” It is also a kind of stagey reticence. Murakami and Bolaño both dare you to think they’re full of shit, and are not. They are magisterial. You see a similar quality in a David Lynch movie like Inland Empire, where Lynch shows you all the guy wires and indulges one extravagance after another, and you still believe. All of which is to say, Greg, you would do well to subscribe. Bolaño aside, there are stories in our next issue by Jonathan Lethem and Amie Barrodale that I think will appeal especially to you. And if you like those, I suggest Bolaño’s second-most Murakamian novel, 2666, and the complete works of Don DeLillo. I’m just a misunderstood poet here in the middle of California. The Paris Review has rejected me twice, and I feel lazy about getting the third. Why is it so hard to get poetry and, well, anything else published? Does that mean that many of us are bad writers? Amateur clowns imitating W. B. Yeats, Kafka, Frank O’Hara, et cetera? Who should I be if I am nothing right now? Will I be somebody if I get published? —Jorge As a young editor, Robert Giroux once asked T. S. Eliot whether all editors were not failed poets. “All poets are failed poets,” said Eliot. And he was Eliot. To have your work published is nice, of course, but in my experience it takes more than a story or poem to make a nobody feel like a somebody. The world is full of published writers who suspect they’re amateur clowns. And those are the good ones! My advice? Be kind to your inner clown. Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.
March 25, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Cooking About Architecture; CEOs and Poets By Lorin Stein “Writing about music is like cooking about architecture” is a quote that has been variously ascribed to Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello, and Brian Eno, but can you suggest any books that suggest contrariwise? Or should I set to work on that cassoulet about Le Corbusier? —Arnold S. My favorite newish book of criticism, August Kleinzahler’s Music: I-LXXIV moved me to tears and laughter, generally at once. Kleinzahler is equally opinionated on the subjects of German Romantics, hard bop, and Liberace. The fact that I knew nothing about any of them did not lessen my enjoyment of Kleinzahler’s prose. When Kleinzahler’s writing, I could happily read an essay about riding the bus in San Diego or seeing a stupid movie on Christmas Eve. (In fact I recommend that book, too.) If you are a midcentury jazz guy, I suggest Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful, biographical vignettes that manage (at least for this reader) also to be about the music. If you want to read about pop music, check out Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums That Changed Their Lives, with standout essays by Benjamin Kunkel, Sheila Heti, Peter Terzian, and our own John Jeremiah Sullivan. And if you want to read a deceptively deep little treatise on the whole idea of music criticism—at least when it comes to pop—read Carl Wilson’s contribution to the 33 1/3 series: Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. True story: I know a guy who wrote to CEOs as a kid, proclaiming how strongly he wanted to be a top business executive when he grew older. Years of persistent snail mail, and finally, in his late teens, he caught the attention of a wealthy business tycoon who offered him an internship at his company. Now, in his mid-twenties, this man is the head of university relations at an educational start-up company, working under the same businessman that hired him as a teenager. And now for my question: what is the likelihood of such dreams coming true in the literary sphere? —Fred Happens all the time. Just replace CEOs with quarterlies, business executive with poet, wealthy business tycoon with editor, head of university relations at an educational start-up company with poet, and subtract several hundred thousand dollars a year. Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.
March 18, 2011 Ask The Paris Review The Younger Fiancée; Studying Abroad in Cairo By Robyn Creswell What is the best poetry anthology to give my father’s new, and much younger, fiancée at her bridal shower? —Rachel Dear Rachel, What a lovely, tricky question. I suppose it depends on how you feel about your mother-in-law-to-be, or how you’d like her to feel about you. Gifts, especially when they are books, say so much about the giver. In my experience the best anthologies are unapologetically personal. The pleasure of reading André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humor or Kingsley Amis’s The Amis Anthology is the pleasure of discovering the editor’s sensibility, refracted into a choice of readings. Great anthologies surprise us. They make connections we hadn’t noticed before. But these might not make ideal gifts for a bridal shower. Might I then suggest John Hollander’s Marriage Poems? Hollander is one of our finest anthologists—if the marriage results in any children, you might try finding The Wind and the Rain: An Anthology of Poems for Young People—and all his collections include pleasurable surprises. Alongside the epithalamia there is James Dickey’s “Adultery” (“Although we come together,/ Nothing will come of us. But we would not give/ It up”) and Swift’s “The Progress of Marriage,” about an elder gentleman and his much younger bride. (Be warned: it’s vicious.) In the same Everyman series is Meena Alexander’s excellent Indian Love Poems, which is exactly what it claims to be. Both books are small, elegant, and inexpensive. Read More
March 11, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Peter Stamm; Coping Without DFW By Lorin Stein I really loved The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery and am looking to read more contemporary literature in translation. Are there any books you would recommend for starters? Well, I’m in the middle of a new translated novel that I can’t wait to go home and finish: Seven Years, by the Swiss writer Peter Stamm. I had never heard of Stamm—I picked the book up because the translator is Michael Hofmann. If Michael Hofmann thinks a book is worth spending that much time on, I’m always happy to read it. So far I am not disappointed. Seven Years begins like a Turgenev novella, in the present day, with a slightly disillusioned architect looking back on the youthful love affair that became his marriage, and on another love affair that didn’t. Just the kind of thing I like. And (as my friend Eric Banks pointed out last night—because it turns out he’s read it, too), Stamm deals convincingly with architects and architecture, something you don’t find in a novel every day. David Foster Wallace is my favorite writer, but I now find it hard to read him without becoming desperately sad. Please can you suggest ways of coping? —Hermione The last time I tried to reread Infinite Jest, I had the same feeling, and stopped. Then I got a note from a friend who, like Wallace, has suffered over the years from debilitating depression. My friend described how her last depression lifted. I can’t resist quoting her here, because what she wrote struck me as beautiful but also because it reminded me that Wallace overcame and overcame his sense of isolation, not only in life, but in his fiction, too—in Infinite Jest, for starters, the least solipsistic of contemporary novels, or even at moments in his last collection, the one my friend was reading: One day in late summer, I decided to give Oblivion another try, or rather to give this one story “‘Good Old Neon” a try. It was a collection I’d previously struggled with. But that story, reading it at the time I did, truly gave me this surge of Spirit—life force—that I doubt I would have found anywhere else. The story’s antihero trapped in various self-created hells of bad faith, and the narrator explaining to him that while we all get hung up on being untrue to ourselves, or faking our way through life, the vastness and complexity of our selves is such that we really couldn’t begin to fake them … We’re tied to the mast of these huge crazy ships, ploughing into dark, icy seas, and our only recourse is an occasional change of hat … He puts it about a million times more elegantly than that. It was one of the moments of the year. Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.