May 2, 2017 Books Refuge By Elisa Albert Wolf Kahn, Dark on the Right (detail), 2009, oil on canvas, 24″ x 26″. From the cover of The Farm in the Green Mountains. When I first read Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer’s The Farm in the Green Mountains, a blustering butthole had just been elected president of the United States of America, and everyone was freaking out. Via any number of platforms on any number of screens, there was a cacophony of anxiety and grandstanding and myopia and rage and despair such as I have never seen, or maybe the sheer number of platforms and screens were the never-before-seen entity. Regardless, things seemed to be turning faster and faster in some widening gyre, to borrow a phrase from Yeats, who didn’t know the half of it. So it came to pass that I found great comfort in the voice of Auntie Al, as I came to think of the indomitable Herdan-Zuckmayer (I can’t imagine she’d mind). It was, in other words, just the right book at just the right time. Read More
February 24, 2017 Books Lamplight and Shadow By Alice Kaplan Patrick Modiano’s novels gaze through “the glass wall of our consciousness of history.” Patrick Modiano In a French TV show from 1990, the forty-five-year-old Patrick Modiano wanders around a supermarket on the rue de Sèvres in Paris. He speaks to himself and to the cameraman as he moves through the aisles of food, then pauses in front of a dairy case. He’s looking for traces of the Pax movie theater that once stood in the same spot, trying to recall where the screen was. But nothing he remembers is quite right, and his sentences break up in midcourse, leaving only verbal gestures at a past no longer visible. His attempt to locate the screen amounts to a fool’s errand. Like the writer in this video, the characters in Modiano’s fiction fail in their search for a lost past. His heroes are elusive, disappearing into the crowd, more comfortable listening than speaking their mind, and always aware of the futility of the hunt: their prey is forever receding. In The Black Notebook, translated with perfect pitch by Mark Polizzotti, a writer named Jean tries to fathom the life of a former girlfriend, Dannie, a woman with multiple pseudonyms and a mysterious bond with gangsters who lived in the Unic Hôtel, in the shadows of the Montparnasse train station. During their affair, the police question him about the criminal activities of the group, but he has no information to give them. In a quintessential scene, Jean stands on the sidewalk of his imagination and stares at the men through the glass window of their hotel lobby. He gazes into an impenetrable story, not for its decor or its nostalgic atmosphere, but for the pull history exerts on the present: “Perhaps the glass was opaque from inside, like a one-way mirror. Or else, very simply, dozens and dozens of years stood between us; they remained frozen in the past, in the middle of that hotel lobby, and we no longer lived, they and I, in the same space and time.” Modiano’s books are full of moments like this; they transmit something deep and essential we’re forced to reckon with, the glass wall of our consciousness of history. Read More
December 1, 2016 Books The Pleasures of Incomprehensibility By Michael LaPointe Why we don’t need to decode “the world’s most mysterious book.” Pages from the Voynich Manuscript. Medieval manuscripts are survivors—of Viking raids, of damp and decay—but even with delicate, fragile pages and binding, many of them remain luminous, their vellum illuminated in gold and silver, embellished with vegetal and animistic imagery, and sketched through with the marginalia of generations of owners. Even editions made from common calfskin can inspire the same awe as the upper reaches of cathedrals. The Voynich Manuscript, an early fifteenth-century volume housed in Yale’s Beinecke library, looks at first like any such edition, with its loopy text and colorful illustrations. Yet as soon as you try reading the book, it resists. There’s no author, no title. It isn’t written in a foreign language; rather, this language is totally unknown. And while the illustrations appear to be plants or stars or baths, in fact they have no analogue in the known world. It’s as outside of genre as dancer Vaslav Nijinsky’s diary, and indeed it’s hard to shake the feeling that it was composed by someone descending into madness. Scholars have tried to decode it for centuries. Some have suggested it was written by the philosopher Roger Bacon, while others insist it must have been bestowed on humanity by aliens. More cynical thinkers believe that the manuscript is a hoax, probably created by medieval charlatans. But no matter how hard people search for answers, the book refuses to yield meaning—it’s totally incomprehensible. Read More
