September 19, 2025 The Review’s Review Fall Books: On Tarjei Vesaas’s The Birds and The Ice Palace By Karl Ove Knausgaard Vesaas’s home in Telemark, Norway. National Library of Norway, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. There are books that don’t leave you once you have finished reading them but remain with you, some for the rest of your life. To me Tarjei Vesaas’s two masterpieces, The Birds and The Ice Palace, are such books. This is not just because they are good—the world is full of good books—but also because they did something to me, changed something in me. I think of The Birds as a place, a place where something vital becomes visible, something that is always present but goes unnoticed, something that Vesaas’s novel, through its great attentiveness, allows to appear. The protagonist is named Mattis. He is mentally disabled and lives with his sister, unable to provide for himself. In social settings he is helpless, he senses other people’s wills and demands but is unable to satisfy them, he gets all tangled up inside. But when he is by himself, in the forest, for instance, or out on the lake below the house they live in, his being opens up, and the world he knows, the world of nature, flows through him; in his relation to it, he is free and unfettered. The linguistic sensibility that Vesaas evinces to accomplish this is unsurpassed. The same sensibility is found in The Ice Palace, which is about an encounter between two eleven-year-old girls, Siss and Unn. They are drawn to each other without knowing why, and their encounter—where everything that is at stake, everything that happens between them is wordless—takes place in an indefinite zone between sensations, emotions, and thoughts, a zone in the novel with its own animal alertness. Seen from the outside, it is difficult to imagine a literature further from the center than these two books. The center of power, the center of money, the center of the entertainment industry. We are in the Norwegian countryside in the fifties, in the mind of a village idiot and in the mind of an eleven-year-old prepubescent girl. And the author himself, Tarjei Vesaas, came from a small, isolated inland village, surrounded by deep forests and high mountains, where he lived his entire life, and he wrote his books in Nynorsk, a language used by a mere half a million people. But when you open The Birds or The Ice Palace and begin to read, you are transported not to the periphery of the world but to its very midst. The circumstances of life in which the main characters, Mattis and Siss, find themselves, are far removed from the reader’s, but their being, their existential presence, is not. And this span of the reading experience is in a sense built into the books themselves, in their rhythm and overarching theme: the interplay between the familiar and the foreign, the near and the far, the graspable and the unfathomable. Vesaas himself called this the “Great Cycle.” Read More
September 18, 2025 Diaries Diary, 1978 By Celia Paul Photograph courtesy of Celia Paul. This diary entry was written on November 15, 1978, just after my nineteenth birthday, before Lucian Freud took me to meet Frank Auerbach for the first time. And the nervous head-jerks and twists of a wild bird. He receives you nervously, tentatively at first and then lunges at you, kissing you as though he would drown you, then as suddenly withdraws and with a serious, abstracted expression, moves towards the hall. Read More
September 17, 2025 First Person Indian Names By Julian Brave NoiseCat Ed Archie NoiseCat, Coyote Survives the Night. Courtesy of Julian Brave NoiseCat. The night watchman who found my newborn father in the dumpster said his cries for life sounded like a cat. But that was pure, if darkly ironic, coincidence. Because our last name, NoiseCat, originally had nothing to do with noises or cats. Instead, “Noiscat,” as it was once written, is a missionary’s bastardization of our ancestral name, Newísket. My family was colonized so hard we don’t remember what Newísket means. What I do know is that the name belonged to my great-grandmother Alice Noiscat from the village of Canoe Creek on the Fraser River. Listening to family and elders, I figure Alice was either a daughter, granddaughter, orphan, or slave of Copper Johnny Noiscat. Copper Johnny must’ve been both clever and industrious. During the Gold Rush and subsequent settlement of the colony and then province of British Columbia, he laid claim to a meadow that still bears his name. Today, Copper Johnny Meadow Indian Reserve No. 8 is part of the reserve lands of the remote Stswecem’c/Xget’tem (Canoe Creek/Dog Creek) First Nation. I’m not sure what Copper referred to. Maybe it referred to his red skin—a name stuck on him by semé7 (whites) who gave Indians names for amusement and convenience: “Oh yeah, this one’s ‘Indian Jim’ and that one’s ‘Copper Johnny.’ ” (In Secwepemctsín, the 7 denotes a glottal stop. The word kyé7e, “grandmother,” for example, is pronounced “kya-ah.”) Or maybe it referred to his wealth. In the Indigenous Northwest, copper is a prized trade good signifying that its owner has a wealth of food and culture to share. In a world where Indians had all our land taken from us, an Indian with land like Copper Johnny was rich. Copper Johnny Meadow may be the ancestral territory of the Newískets going back to some mythic progenitor whose deeds were marked and remembered on that land—through creation, transformation, and forces both natural and supernatural that make our world the way it is—all the way back to Coyote and whoever the first Newísket was. Or maybe, Copper Johnny is that first Newísket. He’s the oldest one we still remember today. Based on conversations with my kyé7e, Alice’s daughter, the name Newísket could mean a couple of things—maybe “Long Day” or “Tall Timber Day.” But to see how that might be the case, it’s necessary to understand some of the history and peculiarities of Secwepemctsín and the Salish languages. Because like the meaning of my name, my ancestral tongues are fast slipping from the Land of the Living to that of the dead. Read More
