September 10, 2020 Arts & Culture Obsession By Amanda DeMarco On translating Nathalie Léger’s Exposition. Pierre-Louis Pierson, Countess Virginia Oldoini Verasis di Castiglione, 1861-67 Exposition is the first in a triptych of books by Nathalie Léger that intertwines Léger’s mother’s story with that of a female artist or celebrity. You could say that Exposition is about the Countess of Castiglione. Considered by many in Europe to be the most beautiful woman alive, Castiglione was probably the most photographed person of the nineteenth century. Born in 1837 in Florence, she was sent to Paris in 1855 to plead the cause of Italian unity at the French court, as an instrument of soft power, essentially. Unfortunately, she had terrible social skills, and it didn’t go well. She became the mistress of Napoleon III but overstepped her social position at the court and was soon asked to leave. Beginning in 1856, she had herself photographed hundreds of times at a high-end studio, spending her family fortune. She would often restage scenes from mythology but also moments of glory from her life at the French court. Some of her portraits were even presented in the International Exposition of 1867. As late as 1871, Castiglione was asked to intercede with Otto von Bismarck to discourage a German occupation of Paris. This point, the end of the Second Empire with which she was so identified, seems to mark the beginning of Castiglione’s decline, and she lived out her days in increasing isolation in her funereal Paris apartment until her death in 1899. However, she remained a legend in urban lore, granting viewings to her admirers and taking long nocturnal walks through a Paris that had changed around her. Read More
September 9, 2020 At Work Male Interiority: An Interview with Emma Cline By Annabel Graham I first encountered the work of Emma Cline in the winter of 2016, when I found myself at one of The Paris Review’s legendary parties: this one celebrating the launch of The Unprofessionals, an anthology in which Cline’s Plimpton Prize–winning story “Marion” (first published in issue no. 203) appeared. I’d arrived late, and I tried to enter as quietly as possible—the living room of 541 East Seventy-Second Street, the residence of George and Sarah Plimpton, was packed full with bodies, almost eerily hushed. Cline read an excerpt from her then-forthcoming debut novel, The Girls, which tracks a California teenager’s peripheral involvement with a Manson-esque cult in the late sixties. Though I couldn’t see her face over the sea of heads between us, I let her singular command of language, image, and psychological nuance carry me into the sort of hypnotic trance the best writing does. Once home, I devoured everything I could find of Cline’s. It was no surprise when The Girls, which I read feverishly in a few sittings, became an international best seller. In her aptly titled new story collection, Daddy, Cline delves deeper into the same thematic concerns that haunted The Girls: agency, cost, the performance of gender, the undercurrent of violence roiling just beneath the surface of ordinary life. An aspiring actress sells her underwear to strangers. A washed-up film director confronts his cruel judgments about his son, who wants to follow in his footsteps. The former nanny to a celebrity takes refuge at a friend’s home after her affair with her employer is revealed in the tabloids. A disgraced magazine editor is hired to help edit the ghostwritten memoir of a tech entrepreneur, an opportunity at what he sees as a final chance at redemption. Above all else, the characters in Daddy vie for control—at times over others, but in large part over themselves, their own narratives, and especially the ways in which they’re perceived. The lengths they go to in order to impose some semblance of that control are shocking, moving, and deeply human. Since 2016, much has changed. 541 East Seventy-Second Street no longer belongs to the Plimptons; living rooms packed with people are, at least for the foreseeable future, a thing of the past. Cline’s prose, too, has undergone an evolution of sorts. Critics of The Girls called it “overwritten”; here, Cline’s virtuosic sensory descriptions are pared down in a way that allows her piercing psychological insights to shine. A satiric, bone-dry humor reigns. Atmospheres hum as though shot through with electricity; place informs psychology, and vice versa. In late August, Cline and I spoke on the phone from opposite ends of Los Angeles, where we both currently live. A heat wave raged on; wildfires were tearing through her native Sonoma County. She was crouching in her neighbor’s driveway, trying to find better service—a scene which could’ve easily sprung from one of the stories in Daddy. INTERVIEWER Even though a handful of your protagonists are women, you render male interiority here in a highly specific, and often deeply uncomfortable, way that feels especially exciting to me. Can you talk about the process of inhabiting some of these “monstrous men”? CLINE The culture has sort of forced everyone into having to imagine the interior lives of men, and why they do what they do. Just think about the amount of energy that is expended trying to decode what Donald Trump is thinking, and why he’s acting so erratically—it’s sort of this forced contemplation of male interiority, and I thought a lot about that, during all of the #MeToo moments. Just seeing an entire workplace having to grapple with the actions of one man, and all this energy and effort that was expended by all of these other people to try and figure out what could have possibly been going on inside this man’s mind. So I think on one level it’s not that much of a leap, just because it’s something the culture is already pushing. But in terms of writing, it was nice after The Girls, which is so much about a character who feels herself to be buffeted about by this larger system that she has no control over, very much enthralled to men—there was something interesting about shifting gears so much as a writer, to try to write about men who didn’t feel so attuned to the emotional world around them, or the emotional world of others. Read More
