February 13, 2019 Arts & Culture Tove Jansson’s “The Island” By Tove Jansson Growing up in Sweden, I read the whole Astrid Lindgren canon from Pippi Longstocking to Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter, but my fascination with Tove Jansson, the equally beloved creator of the Moomins series, only began in New York, as an adult, after I discovered her novel The Summer Book. That book remains one of the most beautiful meditations on the beginning and the end of life I have ever read. During a recent trip to Stockholm, I noticed Bulevarden och Andra Texter, a new collection of stories and essays by Jansson, in the basement of Hedengrens, a venerable bookstore in a posh part of town. The texts, never reprinted before this compilation, span from 1934 to 1997 and cover a wide array of topics and genres, including tableaux of Jansson’s bohemian days in Paris, a humorous account of the indignities of house-hunting, a short story about a botched honeymoon in Fascist Capri, and a gentle manifesto on children’s literature. “The Island,” which I have translated here for the first time into English, was originally published in 1961 in a travel magazine, Turistliv i Finland. At once a short story, an essay, and a prose poem, the piece reads both like a sketch for The Summer Book (published eleven years later) and a vignette of Klovharu, the island where Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä, her partner, built a summerhouse in the mid-60’s. This text seems to change following mysterious tides. There are sudden shifts in point of view and tense—from an impersonal voice that can have the impassivity of nature to a profoundly physical first person, from a timeless present to an urgent past. The punctuation is quite peculiar. Several verbless fragments. Many sentences never really coalesce—they form, rather, a syntactical archipelago. —Hernan Diaz The island of Klovharu There is a surprisingly large number of people who go around dreaming about an island. Sometimes deliberate people look for their island and conquer it, and sometimes the dream of the island can be a passive symbol for what is one step beyond reach. The island—at last, privacy, remoteness, intimacy, a rounded whole without bridges or fences. Read More
February 12, 2019 Redux Redux: Nouns Like Desire 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. Simone de Beauvoir. This week, in honor of Valentine’s Day, we bring you Simone de Beauvoir’s 1965 Art of Fiction interview; Clarice Lispector’s short story about stealing roses, “One Hundred Years of Forgiveness”; and Carl Phillips’s poem “Youth with Satyr, Both Resting.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Simone de Beauvoir, The Art of Fiction No. 35 Issue no. 34 (Spring–Summer 1965) INTERVIEWER None of your female characters are immune from love. You like the romantic element. DE BEAUVOIR Love is a great privilege. Real love, which is very rare, enriches the lives of the men and women who experience it. Read More
February 12, 2019 Arts & Culture The Racy Jazz Age Best Seller You’ve Never Heard Of By Michael LaPointe Ursula Parrott was accused of promoting a dangerous sexual freedom. In her best-selling novels, the controversial author chronicled “life in the era of the one-night stand” during the twenties and thirties. Parrott’s extraordinary life took her to the heights of literary New York and pre-Code Hollywood, then left her jailed, penniless, and alone. Today, her books are out of print, and her name is all but forgotten. I stumbled across her name in an advertisement at the back of a copy of Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy from the early nineties. One of Parrott’s novels was sandwiched between works by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Toni Morrison in a series of classics by “American Women Writers.” Eminent company, to be sure, but that was the last time one of her books was reissued—thirty years ago. Pursuing Parrott through the scant archives, I discovered an author whose work and life were exemplary of her time, yet strangely stranded there. Read More
