September 2, 2020 At Work We Take Everything with Us: An Interview with Yaa Gyasi By Langa Chinyoka When I call Yaa Gyasi to talk about her new novel, Transcendent Kingdom, we are both in New York—she in Brooklyn and I in Harlem. Because of the pandemic, even our relative proximity feels like distance. Our conversation often turns to the topic of distance, how it manifests in the novel and how it plays into the journey toward healing. Transcendent Kingdom could be called a chronicle of an attempt to heal. The narrative follows Gifty, a graduate student at Stanford who is studying reward-seeking behavior in mice. Though Gifty is in denial about her own past trauma, her work is influenced by her family history: her brother’s addiction and eventual overdose, her mother’s depression. That repressed past emerges into the present when Gifty’s mother, in the middle of a depressive episode, moves to California to live with her. With her mother sleeping in her bed, Gifty is forced into a role reversal: caring for the woman who raised her, trying to will her back to health. Gifty is forced to reconcile her new self, the scientist, with the constant reminder of her old self, an Evangelical Ghanaian immigrant raised in Alabama. I wanted to know how Gyasi came to write a novel that departs so much from her first novel, the critically acclaimed Homegoing, a multigenerational saga that spans centuries. I was surprised to hear her say that sticking to a single character in Transcendent Kingdom felt more freeing. The story feels like an excavation, like pulling from the depths a self. When I heard Gyasi speak years ago at Scripps College, she described Homegoing as “a series of love stories.” And certainly each of those vignettes felt like a tribute, small offerings of a character that left the reader mourning the final page of each chapter. With Transcendent Kingdom, Gyasi proves that she can sustain our love for a character over the course of an entire novel. My heart broke for Gifty, my eyes rolled at Gifty, and my chest tightened each time I felt her finally reaching, tentatively and reticently, for intimacy, community, an acceptance of the past and all the feelings that had gone so long hidden. “Where are you, Gifty?” the reader asks. “Come out, come out, come out.” INTERVIEWER This novel is a departure from your last one. In a lot of ways, Homegoing asks questions about American history and mythology. The idea of Americanness. Transcendent Kingdom feels like a personal mythology, a more intimate idea. What is the role of myth, both personal and cultural? GYASI With Homegoing I was thinking about the oracular, larger-than-life nature of storytelling—not necessarily myth, but I was thinking a lot about fables and folklore. I was trying to encompass so much time, and that voice of folklore felt like it could lend itself to holding together such a large swath of story. But for Transcendent Kingdom, I think there’s a more intimate nature to the myth. The family has to start anew and create something of their own in a place where they are othered, not just because of their status as immigrants but also because of the reticent nature of the matriarch, who is often very slow to engage with community. It’s this creation of a family myth that allows them to get through without community. INTERVIEWER Homegoing holds together so much story in a series of vignettes, but Transcendent Kingdom is the whole history of Gifty’s life, as told by Gifty. How did that feel different, both in the writing and in the aims of the story? GYASI I wasn’t setting out to write something completely different from Homegoing when I started. But it became clear to me pretty early on that the story was Gifty’s story alone and that I wanted it to be in first person—and I had never written anything of sustained length in first person before. I found it really challenging and stretching in nice ways. It made me have to think about this character, to try to find ways to see around what she was seeing, and I found that really exciting. There’s a kind of intimacy in this book. I really enjoyed the process of staying with a single character and trying to see into all of the nooks and crannies of her consciousness. INTERVIEWER Elsewhere, you’ve said that sticking to Gifty’s life, Gifty’s voice, was more freeing. How so? GYASI With Homegoing, I knew that I wanted to write a book that covered many centuries and many different countries and cultures and people, so I took almost a mathematical approach to it. How many years between eighteenth-century Ghana and present-day America? How many generations is that? How many pages do I need to write in order to fulfill that? It was much more constrained than Transcendent Kingdom by design. I wanted Homegoing to move very quickly and so I gave myself a twenty- to thirty-page limit for every chapter. Things like that. Those kinds of restraints I did not have with Transcendent Kingdom. It was just really loose. It could be as long as I wanted, and I didn’t have to move around at all. So there was this freedom to explore and to think about structure in an entirely new way, which was really pleasurable. It was like stretching a muscle that I hadn’t gotten to use the last time. Read More
