July 20, 2017

Photo: Stefan Wermuth

The year 2016 ended for Roger Federer on a Friday, July 8. In the fifth set of his semifinal match at Wimbledon, he found himself sprawled out along his service line, face down, ruefully lifting his left leg slightly up and slowly letting it back down, as if to prove to the shocked and silent crowd that he was still alive.

Even when he had been ahead in the match against Milos Raonic of Canada, Federer looked weary. In the fourth set, he double faulted not once but twice, ending any hope for a classic. Raonic—six feet five inches of muscle topped with a Clark Kent hairdo—is an elite-grade version of the typical North American thumper: a thunderous serve, a strong but finicky forehand, and a two-handed backhand right out of an instruction manual; yet he approaches the net like it’s an electric fence. Federer had spent his career feasting on this type of player.

But not lately. He hadn’t won a title all season; he had knee surgery earlier in the year; he skipped the French Open entirely. These days he seemed more gaunt than gracile, more canny than casually assured. Now and then, he would see what the other player didn’t, couldn’t. At such moments—half volleys in 2015 and overhead backhand smashes in 2014—his fans rejoiced in their nostalgia. David Foster Wallace’s Federer essay would make rounds on the Internet like uncorked champagne. For those of us his age, who grew up with Marlon Brando in Superman, Alec Guinness in Star Wars, Laurence Olivier in Clash of the Titans, it was familiar and fine, though we didn’t know why. He slowed, but slowed like a dangerous panther. He staged strange suicide missions to the net on his opponents’ second serves. His game—a sexy hybrid of tennis in black-and-white, tennis in standard definition and tennis in 3-D—looked good in defeat. Other players grunted, lunged, sprinted into swinging splits, found the worn patch on a grass surface to buckle over, the drizzle-slicked white line to slip on. Not Federer. In his tennis dotage, he was like a Fabergé egg spinning on a tabletop because it could. Read More

History

Masses of Beautiful Alabaster

By Marissa Grunes

Johann G. A. Forster, Ice Islands with ice blink, 1773, gouache on paper. Courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. Painted during Cook’s second voyage.

At noon on February 21, 1773, as the Antarctic sun glittered on the decks of the HMS Resolution, a cry of “land” ricocheted through the tiny world of wood, water, and ice. Captain James Cook examined the slate-gray smudge on the southern horizon, and his crew eagerly followed his gaze. For two months they had been seeking the terra australis incognita—the unknown southern continent—first proposed by Aristotle in 350 B.C. Satisfied by what he saw, Cook ordered his men to “work up” to the land, watching its contours sharpen to jagged mountains as they tacked toward it. Two hours later, they were confounded. The land had grown hazy again and seemed to drift away from them, as if dissolving. In his narrative of the voyage, Cook would write, “We thought we saw land to the S.W. The appearance was so strong, that we doubted not it was there in reality, and tacked to work up to it accordingly … We were, however, soon undeceived, by finding that it was only clouds,” which disappeared by evening.

Cook had begun by seeking Cape Circumcision, a spit of land sighted by the French captain Bouvet de Lozier in 1739. He found instead a realm of bewildering mirage. Along with capricious cloud formations, icebergs also baffled Cook’s men, who were “deceived by the ice hills, the day we first fell in with the field ice.” These “floating rocks” of ice were such masters of disguise that Cook believed they had fooled the French captain as well. In his journal, he confided his “opinion that what M. Bouvet took for Land and named Cape Circumcision was nothing but Mountains of Ice surrounded by Field Ice.” Fields, hills, rocks, islands, mountains—the icy formations resembled every land formation imaginable to Cook, with “ponds” or “narrow creeks” of water running among them. Yet solid land itself was nowhere to be found. Read More

July 20, 2017

Ask The Paris Review

best audiobook eva? and Other Questions

By Lorin Stein

Dear Paris Review,

When I suggest he read something, my dad always says, I’m waiting for the movie to come out, just to rankle me. I’ve been meaning to send him a stack of films that are truly good adaptations. What should I send?

