April 26, 2024 The Review’s Review On Elias Canetti’s Book Against Death By Joshua Cohen Evert Collier, Vanitas – Still Life with Books and Manuscripts and a Skull, 1663, oil on panel. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Read an excerpt from The Book Against Death on the Paris Review Daily here. Quixotic is a word that comes to mind when thinking of Elias Canetti, not just because Cervantes’s novel was his favorite novel but because Canetti, too, was a man from La Mancha. His paternal family hailed from Cañete, a Moorish-fortified village in modern-day Cuenca Province, Castile-La Mancha, from which they were scattered in the mass expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Having fared better under Muslim rule than Catholic, the Cañetes passed through Italy, where their name was re-spelled, and settled in Adrianople—today’s Edirne, Turkey, near the Greek and Bulgarian borders—before moving on to Rusçuk, known in Bulgarian as Ruse, a port town on the Danube whose thriving Sephardic colony supported itself by trading between two empires, the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian. Elias, the first of three boys, was born to Jacques Canetti and Mathilde Arditti in Ruse in 1905 and in childhood was whisked away to Manchester, UK, where Jacques took over the local office of the import-export firm established by Mathilde’s brothers. In 1912, a year after the family’s arrival in England, Jacques died suddenly of a heart attack, and Mathilde took her brood via Lausanne to Vienna and then, in 1916, in the midst of the First World War, to neutral Zurich. It was in Vienna that Canetti acquired acquired, or was acquired by, the German language, which would become his primary language, though it was already his fifth, after—in chronological order—Ladino, Bulgarian, English, and French. Following a haphazard education in Zurich, Frankfurt, and Berlin, Canetti returned to Vienna to study chemistry and medicine but spent most of his energies on literature, especially on writing plays that were never produced, though he often read them aloud, doing all the voices. At the time, his primary influence was journalistic—the feuilletons of Karl Kraus—which might have been a way of giving himself the necessary distance from the German-language novels of the Viennese generation preceding his own, the doorstops of Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, both of whom were known to him personally. His own contribution to fiction—his sole contribution to that quixotic art—came in 1935 with Die Blendung (The blinding), which concerns a Viennese bibliophile and Sinologist who winds up being immolated along with his library. Die Blendung was translated into English as Auto da Fé—a preferred punishment of the Inquisition—though Elias’s original suggestion for the English-language title was Holocaust. In nearly all the brief biographical notes on Canetti, this is where the break comes: when he abandons the theater, publishes his only fiction, and escapes the Nazis by leaving the continent. Exile brought him to England again, and to nonfiction, specifically to Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power), a study of “the crowd,” be that in the form of an audience, a protest movement or political demonstration, or a rowdy group threatening to riot—any assemblage in which constituent individuality has been dissolved and re-bonded into a mass, as in the chemical reactions in which Canetti was schooled, or as in the atomic reactions that threaten planetary existence. Canetti’s singular study of collective behavior, published in 1960, stands at the center of his corpus, along with his remarkable series of memoirs, each named for a single sense: The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, The Play of the Eyes. Five volumes were projected, but the series went unfinished: no volume connected to smell or touch was ever completed, and the final year of his life covered in the memoirs is 1937, the year Canetti’s mother died and he began to conceive of a book “against” death, a version of which—the only available version of which—can be found on the pages that follow. Read More
April 26, 2024 The Review’s Review “Choose Hope or Despair”: On John Shoptaw By Jenny Odell A flock of sanderlings in San Francisco, California, in 2011. Brocken Inaglory, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CCO 3.0. In 2007, the same year I was taking my third undergraduate poetry class with John Shoptaw at UC Berkeley, I wrote a short story for a fiction seminar. It involved two estranged friends driving a route familiar to me, between Cupertino and the sparsely visited San Gregorio State Beach. Halfway through the story, we learn that there has been a nationwide pandemic of debilitating anxiety and that everyone has received government-issued Ativan pills. We also learn the reason for the friends’ strained conversation: the Ativan is not working for one of them. When he looks at the world, all he sees is loss and future agony. The friends have a final showdown at the beach, which is littered with dead bees. One friend insists that everything is fine (though his denial is wearing thin), and the other skulks off to a boat that he plans to launch recklessly into the slate-gray, unfriendly surf. This was of course an argument with myself, one I failed to resolve in my life as much as in the story. Thanks to Shoptaw, with whom I reunited eleven years later, and whom I count as a close friend and mentor, I’ve learned a word that helps me understand the problem I faced. It came up one hot day a few years ago, in a sliver of redwoods at a local botanical garden, where we were discussing our respective projects involving time. The term is prolepsis, a figure of speech in which a future event is represented as having already taken place. An oft-cited example of prolepsis is in Keats’s “Isabella,” in which two men and a man they plan to kill are described as “two brothers and their murder’d man.” For many of us, especially those of my generation and younger, there is a serious need to address something like a habitual prolepsis, a feeling that we inhabit a(n already) murdered world. Read More
