October 15, 2024 First Person Bolaño in Girona: A Friendship By Javier Cercas CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM CENTER, A. G. PORTA; LAUTARO BOLAÑO; ROBERTO BOLAÑO; JOEL G. MORERA; CAROLINA LÓPEZ; CERCAS; CERCAS’S SON, RAÚL; AND THE PUBLISHER OF QUADERNS CREMA, JAUME VALLCORBA, IN BARCELONA, 2000. Photograph courtesy of Javier Cercas. I have written about this before, but I want to tell the story again. It happened, I figure, around 1981 or ’82, outside the doors of the Bistrot, a bar in the historic center of Girona, Spain. I was walking up to the university with my classmate Xavier Coromina when he stopped to say hi to a guy who was a bit older than us, looked like a hippie peddler, and had a Latin American accent, Mexican or Argentine or Chilean (back then I was unable to distinguish one from the other). They talked. At some point Coromina asked the guy how things were going with the novel he was writing. He made a skeptical face and answered: “It’s going, it’s going, but who knows where it’s really headed.” That was it, and the phrase remained etched in my mind, maybe because, although secretly I wanted to be a writer, at nineteen I had yet to summon up the courage to admit it, and I was impressed by how naturally that guy—the first real or pretend novelist I’d ever crossed paths with in my life—spoke of his projected novel. Of course, I was sure I would never hear of him again, that he would never be a proper novelist or would only be one of so many Latin American novelists of his generation, thwarted by displacement, bohemianism, and poverty, but seven or eight years later, while I was writing my second novel in the United States, I included a scene in which one character asks another how his doctoral thesis is going, and the other one answers, “It’s going, it’s going, but who knows where it’s really headed.” Time passes, and now the gap is not seven or eight years but fifteen or sixteen. We are in December of 1997. I’m living in Barcelona, but I’ve gone to Girona to write an article for El País about an exhibition of work by a childhood friend, David Sanmiguel. At the same time as the opening, in Llibreria 22—right across the street from the art gallery—Ponç Puigdevall is presenting the book Last Evenings on Earth, by Roberto Bolaño. By now, Bolaño has in quick succession published Nazi Literature in the Americas and Distant Star, and his name is beginning to resonate in certain literary circles. But I, who am totally outside these circles despite having published three novels, have not yet read him, and have heard of him only from Enrique Vila-Matas, who is a mutual friend. Before the exhibition opens, I have a coffee with Bolaño and Puigdevall. Bolaño tells me he lives in Blanes, that all he does is write, that he makes a living—“a very modest one,” he emphasizes—through literature. Suddenly, while listening to him talk, I have a hunch. I ask Bolaño if he was living in Girona in the early eighties; he says he was. I ask him if he knew Xavier Coromina; he says yes. Then I tell him of our fleeting encounter outside the Bistrot and, once inside the Llibreria 22, I show him the passage in my second novel where a character says his thesis is going, but who knows where it’s really headed. Bolaño laughs; I laugh too. Read More
October 11, 2024 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Mark Leidner on “Sissy Spacek” By Mark Leidner An early draft of “Sissy Spacek.” For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Mark Leidner’s poem “Sissy Spacek” appears in the new Fall issue of the Review, no. 249. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? When the novel Heat 2 by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner came out, I thought about how weird it would be to be a man whose name was “Mann.” I thought about how arbitrary names are, and how strange it would be to be assigned such an empty template. I tried to write a poem made up of people with Man or Mann in their names, but the only three I could think of (Michael Mann, Aimee Mann, and Man Ray) weren’t enough for a poem. I added “Al Michaels,” which is an odd name for different reasons: he seems to have two first names, and both are extremely ordinary. Maybe insecurity about my own relatively ordinary first name fueled these concerns. Read More
October 9, 2024 Bulletin Anne Carson Will Receive Our 2025 Hadada Award By The Paris Review ANNE CARSON. PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER SMITH. Anne Carson fell in love with ancient Greek as a high school student, reading Sappho with a teacher during lunch hour. In The Art of Poetry No. 88, published in issue no. 171 (Fall 2004), she recalled, “It was stunning to me, a revelation. And it continues to be stunning, continues to be like a harbor always welcoming. Strange, but welcoming.” For decades, Carson’s own work—which has invented new forms to contain unbearable experiences—has appeared to readers and writers as a similar revelation. And so it gives us great pleasure to announce that Carson will receive the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement, at the Spring Revel on April 1, 2025. Carson’s first book, Eros the Bittersweet (1986), a work of scholarship that reinvigorated the tradition of the lyric essay, examined Sappho’s conception of eros as simultaneous pleasure and pain. Since then, Carson has ranged between poetry, prose, drama, opera, translation, and visual art, often merging these approaches to expand our sense of the possible. Autobiography of Red (1998), a bildungsroman in verse, transposes the story of Herakles and Geryon onto small-town Ontario, where Geryon, a queer teenager with “little red wings,” is destroyed and remade by desire. Each new work has found the form for its subject. The Beauty of the Husband (2001) bears the subtitle “A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos”; Decreation (2005) sets verse and brief philosophical essays alongside a screenplay and a three-part opera; Nox (2009), a meditation on translating Catullus and an elegy for Carson’s estranged brother, is a scrapbook printed on a single long, folded page. Read More
