May 5, 2022 On Nature Chestnut Trees By Hermann Hesse Artwork by Hermann Hesse. Photograph by Martin Hesse Erben. Courtesy of Volker Michels. Everywhere we’ve lived takes on a certain shape in our memory only some time after we leave it. Then it becomes a picture that will remain unchanged. As long as we’re there, with the whole place before our eyes, we see the accidental and the essential emphasized almost equally; only later are secondary matters snuffed out, our memory preserving only what’s worth preserving. If that weren’t true, how could we look back over even a year of our life without vertigo and terror! Many things make up the picture a place leaves behind for us—waters, rocks, roofs, squares—but for me, it is most of all trees. They are not only beautiful and lovable in their own right, representing the innocence of nature and a contrast to people, who express themselves in buildings and other structures—they are also revealing: we can learn much from them about the age and type of arable land there, the climate, the weather, and the minds of the people. I don’t know how the village where I now live will present itself to my mind’s eye later, but I cannot imagine that it will be without poplars, any more than I can picture Lake Garda without olive trees or Tuscany without cypresses. Other places are unthinkable to me without their lindens, or their nut trees, and two or three are recognizable and remarkable by virtue of having no trees there at all. Read More
May 4, 2022 First Person Notes on Nevada: Trans Literature and the Early Internet By Imogen Binnie Imogen Binnie at Camp Trans in 2008. Photo courtesy of the author. Almost ten years ago, I published a novel called Nevada with a small press called Topside that doesn’t exist anymore. You may or may not have heard of it, but if there are trans people in your life who are readers, they probably have. It became a subcultural Thing. It’s been out of print for a few years, but in June, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will bring it back into print. People have called Nevada “ground zero for modern trans literature,” and while I get that—before it was published, I don’t think I’d read a novel with a trans character who I didn’t at least sort of hate—I don’t really feel like a genius visionary who invented literature centering marginalized experiences. At the very least, this idea occludes the work other people had done that made Nevada possible. So instead of celebrating myself, I want to use this opportunity to say thanks, and to think through some of the influences and experiences that shaped the novel. Read More
May 3, 2022 Diaries Other People’s Diaries By Sophie Haigney While reading Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion, I often caught myself mistaking it for a diary. The memoir details an illicit affair in prose that feels startlingly immediate, full of particulars that seem to surface in real time: a skirt in a Benetton shop; a list of fortune-tellers in the telephone book; the faded lettering of a plaque that reads PASSAGE CARDINET, near where the author sought a clandestine abortion years before. Yet I was continually made aware that time had passed, and this was last year’s love seen through this year’s eyes: “From September last year,” Ernaux writes, near the beginning, “I did nothing else but wait for a man: for him to call me and come around to my place.” The details of this “most violent and unaccountable reality” have been refracted and altered, distilled into a remarkable book. Read More
May 3, 2022 Redux Redux: The Marketing of Obsession By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. DON DELILLO, CA. 2011. PHOTOGRAPH BY THOUSANDROBOTS. “Barneys was more than a department store,” issue no. 239 contributor Adrienne Raphel reminisces in a new essay on the Daily. “A glowing spiral staircase, white as milk, wound its way through the store—the Guggenheim, but make it fashion.” This week, we’re unlocking an Art of Fiction interview with the bard of postwar American consumerism, Don DeLillo, as well as Zadie Smith’s story “Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets,” Mary Ruefle’s account of shopping—as in shoplifting—at Woolworth’s in “Milk Shake,” and a series of photographs taken of Paris’s legendary market, Les Halles, in the sixties. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and art portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. INTERVIEW The Art of Fiction No. 135 Don DeLillo INTERVIEWER Frank Lentricchia refers to you as the type of writer who believes that the shape and fate of the culture dictates the shape and fate of the self. DELILLO Yes, and maybe we can think about Running Dog in this respect. This book is not exactly about obsession—it’s about the marketing of obsession. Obsession as a product that you offer to the highest bidder or the most enterprising and reckless fool, which is sort of the same thing in this particular book … And in Libra, of course—here we have Oswald watching TV, Oswald working the bolt of his rifle, Oswald imagining that he and the president are quite similar in many ways. I see Oswald, back from Russia, as a man surrounded by promises of fulfillment—consumer fulfillment, personal fulfillment. But he’s poor, unstable, cruel to his wife, barely employable—a man who has to enter his own Hollywood movie to see who he is and how he must direct his fate. From issue no. 128 (Fall 1993) Read More
May 2, 2022 Diaries Diary, 2018 By Elisa Gonzalez Photograph by Caryl González. In our Spring issue, we published selections from Annie Ernaux’s 1988 diaries, which chronicle the affair that served as the basis for her memoir Simple Passion. To mark the occasion, the Review has begun asking writers and artists for pages from their diaries, along with brief postscripts. July 13, 2018 I was up all night and it’s afternoon now. Maybe writing this will let me go to sleep. Sometimes it feels as if I’ve been awake for six months. Longer? In Cyprus I felt like I never slept. Even when I did my body felt impatient, braced, alert, waiting for the knock of the cat’s paws on the bedroom door at 5 A.M. I would be out of bed before she could start mewing for food. “Acutely, terribly awake,” I wrote in a poem I’m still trying to finish. She knew I was an easy mark, looking for an escape into the day. I saw nearly every sunrise from my window onto the garden. The bougainvillea. “I want to make love to everyone who’s ever lived,” I wrote in the same unfinished poem. An unwise wish, and a lie, of course, if taken literally—but the feeling. What was I trying to ask for? Pleasure. Recompense from the world. Surprise. The end of desire. Something. Read More
April 29, 2022 The Review’s Review Venice Dispatch: from the Biennale By Olivia Kan-Sperling Jacqueline Humphries, omega:), 2022 (detail). Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photograph by Ron Amstutz. My mother is a Renaissance historian who specializes in Venice and paintings of breastfeeding; her books and articles have subtitles like “Queer Lactations in Early Modern Visual Culture” and “Squeezing, Squirting, Spilling Milk.” I have an early memory of her taking me to a Venetian church to see Tintoretto’s Presentation of the Virgin, a depiction of a three-year-old Mary being brought before the priest at the Temple of Jerusalem. The child Mary is shockingly small. Dwarfed by a stone obelisk carved with faint hieroglyphs, she ascends a set of huge, circular steps inlaid with abstract golden swirls. Onlookers crowd around, including three sets of fleshy women with children who dominate the scene and who, my mother explained to me, are likely wet-nurses. Breastfeeding women are often allegories of caritas: Christian care. This vision of femininity—as carnal, and as both literally and figuratively nurturing—reappears, centuries later, virtually unchanged, as the central conceit of Cecilia Alemani’s 2022 Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams.” In her selections, the woman’s body once again serves as a breeding-ground for personal and political metaphors, and the artist’s relation to her own embodiment as cornerstone of her creative practice. Read More