Photo: Erica MacLean.

The introduction to Mariners, Castaways and Renegades, a 1953 work on Herman Melville by the activist, critic, and novelist C. L. R. James (1901–1989), is electrifying to the Melville lover. It starts with an indelible line: “The miracle of Herman Melville is this: that a hundred years ago in two novels, Moby-Dick and Pierre, and two or three stories, he painted a picture of the world in which we live, which is to this day unsurpassed.” That’s a huge claim, but readers of Moby-Dick know it to be as true today as it was when James’s book was first published. James goes on to write that “a great part” of the volume he is introducing was produced while he was held in detention by the immigration authorities on Ellis Island as he was being deported from the U.S. On Ellis Island he found, “like Melville’s Pequod … a miniature of all the nations of the world and all sections of society,” and he synthesized his American experience with the themes and insights of Moby-Dick. I’ve written recently about Moby-Dick’s significance to modern discussions of race, and I was pleased to come across the scholarship of James, one of the novel’s great interpreters, who was neither white nor American but born on Trinidad when it was a British colony. If Melville shows America as multiracial and entwined, James pans out to show it also as hopelessly entangled in the whale lines of the greater world.

Deservedly, James’s work is undergoing a revival at the moment. His only novel, Minty Alley, was reissued earlier this year as part of Bernardine Evaristo’s series with Penguin Books, Black Britain: Writing Back. His other major works include The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, a still-authoritative history of the world’s only successful slave-led revolution, and Beyond a Boundary, a study on cricket and culture that has been called one of the greatest sports books of all time as well as an important entry in the discourse of postcolonialism. Even many of his minor works are back in print. Read More

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for virtual Undset-themed drinks on Friday, June 4, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. For more details, visit our events page, or scroll down to the bottom of the article.

Photo: Erica MacLean.

The most common food in the medieval historical romance Kristin Lavransdatter, written by the Norwegian author Sigrid Undset (1882–1949), is oatmeal porridge, a dish I made elaborate perfection of during my children’s early years. The porridges in Undset’s book are good and nourishing but plain (though in one scene, a young Kristin eats hers with “thick cream” off her father’s spoon). Mine, on the other hand, were ridiculous. I blitzed half the oats in the baby-food blender before cooking. I tried different combinations of milk and water. I made fruit puree swirls. I had a two-year-old daughter, an infant son, and an office job, to which I fled every day in great relief to get a moment to myself and then struggled not to leak breast milk on my work clothes. My husband was unhelpful with the children. Childless people found my travails boring and embarrassing. I’d never thought being a woman mattered much, but suddenly it seemed to. I was miserable, and perfecting the oatmeal made me feel better.

Kristin Lavransdatter, which unfolds over the course of three volumes—The Wreath, The Wife, and The Cross—is a woman’s story. It’s also a gripping read and an impressive feat of historical re-creation, which helped Undset win the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature. The epic’s structural and textual allusions are so numerous that, as the professor Sherrill Harbison dryly remarks in her introduction to The Cross, they “show no signs of being exhausted by scholars.” (She also—correctly, I feel—thinks the book is overlooked.) When writing Kristin Lavransdatter, Undset drew from sagas, ballads, Scandinavian oral tradition, and medieval texts of all types, notably the allegory Le roman de la rose, to tell the tale of a woman in the early fourteenth century, a time when society was changing for women, who takes her newish right to consent to her own marriage a step further and demands her own choice of husband. Not accidentally, Undset was writing in the 1920s, another time of rapid social change. Read More

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for a virtual, Melville-themed wine tasting on Friday, May 7, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. For more details, visit our events page, or scroll down to the bottom of the article.

Photo: Erica MacLean.

Whenever I would tell someone I was cooking from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for my next column, they would gleefully shriek, “Whale steaks!” And I would dither a bit and explain that no, those are illegal in America, and that I was instead planning to make two forms of chowder, clam and cod, that weren’t going to be very different from each other. In our Chowhound-fueled, extreme-eating kind of world, I felt a little silly. Chowder is an easy dish, and while there’s raging conflict over the primacy of New York style (tomato-based) versus New England style (white), and the finer variations of each, the topic seems to inspire passion in inverse proportion to its importance. (Potatoes or no potatoes? Avast.) In fact, as Perry Miller reports in The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville, and the New York Literary Scene, Melville meant for Moby-Dick’s chapter on chowder to be a sardonic response to just such an ongoing foodie feud. (Many thanks to the novelist Caleb Crain for loaning me Miller’s book and writing two excellent essays on Melville, sexuality, and cannibalism, published in A Journal of Melville Studies and American Literature.)

