December 16, 2019 Best of 2019 Our Contributors’ Favorite Books of 2019 By The Paris Review Our contributors, from across our quarterly print issues and our website, read as widely and wildly as they write. Here, they tell us about the books that moved them most in the final year of this decade. 2019 closes with the news that the President’s son killed an endangered sheep this summer. The dull son once again erased in the dark what was majestic and rare. The sheep was an argali sheep. His horns and gentle face resembled the shape of the female reproductive system. These sheep are killed for their horns. The dull son also killed a red deer. I don’t pray, but all year I’ve been carrying around Vi Khi Nao’s Sheep Machine in much the same way my great aunt Rosa carries around the Tehillim (the Book of Psalms). Sheep Machine is a two minute and fifty-two second frame by frame of sheep grazing on a mountainside, but really it’s a spell against apathy and greed. Almost each second is a page, and each page is a poem, and each poem is a story, and each story is a pasture, and each pasture is a hunger, and each hunger is a sheep. Vi Khi Nao has invented a new form that stills the tick before the tock flies like a bullet through the air. This year my favorite books have been the ones that collect around rogue forms. Motherish forms with the belly of a story and the eyes of a poem. Hybrids that swell then go frail, grow wooly, and then grow smooth. Forms that leave the door open for dry leaves and ghosts and a sheep so lost she has forgotten what a sheep even looks like. Kate Zambreno’s Screen Tests, Brenda Shaughnessy’s The Octopus Museum, Tina Chang’s Hybrida, Anne Boyer’s The Undying, and Rachel Zucker’s Sound Machine all completely reimagine what it means to be a book with an earthly shape. Each one is a miracle. They are my fantasy coven. I have no doubt each could draw down the moon. —Sabrina Orah Mark As I see it, the most important reading now and for the foreseeable (or unforeseeable) future falls into three categories. First would be books that continue to inform us with all the hard facts about how the earth is physically changing, year by year, under the effects of climate change, and for this, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming by David Wallace-Wells was important to me, alarming but also surprisingly engaging, a page-turner despite its hosts of statistics. The second category would be something philosophical or spiritual, with a longer view, to give us a little guidance as we reorient our thinking going forward. For this, I sometimes turn to one of the Zen books I have on hand, or sometimes a poem, perhaps one by William Bronk, who is able to embrace death in so many ways, or by the Norwegian imagist Olav Hauge. The third category would include some relief in the form of a good piece of fiction—for me, it is often something from earlier times, such as The Odd Women by the nineteenth-century feminist George Gissing or any of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels (somewhere in the neighborhood of Barbara Pym, she writes with a dependably high level of psychological insight and stylistic skill), but also more recent fiction, such as Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend. Yet one more category might be that of community relationships: how to work toward a harmonious coexistence with others, especially how, amicably, to cross the divide of political difference. Is this wishful thinking? Maybe, but it is also, I think, imminent necessity. One fascinating discussion that includes a meditation on forgiveness is Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past. —Lydia Davis I recognize great storytelling any time I have to momentarily put aside what I’m reading to ask myself, How am I going to steal this? Or simply to say, Wow. It’s the feeling that signals I’ve come across an idea, or a mode of presentation for an idea, that I hadn’t seen before. Kimberly King Parsons’s Black Light brought wow after wow, along with eruptions of guilty laughter, as I encountered her startlingly fresh characters’ shockingly grim, yet palpably human thoughts and actions. That anything could surprise in 2019 is impressive, but Parsons’ surprises pay off doubly because she pulls from the dark recesses of our minds the ugliness we’d prefer not to see in ourselves. The joy is in the shared recognition, in the sense that you’re as fucked up as I am. By contrast, Dariel Suarez’s atmospheric debut collection A Kind of Solitude presents a cast of characters who must navigate impossibly grim conditions through ingenuity, resilience, and stoicism during Cuba’s “Special Period.” Here, it is often the source of the conflict—the system—that seems deranged, exemplified best, perhaps, in “The Inquest,” in which protagonist Elena might lose everything because her refrigerator houses a wheel of contraband cheese. Suarez masterfully collides the personal and the political, moving characters and circumstance toward each other like pieces on a chessboard. Finally, Dana Johnson’s collection Break Any Woman Down (2001, I know) is one I returned to again and again throughout 2019, especially for “Three Ladies Sipping Tea in a Persian Garden,” which baffles and delights me for its nearly conflict-free plenitude and its warm depiction of friendship. —Jonathan Escoffery Part travel narrative, part lyric memoir, Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara was a huge best seller when it was first published in Chinese in 1976, and has retained an enthusiastic following in the Chinese-speaking world ever since. This year, the first mainstream English edition of the book was published, bringing it an even wider readership. Sanmao’s enduring popularity across Asia stems partially from the