February 5, 2024 On Nature Essay on the Sky By Vincent Katz Praia Brava, 2015. Photograph by Isaac Katz. Billows and soft extensions, the cream lapping through there, between solid graymass and float down to sea, and above that gray, more light, and off to the left, white light, then ruffles, and above, more and more gray. In another direction, blue with acrobatic twists, spreadings. Is that the aither high above that the Greeks thought divine? Mountains uplift, spray down to water, cream’s reddening, blocks it off to the right. Bastions, mirth, huge extensions, structures of no hand, silver too is penetrant. [Maricao, Puerto Rico, September 4, 2004] At this time of day (the day has experienced enough and gone through transformations, travels even), a glow from the sky embraces the neighborhood, and as it goes from neighborhood to neighborhood, takes in the whole city in its look, and that glow is comforting. One realizes it is raining lightly, and the rain too takes part in the glow that several angled clouds have hooked into lower down. [São Paulo, Brazil, February 24, 2005] All day not really a cloud in sight—a still blue sky one could see and not feel threatened by. The day would not go very far, not splinter into challenges and excitement. Then, suddenly, they move in and begin to change the sky’s outlook. One large, potato-shaped cloud hovered over the tree line. Much later, at dusk, an out-of-focus cloud echoed the land’s bared curve. [Maricao, Puerto Rico, September 2, 2006] A bit of sunlight touched the sky’s lining, and there was sun setting in the sky, but mainly it was a sky full of clouds. Their textures could be made out overhead and extending far into the distance, over the water and other islands’ darkening outlines. Much farther out, the sky lightened. Out there, white clouds instead of gray, and the mind’s imagination of a clearing for travelers by boat. The full moon half appeared through banks, a lemon sherbet over mountains along ocean edge. Then it disappeared from view. Later, while the moon itself remained hidden, its light could be seen projecting high into the sky against cloud shapes, stage-lighting a place known as heaven. [Praia Brava, Ubatuba, Brazil, April 2, 2007] Read More
February 2, 2024 The Review’s Review The Frenchwoman from Indianapolis By Rosa Lyster Janet Flanner, ca. 1925. Berenice Abbott, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Here is Norman Mailer in his fine black boots, high-cut and shiny and very snug on the ankle, like something you might pick out if you were the prop master for an expensive production of Richard III. Sweating a bit under the TV lights, he seems to be doing an imitation of a scowl, as if to gesture toward his reputation as a guy who goes around scowling. He sits angled toward the host, Dick Cavett, who bends slightly away from him, as do the other two guests. One of them is Gore Vidal. Like Mailer, Vidal is doing an impersonation of himself. He strikes various languorous attitudes as the camera begins to roll, reclining deeper into his chair as Mailer leans forward, toying idly with his glasses and smiling as Mailer yaps and bares his teeth. A cat and a dog. Compared to these two, both positively radiant with the excitement of showing off, the third guest seems to have been invited on by mistake. She is, basically, an old lady. She wears white gloves and a neat skirt suit, with a scarf knotted at her neck. She doesn’t say much at first, waiting patiently as, according to the description on the YouTube clip, “the infamous feud between novelist Norman Mailer and writer Gore Vidal comes to a head in a battle of wit, sarcasm, and condescension with the audience and Janet Flanner”—that’s her—“(reluctantly) in the front row.” Read More
February 1, 2024 Paragraphs Too Enjoyable to Be Literature By Helen Garner Photograph by Jane Breakell. I knew nothing about F. Scott Fitzgerald when I stumbled on Tender Is the Night in 1962. I didn’t know he’d struggled with the book for almost nine years, and that during his lifetime it never settled into a finished version. I was a naive and ignorant twenty-year-old, studying English and French literature at the University of Melbourne, an unawakened literary snob who had hardly read anything twentieth-century American in her life, and was weighed down by the mighty eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and European novels and poetry that we were to study for final examinations. I pulled the Fitzgerald off a shelf in the bookshop where I had a summer job. It was so delicious and joyful to read, I could canter through it with such bright and sudden pleasure, that it felt almost criminal. Secretly I knew it was way too enjoyable to be literature. Read More
