April 28, 2025 On Books Man of the West: Akutagawa’s Tragic Hero By Geoffrey Mak A drawing of the Noppera-bō by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. On the night of July 24, 1927, Ryunosuke Akutagawa swallowed a lethal amount of Veronal, slipped onto a futon beside his wife, and fell asleep reading the Bible. The writer was thirty-five years old. Proclaiming himself an atheist yet preoccupied by Christianity, he had written, shortly before his suicide, “Man of the West,” a series of fifty aphoristic vignettes in which Jesus Christ is an autobiographical writer who has profound insight into all human beings but himself. Akutagawa was a prolific and celebrated writer and one of the first modern Japanese writers to gain popularity in the West. He was drawn to the son of God at a time when he suffered from visual and aural hallucinations, often accompanied by migraines. His wife sometimes found him crouched in his study in Tokyo, clinging to the walls, convinced they were falling in. Days before he died, Akutagawa wrote a series of letters to his family and friends. At a crowded news conference the day after Akutagawa’s suicide, his friend Masao Kume read aloud a letter addressed to him, “Note to an Old Friend,” commonly referred to as Akutagawa’s suicide note. The letter describes, in dark comedy, the practical banalities that undignify the grandiosity of arranging one’s own death: problems involving the rights to his work and his property value and whether he’d be able to keep his hand from shaking when aiming the pistol to his temple. It is also a portrait of the author’s interiority in his final moments. “No one has yet written candidly about the mental state of one who is to commit suicide,” the note opens. “In one of his short stories, [Henri de] Régnier depicts a man who commits suicide but does not himself understand for what reason,” he writes. “Those who commit suicide are for the most part as Régnier depicted, unaware of their real motivation.” Like the Christ-poet of his fiction, Akutagawa thought he could see into the souls of all men—except his own. Perhaps he couldn’t look; perhaps he did not want to, for where there is motivation, there is culpability: precisely what he wanted to abdicate in death. “In my case, I am driven by, at the very least, a vague sense of unease,” he writes instead. “I reside in a world of diseased nerves, as translucent as ice.” He mostly wanted rest, he wrote. In “Man of the West,” he writes, “We are but sojourners in this vast and confusing thing called life. Nothing gives us peace except sleep.” Read More
April 1, 2025 On Books William and Henry James By Peter Brooks William and Henry James. Marie Leon, bromide print, early 1900s, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. When Henry James decided to come to America in 1904 and 1905, his elder brother, William James, was not immediately pleased. William said that while his wife, Alice, would welcome his visit (she and Henry had a firm bond), he felt “more keenly a good many of the désagréments to which you inevitably will be subjected, and imagine the sort of physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you.” There follows an account of how traveling Americans ate their boiled eggs, presumably in hotels and on trains, “bro’t to them, broken by a negro, two in a cup, and eaten with butter.” As a source of physical loathing, this seems a bit excessive: one might linger over William’s attempts to keep Henry’s visit at bay. William’s letter seems more to the point when he notes: “The vocalization of our countrymen is really, and not conventionally, so ignobly awful … It is simply incredibly loathsome.” William’s discouragement provoked from Henry a declaration of his determination not to be deterred from coming. “You are very dissuasive,” he wrote to William. Henry, in a plaintive reply, noted that whereas William had traveled much, he had not been able to—he not been able to afford it nor to leave the demands of producing writing for money. It’s as if Henry must plead for his brother’s approval before he can travel back to his native land. And yet the pleading is accompanied by Henry’s self-assertion, he’s thought it through, analyzed the consequences. There is so often in their dialogues this deference of the younger brother to the elder, mixed with self-assertion, an insistence that the pathetic younger brother does know what he’s doing. I suppose we might, in contemporary psychobabble, call Henry’s relation to William passive-aggressive. William’s to Henry, though, has a tinge of sadism that we will see take more overt forms. His response to Henry’s desire to travel home is a strange mixture of welcome and repulse, a recognition of their sibling bonds along with the sense that they bind annoyingly, that he’d rather not have his brother around. Read More
