October 22, 2018 At Work Becoming Radicalized: An Interview with John Wray By Valeria Luiselli Valeria Luiselli (left) and John Wray (right) John Wray seems restless under the confines of any single identity. He writes fiction in English and German, carries both a United States and an Austrian passport, and works under a pseudonym. The Right Hand of Sleep, which won Wray a Whiting Award, is an austere political thriller; Canaan’s Tongue is a supernatural Southern gothic; and Lowboy, his 2009 breakthrough, narrates one day in the life of a schizophrenic teenager roaming the subway tunnels beneath New York City. “These days, writers have brands,” wrote Carolyn Kellogg in the Los Angeles Times when Wray’s fourth novel, The Lost Time Accidents, was published in 2016. “Wray is all over the place … What to expect of his next book? Something not much like his last.” To some of us, however, Wray’s shape-shifting is a source of fascination. Wray’s fifth novel, Godsend, is forthcoming this month from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It tells the story of eighteen-year-old Aden Sawyer’s journey from the suburban California of her childhood to a Pakistani Koran school, and from there across the mountains into Afghanistan, a place—for a teenage American girl ignorant of the culture’s tribal code—of dreadful, mortal danger. It is derived, to a degree, from the true story of John Walker Lindh, the young man who became infamous in the weeks after the attacks of September 11 as the “American Taliban.” But it owes just as much to a story Wray heard while traveling as a journalist in Afghanistan, about a girl of British background who fought there among the mujahideen, disguised as a man. I visited Wray in September, at a peculiar collective house in Brooklyn that he shares with the writers Alice Sola Kim, Isaac Fitzgerald, and Akhil Sharma, and in which Nathan Englander and Marlon James have writing spaces. We sat in creaking teakwood chairs in the cluttered kitchen, and ate slightly overcooked spaghetti, for which he apologized profusely. Read More
October 22, 2018 Arts & Culture Simply Impossible By Mark Polizzotti Patrick Modiano Translation lore is rife with tales of linguistic derring-do in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Gilbert Adair’s e-less Englishing (or Nglishing) of Georges Perec’s La Disparition is one. So are James Joyce and co.’s Italian and French permutations on Anna Livia Plurabelle, and Henri Parisot’s (and Antonin Artaud’s) gallicizations of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” Less spectacular, but far more common, is a hurdle faced by nearly every practicing translator, across contexts and genres. It’s the challenge of the seemingly unadorned sentence or expression that passes so naturally it seems to “write itself.” While the translation of these sentences can sometimes occur just as naturally, more often than not it requires vast amounts of hairpulling. Few things are as difficult as ease. As a translator, I’ve been grappling (so to speak) with the apparently straightforward prose of Patrick Modiano for the better part of a decade. Having now worked on nine of his books—his newest, Sleep of Memory, was published by Yale University Press this month—I’ve come to appreciate both the economy of his French and the complexities of ushering that economy into English. The familiar rule of thumb, that English is more concise than French by about 15 percent, doesn’t apply here: in my experience, Modiano is one of the rare French writers who can actually come out longer in English translation. Read More
October 19, 2018 This Week’s Reading What Our Contributors Are Reading This Fall By The Paris Review Lucie Brock-Broido and Henri Cole Recently, I visited New York City to attend a tribute for Lucie Brock-Broido, a poet who, like many of the finest, died too young. So I reread Lucie’s last book, Stay, Illusion, which was her best. One of the functions of poetry, and of the poet, is to heal us from the damages of experience; I think Lucie’s poems are often about healing from the damages we inflict upon the earth and its inhabitants. Animal rights was one of Lucie’s passions. As far back as ancient times, animals have been used to represent and critique our human behavior. I think Lucie was part animal. Certainly, she was feral. She believed that in a prior life she had been a lynx, a small lynx. And in this life, she was an ailurophile—or lover of cats. In her poems, there is always the lingering possibility of death. I suspect that Lucie understood from an early age that, as humans, we are finite. In the English language, there is no other poet doing what Lucie did. The Oxford English Dictionary was her Bible, and Lucie refreshed the English language with her radiantly original poems. This summer, I visited her grave at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts several times, and a thick coat of grass already sparkles over her. I find it almost unbearable to absorb her loss. Sometimes, to keep her alive, I repeat a list of words with her name embedded in them: hallucination, elucidate, Lucifern, pellucid. I loved her poems and cannot believe there will be no more. —Henri Cole Read More