September 16, 2025 Diaries Tour Diary, 2008 By Natasha Stagg Photograph by Alexander Fleming. Courtesy of Natasha Stagg. In 2008, I graduated from the University of Michigan and went on a North American tour as the merch girl for my boyfriend at the time, a drummer some fourteen years older than me in an indie band. I didn’t have a smartphone or laptop and perhaps couldn’t find the privacy to write in a notebook from the van, so I typed a “tour diary” in the days after we returned, on a platform that I had until recently assumed was deleted. By 2008, the band had gone through several lineup changes since its start. The men—my boyfriend and the lead singer—were the only remaining original members. The women—a bassist and a second guitarist, also backup singers—had been hired to replace other women, whom I had already gotten to know and like. I mention this as context because my connection to a previous iteration may have been subtly felt. Either way, I’m sure my boyfriend had to defend the decision to take me along. Everyone else was older and treated the band as a job, because it was. I had been hired to sell T-shirts but treated the tour as a vacation from my day job (selling groceries). I’ve changed the names of band members because I’m not in touch with any of them and can’t ask their permission to publish this. I’ve also obscured or deleted the names of other bands, because mostly I wrote about how bad they were and how, in one case, I broke their merch intentionally. Accidentally rediscovering these notes, I am mostly struck by my own immaturity, although perhaps I shouldn’t be. It’s clear to me now that I was trying to convince myself of some intolerable situation, something that was worse than (or larger than?) leaving college and entering so-called real life. May 15, 2008 Subterranean – Chicago, Illinois Wake up around 11 A.M. to Andy’s mother in his house [in Ann Arbor, Michigan]. Have breakfast nervously, making sure I have everything. Ride in the back seat (because I’m told to) while Andy drops off his mother at a dumpster so she can dive in it. Go back to Andy’s house. Ben [the singer/guitarist], Carly [the second guitarist], and Daria [the bassist] arrive, having driven a rented van and trailer from the band’s practice space outside of Detroit. They help us load our suitcases into the trailer, which already has Andy’s drums in it. Ben drives us to Chicago. Early show, 7:30 P.M., not many people because of a false advertisement, bad opening band (lead singer steals all our free PBR tallboys and chugs them) but good show from [the touring opener]. Meet Ernest, our tour manager, who flew in from El Paso, I think. Pack up, check into the hotel (six of us in one room), and go across the street to a diner. Eat, then go back to the hotel to watch TV and go to sleep. Read More
September 12, 2025 The Review’s Review Fall Books: On Shamanism: The Timeless Religion By Marta Figlerowicz From a portfolio by Jacques Hérold, originally published in the Fall 1961 issue of The Paris Review. In Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Ethnographer,” a white American graduate student named Fred embeds himself into a Native American tribe. Eventually, he penetrates its “secret doctrine.” His advisor then summons him back to report on it: He made his way to his professor’s office and told him that he knew the secret, but had resolved not to reveal it. “Are you bound by your oath?” the professor asked. “That’s not the reason,” Murdock replied. “I learned something out there that I can’t express.” “The English language may not be able to communicate it,” the professor suggested. “That’s not it, sir. Now that I possess the secret, I could tell it in a hundred different and even contradictory ways. I don’t know how to tell you this, but the secret is beautiful, and science, our science, seems mere frivolity to me now.” Borges’s story plays with the view that Western and non-Western cultures are fundamentally untranslatable. Stepping into a non-Western belief system makes one fall off the edge of purportedly rational, secular knowledge. Read More
September 12, 2025 The Review’s Review Fall Books: On George Whitmore’s Nebraska By Paul McAdory George Whitmore in his New York apartment, 1980. Photograph by James Steakley, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. I’m going to make a man out of you yet. Parents have probably been making variations on this threat for as long as they’ve had to tolerate weird sons. All sons being weird, that adds up to many threats. But some sons are queer; what then? Two years before his death from AIDS in 1989, George Whitmore—a one-time member of the Violet Quill, the short-lived early-eighties gay-male writing group that also included Edmund White and Andrew Holleran—published his third and final novel, Nebraska, on the theme of anguished man-making. The long-out-of-print text asks what combination of forces and tactics might induce manhood in a fruity kid: isolation, kidnapping, alcoholism, neglect? Now the Song Cave has reissued the book, and, in addition to an inventory of mom-and-pop solutions for correcting aberrant masculinities, we’ve recovered a perfect expression of horniness: “There came a singing in my head.” Desire is an earworm. Nebraska is a stubby gay bildungsroman that tracks an amputee named Craig Mullen, our narrator, from his bedridden preteens in fifties Flyoverlandia to his desperate twenties in SoCal. The novel is a stomach turner that plays sick tricks on the reader. Craig levels false accusations of sexual abuse against a closeted family member, and the results are catastrophic, as his relative undergoes a forced infantilization that runs parallel to Craig’s growing up. When Craig encounters the man again years later, genuine abuse rockets into the frame as a kind of outrageous punchline. The prospect of happiness for the gay characters of this era is rendered as a book-length joke. The novel twists its horrors into funny shapes, like balloon animals filled with poison gas. Read More