November 18, 2013 Arts & Culture Recapping Dante: Canto 7, or Hell by the Numbers By Alexander Aciman Gustave Doré, “Virgil rebukes Plutus at the entrance to the fourth circle,” 1885. This fall, we’re recapping the Inferno. Read along! Canto 7 opens with Plutus, the god of wealth, babbling unintelligibly at Dante and Virgil. Pape Satàn, pape Satàn, aleppe!, he shouts, a phrase that has left readers and scholars baffled ever since it was written. Many offer their own interpretations, but there is never enough evidence for any critic to settle definitively on a single meaning. Virgil, however, responds to Plutus as though the cry is somehow intelligible to him; Plutus doesn’t want to let the pair pass because he has been tasked with keeping the living out. Again, Virgil works some Roman magic and is able to pass by. This canto is one of the first instances in which the sinner’s condition in the afterlife begins to correspond almost unambiguously to the sin committed. Here, Dante and Virgil come across avarice and prodigality. The Hollanders note that the reason the avaricious are shown with their hands closed is as a reminder of their greed. The prodigal have their hair cropped to show inattention to property. Virgil gives Dante a discourse on fortune, and, in brief, explains to Dante that fortune is impartial, and that the unlucky are quick to revile fortune, which Virgil suggests is a misguided aggression since in fact fortune couldn’t care less what people have to say. The two carry on and stop at the Styx. But let’s see what happens of we break this canto down. Read More
November 18, 2013 In Memoriam Doris Lessing, 1919–2013 By Sadie Stein Photo: Warner. INTERVIEWER Do you have any things you would have done differently, or any advice to give? LESSING Advice I don’t go in for. The thing is, you do not believe I know everything in this field is a cliché, everything’s already been said, but you just do not believe that you’re going to be old. People don’t realize how quickly they’re going to be old, either. Time goes very fast. —Doris Lessing, the Art of Fiction No. 102
November 18, 2013 On the Shelf RIP Doris Lessing, and Other News By Sadie Stein Doris Lessing has died at ninety-four. “The adamant child became the adamant adult. She truly had ice in her veins. She believed that her insight and her talent were unique, and she may well have been right.” Justin Cartwright pays tribute. Library copies of Fifty Shades of Grey have been found to carry traces of herpes and cocaine. How Philip Roth gets geriatric sex wrong.
November 15, 2013 In Memoriam William Weaver, 1923–2013 By Sadie Stein “Some of the first books I read or that my father read to me were translations, although I didn’t know they were translations because in those days the translator often wouldn’t even have his name on the book. I remember a French book, Sans famille, called in English Nobody’s Boy, which my father read to me when I was four or five. It was about a little orphan boy who runs away from the orphanage and goes off with an Italian organ-grinder who has a pet monkey and a lot of stray dogs, all of them with names. Since I came from a large family with all these older brothers and sisters, the dream of my life was to be an orphan, so I thought, Oh, this lucky kid. He’s an orphan, and he gets to wander the roads with all these animals and this nice Italian. I thought it a great happy book, but you were supposed to be dissolved in tears from beginning to end. My father understood perfectly.” —William Weaver, the Art of Translation No. 3
November 15, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Great Teachers, Great Books, Giant Wigs By The Paris Review 1778 fashion plate of French court dress with wide panniers and artificially enhanced “big hair.” Plate 43 in Galerie des Modes for 1778. Some years ago, when I was trying to learn Spanish, I bought Borges’s lectures on English literature. As it turned out, these were largely concerned with Old English, so actual Spanish was required to read them and I had to throw in the towel. Now, New Directions has translated the talks as Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature. Recorded in 1966 at the University of Buenos Aires, this introductory class oozes charm. Quoting from memory, because he’d already lost his sight, and relying on his own translations, Borges ranges from Caedmon’s Hymn to the Victorians. It’s been a long time since I went back to the poems of Rossetti—and longer since I had any urge to reread Beowulf—but Borges is no ordinary teacher, and his old-fashioned taste, for Germanic heroes and doomed love and G. K. Chesterton, is sincere, untroubled, and contagious. —Lorin Stein It suddenly feels like winter here in New York: we saw the first snowflakes of the season on Tuesday morning. I don’t have a fireplace, but it’s hard to resist the urge to curl up by the heating pipe with a fat, favorite classic. Enter the new Penguin Clothbound Classics edition of Vanity Fair, beautifully rendered in pale blue, and scattered with stylized gems in honor of the ambitious Becky Thatcher. I am generally fairly indifferent to what my books look like, but I love this series, which manages to feel both modern and heirloom. As to the novel, it’s