August 1, 2022 First Person The Discovery of the World By Clarice Lispector Clarice Lispector at work. Courtesy of Paulo Gurgel Valente. In 1967, the Jornal do Brasil asked Clarice Lispector to write a Saturday newspaper column on any topic she wished. For nearly seven years she wrote weekly, covering a wide range of topics—humans and animals, bad dinner parties, the daily activities of her two sons—but the subject matter was often besides the point. These genre-defying missives are defined by a lyricism and strangeness that readers of her fiction will recognize, though they are a thing apart in their brevity and interiority. Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas will be published in English by New Directions this September. As her son Paulo Gurgel Valente has written, “Enjoy the columns, I know of nothing quite like them.” Today, the Review is publishing a selection of these crônicas. July 6, 1968 The Discovery of the World What I want to tell you is as delicate as life itself. And I want to use the delicacy that exists inside me along with the peasant coarseness that is my saving grace. As a child and, later, as an adolescent, I was precocious in many things. In sensing an atmosphere, for example, in picking up on someone else’s personal atmosphere. On the other hand, far from being precocious, I was incredibly backward as regards other important things. Indeed, I continue to be backward in many areas. And there’s nothing I can do about it: it seems there is a childish side of me that will never grow up. Read More
July 12, 2022 First Person Bona Nit, Estimat (An Ordinary Night) By Robert Glück Illustration by Na Kim. I can’t fall asleep till my skin—sweaty, sticky, sizzling with bacteria, random fungal itches, swellings, vague histamine eruptions—has been unified by a bath or shower. I wear a white cotton T-shirt softened by age to tame this commotion and to guard my insanely sensitive nipples against the onslaught of, say, the blanket’s edge. Mr. X. and I read for a while. I’m reading Derek McCormack’s wondrous Castle Faggot, but after a few paragraphs the words stop making sense. I whisper, “Bona nit, estimat.” Xavi whispers, “Bona nit, malparits,” and we kiss. Why do we whisper? Sometimes we whisper “I love you.” I roll onto my right side, and incredibly Xavi slides closer and drapes an arm over me. Ceding bed territory sets off a small alarm. “Sweet dreams, honey,” he might add, amused to be using the English endearment. Thirty seconds later he snores softly in my ear and a toenail digs into my calf. I am on the edge, he gathers the quilt in such a way that I am half-exposed and if I want more space or more covers there will be a struggle. I find this adorable. Everything explains why we should be together in this bed. I often think about the dead before sleep—saying goodnight to them? Not think about—more like have the feeling of them. Are they my default setting? Is default consciousness what happens before sleep? My mother and I disliked talking on the phone so we spent most of our weekly calls saying goodbye, but now I mentally pick up the phone to say hello, a gesture. I think of Kathy Acker with a pang of love, a welter of unfinished business. When Xavi holds me, he contains these feelings. Tonight it’s simple—I wish Kathy were alive to be held like this. Read More
June 29, 2022 First Person Scenes from an Open Marriage By Jean Garnett Illustration by Na Kim. About six months after our daughter was born, my husband calmly set the idea on the table, like a decorative gun. I said I’d think about it. Read More
June 16, 2022 First Person Corpsing: On Sex, Death, and Inappropriate Laughter By Nuar Alsadir Illustration by Na Kim. We were sitting at a long table, images and diagrams projected onto the wall behind us, while the audience faced us in silence. I was part of a panel on hoarding, along with another psychoanalyst and a memoirist. As I gave my presentation, audience members went about their business as though they were invisible, like people in cars sometimes do. One person directly in front of me scrolled and typed on her iPhone. Another stood up, walked to the back of the room to get a drink, then returned to his seat and rummaged through his bag. I became aware of my attempt to block out these actions, to pretend not to see what I was seeing. At one point, I must have turned my head in the direction of my lapel mic because suddenly the volume shot up. I was explaining the concept of horror vacui, or the fear of emptiness, pointing to the part it played in the aesthetics of the Victorian era, causing every surface to be covered with tchotchkes, and in sex, leading some men to dread a sense of post-coital emptiness so much that they stave off—and this is when it happened—ejacuLATION. Read More
June 7, 2022 First Person New Eyes By Charlie Lee Francisco de Zurbarán, Saint Lucy, 1625–1630; Francesco del Cossa, Saint Lucy, 1473. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Maybe you know this, if you’re Catholic or hang around in churches: in paintings of Saint Lucy, she’s usually holding a pair of eyes. In most cases they’re on a plate, like some sort of local delicacy she’s about to serve up to a tourist. These are her old eyes, the ones she plucked out when a man wanted to marry her, because she wanted to marry only God. She looks down at them with her new eyes, the ones God gave her to say thanks. The version I like best is Francesco del Cossa’s, from 1473. In it, Lucy’s eyes hang drooping from a delicate stem, a horrible blooming flower. She pinches them gingerly, pinkie out like the queen. To me they look like the corsage I vaguely remember wearing at prom; later, who knows, she might put them in the man’s lapel, a consolation prize. I have been drawn to this painting for nearly a decade, though my feelings toward it, toward Lucy and her two sets of eyes, have changed over the years. The first feeling was a slightly delusional but sharp sense of envy. I was seventeen or eighteen, seeing the painting for the first time in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and for as long as I could remember I’d wanted what Lucy had: to pluck out my eyes and get new ones. I believe this is the sort of fantasy often held by people with certain ailments, a childish notion that makes no sense but is still somehow grippingly tantalizing—like how the chronically congested dream of one triumphant nose-blow that clears them out for good, or those with bad backs imagine some kindly giant pulling them apart until every vertebrae gives a magical crack and their pain is banished at last. Read More
May 26, 2022 First Person The Family Is Finished: On Memory, Betrayal, and Home Decor By Menachem Kaiser The author’s parents at his grandmother’s home, celebrating their engagement. (All photographs and videos courtesy of Menachem Kaiser.) A couple of years ago, I sent my parents a chapter from the manuscript of a memoir I’d written. I couldn’t not send it, though I waited—partly out of cowardice and partly to prevent them from claiming a bigger editorial role than I could tolerate—until the copyediting stage, when it was too late to make substantive changes. While working on the book I’d been able to suppress any anxiety over what my family might think or feel about it, but once it was finished I remembered (you really do forget) that those it describes are not merely characters in a story but people in my life. And then, suddenly, everything I’d written about them was available for preorder. Read More