January 30, 2024 Writers' Houses At the Britney Spears House Museum By Emmeline Clein Photograph by Emmeline Clein. Besides Britney, bottled water is Kentwood’s biggest export. Across most of Louisiana, this town is more famous for the water than the woman. “Why are you going to the water bottle town?” the man sitting next to me at the bar asks. I’m in New Orleans, on Carondelet Street. I’m eating at an oyster counter near my grandfather’s former office. Not his favorite, the Black Pearl, where he used to eat a dozen daily on his lunch breaks, grading each one on a scale of 1–10 in his notebook. He died at the start of spring this year, smack in the middle of Carnival, the ambulance stuck in parade traffic for an hour. When I tell the man next to me I’m going to Britney Spears’s hometown to see her house, he says he saw her perform before she became Britney Spears, when she was still Britney from Kentwood, at a concert called Louisiana Jukebox. She was there with her mother, answering audience questions after the show. A childhood friend of my mother’s was there, too, and had incidentally emailed me about it the night before. It was disturbing, she remembered; Britney was so young, but her “song was so sexual, and in person, she looked like the girl next door who every man wants to devirginize.” The next morning, the drive through St. John the Baptist Parish is mostly swamp. Highways on thick stilts through the cypress glens; the long, low bridge over Lake Pontchartrain. Two men fishing, smoking, laughing. Once you cross into Tangipahoa Parish, you’re mostly on dry land, which means Bible billboards and fast-food spots. Read More
January 29, 2024 Syllabi Recommended Readings for Students By Yu Hua Yu Hua in Paris, 2004. Courtesy of Yu Hua. The new Winter issue of The Paris Review, no. 246, includes an Art of Fiction interview with the Chinese writer Yu Hua, the author of novels such as To Live, Brothers, and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant. We asked Yu to contribute a syllabus to our ongoing series, and he obliged with a list of recommendations that he’s provided to his students—but, as he says in his interview, remember not to be narrowly focused on reading lists: “Literature is not the only thing in my life. I encourage my students to think this way, too. Recently, I told one of them, ‘Let’s meet this afternoon to talk about the story you wrote,’ and he said, ‘Professor, I’m going clubbing tonight.’ I said, ‘All right, have fun.’ ” I am a professor of creative writing at Beijing Normal University, and with few exceptions, most of my students have no experience writing before enrolling in my course. We begin with short stories before transitioning to novellas, a literary form uniquely popular in China—works of fiction between thirty thousand and a hundred thousand Chinese characters. Julio Cortázar’s “The Southern Thruway” and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach are both excellent examples. When recommending literary works to my students, I base my suggestions on two principles. The first is to avoid works that are already extremely well-known in China, which most of my students will have read during senior middle school or high school. (The Old Man and the Sea, which I ask them to reread, is an exception to that rule.) The second principle is to tailor my lists to students’ individual writing goals. I have one student whose mind is filled with strange and unusual thoughts; I advised her to read “The Southern Thruway” three times and then search for a scene from everyday life to use as a starting point from which her own narrative could gradually expand, so that the magnification of the narrative would be dependent upon real-life details, which can allow the writer to reveal the vastness and complexity of human nature. I also asked her to read Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” three times, as an example of how the literature of the absurd can actually arrive at the real more quickly. In other words, our starting point is “the real” and that is where we ultimately return—even if “the real” to which we return has become completely unrecognizable. Read More
January 26, 2024 The Review’s Review Qishu: Han Song’s Hospital Nightmares By Michael Berry Digital artwork of a science-fictional surgery room by alan9187, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Hospitals play a big role in Yu Hua’s life and fiction—his parents were both doctors, he grew up in and around hospitals as a child, his first job was that of a dentist, and hospitals would later frequently appear in his work as sites of violence and trauma. Yu Hua first made a name for himself in the eighties with a series of dark, violent, experimental short stories, but over the course of his career, his writing became more conventional, earning him a broad readership and fame in the process. But what if Yu Hua had gone the other direction? What if he had gone darker, stranger, more experimental? If one is looking for someone to inherit the lineage of Yu Hua’s early experimentalism today, I would point them to Han Song’s Hospital trilogy, which not only shares a fascination with the medical setting but also presents an unflinching look at the violence lurking just under the surface of the everyday. It is no coincidence then that, during a recent interview I conducted with Han Song when he was speaking of his formative influences, he told me: “I was particularly fascinated by Yu Hua at that time and even imitated him.” Read More