April 5, 2011 At Work David Bezmozgis on ‘The Free World’ By Irina Aleksander Photograph by David Franco. Set in Rome in 1978, David Bezmozgis’s first novel, The Free World, tells the story of the Krasnansky family, three generations of Latvian Jews, who leave their lives in Riga, and, like many Soviet immigrants bound for the West in the late seventies, must spend six months in the Italian metropolis to secure their visas. Contrary to the book’s title, the Krasnanskys find themselves confined to this Roman waiting room, weighed down by the rubble of their communist past, the uncertainty of their future, and their allegiances to one another. Born in Riga in 1973, Bezmozgis immigrated to Canada with his family in 1980 and told the immigrant assimilation story with his tender, restrained collection of short fiction, Natasha and Other Stories (2004). The Free World is a sort of prologue to Natasha, the taxing journey his resilient characters—Jews in Transit, as the émigré newspaper offered in Rome is called—made before settling in the North American suburb. I recently spoke with Bezmozgis at a café not far from the New York Public Library, where he is currently a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center. The Krasnanskys’ story begins on a train platform in Vienna and concludes before they ever reach the North American free world. Had you always intended to contain the narrative in this strange way station? Yes, one thing I knew very clearly is that the book begins when they get to Italy and it ends when they’re about to leave. That in-between period, that purgatory, is the balancing point between the past, the unknowable future, and the present, which is intriguing and exotic. It’s full of dramatic possibility. It was always fascinating to me that these people had given up their lives without really knowing where they were going. I feel like I leave my apartment in Brooklyn to go to the Bronx with more information than my parents had leaving the Soviet Union to go to Canada. Read More
April 4, 2011 Arts & Culture The Gourmand By Mark Gimein Images by Charlotta Westergren. Charlotta Westergren, Victory, 2010, oil on linen, 58 in. x 58 in. The story repeated most often in the gastronomical canon is Plutarch’s anecdote about the Roman patrician Lucullus. Asked if he might want a simple dinner on a night with no guests, the great gastronome orders up a feast, telling his steward that he is entertaining the most important guest of all: “Tonight Lucullus dines with Lucullus.” What always gets left out in the retelling is that Plutarch’s compliment to Lucullus’s table is a backhanded one. “The daily repasts of Lucullus,” writes Plutarch, “were such as the newly rich affect … With his arrays of all sorts of meats and daintily prepared dishes, he made himself the envy of the vulgar.” The misgivings about the gourmet are as old as Roman times: what if the endless expenditure on luxury signals not sophistication, but just plain gluttony? What elevates the gourmand above your everyday glutton? Both rave about the same three-star Michelin experience, the first because it was rapturous and the second because he wants to make sure you know he had it. Maybe for an old-fashioned stoic there’s no difference, but nowadays things are laxer, and we don’t call the honest gourmet a sinner. But can you always tell the one from the other? I’m not sure if it’s polite to ask these days, now that cooking is right up there with art and music and literature, but let’s just put it out there anyway. The questions come to mind now thanks to Modernist Cuisine, the epic six-volume cookbook published by Nathan Myhrvold, a man of grandiose talents (physicist! paleontologist! billionaire!) and appetites. But I’ve been thinking about this for a while, since reading, at my girlfriend Charlotta’s prodding, Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste, the great nineteenth-century work of culinary science to which Modernist Cuisine gets compared. Read More
April 4, 2011 At Work Sigrid Nunez on Susan Sontag By Thessaly La Force Susan Sontag in 1975, a year before she met Sigrid Nunez. © Estate of Peter Hujar. In the spring of 1976, Sigrid Nunez went to the apartment of Susan Sontag, who was recovering from cancer surgery and needed someone to help answer her mail. Nunez had just gotten her M.F.A. from Columbia and lived nearby to Sontag’s apartment at 340 Riverside Drive. On her third visit, Nunez met Sontag’s son, David Rieff, and shortly thereafter the two began dating. It wasn’t long before Nunez moved in, beginning what would be a complicated relationship with both Sontag and her son. Her memoir, Sempre Susan, chronicles those few years she spent with Sontag and Rieff. We sat down for coffee not too long ago at the City Bakery on 18th Street to talk about the book. I was really struck by the line in the book where you say, “Exceptionalism: Was it really a good idea for the three of us, Susan, her son, myself to share the same household?” Was it? Well, as it turned out, it was a very bad idea. But at the time there were various reasons that made it less crazy than it might have seemed. First of all, Susan had just recently been diagnosed with stage IV cancer. She was also in the middle of breaking up with the woman who’d been her partner for several years. She’d always hated living alone, but now she was frankly terrified, and she made it clear that she’d be devastated if David were to move out. Also, David was still in school at the time, and he was financially dependent on Susan. Read More