Moby-Dick, however, is a book in which pulling on a single thread can reveal a universe. I had some contact with it in my all-girls middle school—to my recollection, just enough to ask why this book had dick in the title and so many mentions of “sperm” in its pages—but it’s only as an adult that I’ve fallen madly in love. I understand it now as a “lifelong meditation on America,” as the Melville biographer Andrew Delbanco writes in his introduction to the edition I own. So when I looked at the book’s two main food passages—one on chowder, the other on eating whale—I found a central theme: the question of what man (specifically gendered man) is doing here in America, what he’s cooking up, and how it nourishes him. In this system, eating chowder is on the side of our better nature, and eating whale is on the side of our worst, so I felt a little better about my dinner plans. Read More

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

Photo: Erica MacLean.

Lately, when I think about jealousy or, shall I admit it, when I feel jealous, I remind myself of the story “The Earthgod and the Fox,” by the Japanese writer Kenji Miyazawa (1896–1933). When I think about politics, I consider Miyazawa’s story “The Fire Stone.” For my artistic practice, there’s “Gorsch the Cellist”; for my place in nature, “The Bears of Nametoko.” I can’t say there’s a Miyazawa story for everything—the writer died young and lived nearly a century ago in rural northern Japan—but he had stories for many of our basic human vices, and for our basic forms of goodness, too. And this only scratches the surface of his work’s appeal.

Miyazawa was born in 1896, the son of two pawnbrokers in the town of Hanamaki in the rural Iwate Prefecture. His parents were pious Buddhists and wealthy people by local standards; their son became a teacher of agricultural science and a social activist who attempted to improve the lot of farmers in his region. His poetry and fiction were not celebrated or even much published in his lifetime, but word spread posthumously, and he is now one of Japan’s foremost writers, widely taught in schools. When I decided to cook from Miyazawa’s work, I asked Tetsuro Hoshii, a Japanese acquaintance who lives in my Brooklyn neighborhood, to help me with the menu, and he revealed excitedly that he was named after a tribute to a Miyazawa novel—that’s how brightly the writer’s star continues to shine, almost a century after his death. Read More

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

Photo: Erica MacLean.

A police inspector wakes up in his beachfront apartment in Sicily and goes for a long swim, then to the office to confront his day of paperwork and complications: the corrupt officials, the jealous girlfriend, the frequent corpses. He has barely started before it’s time for lunch at the kind of restaurant he likes—one with no decor and the owner’s wife in the kitchen. The inspector is an aggressive, tightly wound man who does his job well. The pleasure that he takes in his food is an escape of a kind, an embrace of life by a person who regularly confronts death. The pleasure the reader takes in him is thanks to such signs of a deeper humanity, which add heft to the tales of murder in an exotic locale.

Many readers will already know that I am speaking of Inspector Montalbano, the creation of one of Italy’s best-loved contemporary authors, Andrea Camilleri (1925–2019). Many will also agree with me that at this point in the winter, the world of politics, and the ongoing COVID-19 nightmare, it’s time for some well-crafted, plot-driven escapism, and Camilleri’s books provide this. Conveniently, there are twenty-six of them, which means long stretches of joy. And that’s even before we start cooking from them. Read More

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for a virtual wine tasting on Friday, December 18, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. For more details, visit our events page, or scroll down to the bottom of the article.

Baldwin’s characters haunted French bistros, where oysters with mignonette are a staple. Photo: Erica MacLean.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” So read the inspirational quote in the front window of my Brooklyn gourmet market the day I shopped for a meal celebrating the work and life of James Baldwin (1924–1987). These words, coincidentally but not surprisingly, are from Baldwin, who is the man of the moment again thanks to the extraordinary relevance of his writing to today’s America.

Baldwin as a novelist is perhaps best known for Giovanni’s Room and Another Country, the former a gay man’s self-reckoning and the latter a brutal and tragic wrestling with being Black in America. He is known to a lesser extent for having lived most of his adult life abroad, first in Paris and then in the Provençal town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, though he always kept up his connection to the Harlem of his birth and was an active participant in the U.S. civil rights movement. Intense and multitalented, Baldwin was also a playwright—he loved actors and the theater—and a critic and essayist. His nonfiction collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time have predicted the future to an astonishing degree. Read More