February 18, 2025 First Person More from Scraps By Abdulah Sidran Ann Craven, Moon (Paris Review Roof, NYC, 9-19-24, 8:40 PM), 2024, 2024, oil on linen, 14 x 14″. From our Winter issue, no. 250. Abdulah Sidran (1944–2024) was born to a family of Bosnian Muslims during the occupation of what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Croatian fascist Ustaše. After World War II, the region became, under Tito, a part of the new socialist republic of Yugoslavia, and Sidran’s father, Mehmed Sidran, became a Communist Party functionary. After Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet-led alliance known as Cominform, Mehmed became one of the suspected Soviet sympathizers arrested en masse by Tito’s government. The following excerpt recounts a “family meeting” in the years after Sidran’s father returned from his imprisonment in the forced-labor camp of Goli Otok, a formerly uninhabited island in the Adriatic Sea. You can read more of the Review’s selections from Sidran’s memoir, Scraps, in our new Winter issue, no. 250. The roof was leaking again. Dad stopped coming home, and Mom lined the floor with bowls and pots and pans and other dishes everywhere the water was dripping. Because the water dripped so much, Mom got up in the night to empty the containers and returned them to the same places. We always heard when she got up in the night, and we knew what she was doing as soon as she put the dishes back and the drops of water sounded different, falling into the now empty containers. The worst was when the roof leaked over our beds. We had to move them wherever and however just so the water wouldn’t drip on them. Mom said, My God, what have I done wrong? Whenever we heard Mom crying at night, we knew Dad had come home. Mom said, At least don’t wake the kids. Can you promise? Dad pretended not to hear her and said, Conference. Women to the other room. So we had to get up and go over to the table, and Mom took Dina to the other room. Dad sat at the table and cracked his knuckles. Ekrem, Edo, and I sat in silence, waiting for Dad to talk. Dad said, Lest you think I’m drunk, Ekrem will lead the meeting. Ekrem asked what was the agenda, even though it was nighttime, and then Dad took the floor and spoke about his life and communism. You boys will live to the year 2000. By then communism must prevail, you got that? We got that even though we were sleepy. Have you read Germinal, he asked me, and I lied that I had. He told us how he’d gone to school with nanule on his feet and how we had no right to ask for anything beyond that, even though we didn’t ask for anything. While talking, Dad walked around the room, and then he sat down again at the table or on the couch. When he waved a hand from the couch, we knew the meeting was over. To these meetings, he always brought new words. Always a different one. One night he kept saying pretermit, others, permanently or withdrawal. We didn’t know what those words meant, but we used them to tell one conference from another. Ekrem said, You know, that night he kept sayin’ competent. I said, I know. Mom was crying in the other room, but you could barely hear it because she held a pillow over her face. Dina asked, Why are you crying, Mom? We’ll be happy one day, too. Everyone has to be happy one day. Mom said, When the soil covers me, that’s when I’ll be happy. Read More
February 14, 2025 The Review’s Review My Ex Recommends By The Paris Review Jezebel Parker [2], CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia CommonsI fell in love with my best friend in high school because he was the first boy who could plausibly love me back. Angsty boys always had a way of catching my itty-bitty shoegaze heart. My love—it was a crush, but my nostalgic instincts want to call this love—blossomed to my awareness only after he came out, the summer before all our friends and I went off to different campuses in the University of California system. He was cooler than me. He shopped at Hot Topic. He had the look of a tortured artist without having to make any art. He was the first person who introduced me to the Postal Service, in his bedroom; he said it was a new genre called electronic music, which I had never heard of. He adored the Blood Brothers, which I pretended to like but couldn’t stand. The Unicorns was about as far as I could get with the screaming-into-the-mic bit. The Blood Brothers, with their Satanic-sounding band name, were twitchy and manic on the vocals, bringing to mind some skeletal epileptic, screaming as he’s strapped by his wrists and ankles to a gurney before electroshock therapy. Alone, when I listened to the album Crimes, which came out my sophomore year, my mind would just flood with STOP, STOP, STOP. I couldn’t last the two minutes and twenty-three seconds of the opening track. It’s a good soundtrack if you think that high school was supposed to be the best four years of your life and everything was downhill after senior year. I almost want to say that high school was the worst years of my life, but that isn’t true—those were my Saturn return. When I listen to “Love Rhymes with Hideous Car Wreck” now, it isn’t as intolerable as I remember it. I kind of like it. I seem to remember their songs as being devoid of melody, but this one has some discernable arpeggios amid the glossolalia, a sound that conflates the intensity of high school love with indie glamour. The song still smells like a white crew sock with last night’s dried cum. —Geoffrey Mak Read More
