November 13, 2012 Arts & Culture In Which Philip Roth Announces His Retirement (in English) By Nelly Kaprielian Last month our friends at the French cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles reported that Philip Roth has called it a day, and the world took notice. Here is the full interview with Nelly Kaprielian, in English. —Lorin Stein Out of all your novels, Nemesis seems to be the one where you lay out most clearly your own vision of existence. That’s true. I think everything in life is a matter of luck. I don’t believe in psychoanalysis, or in a subconscious that guides our choices. All we have is the good luck or the bad luck to meet certain people who will be either good or bad for us. My first wife, for example, turned out to be a criminal—she was always stealing, lying, and so forth—and it’s not as if I chose her for that reason. I hate criminals. But there you are, I had the bad luck to marry a bad person. Psychoanalysts will tell you that I chose her unconsciously—I don’t believe in that, though in a certain way this isn’t far from my own view, which is that, in the face of life, we are innocents. There is a certain innocence in each of us in the way we deal with our lives. Nemesis belongs to a group of four novels entitled “Nemeses” (including Everyman, Indignation, and The Humbling). How are they connected? Each one deals with the subject of death from a different point of view. In each of these books, the protagonist has to face his “nemesis,” a word one hears a lot in the United States, and which could be defined as doom, or misfortune, a force that he can’t overcome and that chooses him as its victim. Read More
November 13, 2012 On the Shelf A Man Finds Twenty Grand in a Book, and Other News By Sadie Stein A Massachusetts Good Samaritan found twenty thousand dollars hidden in the pages of a used book and is now trying to find the rightful owner. The real question: Why would an artist reinterpret Smiths titles as the covers of Penguin paperbacks? Reactions from around the world to Philip Roth’s retirement. A list of other notable literary retirements. And speaking of retirements, Salman Rushdie and John le Carré have ended their long-running feud.
November 12, 2012 Weird Book Room Teach Your Wife to Be a Widow By Sadie Stein Selected from the AbeBooks’ Weird Book Room.
November 12, 2012 The Poem Stuck in My Head Dylan Thomas’s “I Have Longed to Move Away” By Alexandra Pechman Liars and lovers often find themselves to be bedfellows. It seems to follow that government officials will forever have to publicly disentangle the lies they tell about their lovers. But a scandal, after all, means evidence or admission, the end of the lie. Only the person who kept it secret so long knows the real terror of the birth and life of the lie, and perhaps it is poetry, rather than the news cycle, that is sensitive enough to trace a portrait of such a slippery subject. After hearing about the resignation of David Petraeus on Friday, I immediately turned to the Dylan Thomas poem “I Have Longed to Move Away.” I first read it, by chance, when I was harboring a huge lie myself, one that had seemed to follow me into the pages of an innocuous-looking poetry book on a friend’s shelf, opened at random. From the first line, the poem not only captures the feeling one gets from living the worst lies; it seduces liars themselves. Like the speaker, I longed in that moment to move away to some foreign place, at least on the page, but once I’d begun the journey, I was led back where I’d come from: there was my lie, staring me down again in the next line. The steady meter interrupts on the unexpected and sinister “hissing,” then come the strong two beats of that unavoidable “spent lie” which is equated to a “continual cry.” It is not just a lie; it has been assigned a heavy weight and value by meter, rhyme, and meaning. Read More
November 12, 2012 In Memoriam T. S. Eliot’s Widow Dies at Eighty-Six By Sadie Stein My father is inordinately fond of pointing out our place in the course of history. “Just think about it!” he would say intensely almost every morning of my childhood, as he scanned the obit pages over breakfast. “This man was born during the Taft presidency! Twice his lifetime was the Pierce presidency! It’s amazing! It’s so recent!” I was reminded of this when I read the news that T. S. Eliot’s widow had died, this Friday, at eighty-six. Of course, it’s not as though Valerie Eliot were some sort of secret: Eliot’s executor, she guarded her husband’s legacy since his death, periodically editing and releasing his work, fiercely guarding his privacy, allowing for the making of Cats, and using the money from that success to start a charitable trust. And considering the difference in their ages—Eliot was thirty-eight years older than his second wife, whom he married in 1957—her relative youth is no shocker either. But hers was, for the most part, a quiet and unobtrusive stewardship (she avoided interviews), and those are themselves rare things these days. She said that their relationship was a quiet one, involving much Scrabble-playing and cheese-eating. As she said in a rare interview, “He obviously needed a happy marriage. He wouldn’t die until he’d had it.”
November 12, 2012 At Work Nimble Surrealism: Talking with Gabrielle Bell By Tobias Carroll Whether delving into memorable personal stories or exemplifying a sort of nimble surrealism, Gabrielle Bell’s comics are harder to classify than one might think. Reading her work chronologically, one can find her range expanding from sharp day-to-day observations to forays into the surreal and magic realist. The title story of the collection Cecil and Jordan in New York follows a young woman who moves to the city and searches for an apartment and a purpose. It’s fairly kitchen sink in its realism, right up until the point where the protagonist matter-of-factly decides to become a chair. It’s a dose of deadpan absurdism that opens up the storytelling possibilities, and keeps the reader on their toes. The Voyeurs is Bell’s latest book, covering several years in her life, and taking her from promoting a film in Tokyo to finding a space for yoga in her Brooklyn apartment to San Diego for Comic-Con. Its introduction comes courtesy of Aaron Cometbus, whose long-running zine suggests certain parallels to Bell’s deftly autobiographical work. We met at a bar near Bell’s apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn—a neighborhood that has provided the setting for much of her work. Lucky begins as a kind of slice-of-life documentation of your life. By the end of the first volume, though, it’s become less overtly realistic and more expressionistic. When did you make that leap? It was towards the end of writing Lucky, when I got to the point about Francophilia, when I talked about talking with Gerard Depardieu. That must have been the first time that I did that. Or maybe it was when I had this fantasy about being an art assistant, and the artist taking all my ideas. Read More