February 11, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Distorted Sexuality; Winking Etiquette By Lorin Stein What would you recommend as a good, raw novel/short story about characters with distorted sexuality? —Shira, Israel Distorted—such an interesting word! If I understand your question, you’re looking for fiction about characters who feel that their desires have somehow been bent out of shape, whether by life or by something native to them. That describes many of Mary Gaitskill’s protagonists, for instance the two heroines of Two Girls, Fat and Thin, or the narrator of Veronica. Dennis Cooper’s early novels are full of this kind of anxiety—books like Closer, Frisk, and Guide. But maybe you’re thinking of another kind of story, like Lolita, where sex acts as a distorting lens for the narrator—but the reader sees clearly. You will find that sort of dramatic irony in Evan Connell’s Diary of a Rapist or Dom Casmurro, by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. You might also enjoy Lydia Davis’s story “Story,” about how hard it is to think straight when you’re unhappy in love. As the title suggests, it’s one of the oldest stories in the book. I just read a blog post about why sending someone a “wink” on a dating Web site is stupid. This seemed like a reasonable argument to make. But then the blog writer went on to say that in real life, it is “totally unacceptable” to wink. The guy said that if you wink at a stranger in a bar, the stranger would call the police. Is that true? Or is it sometimes okay to wink (in real life)? Should I save it for specific situations? (Which ones?) —Georgia You should believe only half of what you read on the Internet. To my knowledge, winking is neither illegal nor actionable in any county that permits the sale of alcoholic beverages. (I haven’t surveyed the rest.) Like the eye roll, the wink is a gesture of complicity. Between friends, it means you share a secret. Between strangers, it means you wish you had a secret to share. You should—you must!—wink whenever the spirit moves you. Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.
February 10, 2011 At Work David Vann on ‘Caribou Island’ By Caitlin Roper Photograph by Diana Matar. David Vann’s Caribou Island is my favorite novel of the past few years. I read it last summer for possible excerpt in The Paris Review. It’s the story, set against the striking landscape of the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska, of Irene and Gary, whose thirty-year marriage is collapsing. The story is disturbing; I read it quickly, consumed. I loved the book so much that I was reluctant to see that an excerpt wasn’t working. The story was so powerful as a whole—it was irreducible. I recently had the chance to talk to Vann. You alternate between characters’ points of view, and between their stories. How did the shape of the book come about? None of it was planned. I was writing seven days a week, a few pages every day, and those were where the chapters ended. It really was such a blind process writing the book. I didn’t know each day what the characters would do or say; I didn’t know when a chapter would end; I didn’t know what the next chapter would be or where it was headed. And so with each chapter, I felt like it had come to where it closed, and then each time, luckily, there was some clear sense of where to go next. How long did the book take to write? Five and a half months. Wow. I started it fourteen years ago when I finished Legend of a Suicide, and I only got forty-eight pages in, and then I just couldn’t figure out how to write a longer arc. I didn’t know whose story it was or where it was supposed to focus, so I put it away. That’s when I went to sea and became a captain and wrote A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea. I couldn’t get Legend of a Suicide published, so I pouted for a while and didn’t write for five and a half years. Not writing was partly pouting and partly because I was stuck. I couldn’t figure out how to do a novel. And I felt like my brain wouldn’t do a longer arc. But in January 2009, I was walking on Skilak Lake, walking out across the frozen lake toward Caribou Island, and I felt like I could see all of it. It seemed really clear that Irene had to be the focus, she had to be the main character right from the start, and that the story had to begin really late, and that their marriage would already be in trouble. The whole thing would feel like the final sequence in that way. I think that was why it was easy to get from chapter to chapter and why they’re fairly short and quick, as if they’re really all the final sequence. Read More
February 9, 2011 Events A Year of Bolaño: Announcing Our Spring Issue By Thessaly La Force Spring is almost here—and so is our spring issue! It’s an especially exciting one: We will be publishing Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich—our first serialized novel in forty years—with original illustrations by Leanne Shapton. This is a first edition like none other—a collector’s item, and a chance to discover Bolaño’s famous lost novel almost a year before it appears in book form. For those of you who aren’t subscribers, we are offering a celebratory discount subscription (25% off the cover price domestically; offer good until March 15). Your subscription will also bring you new work by Lydia Davis, David Gates, and Jonathan Lethem, as well as interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Bret Easton Ellis, Yusef Komunyakaa, and much more … The spring issue features: A rare interview with Janet Malcolm: When journalists remember that the interview is a special sort of encounter, and withhold some of their natural friendliness, they don’t lose anything by it. The subject doesn’t notice. He wants to tell his story. And when the journalist retells the story in a way the subject cannot anticipate, he doesn’t feel like such a rat. A long-awaited interview with Ann Beattie: My students make fun of me for saying, I’ve read this carefully now, and you’ve written it carefully—too carefully. The phone never rings, people get to talk for four pages without interruption. We’re used to daily life being the fire truck coming by with its deafening siren. To put that siren in fiction—and not at the convenient moment, but maybe a minute before the convenient moment, or way after the convenient moment—is a kind of acknowledgment to the reader that you’re aware there’s another life out there that’s out of control. Plus … Fiction by Joshua Cohen. Photos and prose by Édouard Levé. An essay on cave archaeology by our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan. Poems by Clare Rossini, Linda Gregerson, Stephen Dunn, and Chris Andrews. Ancient kabbalist verse translated by Peter Cole. A collage portfolio curated by Pavel Zoubok. Subscribe now!