September 9, 2020 First Person What Remains By Kerri Arsenault Photo: Kerri Arsenault. My father always stooped to pick up pennies he found on the side of the road. If he found one heads up, he considered it good luck and would tuck it in his hand. Tails up, he would leave the penny alone. To him, superstition was superior to religion; he thought he could control the output with steady input. If he stood in the batter’s box a certain way, he’d deliver a base hit. If he worked hard, his impoverished past would disappear. If he rolled the Eisenhower silver dollar he carried in his front pocket, as he did for decades, some unforeseen jinx would never occur. In the end, Eisenhower’s slim hairline and bald head wore down, leaving only a wish of an outline, adumbrated by my father’s own hand. He held such talismans close. The square nail he took from a fence in Colonial Williamsburg became a story he could tell. His P-38, a small metal multitool that used to be part of U.S. Army rations kits, became a tactile vestige of his youth. Stones he plucked from lands he’d never see again became references to who or where he’d like to be. He even gave me a charm of my own: my first year at Beloit College in Wisconsin, he picked a metal nameplate off a paper machine with BELOIT pressed into the design and sent it in the mail. They make our paper machines in Beloit, he wrote, to remind me of the small Maine paper-mill town where I was from. I wish I knew what happened to that nameplate and its emotional residue once held close by my father’s hand. * The next time I’m home, my mother gives me a small veneered box topped with a silver metal figure frozen in a bowling stance that looks a little like my father as a younger man. It was the prize he won in 1970 for earning the highest bowling average. Inside, his expired licenses and membership cards, a wooden nickel, a tiny gold heart-shaped earring he must have found on the side of the road, and his father’s matching black onyx gold-plated bracelet, tie clip, and signet ring. Read More
September 8, 2020 Redux Redux: A Ball of Waxy Light 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. Lydia Davis in Paris, 1973. This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating the release of issue no. 234 and reading work from Fall issue contributors who have appeared in the magazine before. Read on for Lydia Davis’s Art of Fiction interview, Margaret Atwood’s short story “Bodily Harm,” and Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Memory Cave.” After you’re finished, mark your calendar for our forthcoming Fall issue launch, on September 23 at 6 P.M. EST. This free virtual event will feature several Fall issue contributors reading from their work: Rabih Alameddine, Lydia Davis, Emma Hine, and Eloghosa Osunde. For more information and to RSVP, please visit our events page. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. 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. Lydia Davis, The Art of Fiction No. 227 Issue no. 212, Spring 2015 To me a short story is a defined traditional form, the sort of thing that Hemingway wrote, or Katherine Mansfield or Chekhov. It is longer, more developed, with narrated scenes and dialogue and so on. You could call some of my stories proper short stories. Most of the others I wouldn’t call short stories, even though many are very short. Some you could call poems—not many. Read More
September 8, 2020 Arts & Culture Is It Too Scary? By Eula Biss Photo: © kentannenbaum46 / Adobe Stock. I’ve been waiting all this time on the wrong platform and the train just sped by in the wrong direction. The first drops of rain are falling now and I see a taxi idling under the tracks. The driver is an older man in a baby-blue suit and he wants to talk. What do you think, he asks me, of art painted by elephants? If you’re asking if I think it could be beautiful, I tell him, then I think it could, even if the elephant had no intention of making something beautiful. But if you’re asking if abstract art isn’t really art because it could be made by animals or children, then that’s another question. What did you study in college? he asks. He studied architecture, but there wasn’t any work for him when he graduated, with debt. And that’s how he became a taxi driver. It’s good work, he tells me, in that it pays the bills. Do you think it’s wrong, he asks, to make your living teaching something that won’t earn your students a living? No, I say. And then I pause over why. The service I’m doing for my students, I tell him, is teaching them how to find value in something that isn’t widely valued. And I think it’s a gift to give another person permission to do something worthless. Read More
September 8, 2020 Happily All the Better to Hear You With By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Arthur Rackham, Aesop’s Fables, 1912 For days Foryst, my cat, seems to have something caught in his throat. I bring him to the vet. “It might be a twig,” I say. “Or a pebble.” “What’s the cat’s name?” she asks. “Foryst,” I say. “Forest,” I say again, “but with a y where the e should go.” The vet is quiet. “How old is Foryst?” she asks. “Thirteen,” I say. She looks in his mouth. “It hurts when he swallows,” I say. Foryst is still. The vet sees nothing. She listens to his heart, his lungs. She hears nothing. It suddenly makes no sense to me that she is a human. Why isn’t she a wolf with great big eyes and great big ears that are all the better to see him with? To hear him with? “I recommend blood work,” she says. I put my face in Foryst’s fur. “Please tell me what’s wrong.” He is silent. There is something in his throat. A word or a dead leaf. I am sure of it. The vet wants blood work. She wants the cold, definitive clink of numbers. I want Foryst to talk so he can tell me what hurts. I want him to cough up a dry spooked O and be suddenly healed. I want him to tell me the future. I call my mother. “There’s something stuck in Foryst’s throat.” “Of course there’s something stuck in Foryst’s throat,” she says. “Why wouldn’t there be something stuck in his throat? There’s something stuck in all of our throats.” She hangs up. I swallow once. I swallow twice. When we get home, I open Foryst’s mouth and shine a flashlight down his throat. Something shines back, like a diamond in a cave. His teeth are hieroglyphs. I want to jot them down so I can read what’s inside him. I want to reach all the way in, but he snaps his mouth shut and growls. I tell my husband there is something stuck in Foryst’s throat. “What?” he says. He lifts his left headphone from his ear. “There is something stuck in Foryst’s throat.” My husband is always wearing headphones. I say everything twice. In fairy tales animals are always talking. Even when they are dead, they are talking. Read More