September 1, 2020 Redux Redux: Snap and Glare and Secret Life 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. Pat Barker. Photo courtesy of Pat Barker. This week at The Paris Review, we’re dwelling on endings, finishes, and closures. Read on for Pat Barker’s Art of Fiction interview, Reinaldo Arenas’s short story “The Parade Ends,” and Adrienne Rich’s poem “End of an Era.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or, better yet, subscribe to our special summer offer with The New York Review of Books for only $99. And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a 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. Pat Barker, The Art of Fiction No. 243 Issue no. 227, Winter 2018 What I would say is that if you’ve got a strong ending, basically you’ve got the book. If you know you’re working toward something that you think works, you’ll get there, somehow, no matter how awful it is struggling with what’s going on in the middle. It’s much harder to bring a book to fruition when you have a very good sound beginning that then peters out into nothing. Books stand or fall really on their endings. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a good novel that has a weak ending. Read More
September 1, 2020 Conspiracy Wait! What Year Is This? By Rich Cohen In his monthly column, Conspiracy, Rich Cohen gets to the bottom of it all. Do you ever feel like you are somewhere you’re not supposed to be? In a world that is not supposed to exist? Have you ever marveled at how long you have been alive, how old you feel, or how different the world has become than the world you once knew? Have you ever woken in the dead of night, sat up in bed and said, as if from the depths of your being, No. This is a mistake. This is all wrong. Is it the coronavirus that makes you feel this way, the quarantine, the deaths? Is it the fact that you currently spend twenty-four hours a day with your kids, the youngest of whom sounds like this, MAW, MAW, MAW? Is it that you will be seventy if and when that child graduates from college, if you are alive, if there is college? Is it the spooky new relevance you find in the Hank Williams Jr. lyric, “The preacher man says it’s the end of time and the Mississippi River is going dry”? Is it that you live in a flat-roofed house made of windows, that New Orleans was again destroyed by flood, that California was ravaged by fires, that the Chinese have sent a ship to the dark side of the moon, that giant pieces of the Greenland ice sheet routinely calve off and fall into the sea with a splash? Read More
August 31, 2020 Arts & Culture Joseph Cornell, Our Queequeg By William N. Copley William N. Copley (1919–1996), known by his signature name CPLY (pronounced “see-ply”), was a painter, writer, gallerist, art patron, publisher, and art entrepreneur. His work is held in private and public collections worldwide, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Stedelijk Museum, and many more. Copley is now seen as a singular personage of postwar painting and an important link between European surrealism and American Pop art. In this excerpt from a new collection of Copley’s writings, he remembers the artist Joseph Cornell. Exhibition view, “Objects by Joseph Cornell,” Copley Galleries, September 28–October 18, 1948. I knew Joseph Cornell just a little bit and saw him only a few times. To Julien Levy must go the credit for having discovered him as an artist. I can only take credit for having responded to him with a bang as early as about 1947. As I remember, I met him as he was coming off an elevator and I was leaving the old Hugo Gallery, where I’d been with Iolas laying some groundwork for a gallery I was going to open in Beverly Hills. He was carrying two shopping bags full of boxes and Iolas must have introduced us, as I remember following them back into the gallery. I saw what was in the shopping bags and managed to buy an entire exhibition from Joseph—roughly fifty pieces. I think the deal was consummated at a nearby ice cream parlor. Cornell was gaunt and gray and shabby. Being with him was like going down a rabbit hole, he was so like his boxes. Afterward, it seemed like it would be years before I would find my way back to wherever I left from that morning. Just to converse with him, one had to leave the familiar world and enter his. His world was very like Kafka’s Amerika. Read More
August 31, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 24 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 pieces below. “Last week I wrote about the relative calm of the dog days of summer in NYC. But these same days of languor are hardly that elsewhere around the country and the globe. Wednesday I was rooting for Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season at the International Booker Prizes while Hurricane Laura bore down on Louisiana and Texas—a disconcerting coincidence, to say the least. The storm dissipated more quickly than expected, but that did not make its landfall in southwest Louisiana any less destructive. Earlier this month I felt an eerie prescience welcoming the publication of Shruti Swamy’s debut collection, A House Is a Body (we published the title story, about a mother’s evacuation from a wildfire, in 2018), as California