October 9, 2024 At Work Loving the Limitations of the Novel: A Conversation between Sally Rooney and Merve Emre By Merve Emre Sally Rooney. Photograph by Kalpesh Lathigra. Each of Sally Rooney’s novels writes back to a novel that she admires: Conversations with Friends to Jane Austen’s Emma; Normal People to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda; Beautiful World, Where Are You to Henry James’s The Golden Bowl; and Intermezzo to James Joyce’s Ulysses. But while Rooney is delightfully conversant in the history of the novel, it is not, she says, her first thought when she starts to write. Her characters simply walk into her mind and stay there until she has puzzled out the precise nature of their relationships to one another. In Intermezzo, as in the novels that preceded it, her characters—Peter and Ivan Koubek, and the women they love—are often self-deceiving, misguided, and dishonest. No one’s intentions are pure. No one’s actions are consistent. Yet amid this tangle of secrets and lies there is, every so often, a glimmer of mutual understanding—a minor triumph in a world designed to erode all human exchanges and emotions. It is the burden and the pleasure of the novel, from Austen to Rooney, that it can animate these triumphs and the unbeautiful world from which they arise, so long as we keep turning the pages. This summer, Rooney and I met in Dublin, where we mostly talked about novels, old and new. We met again on September 25, for a public conversation onstage at the Southbank Centre in London. Before Rooney and I began to speak, she delivered a brief statement condemning the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the deaths of civilians in Israel, in Palestine, and in Lebanon. She urged the audience “to keep protesting, to keep speaking out, to keep demanding an end to this horrifying war.” Although our conversation in London was a continuation of our earlier exchange, her words were a reminder that any discussion of the novel, cannot be, and must not be, isolated from a consideration of longer and broader histories—of death and dispossession, beauty and belonging. INTERVIEWER In Dublin this summer, we talked about contemporary novelists who, quite self-consciously, are writing back toward the history of the novel. You said something that stuck with me—“Many writers are contemptuous of the novel as a bourgeois form, but I love the novel.” How does one sustain that love for the novel at a time of horrific violence? More specifically, what shape does that love take in Intermezzo? SALLY ROONEY I stand by that. I do love the novel, and I think a lot about its specific textual lineage. My great friend Tom Morris is a fantastic short-story writer, and he often says short-story writers get asked about form, but novelists just get asked what their novels are about. We tend to forget that the novel isn’t just a big, long piece of text. When we say it’s a bourgeois form, what we mean is that it emerged coincident with the emergence of industrial capitalism, and it documented a kind of psychology, a kind of individuality that that historical moment produced and made possible, which was, at the time, a bourgeois subjectivity. Now, in the twenty-first century, most novels have been written by people who had to work for a living, who didn’t just live off passive income, capital income, and most protagonists of novels similarly don’t live off the riches of their tenant farmers, as the protagonists of nineteenth-century novels often did. How can contemporary novelists work in conversation with that textual lineage, respond to it, subvert it, make it more capacious, or change the kinds of subjectivity it’s capable of documenting? Read More
October 8, 2024 First Person My Enemies, A–Z By Molly Young Ann-Margret in Tommy (1975). Screenshot by Molly Young. A list of all my enemies, in alphabetical order. ADMIN All the tasks I dread because I’m too weak or lazy to (a) find a way to not do them or (b) use my imagination to render them interesting. BELATEDLY LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE Studying a new language when you’re thirty-seven is an unbelievably inefficient use of time. It takes me weeks to grasp what a five-year-old child could pick up without even trying. This isn’t true of anything else I do in my spare time, like gardening or baking. I could crush a five-year-old’s learning curve in both of those things. When trying to speak a foreign language I am always catapulting myself out of a frying pan and into a fire. Last year, in Mexico, for instance, someone asked why I wasn’t speaking Spanish and I replied, “Because I’m afraid I will accidentally be rude”—except what I actually said was “Because I’m afraid I will accidentally become horny.” COFFEE HEART Some call it tachycardia. The New York Times named it “coffee heart” in a 1905 article with the fantastic title of “SMALL BOY HAS ‘COFFEE HEART'” and the subtitle “Child of Eight Is in City Hospital Slowly Regaining Health. HEART BEATS TOO FAST. Muscle Was Wearing itself Out — Drank a Dozen Cups a Day.” The article is about an eight-year-old named Johnnie Murphy, whose heart was apparently beating at “twice the normal rate” after its owner got into the habit of drinking nine to twelve cups per day. A suspiciously timed mention of the coffee substitute Postum at the end of the article raises the likelihood that the whole thing is sponcon, though there’s no way to be sure. Read More