November 22, 2016 Books Mariette in Ecstasy By Nick Ripatrazone Revisiting Ron Hansen’s outré, erotic Catholic novel, twenty-five years later. From the cover of Mariette in Ecstasy. In 1906, Mariette Baptiste, a seventeen-year-old postulant, is the talk of the Sisters of the Crucifixion convent. Although their days are scheduled down to the minute—silence, recitation, meditation, prayer, work, meals—the sisters can’t help but talk about the new, rich teenager in their midst. Why did she join them? What’s her secret? Mariette in Ecstasy, Ron Hansen’s prose-poetic novel, was published twenty-five years ago, and its strangeness hasn’t withered. The rare book lauded by both The Village Voice and diocesan newspapers, Hansen’s novel is written in gorgeous sentences that combine meticulous material specificity with ambiguous emotion. (Mariette’s room in the convent is described as a “cell” where a “holy water stoup is next to the doorjamb, and just a few feet above Mariette’s pillow is a hideous Spanish cross and a painted Christ that is all red meat and agony.”) A quarter-century after its publication, no other novel has quite captured its marriage of the sacred and the sexual, the pious and the secular. Read More
November 16, 2016 Books Super Sad Woman By Elisa Albert On Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s La femme de Gilles. From the cover of Melville House’s new edition of La femme de Gilles. It’s probably not unusual to read a novel whose protagonist bears your own name if your name is Jane or Emily or John or Jack, but it’s a neat first for me. What immediate force of recognition! Elisa: a tall, handsome woman, breasts not as high and mighty as they once were, fully vested in domestic life, and holding fast to the hope that domestic life matters, because breasts, like time, go only in one direction. Cry us a river. But Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s Elisa—the centerpiece of La femme de Gilles, and marginalized from the get-go by its clever title!—is massively betrayed by her cheerfully unrepentant husband on page eight. And Bourdouxhe’s Elisa can’t skip off to an artists’ colony and seek revenge with a neurotic sculptor or hop a train down to the city and buy a new dress and flirt with someone at a party or take her kids to live in an intentional community in Vermont, where she’d discover an affinity for orgies and hallucinogens and spinning pottery (as this Elisa might). She can’t write a think piece about having been betrayed, parlay it into a book deal, and promote it via an Instagram account with a chic, aspirational, rural/industrial French aesthetic. Bourdouxhe’s Elisa—known in her own damn novel as Gilles’ Woman, for God’s sake—has no recourse. No practical recourse, and, worse, no emotional recourse. There’s no precedent for middle-aged feminist reinvention in pre–World War II–era rural/industrial Belgium (that I know of). Read More
November 2, 2016 Books The Meaning of the Bones By Michael LaPointe Does Shakespeare really have “universal appeal”? From the U.K. cover of Shakespeare in Swahililand. “People frequently ask me why I devote so much time to seeking out facts about man’s past,” the paleontologist Louis Leakey said in 1964. “The past shows clearly that we all of us have a common origin and that our differences in race and color and creed are only superficial.” Leakey sought to prove that humankind’s earliest ancestors evolved in East Africa’s Rift Valley, and in doing so, to invert the common Western idea that “Africa is always producing something new.” Rather than an endless fount of novelty, Leakey’s Africa held a promise of the immutable. He believed that excavating African earth could speak to the universal essence of humankind. Over the past few years, the literary critic Edward Wilson-Lee went searching in East Africa for his own evidence of a shared humanity. Wilson-Lee, a Kenyan-born son of British descent, sought “the Holy Grail of Shakespeare studies”—the key to the Bard’s “universal appeal.” His new book Shakespeare in Swahililand: In Search of a Global Poet asks whether Shakespeare’s plays, like Leakey’s specimens, can point toward an essential human quality. Read More