October 13, 2020 Arts & Culture The Second Mrs. de Winter By CJ Hauser Illustration for a Rebecca paper doll by Jenny Kroik for The Paris Review “The sexiness of [Rebecca] is maybe the most unsettling part, since it centers on the narrator’s being simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the memory and the mystery of her new husband’s dead wife.” —Emily Alford, Jezebel NB: This essay contains all of the spoilers for Rebecca. Rebecca had good taste—or maybe she just had the same taste as me, and that’s why I thought it was good. She loved a particular shade of vintage minty turquoise. The kitchen cabinets were all this color. As were the plates inside. The cups and bowls were white with dainty black dots on them. Not polka dots—a smaller, more charming print. I loved them. I might have picked them out myself. It made me feel sick that I loved them. I imagined Rebecca had picked out these cups and plates when she moved into this house, but the cupboards I was investigating, and the very lovely dishes inside them, now belonged to her ex-husband, my boyfriend. Rebecca lived fifteen minutes away. Of course, her name wasn’t really Rebecca. But grant me a theme. We’ll call him Maxim. * Every once in a while, a book will pass through my writers’ group, all of us swept up in reading the same novel. In the early days of my dating Maxim, that book was Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. My friend Emily was rereading it to write an essay for Jezebel called “The Nihilistic Horniness of a Good Gothic Read: Ranking the Genre’s Sexiest and Scariest Secrets.” Rebecca ranks number one. Emily’s love for the novel was so persuasive the rest of us soon joined in. The basic premise of Rebecca is that our narrator, a naive young woman, marries an older, brooding widower and goes to live in his strange and beautiful house, where it rapidly becomes clear that the legacy of his dead wife, the titular Rebecca, is … potent. The narrator constantly worries over whether she can run the house as well as Rebecca did. At one point, Emily was in the bathtub with a scotch and the novel and somehow still had enough hands to text us: THIS WOMAN’S ONLY PROBLEM IS THAT THE SERVANTS ARE MEAN TO HER AND I WANT THAT LIFE. The servants do not like the narrator for the very good reason that she is not Rebecca. Beyond the servants, of course, the narrator is also concerned that she’ll never live up to Rebecca in Maxim’s heart, that in the wake of his great and tragic love, she stands no chance. Again, from Emily’s bath: EVEN THE DOGS DON’T LIKE HER. * I had never read Rebecca before. About fifty pages in I felt stupid because I hadn’t retained the narrator’s name. I flipped back through the opening and still couldn’t find it. Maxim was the husband. Rebecca was his dead wife. Mrs. Danvers was the housekeeper. Jasper was the dog. WTF, I texted Emily, THE DOG HAS A NAME BUT NOT THE NARRATOR? HE’S A VERY GOOD DOG, Emily said. For 410 pages, the narrator of Rebecca is only ever known as The Second Mrs. de Winter—and isn’t that just the whole story? CAN I TELL YOU SOMETHING HORRIBLE? I asked Emily. OF COURSE I’VE BEEN FEELING A LOT LIKE THE SMDW LATELY OH GIRL * The little white house in New York where my Maxim lived was no Manderley, but like Manderley, the house was an issue. The house with Rebecca’s lovely dishes in the cupboard. The house with art on the walls no man would ever pick. The red, floral, calico curtains, which Maxim eventually took down because, despite having sewn them himself, he had never liked the print Rebecca picked (I did) and after that there were no curtains at all. The kitchen where I cooked us dinner and accidentally used a special salt Rebecca had favored but left behind, which made Maxim look up from his meal and ask, What did you put in here? One afternoon I was working at a desk in the office and, playing with the drawer, found inside Rebecca’s birth certificate. I’d already known we were born a week apart because on our second date Maxim had asked my birthday and blanched when I’d said October. More than once Maxim returned an article of women’s clothing to me that was not mine. There were notes in Rebecca’s handwriting on the fridge and photos of her in the house, and this was right and good, because she and Maxim had a daughter, an eight-year-old girl who was funny and sweet and who I was very lucky to know for those nearly two years. I must leave her out of this—she is a still-becoming person—but of course she remains an invisible source of gravity in this story. There were photos of them at Disney World. Photos of them holding their daughter the day she was born. Read More