fires flared again. And until a few weeks ago, the only derecho I knew was dance partner to izquierda. The Art of Distance began as a meditation on our social distancing during the COVID crisis, but this week, that same framework seems to emphasize the distance between here and there, the dichotomous feeling of at once wanting to rush in and help and feeling grateful to be out of harm’s way. But even from afar, we may find inspiration and empathy in literature that stares these disasters in the face, marks their dimensions with incisiveness and artfulness, and, sometimes, even imagines a way forward.” —Emily Nemens, Editor Saturday marked the fifteenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Claudia Rankine discusses writing in response to the disaster in her Art of Poetry interview. “They Called Her the Witch,” excerpted from Melchor’s Hurricane Season, explains the trauma of the land on which the Witch lives and grows her poisonous herbs: “They lost everything, right down to the stones of their temples, which ended up buried in the mountainside in the hurricane of ’78, after the landslide, after the avalanche of mud that swamped more than a hundred locals from La Matosa.” Read More
August 31, 2020 Arts & Culture Even the Simplest Words Have Secrets: An Interview With Jennifer Croft By Rhian Sasseen In honor of Women in Translation Month, Jennifer Croft discusses why translation is like swimming, how every language holds its own mystery, and what it was like to translate Olga Tokarczuk. I first encountered the work of writer and translator Jennifer Croft through her translation of the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights, which would go on to win the 2018 Man Booker International Prize (Tokarczuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature that same year). The book was like nothing I had read before, a fragmentary novel that bridged history, fiction, and essay in writing that was at once wry, meditative, and somehow elusive. I had to know more, both about the writer and about the translator who had introduced her work to the English-speaking world. Croft grew up monolingual in Oklahoma, a place that, she notes, “didn’t really feel my own.” Studying Russian—and later Spanish, Polish, Ukrainian, and other languages—brought her to the University of Iowa’s M.F.A. program in translation and, later, led her to win a Fulbright and grants and fellowships from PEN, the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She recently finished translating Tokarczuk’s epic The Books of Jacob, as well as several works by Argentine writers. Croft is also a writer; she has published the autobiographical Spanish-language novel Serpientes y escaleras and the memoir Homesick in English. In Homesick, one can see how the slippage between languages produces creative ferment: “Every word is untranslatable,” she writes, “if what translation is is making something new that stays the same.” This interview originally took place as an Instagram Live conversation held on the Paris Review Instagram in honor of Women in Translation Month. INTERVIEWER You’ve translated numerous works across languages and genres. You’re also a writer of fiction and memoir. Could you tell us a little bit about your journey into translation? CROFT I grew up totally monolingual in Oklahoma, as I kind of describe in Homesick. I got the idea that learning languages might open doors for me. So, I started with Russian, studying intensively on my own for quite a while. Then I ended up majoring in English and Russian and minoring in creative writing in college. As I was approaching graduation, it occurred to me that the only real logical way of combining my areas of expertise might be translation. I applied to the University of Iowa’s fantastic M.F.A. program in translation. It’s much better now than it was when I was in there, in fact. I just taught there last fall and the students were all geniuses. I had a really good experience there with Polish, so I ended up adding Polish to my languages, and then eventually phasing out Russian. I moved to Poland and that was what really opened up everything for me. I started translating Olga around the time that I first moved to Warsaw in 2003. INTERVIEWER How did you first come across Olga’s work? CROFT At the University of Iowa library I found a short story collection that she had published in 2001 called Playing Many Drums. Speaking of women in translation, in college I had been almost exclusively drawn to women writers. And I really thought that that was kind of my mission, to support women’s writing and really champion it. I don’t think that that’s not my mission now— although my tastes and interests have expanded, and my senses of gender and genre have shifted, as well. Back then, I was looking specifically for contemporary writing—I still only translate contemporary writing, though who knows, that may change in the future. When I came across Olga’s book, I immediately fell in love with it, as I have with all of the books that I have really wanted to translate, and I really wanted to work with her. INTERVIEWER When you are translating, do you find that it affects your writing in any way? Or does your writing affect your translation? Read More