July 28, 2011 Arts & Culture Stieg’s Stockholm By Elisabeth Donnelly This spring, exiting the Stockholm-Arlanda airport, I found myself in a hall which enthusiastically proclaimed, “Welcome to Sweden!” From its walls, huge portraits of the country’s greatest cultural exports greeted me, head shot after head shot. There were actors and directors (Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, Ingmar Bergman), austere portraits of authors (Astrid Lindgren, August Strindberg), and, in 1970s color, ABBA under disco lights, and Bjorn Borg, whacking a tennis ball. At the end of this procession, as if its grand finale, was a full-body photograph of Stieg Larsson. His head rested on his hand, in a position not unlike that of Rodin’s thinker. It’s a familiar photograph, the same one that appears on the back of each of his books: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. The Millennium trilogy, as the three are called, has sold more than fifty-one million copies worldwide. Larsson, who died in 2004 of a heart attack, at the age of fifty, never saw the success of his fiction, which he wrote mostly on the side. For him, the books were “like therapy,” his partner Eva Gabrielsson writes in her memoir ‘There Are Things I Want You to Know’ About Stieg Larsson and Me. Read More
July 27, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Just where are Cervantes’s bones? Maurice Sendak’s new book, Bumble-Ardy. Is this the worst sentence of the year? The Man Booker Prize longlist is announced; it’s eclectic! The shortlist comes out in September. Let’s not forget the Not Booker Prize. This artist fought George Lucas, and won. “Award-winning science-fiction writer Alastair Reynolds is to delve into the past of Doctor Who in a new novel that sees the Time Lord in his Jon Pertwee incarnation taking on the Master.” And that’s not all: “new” Mickey Spillanes! After twelve years, Whit Stillman has a new film. Damsels in Distress, starring Greta Gerwig, will close the Venice Film Festival. “In an industry that has been upended by the growth of e-books, publishers are moving against convention by pushing paperbacks into publication earlier than usual, sometimes less than six months after they appeared in hardcover.” Grace Coddington sells her memoir for seven figures to Random House. Moist and other repulsive words.
July 26, 2011 At Work Antonio Lobo Antunes on ‘The Land at the End of the World’ By Anderson Tepper Portuguese author Antonio Lobo Antunes is the author of more than twenty books, including the novels The Return of the Caravels, Knowledge of Hell, The Natural Order of Things, The Inquisitors’ Manual, and What Can I Do When Everything’s On Fire? His book of newspaper “crónicas”—a free-form amalgam of essay and fiction—was published in the U.S. in 2009 under the title The Fat Man and Infinity. Last month, his groundbreaking 1979 novel, South of Nowhere, was reissued in a new translation by Margaret Jull Costa as The Land at the End of the World, and this September Dalkey Archive will release another early novel, The Splendor of Portugal. Both books are dense, kaleidoscopic visions of a modern Portugal scarred by its Fascist past and its bloody colonial wars in Africa. Lobo Antunes has been called “the heir to Conrad and Faulkner” (by George Steiner) and “one of the living writers who will matter most” (by Harold Bloom). I spoke to Lobo Antunes, now sixty-nine, over a scratchy phone connection to his home in Lisbon. Your author bio mentions that you were trained as a psychiatrist and served as a military doctor in Portugal’s war in Angola before becoming a writer. This experience seems to be at the heart of The Land at the End of the World, which takes the form of the soul-baring rant of a Portuguese war veteran honing in on a sexual conquest in a late 1970s Lisbon nightclub. How do you see this novel now, which has since been acclaimed as a literary masterpiece on the absurdities and wretchedness of war? I started that book more than thirty years ago, as a very young man. In the first versions, there was no war at all. In many ways, it’s impossible to speak about the war directly. For me, it was a personal matter. When I arrived in Africa I looked up at the sky and said, “I don’t know these stars. Where am I? What am I doing here?” I just wanted to return alive. I remember we kept calendars and would cross off each day that we were still alive! Read More
