February 4, 2019 Arts & Culture The Reluctant Leader of Spain’s Literary Avant-Garde By Thomas Bunstead Agustín Fernández Mallo. Author photo: Mutari, from Wikimedia Commons. In June 2007, in Seville, Spain, a conference was held under the banner “New Fictioneers: The Spanish Literary Atlas.” Around forty writers and critics came together at the Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art to discuss the conservatism they felt to be suffocating their national literature. United in their belief that the Spanish novel in particular was in a bad state, they pointed to a disregard for the increasing centrality of digital media in people’s lives and a knee-jerk resistance to anything that smacked of formal experimentation. They were mostly of a similar age, born in the twilight of the Franco regime, committed to the DIY punk ethos of the fledgling blogosphere, and more likely to claim lineage to J. G. Ballard or Jean Baudrillard than any garlanded compatriots of their own. Nonetheless, the only true point of agreement on the day was that they were not part of a unified movement. The conference’s inaugural address itself rejected any suggestion of a coherent generation—a critical commonplace familiar in Spain ever since the clumping together, at the end of the nineteenth century, of the Generation of ’98. Within a few weeks, however, an article appeared dubbing these writers “The Nocilla Generation”: the most significant literary phenomenon of Spain’s democratic era now had a label, and it stuck. Perhaps appropriately, the group’s designated leader, Agustín Fernández Mallo, had not been at any of these meetings, and he claimed to have no ties with those who had. His Nocilla Dream, the first book in a trilogy and one part of a wider, philosophically inflected project, had, however, been the surprise literary sensation of the previous twelve months. By “injecting the Novel with a large dose of [the land artist] Robert Smithson, and Situationism, and Dadaism, and poetry, and science, and appropriation (collage and quotes and cut-and-paste), and technology (often anachronistic), and images (almost always pixelated), and comic books,” as Jorge Carrion has written—and perhaps above all because he simply presented compelling new possibilities for the form—Fernández Mallo was deemed the most distinctively representative of these writers in all their anticonventional guises. He was certainly the most widely read. Nocilla Dream was the first Spanish book ever to go viral, a success with readers before its embrace by critics. The enthusiasm of like-minded bloggers propelled it onto spots on national TV and radio, where it was discussed alongside a commemorative edition of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as the defining literary event of 2006. The novelist and critic J. Ernesto Ayala-Dip called it a “shot to the heart of traditional novelistic representation,” and the novelist Ana Pomares Martínez echoed a widespread view among younger writers in saying, “It radically changed my idea of what literature was.” The rights to parts two and three—Nocilla Experience (2007, translation in 2016) and Nocilla Lab (2009, translation in 2019)—were then acquired by Alfaguara, one of Spain’s preeminent publishing houses, clearing the way for Fernández Mallo to become the most discussed Spanish author of the decade to follow. In the words of the poet Pablo García Casado, he “invited in a more daring, less constrained kind of reader, one not afraid to look at the world anew; a reader with new hope.” Read More
February 4, 2019 At Work Schizophrenia Terrifies: An Interview with Esmé Weijun Wang By Marta Bausells Esmé Weijun Wang’s first book was a novel, The Border of Paradise. It was a multifaceted epic about family, migration, language, and mental illness, for which she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists in 2017. Her second book, out this week, is a collection of essays. The Collected Schizophrenias (read an excerpt here) examines schizophrenia from historical, medical, social, and emotional perspectives, and looks at the myriad ways it is misunderstood, including by the psychiatric community and schizophrenics themselves. This nonfiction project has been acclaimed since long before publication: in 2016 the manuscript-in-progress won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, and in 2018 Wang was awarded a Whiting Award for nonfiction, the committee noting that she “sends out revelatory dispatches from an under-mapped land, shot like arrows in all directions from a taut bow of a mind.” Her prose is precise and lyrical at the same time. She is equally comfortable in the realms of science and spirituality. She provides personal documentation of experiences that, almost by definition, seem to erase the possibility of doing so. Wang was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder eight years after experiencing her first hallucinations. She recounts those intervening eight years of confusion in the first essay in the book, laying out the changes in the DSM. (“Changes in the bible of psychiatry continue to affect people’s lives,” she writes.) But an accurate diagnosis is just a small shard of clarity in a universe of pain. In the essay “On the Ward,” Wang offers a harrowing account of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization; in “Yale Will Not Save You,” she tells of how the university essentially forced her to leave after two hospitalizations that did little to help her. For an overachieving child, Wang writes, “ ‘I went to Yale’ [was] shorthand for I have schizoaffective disorder, but I’m not worthless.” She went on to complete her undergraduate degree at Stanford and, later, received an M.F.A. at the University of Michigan. Other essays discuss the intersection of PTSD and psychosis, the performative power of fashion and self-presentation, and schizophrenias in pop culture and the collective consciousness (for example, The Exorcist, or the true story of the twelve-year-old girls who stabbed their friend nineteen times after becoming absorbed by an internet meme, depicted in the HBO documentary Beware the Slenderman). When we spoke on the phone, it was morning in San Francisco. It was raining very hard there, and she was lying on the bed she has in her office. Wang has created that configuration out of necessity—she suffers from late-stage Lyme disease, a debilitating chronic illness that means that she often has to write by tapping one finger on her phone or small tablet. She has written entire essays that way. “It gets done; slowly, but it gets done,” she told me. INTERVIEWER In your novel, The Border of Paradise, you set out to write about mental illness and certain psychological and psychiatric experiences—for example hallucinations—in ways that were new, moving away from the Beautiful Mind narrative. For example, there’s a scene in which the protagonist, who is a Polish American man in rural California in the fifties, sees a deer in the woods. What does nonfiction, and the essay form in particular, give you that’s different from what fiction gives when it comes to writing about those experiences? Read More