October 4, 2024 On Poetry Bernadette Mayer on Her Influences By Bernadette Mayer Photograph of basalt by Marek Novotňák, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The first big influence on my writing was Nathaniel Hawthorne. My teacher in senior year of high school had written her doctoral thesis on The Marble Faun, if you can imagine that—and she was a nun! I went to one of the bookstores on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and bought a complete Riverside Editions set of Hawthorne’s writing. Later I added a volume, Septimius Felton; or, The Elixir of Life, two volumes of Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, and Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny. I had become addicted to his long, elegant prose sentences, which I studied and even diagrammed; a habit as old-fashioned as nuns. If you read the introductory essay to The Scarlet Letter, “The Customs House,” you will see what I mean. In it Hawthorne says that Hester Prynne became a social worker. As far as I know, Hawthorne did not write poetry, but he was an excellent candle-waster, in more ways than one. His writing made it clear that words have a magical quality to take you to another sphere but then you see that it’s only a book you are holding. I already had synesthesia in the form of seeing letters as different colors, so in many ways I was grateful to the author of The Scarlet Letter. Perhaps it was Hawthorne who inspired me to see prose as poetic. Read More
October 3, 2024 On Books The Dreams and Specters of Scholastique Mukasonga By Marta Figlerowicz Watchers by Bradford Johnson. From Painting Past Photographs, a portfolio that appeared in issue no. 168 of The Paris Review (Winter 2003). “Every night the same nightmare interrupts my sleep.” With this sentence Scholastique Mukasonga begins her debut Cockroaches, a memoir that came out in French in 2006. That year, Mukasonga was fifty. She had been living in Normandy since 1992, when she moved there hoping to find employment as a social worker. She left Rwanda after a childhood marked by rising violence, shortly before the Tutsi genocide wiped out nearly her entire family. The nightmare with which she opens Cockroaches involves running away from a violent mob, not daring to look back—“I know who’s chasing me … I know they have machetes. I’m not sure how, but even without looking back I know they have machetes …”—then waking up with a start right as she is about to fall. Especially in the cadences of its original French (“Toutes les nuits, mon sommeil est traversé du même cauchemar”), the book’s opening sentence jumps out as an allusion to the work of another famous, autobiographically minded frequenter of Normandy: Marcel Proust. Proust immortalized the Norman town of Cabourg under the fictional appellation of Balbec, and In Search of Lost Time opens with a temporally ambiguous admission of chronic sleeplessness that begins: “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” Proust’s narrator goes to sleep early yet sleeps fitfully. He dreams of beautiful women but also of chimerical specters from French history that presage the imminent demise of the many worlds to which he has belonged. These worlds include the airy sphere of French aristocratic milieus but also—so troublingly that Proust’s narrator barely admits it—the French Jewish community surrounded by an ever more virulent anti-Semitism. Read More
October 2, 2024 First Person The River Rukarara By Scholastique Mukasonga Map of Richard Kandt’s expedition to find the source of the Nile, from Caput Nili. Public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I was born on the banks of the Rukarara, but I have no memory of it. My memories come from my mother. The Rukarara flows in my imagination and my dreams. I was just a few months old when my family left its shores. My father’s job required our relocation to Magi, a village at the top of a tall, steep incline that overlooks another river, the Akanyaru. Beyond the Akanyaru is Burundi. For us to go down to the river was out of the question. Mama forbade her children to climb down the hill, even the intrepid boys, for fear of seeing us tumble to the bottom, where crocodiles and hippopotami crouched in the papyrus, waiting to devour us—not to mention, she added, the Burundian outlaws who lurked in the swamps along the banks, ready to spirit children away in their canoes and sell them to the Senegalese, who traded in human blood. For me, as for my brothers and sisters, the Akanyaru remained an inaccessible stream visible far below, like a long serpent amid the papyrus that barred our access to the unknown world stretching beyond the horizon—a world in which other rivers surely flowed, other rivers that I swore to myself I’d explore someday. Read More
October 1, 2024 Bookmarks An Excessively Noisy Gut, a Silver Snarling Trumpet, and a Big Bullshit Story By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often, we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We often share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some of the curious, striking, strange, and wonderful bits we found, from books that are coming out this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From Hélène Cixous’s Rêvoir (Seagull Books), translated from the French by Beverley Bie Brahic: I lie, I say I’m going to the hairdresser, secretly I’m off to see you, I am on my way right to the day when the Question peeps up, I no longer know which day that was. Dispatched on the instructions of Time, of Age, like a sprite ready to demand the Shadow’s identity card, proof of domicile, like the spirits of dates delegated to persecutions, of retirement dates, of warrants of life, of entry into silences, of fateful anniversaries Day broke, the tale was back on the road, I followed it Read More