October 7, 2020 At Work Ice Pick: An Interview with Katharina Volckmer By RL Goldberg Author photo: Jean-François Paga When Katharina Volckmer and I first met over Zoom, her in London and myself in Baltimore, I couldn’t stop talking, not unlike the narrator of Volckmer’s debut novel, The Appointment. The novel is bracingly frank, acerbic; some might call it transgressive, though I don’t think that’s the right term. The novel’s titration of wit, directness, and erudition made me feel a bit like the narrator: full of nervous, excited, voluble energy. I said that if Volckmer didn’t like any of the questions I’d prepared, she could skip them. She wryly offered to “do a Klaus Kinski on me,” alluding to the German actor’s notorious hostility in interviews. Our conversation could not have been more unlike a Kinski interview: Volckmer was measured and patient, generous with her time and humor. This is not to say that our conversation was comforting, which makes sense, as Volckmer’s work refuses comfort. Elsewhere, she noted, “We cannot spend our lives wearing woolly socks and drinking tea and expecting books and art to broadly reconfirm what we think already—I’m much more in favour of thinking of art as some sort of ice pick,” recalling Kafka’s notion that “we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” The Appointment, out this month from Simon & Schuster, is reminiscent of a Bernhardian monologue, one half of the conversation between a German patient living in London and her Jewish doctor. Over the course of her appointment, the speaker “tests the ice,” demarcating the boundaries of the sayable and the unsaid. Superficially, the novel offers a garrulous tide of sentiments that many might find upsetting (we begin with the narrator’s Hitler sex fantasies). But it is also deftly subtle, never binding the narrator to a determined gender identity or to a specific historical or national inheritance. At once sexy, hilarious, and subversive, the book is also acutely sad. Desire, in this novel, takes many forms: the desire to be heard, the desire to be otherwise, the desire for a different past and a different future. It was not lost on me that my meeting with Volckmer staged, at least formally, the conversation in the book: Volckmer was born in Germany; I am Jewish; the structure of an interview begs confession. But there the similarities stopped. We spoke, on this recent September evening, about identity and desire, the inheritance of the Holocaust, the difficulties with which German readers might receive the book, the impossible definition of a “trans novel,” nestbeschmutzers, Tolstoy, and form. “Every writing worthy of its name wrestles with the Angel and, at best, comes out limping,” French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard wrote in Heidegger and “the jews”; Volckmer’s novel comes out limping in the finest sense, ice pick aloft, frozen sea shattering. INTERVIEWER When people ask you to sum up the book, how do you sum it up? Because the only way I’ve been able to do so is to say something like, It starts with a Hitler sex fantasy and goes on from there. But that part is so peripheral to the novel. VOLCKMER For me the easiest has been to say it’s about identity. It’s obviously about gender identity. One of the questions I often ask myself is, What is it about your identity you can possibly change? Is there anything you can really change about it? Or is there nothing you can change about it? Obviously you can’t change the fact of the language you’re born into or the geographic location you’re born into. And she’s trying. She doesn’t want to be German necessarily, she doesn’t want to live with that burden and that guilt. But the only thing she can really change is her gender, that’s something she can do. And she decides to do it with a Jewish doctor. The original title for the book was A Jewish Cock. That’s the point where she tries to mix these two aspects of her identity, her gender and her national identity. Obviously it’s slightly absurd because she thinks, “If I get a Jewish cock I won’t be as German anymore.” But for me the book was about exploring what things you can permanently change about yourself and what you can’t, and some of the sadness that comes with that. INTERVIEWER Could you speak a bit about Dr. Seligman? He’s very reticent. How do you see that character both in silence and, simultaneously, in dialogue with the narrator? VOLCKMER To me, he’s always been as important as the narrator. He’s very present and—I’m going to keep saying this until someone does it—I’d love to see it on a stage because it’s quite theatrical. His presence was also important because a lot of the stuff she says I didn’t want to be spoken into a void. It’s always her feeling her way along that fine line of the stuff she can say and the stuff she can’t say. Even though he’s silent, and it’s technically a monologue, it’s got strong elements of a dialogue. I hope it has. Of course, it also makes her at times less secure. If he was talking back it would be no different, but there’s an opacity and she has to work it out by herself. Read More
October 7, 2020 Happily It’s Time to Pay the Piper By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Pied Piper illustration by Kate Greenaway It’s time to pay the piper. We gather around the old wooden table. No one wants to pay, but it’s time. It’s one thousand o’clock. Everyone is here. The living and the dead. My grandparents, my mother, my father, my sons, my husband, the rabbis, even the president. You are here, too. Your teachers, your neighbors, your long-lost friends. Everyone you know is here. We put what we can on the table. Everyone must add to the pot. My sons leave wildflower seeds, my husband leaves a rose-colored pendulum, the president mutters and leaves ash, the rabbis leave ink marks scattered like sewing needles, my father leaves his stethoscope. I leave this essay. I leave my favorite broom. My grandfather leaves a small black key. My grandmother leaves her radiance. My sister leaves her hair. “I’m not paying,” says my mother. “I’ve paid enough.” The earliest known version of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” is not a fairy tale, but a stained glass windowpane from a church in Hamelin, Germany, that was destroyed in 1633. Only a shard remains, which my nine-year-old son, Noah, pulls from his pocket and holds up to the light. It’s the piece of glass with the piper’s magical flute. The flute is bronze, and the light catches what’s left of the piper’s hands. Noah adds the shard to what we’ll use to pay the piper. Read More
