August 5, 2020 Arts & Culture Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Cabinet of Wonders By Howard A. Rodman Jean-Patrick Manchette, 1967. They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick Herman Melville called them isolatoes—the word he coined for those among us who don’t have much truck with fellow humans. The bonds of society, except in odd and extenuating circumstances, are not really for them. Love, marriage, family seem as strange, distant institutions, things one might observe with a notebook in the other hand. At best, there are a couple of old comrades accumulated on life’s journey to whom one might turn when things go south. For isolatoes, the most constant of companions are those voices inside the head. Jean-Patrick Manchette’s protagonists are isolatoes. Georges Gerfault in Three to Kill, Julie Ballanger in The Mad and the Bad, Martin Terrier in The Prone Gunman, Aimée Joubert in Fatale: windowless monads, all of them. Memorable, violent, alone. Read More
August 4, 2020 At Work Dissecting Pain: An Interview with Alisson Wood By Leslie Jamison I read Being Lolita in two feverish, painful, clarifying, enthralling, disturbing sittings, over the course of two nights, while my toddler daughter slept in the next room. I found myself wanting to reach into its pages and save the girl who was caught in them, but as I kept reading, I started to understand she didn’t need my saving. Her author was the woman she’d become, and her voice was electric, alive, rigorous, humane, allergic to reduction. It would be easy to summarize Being Lolita as a memoir about a toxic, exploitative relationship between a high school English teacher and his student, and it is about that—but it’s about that in the way Walden is about a pond, or Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is about sharecroppers. Which is to say, it’s also about so much more. It’s about narrative itself—the poly-edged blade of storytelling, how it seduces and distorts and justifies; how it liberates and unsettles; how it settles like fog but also pierces through obscuring mists with the chill sunlight of something uncomfortable getting discovered. It’s a book about the way stories can feel like straitjackets and also like exhalations; how we can lose or find ourselves in them—sometimes both at once. The book begins at one chalkboard and ends at another, with the student becoming a teacher, reclaiming the stories that once took away her voice even as they convinced her they were giving it to her. It’s a book that’s faithful to the grit and grain of lived experience, how it inheres in a thousand particulars itching like mosquito bites under the skin: the Latin conjugations and hallway gossip and crepe paper banners of high school; the gimlets and bloody sheets and wearying, labyrinthine convolutions of endless gaslighting. It’s a book that knows if you follow these slivers back into the pulse and flesh of memory, they take you somewhere more complicated than the stories we often tell ourselves about abuse and violence, and they force you to reckon with its messy, enduring aftermath. I first met Alisson Wood after a reading last year, when she approached me to tell me that my own writing had been meaningful to her. There was something in her voice and in her eyes when she described the book she had written that made me realize the world needed it. And when I read Being Lolita a year later, I felt the world expanding—gaining another layer in the compost of its infinite human experience, of all the stories we need to hear told. As I read, I was deeply moved by the ways Wood summoned the teenager she’d once been, faithful to the furrows of that psyche—its delusions and its fragilities and its curiosities and its capacities and its hunger—even as she gazed backward through the years with exacting and attentive clarity. Read More
August 4, 2020 First Person Self-Portrait in Venice By Cynthia Zarin Lion of Venice, Photo: Didier Descouens. CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0). In maps of the brain, the central cortex is shaped like Venice. The amygdale, the locus of emotion and fear, is the quarter of the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo; the hippocampus, the site of long- and short-term memory, is the entry into Venice via the Grand Canal; the cerebellum, which regulates balance, the lagoon bordered by the Lido; the hypothalamus, which controls circadian rhythms, the Piazza San Marco. The first summer I came to Venice, I was nineteen. I was with a boy I thought I might marry, and we sat on the steps of the baroque basilica of Santa Maria della Salute, which is a short walk from where I am writing now, at the Pensione Accademia, in the quieter environs of Dorsoduro. We ate sandwiches made of pressed veal, and drank cans of aranciata. It was too expensive to stay in Venice; we took the train from Padua, where we had gone to see the Giottos in the Scrovegni Chapel, and stayed in a gimcrack boardinghouse where the walls were paperboard painted to look like wood. The ceiling of the chapel was flecked with gold stars. Now, in Padua, you walk into an air-controlled chamber and have fifteen minutes to look at the frescoes. Then, you stayed as long as you liked. We sat in the pews and read letters that Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote from Italy. It was hot and I argued with the boy—I did not want to hear any more about Savonarola, with whom he had become obsessed. He had written a senior thesis on Jonathan Edwards, about whom I had previously listened. To annoy me, because I would not listen, he was rude to an old friend of mine who had come up for the day from Florence, where she was studying, to meet us. It has been years since I spoke to either of them. Perhaps it is better for me to come to Venice alone; there is no one with whom I have been to Venice that I am now on speaking terms, as if one caprice of the city is to induce fever dreams from which there is no return. On June 4, 1851, Mrs. Browning wrote to a Miss Mitford: I have been between heaven and earth since our arrival at Venice. The heaven of it is ineffable. Never had I touched the skirts of so ineffable a place. The beauty of the architecture, the silver trails of water … nothing is like it, not a second Venice in the world … But now comes the earth side: Robert, after sharing the ecstasy, grows uncomfortable and nervous, unable to sleep or eat, and poor Wilson, still worse, in a miserable condition of sickness and headaches. On the earth side, from the man whose face was like a portrait by Bronzino: “Would like to report something amusing yet I have really overstretched myself and am paying for it … Today high blood pressure, splitting headache, not enough sleep, and all the usual tension.” Perhaps my own instinct for complication, for the rococo, for situations that cannot possibly resolve themselves, can be traced to an inability to keep track of a thought a sensible person would heed—a grain of millet blown over San Marco, which, left to fall into the canal, swells and bursts? Read More