October 9, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Memorials, Maps, and Machines By The Paris Review Bryan Washington. Photo: © Dailey Hubbard. There are many ways to cross this country. What my gentleman and I did the first summer of our romance, the September after we graduated, was take three weeks to drive along the northern United States in a sedan with four CDs, little money of our own, and no air-conditioning. By the time we drove down out of the Berkeley Hills, I wondered if he still liked me, much less loved me. The matter of what keeps people together, what makes two people a couple, is one of the central questions of Bryan Washington’s extraordinary new book Memorial, and no one writing today can make an unanswered question as satisfying, as delightful, as moving, or as vibrant. Memorial has the kind of premise for which generations of M.F.A. students would offer lesser-used digits: a young man wakes one morning to the reality of living in a Houston one-bedroom alone with a stranger—his boyfriend’s mother. Things aren’t going great with the boyfriend, who has just flown to Japan, where his estranged father is dying. Washington writes with ease, like a juggler who is adding in new objects all the time, except the book ends with everything aloft instead of in hand. In contemporary fiction, there seems to be an idea that only brutality is sophisticated and only evil is art, but basically all of Washington’s characters are capable of goodness and love. In 2020, that is one hell of a twist. I finished Memorial with a shout after several late-night sessions and handed it immediately to my man, who, it turns out, does still like me. It can be difficult to share your life with someone; Washington somehow explains this anew. Memorial, on the other hand, is easy to share. —Julia Berick Read More
October 9, 2020 Arts & Culture Don’t Get Comfortable By Dana Levin On lessons learned from a long friendship with Louise Glück Louise Glück © Katherine Wolkoff My friend Mark texted me at 6:18 A.M. yesterday: Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize! All morning, I found myself doing something I hadn’t done much, since the pandemic hit this horrid election year: joyscrolling. Such recognition for a life in art! That life had changed mine, too: the minute, twenty-two years ago, that Louise plucked my first book manuscript from the submission pile for the APR/Honickman Prize. One year after that, in 1999, I met her for the first time at a reading in Santa Fe. I tapped her shoulder and introduced myself. She enveloped me in the warmest, beariest hug—it seemed improbable that such a hug could come from so petite a person. Grasping my arms, she leaned back and took me in: “You are not at all what I expected—who would have thought such a sunny personality could write such devastating poems!” It was a compliment of a high order, and one that troubled me for days. Was there some split between my self in the world and my self on the page? Louise seemed to me to be exactly herself, everywhere: in life and in art. Confounding, difficult task! So few truly accomplish it. Read More
October 9, 2020 Eat Your Words Cooking with Qiu Miaojin By Valerie Stivers Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for a virtual wine tasting on Friday, October 23, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. For more details, visit our events page, or scroll to the bottom of the page. The narrator of Notes of a Crocodile explains: “I lived in solitude. Lived at night. I’d wake up at midnight and ride my bike—a red Giant—to a nearby store where I’d buy dried noodles, thick pork soup, and spring rolls.” Soup is pictured. Photo: Erica MacLean. The work of the Taiwanese author Qiu Miaojin (1969–1995) feels eerily familiar to me. Qiu was a near-contemporary of mine who died by suicide at twenty-six, and her two slim novels, Notes of a Crocodile and Last Words from Montmartre, are experimental mash-ups of letters, journal entries, and social satire about depressed lesbian university students and their tortured, impossible relationships. They offer a shared culture from the late eighties and early nineties—the song “Cherry Came Too,” the films of Derek Jarman and Andrei Tarkovsky—and a shared roster of activities that probably hasn’t changed much for students today: crying, drinking in excess, writing or receiving long hopeless love letters, eating instant noodles, skulking around waiting to run into someone, and spending endless hours analyzing the character of friends and lovers. In the hands of most college students, this is not the stuff of genius, which makes Qiu’s ambition all the more thrilling. Writing in the journal Asymptote, the scholar Dylan Suher locates her work in the tradition of “what the Chinese call qing, which is passion as a full-blown aesthetic ideology.” The concept has a storied history in Chinese literature, and to write about it using the details of contemporary youthful melodrama—the notes in the bike baskets, the tears over beers—must have been an innovation. The journals and letters that make up the body of each book are convincingly conversational and interior, yet they achieve formal elegance. Rhythmic waves of short sentences form a flood, which lifts up the collegiate sentimentality, as when the anonymous narrator of Notes of a Crocodile writes: “Those wrenching eyes, which could lift up the entire skeleton of my being. How I longed for myself to be subsumed into the ocean of her eyes. How the desire, once awakened, would come to scald me at every turn.” Any young adult with a painful crush might recognize the feeling, but not just any young adult writes like that. We respect Qiu’s narrator when she explains that her intention is to take herself seriously, because “the significance of this special experience will disappear from the world unless I recount it. So few dare to articulate their unique experiences and try to distinguish nuances of meaning between them.” Read More