October 6, 2020 Redux Redux: The Things between Me and Time 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. Grace Paley. This week at The Paris Review, the clock is ticking. Read on for Grace Paley’s Art of Fiction interview, V. S. Naipaul’s short story “My Aunt Gold Teeth,” and David Rokeah’s poem “Between Me and Time.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or, to celebrate the students and teachers in your life, why not gift our special subscription deal featuring a copy of Writers at Work around the World for 50% off? And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more. Grace Paley, The Art of Fiction No. 131 Issue no. 124, Fall 1992 INTERVIEWER What were you doing before you became a published writer? GRACE PALEY I was working part time. I was hanging out a lot. I was kind of lazy. I had my kids when I was about twenty-six, twenty-seven. I took them to the park in the afternoons. Thank God I was lazy enough to spend all that time in Washington Square Park. I say lazy but of course it was kind of exhausting running after two babies. Still, looking back I see the pleasure of it. That’s when I began to know women very well—as co-workers, really. I had a part-time job as a typist up at Columbia. In fact, when I began to write stories, I typed some up there, and some in the PTA office of P.S. 41 on Eleventh Street. If I hadn’t spent that time in the playground, I wouldn’t have written a lot of those stories. That’s pretty much how I lived. And then we had our normal family life—struggles and hard times. That takes up a lot of time, hard times. Uses up whole days. Read More
October 6, 2020 Look Painting with a Moth’s Wing By The Paris Review Agnes Pelton was overlooked during her lifetime, but her paintings are eternal. Deeply abstract and yet grounded in shape and line—she has a predilection for looming landmasses, jellyfish-like veils, rings of light, and the alignment of planets and stars—her work lays bare the workings of the universe. She once described her process as “painting with a moth’s wing and with music instead of paint.” These are cosmic visions projected from the sleeping desert floor. The first retrospective of her work in more than two decades, “Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist,” is on view through November 1 at the recently reopened Whitney Museum of American Art. A selection of images from the show appears below. Agnes Pelton, Future, 1941, oil on canvas, 30 × 26″. Collection of Palm Springs Art Museum, seventy-fifth anniversary gift of Gerald E. Buck in memory of Bente Buck, best friend and life companion. Agnes Pelton, Messengers, 1932, oil on canvas, 28 × 20″. Collection of Phoenix Art Museum; gift of The Melody S. Robidoux Foundation. Read More
October 6, 2020 At Work Something to Hold On To: An Interview with Rumaan Alam By Cornelia Channing photo credit: David A. Land Leave the World Behind was written in the before times. It was written before the pandemic, the recession, and the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. It was written before wildfires burned more than four million acres of the American West and before skies halfway across the globe were made blurry with smoke. And yet it feels, in a way, like the first novel to be written about our new world. This is not only because it centers around a group of people quarantined in a house together during a crisis (though it does), but because it offers a clear-eyed, if deeply unsettling, portrait of what emerges when our shared reality is bent, cracked, and forever altered. The novel follows Amanda and Clay, a white couple from Brooklyn, who, following the seductive command of the novel’s title, go on vacation to a rural area on the East End of Long Island with their teenage children, Archie and Rose. But after a few indulgent days of hamburgers, sex, and drinking wine by the pool, the homeowners, a Black couple named G. H. and Ruth, arrive one night unannounced. They bring with them news that there has been a blackout in New York City, and, panicked, they have come to stay. It is an awkward, fraught moment that seems to set up a story about race and hypocrisy and misjudged expectations. Without giving too much away—Alam should teach a master class on the suspenseful withholding of information—the novel quickly spirals into something entirely different. Over the next twenty-four hours, a series of terrifying and inexplicable events befall the household. The internet and phone service go out; Archie comes down with a bad fever; flamingos land in the swimming pool; and the air is rent by a series of massive, deafening sounds. Overnight, the world becomes unrecognizable, and the strangers form a tense, unlikely union. Alam plays his cards close to the chest, explaining very little about the nature of the crisis. And in a way, uncertainty itself becomes the novel’s primary subject. Alam attends to the contours of that uncertainty with devastating precision. At a time when focus has not come easily to me—my attention flickers restlessly between impossible headlines, bottomless news feeds, and the same four walls I have occupied since March—I was held still by the urgency, beauty, and uncanny familiarity of Alam’s world. The author of two previous novels, Rich and Pretty (2016) and That Kind of Mother (2018), Alam’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, and The New Republic, where he is a contributing editor. He also cohosts two podcasts for Slate. Leave The World Behind is a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. I spoke