fascination with who she was: a dashing, instinctive, often quixotic figure who seemed far ahead of her time in the way she saw the world and her place in it. Arranged as a series of short essays, the book appears at first glance to be a straightforward record of her move from Taiwan to the Sahara, where she lived with her Spanish husband, José María Quero, but almost immediately, it opens up to reveal a hypnotic meditation on love and loneliness in a foreign place. Writing with frankness and vulnerability, Sanmao’s constant questioning of her insecurities and flaws is remarkably human, and nothing remains beyond the boundaries of her probing eye, not least her relationship with José. Mike Fu’s gorgeous translation brings to life Sanmao’s evocative descriptions of the Sahrawi communities in which she lived, along with her wit and her gift for capturing life’s absurdities. Stories of the Sahara is a record of one person’s fierce refusal to follow a path laid down for her by the rest of the world, but it is also a celebration of the complexities of being an outsider, and, ultimately, an ode to freedom. —Tash Aw Read More
December 13, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bas, Beauvoir, and Britain By The Paris Review Damon Daunno as Curly and Mary Testa as Aunt Eller in Oklahoma! © Little Fang. My junior year of high school, I was not asked to the prom. Bear in mind that my high school had 4,500 students and that although 2,250 of them were eligible to attend this dance, not a single person deigned to be my date. I went, instead, to see Oklahoma! A lovely time, to be sure, but boring as all get-out. While my peers enjoyed a disastrous evening of sex, drugs, and revelry, I watched that bland production from a blurry distance. At Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! last weekend, I found these two evenings had merged into a marvelous party, to which I had finally, belatedly been invited. Twitter chatter informed me this was “Sexy Oklahoma!,” and while it certainly is sexy, it’s also so delightful I beamed through much of the first act. It’s funny and warm. The house lights are almost always up, and they serve chili during intermission. First, we are primed with tenderness; then, tragedy unfolds, and its arrival is shocking, cold, and truthful. I loved it, and I’m pretty darn sure it loved me back—if only for one night. —Noor Qasim Read More
December 12, 2019 Arts & Culture The Exceptional Dovey Johnson Roundtree By Tayari Jones Dovey Johnson Roundtree. We have all heard that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, but during dark and difficult times, it’s sometimes a challenge to see it curving in the right direction. History tells us the stories of the great men—charismatic, brave, and doomed—who gave their lives to the struggle for racial equality. While these men earned our praise, we know that they did not change the world alone. Mighty Justice is the story of a great woman, Dovey Johnson Roundtree, who dedicated her life to moving the United States closer to ideals outlined in the Constitution. Born in 1914 in Charlotte, North Carolina, Dovey Roundtree came into this world with her mind stayed on freedom, as the sixties protest song goes. Mighty Justice is a love story. Dovey Johnson Roundtree was a patriot, in love with a flawed, unfair, and often cruel nation. One of her earliest memories was the sight of her grandmother’s feet, misshapen and gnarled as a result of violence at the hands of an angry white man. But along with her memory of the damage done to her grandmother’s body, she recalls herself on bended knee, kneading and massaging the same feet, providing comfort to the woman who had been brave enough to say no in the face of power and paid the price. Even as a small child, Dovey Johnson Roundtree understood that the ultimate act of love is service. I wonder how Dovey Johnson Roundtree would want this work to be discussed. I am sure many will read her story, as I did, and marvel that her name and contributions are not better known. Still, I resist the impulse to call her a “hidden figure,” the term coined to honor the black women whose unsung contributions to NASA helped put a man on the moon. But I can’t imagine that Ms. Roundtree would cotton to such a description. While she was no doubt aware that hers was not a household name, I am not convinced she would consider that a tragedy. There is a hymn well-loved in the African Methodist Episcopal Church that proclaims, “Let the work I’ve done speak for me.” Read More
December 12, 2019 Freeze Frame The Many Lives of Hou Hsiao-Hsien By Tash Aw In Tash Aw’s column Freeze Frame, he explores his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema. In this installment, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Three Times. Still from Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Three Times (2005) Not long after the turn of the millennium, there were a few years where it seemed I was saying goodbye to people all the time. People I loved, who had been part of my life for a very long time, but also people I’d only recently met and formed close friendships with strangely and swiftly, the way you sometimes do when you find yourself in a city far from home. My first book had recently been published and suddenly I was offered opportunities to travel in ways that I had only dreamed of as a child. I went to places I’d always wanted to visit, and occasionally I would stay on once the book tour was over, forming attachments to cities that seemed magical and full of promise, like Vancouver or Mumbai. Friends would put me in touch with friends of theirs, in some cases people they barely knew, who would show me around, and talk to me about what it meant to live there. They opened their lives to me and in doing