October 19, 2018 Arts & Culture Surviving Unrequited Love with Ivan Turgenev By Viv Groskop I found out about Ivan Turgenev’s existence at a crucial moment. There had been a very small leap for me between obsessing over Anna Karenina in my midteens and deciding that learning Russian was my destiny. There was, unsurprisingly, an even smaller leap between becoming obsessed with learning Russian and becoming obsessed with unsuitable men who spoke Russian. This culminated in my acquaintance with a man whose name—Bogdan Bogdanovich—translated as “God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift.” In many ways, he lived up to his name. He was a man whom I loved with the passion that Anna Karenina first feels for Vronsky, but he regarded me with as much affection as Levin holds for the ladies who stink of eau de vinaigre. This is where Turgenev comes in. No one writes better about unrequited love. Real life is about quiet, slow, awkward moments of humiliation. And what greater humiliation is there than loving someone far, far more than they love you? This is the kind of embarrassing, self-inflicted fever that Turgenev is brilliant at describing. In August 1994, I was twenty-one years old and spending the summer by the Black Sea in Odessa, Ukraine. It was the last few months of my year abroad. That summer was a blur of strong cigarettes, black bread, tea and jam, and whispered invitations on a Saturday night. I spent a lot of time drinking samogon (moonshine), eating pig fat, and being in love. He was in a rock band. They played songs in terrible English with titles like “I’m Not Drunk, It’s Only Fucking Funk.” I was his groupie. He was my world. We went everywhere together. We kissed. We laughed. We ate pig fat. I was drunk a lot of the time, but I was never too drunk to know that God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift, did not love me in the same way that I loved him. Luckily, while I was plowing my way through Tolstoy with a dictionary, I also happened to be reading in translation Turgenev’s play A Month in the Country. It is a cruel and hilarious cautionary tale about unrequited love. Turgenev himself experienced this unhappy state for more or less the entirety of his sixty-four years. From around the 1840s to the end of his life in 1883, Turgenev adored the married opera singer Pauline Viardot. The exact nature of their relationship is hotly debated. But it seems to me to be one of the most extreme examples of one-sided love in history. Turgenev represents his complicated feelings about this state of being through the mournful, resigned, comically self-pitying character of Rakitin. Read More
October 19, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Georges Bataille By Valerie Stivers It is an unfortunate quirk that when I try to think of food scenes in literature, one of the first that comes to mind is from the opening pages of a 1928 classic of transgressive pornography, The Story of the Eye, by the French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897–1962). In the scene in question, Simone, the female protagonist, lifts up her skirt and dips an exposed body part into the kitty cat’s saucer of milk while the sixteen-year-old male narrator looks on. Simone is wearing “a black pinafore with a starched white collar.” She says, “Milk is for the pussy, isn’t it? … Do you dare me to sit in the saucer?” “I dare you,” the narrator answers—“almost breathless.” The scene is sexy and also a perfect riff, with the cat, the body part, the milk, and the potential lapping up. Strangely, when I have this thought, a dish springs to mind as well—a terror of haute French cuisine called floating islands, or iles flottante, in which meringue towers drift lazily in a pool of crème anglaise. The meringues can be baked or poached and, in a recipe I found from The Cordon Bleu Cookbook, are served dusted with crushed pink Jordan almonds. The dish’s relevance to The Story of the Eye is that it’s made mostly from milk (starring in the passage above) and eggs, which participate in one of the text’s main metaphor chains, linked to eyes and testicles. Eggs, for the narrator, are “extraordinarily meaningful” and are used for bizarre and grotesque purposes. He explains, “Another game was to crack a fresh egg on the edge of the bidet and empty it under her: sometimes she would piss on it, sometimes she made me strip naked and swallow the raw egg from the bottom of the bidet.” Milk in the book participates in a second metaphor chain, this one of fluids, primarily semen and urine. (Coincidentally, the meringue of my iles flottante floats in a pool of creamy yellow liquid. Mmm … ) Read More
October 18, 2018 Arts & Culture Virginia Woolf’s Little-Known Biography of a Cocker Spaniel By Erin Schwartz Sawrey Gilpin, English Springer Spaniel on a Cushion, 1807 In her 1911 opus Toy Dogs and Their Ancestors, Judith Blunt-Lytton, sixteenth baroness of Wentworth, great-granddaughter of Lord Byron, wrote, “It has cost me years of research both in the British Museum and in the picture galleries of Europe to disentangle the truth from the cocoon of falsehood into which it was spun.” What Blunt-Lytton sought to recuperate from the cobwebs of history was the lapdog’s true form. Blunt-Lytton contended that many breeds had recently strayed from their roots, in large part due to the Victorian proliferation of “dog fancying”: a British term that evokes, at once, a group of people who like dogs and a group people who fluff up dogs’ fur and tie ribbons around their necks. Of the spaniel, Blunt-Lytton asserts that the contemporary model “was introduced comparatively recently, certainly no earlier than the year 1840,” and compiles visual evidence of its transformation. The spaniel in Titian’s Venus of Urbino is technically correct, as are eighteenth-century pooches painted by George Stubbs; for comparison, her book contains a mug shot of a puppy described as “noseless atrocity, bred by author,” while another dog’s portrait is captioned: “noseless toy spaniel, with wrongly carried ears and bad expression.” Read More