February 12, 2019 Arts & Culture Lynne Tillman and the Illusion of Realism By Lucy Ives Lynne Tillman. Photo: Craig Mod. Realism disturbs me. For indeed fiction, if realistic, is a manufactured veil through which we train our gaze in order to obtain a pattern that organizes dots and squiggles into something legible, “an image of a pork chop which looks exactly like a pork chop,” as Terry Eagleton writes in the London Review of Books. Realism is paradoxical: a lie that reads true. We take two pet rocks, name one “Reality,” the other “My (Mimetic) Attempts to Write About It,” and smash them enthusiastically together. What survives is combed into a neat pile, carefully labeled, set out as a sort of snack. Figure 1. Mimesis is imitation, and when Aristotle talks about it in his Poetics, he means for it to do one thing: Imitation isn’t a faculty poets deploy to represent the world solely for the sake of skillfully representing the world. Imitation is deployed with the specific aim of inspiring recognition—of evoking, in a somewhat distant audience, a feeling of pity. (Aristotle: “Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, ‘Ah, that is he.’ ”) We are brought to tears when someone on stage pokes out his eyes; safe in our chairs, we’ve confused him with ourselves. We’re deceived, yet in awe. Perhaps we resolve not to kill or have sex with our parents (or, failing this, not to get married—regarding which topic, more later). Read More
February 12, 2019 In Memoriam Ricky Jay, the Magician with an Edge By Michael Chabon Ricky Jay, one of the world’s greatest sleight-of-hand artists, was also an accomplished author, actor, historian, and renowned bibliophile with a library to envy. He died on November 24, 2018. The essay below is adapted from a speech given at a recent memorial service in his honor. Still from the 2012 documentary Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay The first time I saw Ricky Jay perform was sometime around 1976, on The Mike Douglas Show. Ricky was beheading roses and puncturing watermelons with one of the simple playing cards that, in his hands, became a deadly missile. He was wearing a three-piece suit but he had a long beard, and hair down to his waist, and my grandmother, watching with me, thought he looked like a degenerate. I thought he was the coolest human I had ever seen, and that impression only deepened when, many years later, I was lucky enough to get to know him. Ricky was an artist and scholar with a fearsome intellect and a biting wit. He was also a surprisingly sweet and gentle soul. The greatest trick I ever performed was fooling him, with my novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, into thinking that I really knew something about the magician’s art. The greatest of the many kindnesses he ever did me was to not hold it against me when he fairly quickly discovered that I was, in that regard at least, a charlatan. We met in 2001, when the late Sydney Goldstein asked me to interview Ricky for San Francisco’s City Arts & Lectures, back when it was still at the Herbst Theatre. Ricky seemed a bit weary that night, and as we waited backstage to go on, I found myself thinking about all the hundreds of times that he must have stood there like that, in the darkness, listening to the murmur of the house, waiting for the curtain to open and the footlights to come up. Read More
February 11, 2019 At Work You Are in the Middle of Time: An Interview with Mariana Dimópulos By Jennifer Croft Mariana Dimópulos Mariana Dimópulos’s novel All My Goodbyes, translated by Alice Whitmore, is a tale of murder in Patagonia and of wanderlust, or rather, a lust for an arrival that never quite happens. In crisp prose that is often as catchy as a pop song, the narrator jumps between Buenos Aires, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Málaga, and between maturity and youth, lovers and friends. The novel is written in bursts varying in length from a paragraph to a few pages, moving through time and place. These vignettes, or snapshots, or ruminations, or lines of dialogue, are linked not by chronology or geography but by theme—sometimes obliquely. The result is a powerfully propulsive journey that is both circular and suspenseful. I read the whole (admittedly slim) book without putting it down, on a flight from New York to Los Angeles. I got in touch with Dimópulos over email in order to ask her some questions about her work. We did the preliminaries in Spanish and agreed to do the rest in English; Mariana is an accomplished translator from German and evidently something of a polyglot. INTERVIEWER In this book, you write: “My freedom always implies the slavery of another. So, my heart asks (and at heart I’m no good): if I enslave myself, does that mean someone else is set free?” Can you talk a little bit about what this means? DIMÓPULOS Since my early years, I’ve been interested in how people live and how the social differences between people come to be. The world is far from being a fair place. The sentence you are pointing at is an intended fallacy, and its answer is no. There is no perfect balance between two constants—free people and enslaved people—and there is no personal, isolated solution to the problem of inequality. But if you are young, like the protagonist, and you have a critical vision about how our world is built, with its contradictions and conformism, then you may think in this way. Read More