to Alam by phone in late September. He was at home with his husband and kids in Brooklyn, where he has spent most of the past seven months since the pandemic began. He spoke softly, he explained, because his children were attending online school in another room. INTERVIEWER In your new novel, strangers are stuck in a house together as the world undergoes a mysterious and unidentified disaster. You wrote the book long before the pandemic began, but it’s almost impossible to read it or discuss it without acknowledging the eerie resonances it has with our current moment. ALAM Yes, totally. And, of course, in a very simple way, it’s just a strange coincidence. The fact that I fixed on the metaphor of isolation and the device of people trapped in a house, without knowing that we, American readers, would all be people trapped in our houses, was just an accident of timing. But the novel is also grappling with things that I think have been in the cultural atmosphere for a long time. It’s talking about technology and our strange dependence on it. It’s talking about race and the very complicated ways in which race defines people in our country and in our culture. These are not new ideas. These are things that have been in the air for a long time. It’s inevitable that the cultural and political context of a given moment will determine how we understand art, right? But art isn’t necessarily a reflection of that immediate context. It’s usually the product of an earlier moment. A painting takes time. A film takes time. A book takes time. It’s an understandable impulse to try to make sense of art through the lens of the current moment. And this current moment—I’m talking particularly about the coronavirus—is so heightened. It’s so strange and unusual that it has really dramatically affected how we understand art. There are so many relics of the recent past that already feel irrelevant. When I say that, I am thinking about a reality TV show that I happen to be watching. It was filmed before the pandemic, and it just feels like it’s from a million years ago. But I don’t think that that’s necessarily a fair way to consider art. It has to have a longer or a broader purpose than simply to riff on something in the moment. In many ways, I would be very suspicious of a work that emerged right now—a film, a book, even a short story—that aimed to talk about what is happening right now … whether that is the coronavirus or the 2020 election, because it’s still happening. You need a little context, a little distance. INTERVIEWER That makes a lot of sense. ALAM A while ago, I posted a related question on Twitter. I was trying to solve this problem intellectually and I asked around to see if anyone thought there was a really good novel about 9/11. I don’t mean a novel that depicts 9/11, but a novel that distills what that moment felt like in our cultural and political life, in our individual psyches, in our collective psyches. A novel that really got at what that moment was. And a friend of mine responded, very wisely I think, that they felt it took until Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried for the culture to digest in literature the Vietnam War. And that book didn’t come out until like two decades after the war ended. I think that is a very astute statement. It takes time to digest something in a work of art. If my book was, in a way, an attempt to digest current uncertainties, they were pre-pandemic, pre–Donald Trump existential uncertainties. We are going to see much more art that wrestles with this question. INTERVIEWER That said, I think people are hungry for art that speaks to the bizarre moment we are in. And it’s been interesting to see the novels and films, some of which are decades old, that have a renaissance right now. Is there a particular book or film that you have gone back to during the pandemic? Read More
October 5, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 28 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive selection below. “We’re trying something new with The Art of Distance this month. Over the next four weeks, we’re serializing a story in four parts. Deciding what to share was no easy task. We have more than a thousand stories, novel excerpts, and other permutations of storytelling in the magazine’s archive. (I’d be remiss not to remind you that subscribers to the print magazine just have to link their account to get digital access to those stories in their entirety—and to more than four hundred Writers at Work interviews and north of four thousand poems as well.) That being said, Edward P. Jones’s “Marie,” which originally appeared in issue no. 122 (Spring 1992), felt like a natural choice for this moment. (The story later appeared in Jones’s PEN/Hemingway Award–winning debut collection, Lost in the City.) Here is a story about the possibility—and the frustrations—of Washington, D.C., about ageism and bureaucracy and the importance of listening to each other. So without further ado, please enjoy part 1 of “Marie,” by Edward P. Jones.” —EN P.S. Today also happens to be Jones’s birthday—happy birthday, Edward! Every now and again, as if on a whim, the Federal government people would write to Marie Delaveaux Wilson in one of those white, stampless envelopes and tell her to come in to their place so they could take another look at her. They, the Social Security people, wrote to her in a foreign language that she had learned to translate over the years, and for all of the years she had been receiving the letters the same man had been signing them. Once, because she had something important to tell him, Marie called the number the man always put at the top of the letters, but a woman answered Mr. Smith’s telephone and told Marie he was in an all day meeting. Another time she called and a man said Mr. Smith was on vacation. And finally one day a woman answered and told Marie that Mr. Smith was deceased. The woman told her to wait and she would get someone new to talk to her about her case, but Marie thought it bad luck to have telephoned a dead man and she hung up. Read More