February 9, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Jacques Testard, Editor, Part 2 By Jacques Testard This is the second installment of Testard’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 9:47 A.M. I have a mild headache and I am only on life number three of Dalrymple’s Nine Lives. I’m beginning to think that it’s quite difficult to get any reading done at a literary festival. When we got home last night I asked Forty to pick me up at 9:30 A.M. He asked me for two cigarettes as a token of goodwill. I complied. He never turned up. 10:34 A.M. I’m attending a showcase panel on “Why Books Matter” with Kiran Desai and Penguin CEO John Makinson. It’s being filmed for the BBC and the spotlights are on the audience. It’s quite painful on the eyes. According to Sunil Sethi, who presents the only literary show on Indian television, book sales are rising by fifteen to eighteen percent per year in India. I find that very hard to believe. One interjection from the floor offers an interesting insight into this phenomenon. “It is not true Mr. Sethi,” says Mumbaikar. “In Bombay the Encyclopaedia Britannica is very popular but that is because it matches the furniture.” That’s more like it. 1:15 P.M. It’s lunch time. I’ve just had my photo taken by a dozen journalists as a smiling Indian man with neat white hair placed a piece of naan bread onto my plate. I might be in the papers tomorrow—his name is Javed Akhtar and he is a very famous lyricist for Bollywood songs, I’m told. I was an extra in a Bollywood film once. I had to wear a tweed suit at a beach party and pretend to swig from a magnum bottle of vodka. 7:40 P.M. Salman Ahmad has just taken to the stage. The Guardian has described him as Pakistan’s answer to Bono. Kamila Shamsie wrote a piece on the rise of pop music in the Pakistan issue of Granta last year on the emergence of pop music in the eighties which charted Ahmad’s rise and his turn to Sufi Islam for inspiration. 10:36 P.M. I’m sharing a drink with Samrat, whose debut novel The Urban Jungle came off the press yesterday. He’s just given me a signed copy of it—it’s a modern rewriting of Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Samrat tells me that Sunil Sethi’s statistics on the growth of the book market in India are inaccurate. An English language best-seller in India sells no more than five thousand copies, according to Samrat. I’ve since been looking online and cannot find any information either way. Surely that’s too low? Read More
February 9, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Jacques Testard, Editor By Jacques Testard DAY ONE 11:45 A.M. I’ve just landed in Delhi. I’m here for the Jaipur Literature Festival, starring Orhan Pamuk, J. M. Coetzee, Richard Ford, and Candace Bushnell. I haven’t been in Delhi for close to three years. The Commonwealth Games have left their mark: the new airport terminal is gigantic, crisp, and shiny. I step outside into the crowd and am greeted with silence. A few years back fifty drivers would have competed for my custom but now they wait in an orderly fashion. My father, who has lived in Delhi for close to a decade, picks me up. Our driver is a Hindu; Ganesh stickers adorn his windscreen. 3:00 P.M. I have an afternoon in the city and have decided to revisit the old town. I go to the Jama Masjid, a legacy of Delhi’s Mughal past. An auto-rickshaw drops me off a few hundred yards away, and I walk up the central walkway toward the towering minarets and white-marble domes, carefully treading my way past the crouching lepers and stray cows. The mild January weather tempers the overwhelming olfactory experience that is India. A man with hennaed hair tells me the mosque is closed for prayers. He asks me if I want to visit a haveli hidden out in Old Delhi. He says it is bigger than the Jama Masjid and has a magical tree hovering in its central courtyard. It will cost me five hundred rupees. I decline. 5:15 P.M. I’m in Khan Market at the Full Circle bookshop. Books are cheaper in India. I’m looking for David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The girl at the till has not heard of it. She recommends Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. I decline, this time politely. I forgot how much time one spends declining in India. 8:20 P.M. My father and I visit the Nizamuddin Dargah before dinner. Nizamuddin, a thirteenth-century Sufi saint, is buried here. Millions visit every year. To get there one has to walk through a maze of alleys among scores of bearded pilgrims and rose-garland vendors. The pilgrims buy the flowers and deposit them on the holy man’s grave. Everyone wants to sell me flowers or look after my shoes while I step into the shrine. Pilgrims sit in rows singing Sufi songs. It is colorful, convivial. Children run freely, friends and families chat happily on the periphery. I imagine that churches in medieval Europe would have felt similarly chaotic. We must be the only non-Muslims. Most people don’t seem to notice us and those who do smile and hold out their hands in greeting. Read More
February 8, 2011 Arts & Culture An Adult Returns to ‘Sleeping Beauty’ By Rana Dasgupta Sleeping Beauty is often cited these days as the ultimate antifeminist tale. Recently, while visiting my parents, I came across my childhood edition of Sleeping Beauty. As I opened the book again, the decades collapsed: the old illustrations recalled how dire that sleeping palace had appeared to me as a child, how thick its rooms had seemed with dark, ungraspable truths. The story had seemed entirely indecent, and that was precisely why it was so magnetic. Sleeping Beauty is laced throughout with inchoate threat, which is why it feels so bottomless. Most obviously, there is an outrageous fact that the story passes over and that most children do not consciously note: Beauty is a century older than the prince who kisses her and ends her sleep. When he enters her dusty room she is one hundred and fifteen years old. As the reader bends with him over her inert form, adoration is tinged with something else entirely—the apprehension of death. Earlier versions of the story, such as Charles Perrault’s (1697), make this explicit: the prince, seeing the newly awoken princess, “took care not to mention that she was dressed like his grandmother.” Later versions—the Grimm brothers’, for example—got rid of such details so as to make the ending more youthfully nuptial. But the fact of Beauty’s age still lurked in the background as a kind of unfamiliar smell; even a child reader has the sense that this apparently straightforward love affair is stalked by impossibility and decay. Read More