February 4, 2019 Happily The Postmenopausal Fairy Tale By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. “I’m dying,” says my grandmother. “Dying where?” I ask. “I’m coming. Don’t go anywhere before I get there.” “I have to go,” says my grandmother. On December 26, 2018, my grandmother, Gertrude Mark, died somewhere. * If this were a fairy tale, I’d go look for her. Read More
February 1, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Steepletop, Sandra Bullock, and Celeste By The Paris Review Prabda Yoon. I’ve wanted to read the work of the Thai writer and filmmaker Prabda Yoon for a while now, and with The Sad Part Was—his 2002 collection, translated into English by Mui Poopoksakul and released by Tilted Axis Press in 2017—I’ve finally delved in. The stories are marvelous: witty and at times irreverent looks at life in contemporary Bangkok that are unafraid to ask the big questions concerning the human capacity for good and evil. They’re formally innovative, too. The first story, “Pen in Parentheses,” uses the parenthetical to an almost Woolf-like effect, while “Miss Space” ends with a note that its final sentence isn’t a conclusion but rather “a waiting period that doesn’t yet have a thought to succeed it.” By the end, I wanted more—and luckily, it looks like Tilted Axis has recently published another collection of Yoon’s stories. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
February 1, 2019 Arts & Culture Three Writing Rules to Disregard By Benjamin Dreyer I have nothing against rules. They’re indispensable when playing Monopoly or gin rummy, and their observance can go a long way toward improving a ride on the subway. The rule of law? Big fan. The English language, though, is not so easily ruled and regulated. It developed without codification, sucking up new constructions and vocabulary every time some foreigner set foot on the British Isles—to say nothing of the mischief we Americans have wreaked on it these last few centuries—and continues to evolve anarchically. It has, to my great dismay, no enforceable laws, much less someone to enforce the laws it doesn’t have. Certain prose rules are essentially inarguable—that a sentence’s subject and its verb should agree in number, for instance. Or that in a “not only x but y” construction, the x and the y must be parallel elements. Why? I suppose because they’re firmly entrenched, because no one cares to argue with them, and because they aid us in using our words to their preeminent purpose: to communicate clearly with our readers. Let’s call these reasons the Four C’s, shall we? Convention. Consensus. Clarity. Comprehension. Also simply because, I swear to you, a well-constructed sentence sounds better. Literally sounds better. One of the best ways to determine whether your prose is well constructed is to read it aloud. A sentence that can’t be readily voiced is a sentence that likely needs to be rewritten. A good sentence, I find myself saying frequently, is one that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter how long it is, without having to double back in confusion because the writer misused or omitted a key piece of punctuation, chose a vague or misleading pronoun, or in some other way engaged in inadvertent misdirection. (If you want to puzzle your reader, that’s your own business.) As much as I like a good rule, I’m an enthusiastic subscriber to the notion of “rules are meant to be broken”—once you’ve learned them, I hasten to add. But let’s, right now, attend to a few of what I think of as the Great Nonrules of the English Language. You’ve encountered all of these; likely you were taught them in school. I’d like you to free yourself of them. They’re not helping you; all they’re doing is clogging your brain and inciting you to look self-consciously over your own shoulder as you write, which is as psychologically painful as it is physically impossible. And once you’ve done that, once you’ve gotten rid of them, hopefully you can put your attention on vastly more important things. Read More
February 1, 2019 Eat Your Words Cooking with Iris Murdoch By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. Some novels are so full of eccentric food and cooking instructions that it seems the best treatment of them would be to write a second book trying all the recipes. The Sea, the Sea, by the British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919–99), is one such novel. In its first pages, Charles Arrowby, a retired actor and theater director, veers from his description of the English coast, where he’s come to work on his memoirs, to discuss his lunch. I’m reproducing the following passage in full, since it’s exemplary of the book’s treatment of food. It is after lunch and I shall now describe the house. For lunch, I may say, I ate and greatly enjoyed the following: anchovy paste on hot buttered toast, then baked beans and kidney beans with chopped celery, tomatoes, lemon juice and olive oil. (Really good olive oil is essential, the kind with a taste, I have brought a supply from London.) Green peppers would have been a happy addition only the village shop (about two miles pleasant walk) could not provide them … Then bananas and cream with white sugar. (Bananas should be cut, never mashed, and the cream should be thin.) Then hard water-biscuits with New Zealand butter and Wensleydale cheese. Of course I never touch foreign cheeses. Our cheeses are the best in the world. With this feast I drank most of a bottle of Muscadet out of my modest ‘cellar’. I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading. Indeed eating is so pleasant one should even try to suppress thought. Charles’s food descriptions are wonderful in their particularity and spur all kinds of culinary thoughts, such as, Can canned baked beans be redeemed by good olive oil?, and, Why hasn’t the old-fashioned dessert of fruit in heavy cream made a comeback? The preparation details are a boon for a person wishing to replicate the food. Another simple dessert of apricots with shortbread cookies specifies that the apricots, if not available fresh, should be obtained dried, and soaked for twenty-four hours. Each meal comes with a wine pairing. Read More