so, changed the way I saw the world. Each time I had to say goodbye I felt unexpectedly sad, as if I was losing something that I had come to regard as my own—as if after only a few days, a week, a month, I had carved out a space for myself in that new country, in those new friends’ lives, only to leave it all behind. Shanghai, where I lived on and off over the space of two years, proved especially difficult to leave. I had initially gone there to research a novel, but friends in Malaysia thought that I was going to rediscover my Chinese roots. I laughed because the idea seemed ridiculous. Growing up in Malaysia, I couldn’t not be aware of my origins—of what it meant to have the language, culture, and physical features of southern China embedded in my identity, whether I liked it or not. I didn’t need to go searching for a heritage that was already mine. And yet. Several times in Shanghai, I met locals who weren’t interested in the multiplicity of my identity (Chinese Malaysian, Chinese- and English-speaking at home, Malay-speaking at school, et cetera). For them, I was Chinese, and only Chinese, a simplicity that should have upset me, would have upset me if I had been in New York or Paris. But in Shanghai, it felt as though the city were absorbing me, claiming me as its own, even though we both knew that this sense of belonging was just an illusion. Back in Kuala Lumpur, I spoke with my parents about this odd sensation of wanting to be part of somewhere that isn’t your home. I asked them about the three years they spent working in Taipei in the early seventies, a time when—as the few remaining stories and photographs would suggest—they seemed happy and settled. (There had been race riots in Malaysia in 1969, hundreds of ethnic Chinese had been murdered on the streets of Kuala Lumpur; Taipei must have been a relief). Had they been tempted to stay in Taipei? Were they sad to leave? They shrugged. “Don’t remember,” they said. “Anyway, that’s life, isn’t it? It was time to go home.” Read More
December 11, 2019 Our Correspondents Nellie Oleson, C’est Moi By Anthony Madrid Nellie Oleson, as played by Alison Arngrim I only have one insight about the Little House TV series, so I’m just gonna get it out of the way up front here. It’s this: Nellie Oleson made that show. I don’t just mean the character is an essential part of the show’s success. I mean Nellie Oleson wrote the original books and most of the scripts for the TV program. She directed most of the episodes, and, for the most part, she was the audience. I am saying: you and I and Ronald Reagan and possibly Saddam Hussein and definitely Michael Landon—were Nellie Oleson. Put down that gun. Sorry, put down that frontier rifle. Hear me out. Let’s start on a very basic, noncontroversial level. The books came out in the thirties and early forties. The woman who wrote them, Laura Ingalls Wilder, was in her midsixties when the first one dropped. Her case is well documented. She did live more or less like she describes in those novels, and so she had the luxury of being able to traffic in billions of authentic details. And the novels were a big hit. For forty or fifty years, everybody read ’em. (Except me—’til a couple months ago.) In the books, Nellie is not a very important character. She isn’t even introduced ’til the fourth book in the series (On the Banks of Plum Creek, 1937). Read More
December 11, 2019 Arts & Culture Staring at a Digital Black Hole By Amir Ahmadi Arian Tehran skyline On the morning of November 16, 2019, we, the exiled Iranians, woke up and like billions of other internet addicts in the world immediately checked our phones, only to realize that Iran had been cut off from the global internet. Many of us are members of family group chats on WhatsApp and Telegram, used to receiving a “good morning to my children” from a parent, a “did you finally go to the doctor?” from the other parent, a picture of the overdue first snow in Tehran from an aunt, and a joke about the president from an uncle. Over the years, these short messages have served as daily reminders of where we come from and who our people are. Above all, they have been our daily reassurance that our families were fine. The internet had functioned as the umbilical cord that kept alive the part of our soul still dependent on the motherland. That morning, the cord was cut. * The internet blackout, we learned, was the Iranian government’s response to the protests that broke out after it announced a 300 percent increase in the price of gas. The decision was made and implemented at midnight, with no advance warning given. Thanks to the state of Iran under sanctions, the news of the price hike was like a lit match in a barrel of dynamite. Protests spread very wide, very fast. The protesters moved beyond the gas price issue to target the entire status quo. The Iranian government let loose its police and militia. The crisis became so deep and so serious, the bloodshed so vast and the heap of corpses so high, that the government cut off the internet to keep people from organizing and to stifle the distribution of videos of its brutality, which included numerous instances of indiscriminate shooting at unarmed protesters. For us, the Iranians abroad, desperate and in the dark, the savagery was nothing new. Everyone who has paid attention to Iran, a country beleaguered by ruthlessness of sanctions and brutalized by its own vicious, paranoid government, expected an explosion of violence. But the internet blackout came out of nowhere. None of us had ever thought that one day Iran would become a digital black hole, a dark void on the blindingly glittering map of the global network. We found ourselves locked out of the house whose windows, we had thought, we would always be able to look through. Read More