April 25, 2024 On Poetry Making of a Poem: Maureen N. McLane on “Haptographic Interface” By Maureen N. McLane The poem begins. Photograph courtesy of Maureen McLane. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Maureen N. McLane’s poem “Haptographic Interface” appears in the new Spring issue of the Review. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? This poem took wing, or distilled itself, during a conference on “Writing Practice” at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf in September 2022. I started writing while listening to the closing remarks. The scholar Andrew Bennett had given a talk on Keats vis-à-vis haptographics, a term I hadn’t heard before—that was one spur. Keats is someone I’ve read and thought about for a long time (in one wing of my life I work on Romantic-era poetry). Bennett had spoken about Keats’s handwriting—how moving it can be to encounter it—and his letters, and the matter of “literary remains.” Some months after the conference, I looked up haptographics—one of the first hits on Google tells you that “haptographic technology involves highly sensorized handheld tools”—is a pen such? Haptography is a technique for “capturing the feel of real objects”—is this what Keats was up to, capturing the feel of things (experiences, emotions, movements of thought)? I think so. Is this still poetry’s aim? These are questions the poem implicitly pursues, but I can only say that having written the poem. There was no thesis-in-advance. Read More
April 24, 2024 On Music The Art of the Libretto: John Adams By Sophie Haigney John Adams. Photograph by Deborah O’Grady. This week, a new production of the composer John Adams’s oratorio El Niño opened at the Metropolitan Opera, where it will run until May 17. El Niño is Adams’ rewriting of the Nativity story, and his libretto—cowritten with stage director Peter Sellars, in one their many collaborations—draws on source texts as wide-ranging the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and Mexican poetry written in the sixties. The text of the libretto reminded me of an assemblage poem as much as an opera. I spoke to Adams, who has composed some of the most notable contemporary operas, among them Nixon in China, for our Art of The Libretto series. We talked over Zoom recently about the joys and pains of collaboration, learning and then setting Spanish text to music, his life as a Californian, and his attempt to write his own Messiah. INTERVIEWER How did El Niño begin for you? JOHN ADAMS I’d been asked by the Châtelet in Paris to create something to celebrate for the millennium. So I began to think about what the millennium was and what was special about the year 2000. It also reminded me that ever since I was a kid, I had always loved Handel’s Messiah, which speaks to that time of year, because it’s also about birth, optimism, and hope. I thought that the millennium as a celebration should have something to do with these emotions. If you want to put it in another way, I wanted to write my own Messiah. Read More
April 23, 2024 Dinner Parties Bad Dinner Guest By Laurie Stone Photographic print by Frank Scholten, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. I ruined a dinner party ten years ago in Phoenix. Among the guests was a judge who said abortion was an issue that reasonable people could disagree on, and I opened my mouth. At that time, Richard was teaching at the sprawling university in Tempe. We were at the home of two people we were lucky even talked to us. The woman in the couple was a brilliant sculptor. She built whole cities out of clay, where invisible inhabitants take refuge from the “everlasting no” I often represent. The man was a tenderhearted and sexy archaeologist, who was heading a big fat famous institute on human origins and the kind of primate behavior that accounts for actions like mine. He was, like me, a Jew from the East Coast, and he recognized in me a collegial form of urban unrefinement he liked. Read More
April 22, 2024 First Person Encyclopedia Brown: A Story for My Brother, Philip Seymour Hoffman By Emily Barr Philip, Emily, and their dog, Tess, in the summer of 1990. Photograph by Marilyn O’Connor. “What do you do with the old magazines when the new issues come out?” I asked the librarian. “At the end of the year, we donate them to neighborhood schools so kids can cut them up and make collages,” she replied. Our small public library is relatively new, sparsely filled with only the most popular items: a smattering of pregnancy and parenting books, mostly on sleep training; the latest mystery novels; DVDs on how to build your own she-shed; and a few shelves of history and religion to round it out. We live in a master-planned community filled with parks in a kid-friendly city, so the children’s section is by far the biggest part of the library. This library is very different from the Rochester Public Library close to where I grew up in New York. I can remember our mom bringing my older brother, Phil, and me to the main branch downtown during school breaks to pass the time. The children’s room was so tucked away you had to crawl through a tiny child-size secret wooden door to get to it. That was my favorite part. The library, which opened in 1936, was massive, dark, and quiet, but inside that small room, there were tall windows where the sun splashed from the Genesee River onto the colorfully illustrated book covers. I wanted to check out dozens of books but knew that my mom would get frustrated trying to find the overdue items missing somewhere in our messy room while late fees piled up. Read More