February 13, 2025 First Person Love, Beyond Recognition By Benjamin Ehrlich Marc Lehwald, The Mirror Project, Keukenhof, the Netherlands, 2014, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 DE. My very first memory takes place at the local Blockbuster store, where I went one night with my father to rent a movie. I was four or five years old. He let me run ahead of him through the aisles, and I remember a rare, if not completely novel, feeling of independence. Turning a corner, I saw a man wearing glasses and light-wash jeans, with a brown beard and brown hair, standing with his back toward me, facing the shelves. He looked exactly like my father. I hugged him around his legs. When the man turned around, I realized that he was not my father but rather another man, a stranger, whom I had mistaken for my father. And the stranger seemed displeased with my affection. I exploded into tears. This is not only my first memory but also my first experience of terror. Lately, I have been having nightmares in which my ex-girlfriend J.—whom I was with, off and on, for more than ten years—treats me like a stranger. These dreams are so disturbing that I wake up from them in the middle of the night. I write them in my journal as soon as possible: Read More
February 11, 2025 First Person Briefly a Hawk By Sam McPhee Photograph by Sam McPhee. I live with my family in the mountains of western Montana, near the small railroad town of Alberton. A week ago I found a dead hawk on my front porch. Flight feathers and bristle had been torn from the body, and scatters of down were fluttering in place or tumbling away, light as ash. But there was no blood anywhere, not even on the carcass. My five-year-old daughter, June, was there with me. We were on our way out to the car, on our way to school. The morning sunlight was rich and cold. Then I saw a tiny down feather dabbed to the pane of one of our front windows. A point of impact. How sad, June said. Yes. It’s rare to see a hawk up close, I told her. We looked at the bird for a moment, as if to pay it our respects. When I returned home an hour later, the hawk was still there on the porch. No scavenger had come for it. I called a taxidermist in Frenchtown. He was driving when he answered my call, and his truck was full of wind. He shouted his hello. I asked him if he did birds, and he said, Yeah, laughing to himself, I do birds. But when I told him the bird was a hawk, he said, Let me stop you right there. I can’t touch that bird. You can’t touch it, either. I told him that it flew into my window. The hawk will just go to waste, I said. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, I would love to do it for you, and his voice was different now, almost mournful. But I can’t touch a hawk. Read More
February 10, 2025 Rereading The Erotics of (Re)reading By Peter Szendy John La Farge, The Relation of the Individual to the State, 1905. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Plato’s Phaedrus begins at the edge of the city of Athens, in the countryside, as we would say today. Enter Socrates and Phaedrus, his younger friend. Phaedrus has just come from the house of Lysias, his master and erastēs (older male lover). SOCRATES: Dear Phaedrus, wither away, and where do you come from? PHAEDRUS: From Lysias, Socrates … and I am going for a walk outside the wall [of Athens]. Earlier that day, Phaedrus says, Lysias had given him a speech in which he described the erotic relationship that a master can have with a young disciple whom he does not love, with whom he is not in love. PHAEDRUS: Lysias has represented one of the beauties being tempted, but not by a lover; this is just the clever thing about it; for he says that favors should be granted rather to the one who is not in love than to the lover. This report does not satisfy Socrates. Dying to know more, he is determined not to let Phaedrus out of his sight; he will follow him everywhere, hound him until he agrees to read Lysias’s speech to him. At the very threshold of the reading scene there thus emerges a close and complex connection between loving and reading, two verbs, two gerunds, between which, for reasons that will soon become apparent, it makes sense to leave open all the possible punctuation marks, including the possibility that there be none (as though one wrote them in scriptio continua, with no space between them, which was a common scriptural practice in Plato’s day). Loving()reading could then be read (or connected) at least in two different ways: 1. Lovingreading or loving-reading (a double verb, conjugated as transitive, where what one loves-reads is someone or something, Lysias or the book). 2. Loving reading (in which case, it is reading that one loves). Read More
February 7, 2025 On Books The Image of the Doll: Tove Ditlevsen’s Worn-Out Language By Olga Ravn Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. While I write this, my husband is cycling through the rain, taking our one-year-old son, who last night yet again wouldn’t sleep, to nursery school, and I am thinking of Tove Ditlevsen’s poems. I, too, want to write lists of my quirks, vices, unattractive traits, that which is me but is not me. Those I love but don’t love. What I ought to do and be, but neither do nor am. Reading these poems, which were written between 1939 and 1976, I realized that Tove Ditlevsen’s poetry is always about the discrepancy between who I ought to be and who I am (which leads to the inevitable awkward moment in so many of Ditlevsen’s poems). Take, for instance, “The Eternal Three,” where love is not the exalted union of two souls; rather, one is always in love with the wrong person. Or “Self-Portrait 1,” where Ditlevsen lists what she can and cannot do: “I cannot: cook / pull off a hat / entertain company … I can: be alone / do the dishes / read books.” Or “Warning”: where the heart “can only dream, not yearn / for what exists in light of day.” In these poems there is so often a longing for something that is not, something that was, something that could be. Read More