March 3, 2025 On Books On Helen Garner’s Diaries By Leslie Jamison From Claudia Keep’s portfolio, Interiors, in issue no. 246 of The Paris Review. What secret desires and resentments are tucked inside the people we love? A little girl’s diary, with its tiny lock and key, testifies to the impulse to keep parts of ourselves hidden, but it’s impossible to look at a locked diary without imagining breaking it open. What to do then, with the published diary? With its lock removed, its interior offered to the world not only as exposure but as form: a genre beholden to the insight that rises from immediacy rather than retrospection. Many writers’ diaries have been published, but far fewer have been published in their lifetimes—and none carry the singular acuity, wit, and electric grace of Helen Garner’s. An Australian national treasure known for her novels of domestic nuance and entanglement (Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach) and journalism of grand sorrow and fierce controversy (The First Stone, This House of Grief), Garner has given us diaries that read like they are inventing a new language made from utterly familiar materials: fresh, raw, vibrating with life. “Like being given a painting you love gleaming with the still wet paint,” as the writer Helen Elliott put it. They are seductively loose and nimble, delivering shards of experience rather than an overdetermined narrative, pivoting from sharpened skewers of observation (“The writers’ festival. It’s like being barbecued”) to a clear-eyed claiming of pleasure (“tear meat off a chicken and stuff it into her mouth”), swerving from deep reckonings with romantic intimacy and dissolution to sudden, perfect aphorisms hidden like Easter eggs in the grass: “Sentimentality keeps looking over its shoulder to see how you’re taking it. Emotion doesn’t give a shit whether anyone’s looking or not.” Read More
February 7, 2025 On Books The Image of the Doll: Tove Ditlevsen’s Worn-Out Language By Olga Ravn Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. While I write this, my husband is cycling through the rain, taking our one-year-old son, who last night yet again wouldn’t sleep, to nursery school, and I am thinking of Tove Ditlevsen’s poems. I, too, want to write lists of my quirks, vices, unattractive traits, that which is me but is not me. Those I love but don’t love. What I ought to do and be, but neither do nor am. Reading these poems, which were written between 1939 and 1976, I realized that Tove Ditlevsen’s poetry is always about the discrepancy between who I ought to be and who I am (which leads to the inevitable awkward moment in so many of Ditlevsen’s poems). Take, for instance, “The Eternal Three,” where love is not the exalted union of two souls; rather, one is always in love with the wrong person. Or “Self-Portrait 1,” where Ditlevsen lists what she can and cannot do: “I cannot: cook / pull off a hat / entertain company … I can: be alone / do the dishes / read books.” Or “Warning”: where the heart “can only dream, not yearn / for what exists in light of day.” In these poems there is so often a longing for something that is not, something that was, something that could be. Read More
January 24, 2025 On Books Small-Town Sex: Colm Tóibín on John Broderick By Colm Tóibín Pilgrims kneeling before the shrine of our Lady of Lourdes, via Wikimedia Commons and the Wellcome Collection. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. It must have been clear, as John Broderick wrote his first novel, The Pilgrimage, that it would be banned by the Irish censorship board. (This was almost a badge of honor at the time for Irish writers. Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy was banned in 1958, Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls in 1960 and John McGahern’s The Dark in 1965, joining books by Balzac, Hemingway, H. G. Wells, and many others until the law was reformed in 1967.) His 1961 exploration of religiosity and sexuality is fearless and frank and sometimes comic. In the opening chapter, we hear the devout Glynn family—husband Michael, wife Julia, nephew Jim—conclude their plans for a pilgrimage to Lourdes. In the last paragraphs of the chapter, the visiting priest, chief promoter of the trip, “loosened the cord of his habit, and belched.” And then: “He belched again and then made the sign of the cross hazily in the air.” Soon afterward, Julia Glynn, in the guise of the faithless wife, goes to her bedroom “where her nephew was already waiting for her.” Read More
November 25, 2024 On Books Rabelaisian Enumerations: On Lists By Andrew Hui Illustration by Albert Robida, from chapter seven of Pantagruel (1886). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Few are the authors whose names rise to the status of adjectives: Shakespearean profundity, Dickensian squalor, Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Rabelaisian—satirical, excessive, corpulent—joins these ranks. The French author François Rabelais’s first novel, Pantagruel, is a heady celebration of abundance in which sexual organs and epic feasts sit alongside scatological humor. Beneath the absurdity, however, is a deep critique of Renaissance learning. The plot is simple: Pantagruel, a giant, grows up, gets an education in Paris, makes many friends, and ends up fighting to defeat the Dipsodes, a rival group of giants who have invaded Utopia. In an early chapter, the eponymous hero heads off to the University of Paris and stumbles upon the Library of Saint-Victor, which he finds “most magnificent, especially certain books he found in it.” What follows is a long list of rather odd titles, among them: • Bregeuta iuris (The codpiece of the law) • Malogranatum vitiorum (The pomegranate of vices) • La couillebarine des preux (The elephant balls of the worthies) • Decretum universitatis Parisiensis super gorgiasitate muliercularum ad placitum (Decree of the University of Paris concerning the gorgiasity of harlots) • La croquignolle des curés (The curates’ flick on the nose) • Des poys au lart cum commento (On peas with bacon, with commentary) • Le chiabrena des pucelles (The shitter-shatter of the maidens) • Le culpelé des vefves (The shaven tail of the widows) • Antipericatametanaparbeugedamphicribrationes merdicantium (Discussion of messers and vexers: Anti, Peri, Kata, Meta, Ana, Para, Moo, and Amphi) • La patenostre du singe (The monkey’s paternoster) • La bedondaine des presidens (The potbelly of presiding judges) • Le baisecul de chirurgie (The kiss-ass of surgery) Read More