February 5, 2019 Redux Redux: A Game of Touch Football in a Snowstorm 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. Don DeLillo, ca. 2011. Photo: Thousandrobots. This week, we bring you Don DeLillo’s 1993 Art of Fiction interview, the first installment of Chris Bachelder’s novel The Throwback Special, and Greg Kosmicki’s poem “Today.” 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. Don DeLillo, The Art of Fiction No. 135 Issue no. 128 (Fall 1993) There’s a zone I aspire to. Finding it is another question. It’s a state of automatic writing, and it represents the paradox that’s at the center of a writer’s consciousness—this writer’s anyway. First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there’s a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger. The best moments involve a loss of control. It’s a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often—completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages—I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do. In End Zone, a number of characters play a game of touch football in a snowstorm. There’s nothing rapturous or magical about the writing. The writing is simple. But I wrote the passage, maybe five or six pages, in a state of pure momentum, without the slightest pause or deliberation. Read More
February 5, 2019 Archive of Longing Posthumous Bolaño By Dustin Illingworth In his new monthly column, Archive of Longing, Dustin Illingworth examines recently released books, with a focus on the small presses, the reissues, the esoteric, and the newly translated. Right image: stencil of Roberto Bolaño from Barcelona, 2012 The Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño idolized Jorge Luis Borges. “I could live under a table reading Borges,” he once told an interviewer. In the Argentine metaphysician, Bolaño found a path through the Latin American Boom’s sticky, commercial aftermath. Borges, with his elegance, his recursiveness, his allegorical purity and erudition, may at first blush seem worlds apart from the violent, hard-boiled predilections that came to define Bolaño’s oeuvre. But to think so is to overlook Bolaño’s subtle comic chops and lifelong interest in pulp. One of the great gifts Bolaño bestows upon Borges in return is how, in essays and interviews, he dispels the aura of brainy sobriety that tends to rarify his hero into an abstraction. Bolaño absorbed the cosmopolitanism and menace of Borges’s lesser-known stories—he was especially fond of the detective potboilers Borges wrote, pseudonymously, with Adolfo Bioy Casares. But he also pursued something more corporeal, savage, and belatedly modern in his own work. To a remarkable degree, Bolaño’s characters—all of them poets or poets manqués, regardless of their stated profession—delineate the aches and appetites that moor the gentle madness of their art. They eat ham sandwiches, fuck in stairwells, fight, sob, ride motorcycles, drink coffee, and read until their eyes burn. They are often poor or hungry, morally benighted, naive, wretched with longing and a writer’s remote gratifications. “Literature is basically a dangerous calling,” Bolaño said during a 1999 acceptance speech for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and his work, like a slow mugging, poses a persistent, shiv-sharp question: What price would you pay for literature? Read More
February 5, 2019 Arts & Culture The Museum at Auschwitz By Sigrid Rausing A corridor at Auschwitz (Photograph: Sigrid Rausing) “And elsewhere other workers were tearing open the dead”—Charles Reznikoff, Holocaust How ordinary it seemed at first, a museum—the word is important—on the outskirts of the little industrial town of Oświęcim, or Auschwitz in German. Coaches and cars in a parking lot. A modest snack bar, some buildings. The driver showed us where to go. We joined the line of people for the airport-style security, though it felt more casual, pleasantly shabby. We were shepherded through, moved forward, took our headsets and receivers, found ourselves in a group of fifteen or so people, waited for our guide. We got a sticker for our coats, “English.” We could see the entrance; walked toward it and through it. How low it was, the terrible sign over the gate: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. The camp orchestra played there, by the side of one of the barracks. The scale of it is shocking, people say, but I was struck by how small it was, the original Auschwitz, or Auschwitz 1. Mordecai Lichtenstein, a survivor, called it a “show camp” in his testimony to the Jewish Central Information Office in May 1945, and perhaps it was, at one time: tidy rows of two-story brick Polish army barracks, built in the twenties and thirties. Tiled stoves in large rooms. Wooden floors. The prisoners slept on the floor, on straw and coarse canvas. Washrooms. Rows of toilets. The kapo, the block eldest, had his or her own room: a narrow single bed, a chair, a table. Read More
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