April 1, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Terry Castle, Jane Smiley, Ramona Ausubel By The Paris Review Diary of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne (1809–71). Do not take Terry Castle to bed if you plan on getting any sleep. I keep trying to savor The Professor, her memoirs of love and friendship in the academy. It’s like trying to savor cocaine. The title essay, about a formative affair Castle had as an undergraduate, is now up there on a short shelf in my mind alongside Adolphe and First Love. —Lorin Stein In the Morgan Library’s exhibition “The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives,” Bob Dylan sketches a hotel-room table and then uses it to ink out a poem; JP Morgan has a first-rate time with the girls at dancing school; Charlotte Bronte struggles to write in between her studies; John Ruskin graphs out “pretty” chess moves; and Albert Einstein thinks “about the gravitation-electricity problem again” even though he knows he should be doing other things. The show comes complete with a brochure of carefully typed out diary entries, but I found it much more rewarding to squint my way through the diaries, wondering at the tiny scribbles and neat printings, and feeling just a bit closer to these beloved authors and figures. —Rosalind Parry I have a girl crush on Ramona Ausubel, whose short story “Atria” was published in The New Yorker this week. I can’t wait to read her forthcoming novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us. Of it, Ausubel admits, “I have been trying not to think too hard about what it will be like to release this story to the great big world.” (P. S. Don’t miss her story in The Daily last week.) —Thessaly La Force Read More
April 1, 2011 Ask The Paris Review The Murakami Landscape; Your Inner Clown By Lorin Stein Dear Mr. Stein, I recently got back from Germany, where they’ve had Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 for months. After reading it (and already having read most of his other works several times), I’m interested in finding books by other authors that will create the odd, developed mental landscapes I experience when reading his. Do you have any suggestions? Thanks, Greg Smith We are Murakami fans, too. In fact his name came up several times this week at the office. One Paris Review contributor wrote in, comparing The Third Reich to Murakami’s work, suggesting that Bolaño and Murakami share “a reverence for mystery, the sense of another realm.” It is also a kind of stagey reticence. Murakami and Bolaño both dare you to think they’re full of shit, and are not. They are magisterial. You see a similar quality in a David Lynch movie like Inland Empire, where Lynch shows you all the guy wires and indulges one extravagance after another, and you still believe. All of which is to say, Greg, you would do well to subscribe. Bolaño aside, there are stories in our next issue by Jonathan Lethem and Amie Barrodale that I think will appeal especially to you. And if you like those, I suggest Bolaño’s second-most Murakamian novel, 2666, and the complete works of Don DeLillo. I’m just a misunderstood poet here in the middle of California. The Paris Review has rejected me twice, and I feel lazy about getting the third. Why is it so hard to get poetry and, well, anything else published? Does that mean that many of us are bad writers? Amateur clowns imitating W. B. Yeats, Kafka, Frank O’Hara, et cetera? Who should I be if I am nothing right now? Will I be somebody if I get published? —Jorge As a young editor, Robert Giroux once asked T. S. Eliot whether all editors were not failed poets. “All poets are failed poets,” said Eliot. And he was Eliot. To have your work published is nice, of course, but in my experience it takes more than a story or poem to make a nobody feel like a somebody. The world is full of published writers who suspect they’re amateur clowns. And those are the good ones! My advice? Be kind to your inner clown. Have a question for The Paris Review? E-mail us.
March 31, 2011 Arts & Culture Barry Yourgrau on Super 8 (?) By Lorin Stein As the late Édouard Levé once wrote, “I like watching anything shot on Super 8, even though that is in such predictable good taste.” We feel the same. So imagine our delight to discover this video of the melifluous and virtuosic Barry Yourgrau reading one of his recent Gangster Fables—shot on an iPhone using the “8mm” app. Here endeth the ad.