August 3, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 20 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. “Many summertime rituals have been iced this year in the name of health and safety, including those of Hollywood. No big summer blockbusters for 2020; big-ticket movies have been postponed or sent straight to streaming. And while there is more content to watch on our laptops now than at any time in human history, I miss the movies: the chance to spend a few hours in the cineplex’s too-cold air conditioning, eating oversalted popcorn and watching something with a lot of explosions and/or dinosaur attacks. That being said, maybe even more than mall multiplexes and The Lost World, I’m missing my neighborhood theaters: I think it was at Village East—formerly a Yiddish theater, now on the National Register of Historic Places—that I saw my last film in theaters, a German epic inspired by the life of Gerhard Richter, Never Look Away. Little did I know those three-plus hours of huge cinematography, swelling music, and fraught, inspired narrative would have to last me awhile. But! There is a bright side to this theater-free season: The Paris Review can take you to the movies, in some literary sense. Read on for unlocked fiction, poetry, and interviews that can transport you to the cineplex, and below, find details on our own streaming offering: Plimpton!, the documentary (a New York Times Critics’ Pick) about the magazine’s charismatic, intelligent, and always adventurous founder.” —Emily Nemens, Editor Read More
August 3, 2020 Arts & Culture The Crisis Cliché By Hermione Hoby On a Saturday, as though the concept of “weekend” still pertains, we go for a drive. This is a great excitement. It marks the day as different from other days, brings it into Technicolor, and it feels like movie magic to be in a car in motion, seeing a wider world of different streets out the passenger window, now more zoetrope than mere plane of glass. I gaze through it with moronic delight, like a person who’s never ridden in a car before. There’s also—after all these slow, ambulatory weeks—the plain thrill of speed as we accelerate onto the highway. All of this is heightened by the frisson of the illicit, because these roads are deserted and above them loom signs telling us to avoid nonessential travel. As I read them, something both sincere and self-mocking rises up in me, wailing, to ask: “but what’s ‘essential’ anymore, what does ‘essential’ mean now?” The things we used to hold essential—human touch, in particular—are now denied. Masked, we stand six feet away from our friends making hugging motions at each other in a sad, awkward, teddy-bear like travesty of the real thing. It is so good and necessary to touch and be touched. It is also so good and necessary not to transmit this virus which, unlike touch, is not a discrete and contained contract between two, but a potentially endless chain of infection. So I know that this drive, this nonessential travel, is an infraction. I also know that leaving the house and getting in the car strikes me as a psychological necessity, that is to say, essential. The world has become much smaller—physically circumscribed by the walls of our homes, socially contracted to the friends we wish to call (or Zoom)—and simultaneously bigger, because now all the shameful inequities of this country tower over things, crudely exposed and monstrous. The enormous problem, then, is the political one: the way in which we’re called to do all we can to ensure this moment reconstitutes us in lasting, salutary ways. And then there’s the much smaller problem: the individual one, my problem, which is that I have not written King Lear in quarantine. Instead, I have been mostly logging in and out of Twitter, against a white noise brain backdrop of Rilke, on loop, going: “You must change your life.” In “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” he ends the sentence and with it the poem like that—a sober period. In my head it ends with a hysterical flurry of exclamation points and runs in all caps. Read More
August 3, 2020 Arts & Culture Murder Most Foul By P. D. James The legendary mystery writer P. D. James, often dubbed the Queen of Crime, was born on this day a hundred years ago. Below, read her 1982 essay “Murder Most Foul,” in which she explains her attraction to detective stories, considers what makes a successful whodunit, and highlights her favorite practitioners of the genre—including her predecessor Agatha Christie, “a lady I think of less as a novelist than as a literary conjurer whose sleight of hand as she shuffles her cardboard characters can outwit the keenest eye.” P. D. James. Photo: Ulla Montan. “Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of innocent enjoyment than any other single subject.” So wrote Dorothy L. Sayers in 1934. She was, of course, thinking of murder; not the sordid, messy and occasionally pathetic murders of real life but the more elegantly contrived and mysterious concoctions of the detective novelist. To judge, too, from the universal popularity of the genre, it isn’t only the Anglo-Saxons who share this enthusiasm for murder most foul. From Greenland to Japan, millions of readers are perfectly at home in Sherlock Holmes’s claustrophobic sanctum at 221B Baker Street, Miss Marple’s charming cottage at St. Mary Mead, and Lord Peter Wimsey’s elegant apartment in Piccadilly. There is nothing like a potent amalgam of mystery and mayhem to make the whole world kin. When I came to write my first novel in the early sixties it never occurred to me to begin with anything but a mystery, partly I think because its highly disciplined form provides an admirable apprenticeship for a writer who aspires to become a serious novelist. I had always enjoyed the genre—Dorothy L. Sayers was a potent influence—and I was fascinated by the challenge of trying to do something new with the well-worn conventions of the detective story: the central mysterious death; the closed circle of suspects each with a credible motive; the arrival of the detective like the avenging deity of an old Morality Play; the final solution which the reader himself can arrive at by logical deduction from clues presented to him with deceptive cunning but essential fairness. In my own reading it wasn’t the puzzle which most intrigued me and I sometimes think that fewer readers watch for every clue, note every twist in the plot, and sniff happily after every red herring than we writers imagine. My younger daughter, reading my latest book, merely comments: “It can’t be him or her; you like them too much”, and I suspect that most of us guess the murderer more through our knowledge of the author, his style, prejudices, and foibles, than through close attention to every detail of the plot. We are pitting our wits primarily against the writer, not his villain or his detective. Read More