May 8, 2012 In Memoriam R.I.P. Maurice Sendak By Sadie Stein Photo by John Dugdale.It is with great sadness that we note the death, at eighty-three, of legendary writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak. In books like Where the Wild Things Are, Outside Over There, The Nutshell Library, The Sign on Rosie’s Door and many more, Sendak defined childhood for many of us. Last September, we ran this interview with Mr. Sendak; his inimitable wit, wisdom, and legendary cantankerousness came through loud and clear.
April 25, 2012 In Memoriam A Singular Southern Gentleman Goes Out “Biting” By Gary Lippman Whenever I rang the phone at a certain house in the kudzu-covered college town of Gainesville, Florida, I knew what I was likely to hear: not a polite “hello” or “good afternoon,” but a gruff-voiced, rural Georgia-accented statement of self: “Harry Crews.” And whenever I visited my friend Harry, the notorious American novelist and essayist who died (“bit the big bagel,” he’d say) in March at the age of seventy-six, I knew what I’d likely find: a great boulder of a man in a bathrobe sunk into a brown recliner chair in a living room filled with books, photographs, and, on one wall, the framed quilted image of a typewriter. “Come on in, blood, grab a seat, how ya been?” Harry would call to me as I stepped inside. He took pride in rarely locking his home’s front door, just as he prided himself on keeping his number listed in the Gainesville white pages. “All’s good,” I’d say, dropping into a chair that faced his. “New York’s fine, how you been?” “Well, I’m hurting.” Read More
March 29, 2012 In Memoriam Adrienne Rich By Robyn Creswell Photo by Robert Giard. Adrienne Rich’s first poem in The Paris Review was “The Snow Queen,” which appeared in the magazine’s second issue (Summer 1953). Her last, “Itinerary,” was published this spring in our two-hundredth. Rich was twenty-three when she wrote “The Snow Queen,” but she had already been discovered. Her first book, A Change of World, was chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1951. Rich’s early work is formally impeccable, its ideas and idioms rooted in the poetry of Yeats and Stevens (“The Snow Queen” can be read as a variation on Stevens’s “The Snow Man”). But Rich quickly moved beyond her early style. She found its virtuosity too prim, too imitative—“exercises in style,” as she once put it. In her early thirties, she was already looking back at her accomplishments and measuring their limitations. “Necessities of Life,” the title poem of her 1966 collection, was first published in The Paris Review as “Thirty-Three” (Winter-Spring, 1964), which was Rich’s age when she wrote it. It is a poem of retrospection and prophecy. It begins, Piece by piece I seemto re-enter the world: I first began a small, fixed dot, still seethat old myself, a dark blue thumbtack pushed into the scene,a hard little head protruding from the pointillist’s buzz and bloom.after a time the dot begins to ooze. Certain heatsmelt it. “The pointillist’s buzz and bloom” is still Stevensian, but the oozing and heat—here signaling the onset of adolescence—are heralds of Rich’s mature poetry. Her great work of the sixties and seventies, the period in which she came out as a lesbian and a radical feminist, are poems of Eros. Not merely eroticism, though there is plenty of that—and it is important—but a poetry of passionate relation and reinvention. It is also a poetry that values plainspokenness over rhetorical expertise. “Now and again to name / over the bare necessities,” as she instructs herself in “Necessities of Life.” Read More
February 6, 2012 In Memoriam Wisława Szymborska By Lorin Stein Last week Wisława Szymborska died in Kraków at the age of eighty-eight. Szymborska received the Nobel Prize in 1996 and was Poland’s best-loved living poet. Her poem “Negative” appeared in issue 144 of The Paris Review, translated by Joanna Trzeciak: In the dun-colored sky A cloud even more dun-colored With the black outline of the sun. To the left, that is, to the right A white cherry branch with black flowers. On your dark face, light shadows. You have sat down at a small table And laid your grayed hands on it. You give the impression of a ghost Who attempts to summon the living. (Because I’m still counted among them, I should appear and knock: Good night, that is, good morning, Farewell, that is, hello. Not being stingy with questions to any answer If they concern life, That is, the storm before the calm.)
December 19, 2011 In Memoriam Daniel Sada By Francisco Goldman Roberto Bolaño considered Daniel Sada to be without rival among Mexican writers of their generation. Both were born in 1953. Bolaño spent his adolescence in Mexico, and even though some of his greatest novels and stories have Mexican settings, he never set foot there again after moving to Spain in his early twenties. I imagine that Bolaño must have relied, at least to some extent, on Sada’s novels—Sada’s perfect ear and exuberant re-creation of Mexican voices, the voices of the Mexican desert north especially—while writing his own Mexican masterpieces. Sada’s works were a polyphonic parade of voices, a Mexican cacophony: shouts, laughter, violent, lewd curses, sweet whispers, song. “It was a place rarely visited, but attractive, four kilometers to the south of Sombrerete. There was a barranca whose abyss made you want to stop and contemplate it, and a cascade of crystalline water, thin and capricious.” So opens, modestly enough, Sada’s novel A la vista, published months before his death this year, on November 18. In the next sentence, Sada strikes a more characteristic note: “También había un ornato de árobles por doquier”—that ornato is a peculiar and Sada-esque word, impossible to translate, the whole phrase delicious to pronounce, though all it means, really, is that there were also a lot of trees around, and “a temperate year-round climate.” “The great thing about that place,” Sada goes on to write, “was that it was limited to the efficacy of words, as no photograph existed to give a more precise notion of the supposed marvel.” The description, the reader realizes by the end of the paragraph, is a set-up for a real estate scam. (As it turns out, there is no cascade, and no trees, only that abyss, and the climate.) Bolaño compared Sada’s baroque writing style to Lezama Lima’s, by way of making the point that because the Cuban Lezama’s baroque reflected the crowded natural effulgence of the tropics, Sada’s baroque is a more impressive verbal invention, a baroque of the desert. Read More
December 14, 2011 In Memoriam George Whitman, 1913–2011 By The Paris Review George Whitman. It is with sadness that we mark the passing of Shakespeare & Co. proprietor George Whitman, a good friend to this magazine and to literature generally. Whitman played host to literary giants and hundreds of itinerant travelers. A living legend and a certified character, he for decades managed to balance the demands of an artistic institution and a popular tourist attraction. He’ll be missed and remembered—as he is in this bittersweet reminiscence by Alexander Nazaryan.