just the best; you don’t need to hear that from me. From the opening lines of Thackeray’s preface, “Before the Curtain,” you know you’re in for a treat, whether reading it for the first time or the twentieth. The author subtitled Vanity Fair “A Novel without a Hero,” but though it’s peopled with some of literature’s most memorable characters, it’s true that the real star is a sweeping story that manages to be both tragic and fun. —Sadie O. Stein On Saturday afternoon, I took the Southeast line from Grand Central Station to Mount Kisco and read a fitting book: the 116-page Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. A mélange of sharp realism and muted surrealism, this novella was first published in the 2002 summer issue of The Paris Review; it was released in book form to great acclaim in 2011. Johnson takes us from the turn of the twentieth century through the late 1960s; Robert Grainer is the stoic loner who guides us through both the Idaho Panhandle and industrialization. “Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by.” —Caitlin Youngquist Among the many wondrous artifacts left by the late poet John Hollander is Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse, a 2001 volume of slim dimension and great poetic wisdom that has traveled with me for the past few days. I have been thinking about poetry’s relation to music, and early on Hollander writes, “It should be remembered that all poetry was originally oral. It was sung or chanted … poetic form as we know it is an abstraction from, or residue of, musical form, from which it became divorced when writing replaced memory as a way of preserving poetic utterance.” The book does not linger in sermon though, hastily moving into witty explorations of wide-ranging forms, schemes, and meters. —Adam Winters The eighteenth-century French court’s rococo hairstyles—if such a word can even be applied to the elaborate confections—are the stuff of legend. Will Bashor’s Marie Antoinette’s Head: The Royal Hairdresser, the Queen, and the Revolution certainly gives you plenty of bang for your buck in that regard: thirty-pound wigs, mouse-infested coiffures, and the occasional miniature naval battle all make appearances. But it is also a scholarly history not merely of the vagaries and politics of Versailles court fashion, but the rise and fall of Léonard Autié, a man of modest background who rose to become hairdresser to the queen, and whose fortunes were inexplicably tied to that of the doomed monarchy. —S.O.S.
November 15, 2013 Books The Known Unknown: On Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky By Adam Thirlwell Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky on holiday in Italy in 1912. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky was born in Kiev to a Polish-speaking family on February 11, 1887. At university, he studied law. In 1912, age twenty-five, he traveled through Europe, visiting Paris, Heidelberg, and Milan—for the young Krzhizhanovsky was the pure apprentice intellectual. After the First World War, and the 1917 Russian Revolution, he returned to Kiev, where he taught at the Musical Institute and the Theatrical Conservatory. In 1922, age thirty-five, he left Kiev for Moscow, where he lived for the rest of his life. In Moscow, Krzhizhanovsky wrote articles and gave lectures, in particular at Alexander Tairov’s Drama Studio. He also worked as a consultant to Tairov’s Chamber Theater. Meanwhile, he wrote novellas and stories, which were never published—either due to economic problems (bankrupt publishers) or political problems (Soviet censors). Twenty years passed in this way until, in 1941, with Krzhizhanovsky now fifty-four, a collection of stories was finally scheduled for publication—but then the Second World War intervened, preventing even that collection from appearing. In May 1950 he suffered a stroke and lost the use of speech. He died at the end of the year. (His works—almost all of them unpublished—were stored by his lifelong companion, Anna Bovshek, in her apartment: in her clothes chest, under some brocade.) Almost no one knew that Krzhizhanovsky was writing fiction, since the state never allowed its publication. They knew him in other guises—as a lecturer on theater, or essayist, or occasional playwright. In 1939, Krzhizhanovsky, despite his restricted publication history, was nevertheless elected to the Writers’ Union—which meant that posthumously he was eligible for the process of “immortalization.” In 1953, Stalin died, and three years later Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” to the Twentieth Party Congress instituted a revisionist anti-Stalinist thaw. In 1957—the same year as Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago—a commission was set up to examine Krzhizhanovsky’s literary legacy. It lasted two years and was then disbanded, having drafted a publishing plan that was never implemented. Then, in 1976, Vadim Perelmuter, a poet, literary historian, and essayist, discovered Krzhizhanovsky’s archive. He had to wait until 1989 and the full thaw of perestroika before he could publish one of Krzhizhanovsky’s stories. Between 2001 and 2008, Perelmuter finally edited a handsome five-volume edition of Krzhizhanovsky’s works. Read More