Sincerely,

A Rankled Amateur

Dear Rankled,

It may not be your father’s speed, but you should definitely check out Gabrielle, Patrice Chéreau’s 2005 adaptation of The Return, by Joseph Conrad. It stars Isabelle Huppert as the adulterous wife of a newspaper publisher in fin de siècle Paris. It got a César for best costumes. The sets are terrific. There’s one shot of a bathroom, and that’s all I remember—the bathroom, a normal bathroom, very much like the bathroom in the house where I grew up, which I had never seen until then as an historical artifact. It was that kind of film. It made you feel the past as presence.

More obviously, there are Rebecca and Don’t Look Now, two adaptations so perfect that you might think Daphne du Maurier’s books just adapted themselves—until, that is, you see either version of My Cousin Rachel: the 1952 adaptation starring Olivia de Havilland and Richard Burton (as what has to be the least believable male virgin in the history of nonpornographic cinema) or the 2017 remake starring Rachel Weisz (and really only Rachel Weisz). In this new version, the ending has been rewritten so it doesn’t make any sense, and for some reason, even though the story’s set two hundred years ago, the men keep going around without their cravats—as if they’d just got off the magic airplane to Cornwall from LAX—and everyone seems to have been infected with a twenty-first-century case of potty mouth. It’s odd enough to hear the aged butler yell at some local yeomen about the “fucking holly,” while they’re trying to deck the ancestral hall—but when a little girl mouths the word bitch at Rachel Weisz, in church no less, I reach for the soap.

Humor

Great Moments in Literacy: The American Library Association

By Sara Lautman

Look for a new cartoon by Sara each morning this week.Sara Lautman is a cartoonist who lives in Baltimore. Her sketchbooks are on Instagram and her most recent collection is Ghost Sex.

Arts & Culture

Odd Jobs

By Tony Duvert

Niko Pirosmani, Threshing Floor, 1916, oil on cardboard.

The French writer and philosopher Tony Duvert published the slim volume Les petits métiers in 1978. A satirical, caustic, and yet delightfully light collection of fables, the book comprises twenty-three narratives from an imaginary village where denizens perform the strangest—and dirtiest—traditions and professions. A new translation, by S. C. Delaney and Agnès Potier, is forthcoming from Wakefield Press this fall. We’ve excerpted a handful of these very odd jobs below. —Ed.

The Snot-Remover

He’d set up his pump at the entrance of the school, and knew each child by name.

My grandfather told me that in his time, the snot-remover had no pump: he only had a small reed pipe with which to suck up the mucus with his mouth. Also, to completely clean out the nostrils without swallowing anything, he’d put such flair into it that the scamps would have preferred having two boogers instead of one, to endure the delicious service longer.

The work of the pump had less charm. I remember that at some point, certain schoolmates would even snub the snot-remover and blow into their fingers, sweeping down their hands to smear the sidewalks and their clean uniforms. Read More

On Film

Where the Farts Come In

By Annie Julia Wyman

In Yasujiro Ozu’s Good Morning, well-placed farts stand in for the limits of language.

Still from Good Morning.

In 1953, two years after my mother was born in Japan, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story was released. I remember watching it sometime in the early 2000s, alone, just after my grandmother’s death and thirty years after the film’s eventual American premiere. (It was long assumed to have been “too Japanese” for foreign audiences.) Watching it again a few weeks ago, I realized that on the first go I had absorbed almost none of the plot. Only on second viewing did I remember anything—and then only because I recognized the speech patterns of a certain character, a grandfather who comes with his wife to visit his children. His verbal tics brought not just the plot but the film’s patient and peculiar beauty back to me in a rush.

Tokyo Story is laden with nonspeech; it punctuates the conversation of the grandparents, rendering their observations and questions melancholic, tentative. The grandfather in particular indulges in almost incessant hmms and sighs, each seeming to remark, worryingly, on the fragility and formality of the space in which parents and their adult children must meet. How exactly do our lives emerge from the lives of the people who made us and from the lives of the people who made them? And when do we break from them? And what if new ways of life—new cultures and socioeconomic organization and forms of modernity—intercede, as they always do? I’ve never learned Japanese, nor has my mother. The expectation that she would, today, visit me in my home for more than an hour strikes me as faintly ridiculous. When she was alive, my grandmother never saw the inside of one of my apartments—perhaps a good thing, given the company I kept. Read More

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