July 25, 2011 Arts & Culture Dummy Land By Avi Steinberg Photographs by Avi Steinberg. I’m waiting for the elevator in a medieval-themed hotel in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, when the elevator doors open to reveal a heated exchange between a bald man in a Hawaiian shirt and a puppet shaped like a toucan. My presence brings an uncomfortable end to their private imbroglio. Both stare at me silently as I enter the elevator, and for five awkward floors I’m brought into direct contact with what George Bernard Shaw described as the “unvarying intensity of facial expression” of puppets, an attribute he believed makes them more compelling actors than humans. I’m at the Vent Haven ConVENTion where, each July, hundreds of ventriloquists, or “vents,” as they call themselves, gather from all over the world. For four days, they attend lectures on the business, getting advice on AV equipment, scriptwriting, or creating an audience through social networking. They listen to a keynote address by Comedy Central’s ventriloquist-in-residence, Jeff Dunham, who exhorts his notoriously defensive colleagues to “quit complaining that people say we’re weird. We talk to dolls. We are weird, ok. Just own it.” They eat at a Denny’s off the highway and visit the creationist museum down the road. And they don’t go anywhere without the accompaniment of their alter egos. Read More
July 22, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Food, Fiction, and Summer Dresses By The Paris Review For anyone who loves to read, or eat, or both, Anka Muhlstein’s terrific Balzac’s Omelet is a must: the historian takes on the evolution of food in fiction—specifically Balzac’s—with results that I could (but won’t) call mouth-watering. I’m a total food-history nerd, but I don’t think you’d need to be to enjoy what’s ultimately a treatise on the making of modern French culture. —Sadie Stein The subject of summer dresses seems to be everywhere. Geoff Dyer described the “perfect summer dress.” And the Times did some serious investigative reporting on the fashion. But let’s not forget the classic short story by Irwin Shaw, “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” —Thessaly La Force Fist bumps to David Chang and McSweeney’s for their new food magazine Lucky Peach. Naturally, the first issue is on ramen. —Cody Wiewandt I’m anxiously awaiting the Los Angeles Review of Books’ next installment of Mike Davis’s serial “The Ghost of Wrath,” an account of the deliciously evil original LA Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis. —Ali Pechman I’m from Ohio, but I’m not from Donald Ray Pollack’s Ohio. His new book and first novel, The Devil All the Time, is as scary as it is good. —C. W. I’m quite enamored with Worn Journal, a smart, sassy, Toronto-based, antifashion mag with an emphasis on used clothing. I just got the latest issue and am finding it a total delight. —S. S. It’s summer, and there’s not a cornfield or a mosquito-infested pond in sight. If, like me, you’ve got the big-city blues, try paging through the lush architectural renderings in Marion Mahony Reconsidered for a respite from the skyscrapers and the carefully allocated greenery. —Clare Fentress Were you one of those people who hated summer camp? Or were you the kind that really, really, really loved it? Slate has a breakdown of the types. —T. L.
July 22, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Larry David Humor; Fairies and Mushrooms By Sadie Stein I’m a huge Curb Your Enthusiasm fan and totally addicted to Larry David’s brand of car-wreck-that-I-can’t-stop-watching humor. I was wondering: can you think of a book that induces the same cringe-worthy yet high-inducing experience? —Hannah, NYC That, Hannah, I can tell you in two words: After Claude. While I can’t pretend Iris Owens’s 1973 novel of a humilating New York summer is great all the way through, the first two-thirds are so great, and so cringe-inducing that I’d be remiss not to bring it up. And given that it takes place during a particularly blistering heatwave, anyone on the eastern seaboard will be able to relate all too well. Do you believe that when a circle of mushrooms spring up around a tree, it’s proof that a fairy lived and died there? —Kim Yes. I broke up with my boyfriend and he told me I was never going to love anybody because I’m Blanche Dubois (!). I’m really upset, but primarily because he meant it to be insulting. I can’t help but identify with a desire for incessant fantasy—does that make me a bad person? Or more pointedly, which character can I accuse him of being? —NOT Stella Well, without knowing the specifics of the case, it’s hard to know what would be especially apt (or, for that matter, especially cutting). I know one friend who was really insulted to be compared to The Razor’s Edge’s Elliott Templeton. I once called someone an Ellsworth Toohey, which has the added sting of invoking Ayn Rand. But as to all-purpose digs? Well, I can’t imagine anyone would be thrilled to be likened to Uriah Heep. As to your other question: craving escape through fantasy certainly doesn’t make you a bad person, just human. And if you have a tendency to retreat too much from reality, well, being aware of it is probably a good sign, no? But as a general rule, I don’t think it’s a good idea to put too much stock in anything said in the heat of a break-up—particularly when literal drama is invoked. Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.