October 8, 2020 Arts & Culture The Children of the Appalachians By Rebecca Bengal Ruby Cornett, ‘I asked my sister to take a picture of me on Easter morning,’ from ‘Portraits and Dreams’ by Wendy Ewald. Courtesy the artist and MACK. In 1976, twenty-five-year-old Wendy Ewald rented a small house on Ingram Creek in a remote landscape in eastern Kentucky, hoping to make a photographic document of “the soul and rhythm of the place.” As she writes in an essay included in the expanded new edition of Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories By Children of The Appalachians, originally published in 1985, her camera landed on the “commonplaces” of Letcher County. Set in the Cumberland Mountains at the edge of Kentucky and Virginia, Lechter Country is in the rural, rolling, rugged, coal-mining heart of the still sprawling and still vastly misunderstood and frequently mispronounced region known as Appalachia (the correct pronunciation is Appa-LATCH-uh). More than a decade before Ewald’s arrival, the publication of Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area, by local lawyer and environmental crusader Harry Caudill, had helped spur John F. Kennedy and later Lyndon B. Johnson to declare war on poverty in Letcher County and regions like it. But Ewald did not intend to photograph “poverty,” or to photograph the place in the reductive way it had come to be depicted. She was interested in the way the people pictured themselves. She went to speak with a local school principal and, during the years 1976 to 1982, taught photography in three elementary schools, including a surviving one-room school called Kingdom Come, which was heated by a coal stove that the students took turns refilling. She sold Instamatic cameras to her students, “So they would value them as things they had worked for” as she put it, for the price of ten dollars, or its equivalent counted out in odd jobs. In the classroom she guided them toward a way of seeing born out of feeling and imagination, inviting them to photograph around themes of family, animals, self, and dreams. The resulting pictures, made in a mentored creative collaboration and collected in Portraits and Dreams, call up a music of the place only Ewald’s students could hear and access; and thus the book amounts to a reliquary of a magic hour in the children’s own lives, fleeting and resonant. Read More
October 8, 2020 Arts & Culture The Language of Pain By Cristina Rivera Garza Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Snyders, Hoofd van Medusa, ca. 1617, oil on oak, 24 x 44″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. On September 14, 2011, we awoke once again to the image of two bodies hanging from a bridge. One man, one woman. He, tied by the hands. She, by the wrists and ankles. Just like so many other similar occurrences, and as noted in newspaper articles with a certain amount of trepidation, the bodies showed signs of having been tortured. Entrails erupted from the woman’s abdomen, opened in three different places. It is difficult, of course, to write about these things. In fact, the very reason acts like these are carried out is so that they render us speechless. Their ultimate objective is to use horror to paralyze completely—an offense committed not only against human life but also, above all, against the human condition. In Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence—an indispensable book for thinking through this reality, as understanding it is almost impossible—Adriana Cavarero reminds us that terror manifests when the body trembles and flees in order to survive. The terrorized body experiences fear and, upon finding itself within fear’s grasp, attempts to escape it. Meanwhile, horror, taken from the Latin verb horrere, goes far beyond the fear that so frequently alerts us to danger or threatens to transcend it. Confronted with Medusa’s decapitated head, a body destroyed beyond human recognition, the horrified part their lips and, incapable of uttering a single word, incapable of articulating the disarticulation that fills their gaze, mouth wordlessly. Horror is intrinsically linked to repugnance, Cavarero argues. Bewildered and immobile, the horrified are stripped of their agency, frozen in a scene of everlasting marble statues. They stare, and even though they stare fixedly, or perhaps precisely because they stare fixedly, they cannot do anything. More than vulnerable—a condition we all experience—they are defenseless. More than fragile, they are helpless. As such, horror is, above all, a spectacle—the most extreme spectacle of power. Read More