October 9, 2024 At Work Loving the Limitations of the Novel: A Conversation between Sally Rooney and Merve Emre By Merve Emre Sally Rooney. Photograph by Kalpesh Lathigra. Each of Sally Rooney’s novels writes back to a novel that she admires: Conversations with Friends to Jane Austen’s Emma; Normal People to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda; Beautiful World, Where Are You to Henry James’s The Golden Bowl; and Intermezzo to James Joyce’s Ulysses. But while Rooney is delightfully conversant in the history of the novel, it is not, she says, her first thought when she starts to write. Her characters simply walk into her mind and stay there until she has puzzled out the precise nature of their relationships to one another. In Intermezzo, as in the novels that preceded it, her characters—Peter and Ivan Koubek, and the women they love—are often self-deceiving, misguided, and dishonest. No one’s intentions are pure. No one’s actions are consistent. Yet amid this tangle of secrets and lies there is, every so often, a glimmer of mutual understanding—a minor triumph in a world designed to erode all human exchanges and emotions. It is the burden and the pleasure of the novel, from Austen to Rooney, that it can animate these triumphs and the unbeautiful world from which they arise, so long as we keep turning the pages. This summer, Rooney and I met in Dublin, where we mostly talked about novels, old and new. We met again on September 25, for a public conversation onstage at the Southbank Centre in London. Before Rooney and I began to speak, she delivered a brief statement condemning the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the deaths of civilians in Israel, in Palestine, and in Lebanon. She urged the audience “to keep protesting, to keep speaking out, to keep demanding an end to this horrifying war.” Although our conversation in London was a continuation of our earlier exchange, her words were a reminder that any discussion of the novel, cannot be, and must not be, isolated from a consideration of longer and broader histories—of death and dispossession, beauty and belonging. INTERVIEWER In Dublin this summer, we talked about contemporary novelists who, quite self-consciously, are writing back toward the history of the novel. You said something that stuck with me—“Many writers are contemptuous of the novel as a bourgeois form, but I love the novel.” How does one sustain that love for the novel at a time of horrific violence? More specifically, what shape does that love take in Intermezzo? SALLY ROONEY I stand by that. I do love the novel, and I think a lot about its specific textual lineage. My great friend Tom Morris is a fantastic short-story writer, and he often says short-story writers get asked about form, but novelists just get asked what their novels are about. We tend to forget that the novel isn’t just a big, long piece of text. When we say it’s a bourgeois form, what we mean is that it emerged coincident with the emergence of industrial capitalism, and it documented a kind of psychology, a kind of individuality that that historical moment produced and made possible, which was, at the time, a bourgeois subjectivity. Now, in the twenty-first century, most novels have been written by people who had to work for a living, who didn’t just live off passive income, capital income, and most protagonists of novels similarly don’t live off the riches of their tenant farmers, as the protagonists of nineteenth-century novels often did. How can contemporary novelists work in conversation with that textual lineage, respond to it, subvert it, make it more capacious, or change the kinds of subjectivity it’s capable of documenting? Read More
October 8, 2024 First Person My Enemies, A–Z By Molly Young Ann-Margret in Tommy (1975). Screenshot by Molly Young. A list of all my enemies, in alphabetical order. ADMIN All the tasks I dread because I’m too weak or lazy to (a) find a way to not do them or (b) use my imagination to render them interesting. BELATEDLY LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE Studying a new language when you’re thirty-seven is an unbelievably inefficient use of time. It takes me weeks to grasp what a five-year-old child could pick up without even trying. This isn’t true of anything else I do in my spare time, like gardening or baking. I could crush a five-year-old’s learning curve in both of those things. When trying to speak a foreign language I am always catapulting myself out of a frying pan and into a fire. Last year, in Mexico, for instance, someone asked why I wasn’t speaking Spanish and I replied, “Because I’m afraid I will accidentally be rude”—except what I actually said was “Because I’m afraid I will accidentally become horny.” COFFEE HEART Some call it tachycardia. The New York Times named it “coffee heart” in a 1905 article with the fantastic title of “SMALL BOY HAS ‘COFFEE HEART'” and the subtitle “Child of Eight Is in City Hospital Slowly Regaining Health. HEART BEATS TOO FAST. Muscle Was Wearing itself Out — Drank a Dozen Cups a Day.” The article is about an eight-year-old named Johnnie Murphy, whose heart was apparently beating at “twice the normal rate” after its owner got into the habit of drinking nine to twelve cups per day. A suspiciously timed mention of the coffee substitute Postum at the end of the article raises the likelihood that the whole thing is sponcon, though there’s no way to be sure. Read More
October 4, 2024 On Poetry Bernadette Mayer on Her Influences By Bernadette Mayer Photograph of basalt by Marek Novotňák, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The first big influence on my writing was Nathaniel Hawthorne. My teacher in senior year of high school had written her doctoral thesis on The Marble Faun, if you can imagine that—and she was a nun! I went to one of the bookstores on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and bought a complete Riverside Editions set of Hawthorne’s writing. Later I added a volume, Septimius Felton; or, The Elixir of Life, two volumes of Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, and Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny. I had become addicted to his long, elegant prose sentences, which I studied and even diagrammed; a habit as old-fashioned as nuns. If you read the introductory essay to The Scarlet Letter, “The Customs House,” you will see what I mean. In it Hawthorne says that Hester Prynne became a social worker. As far as I know, Hawthorne did not write poetry, but he was an excellent candle-waster, in more ways than one. His writing made it clear that words have a magical quality to take you to another sphere but then you see that it’s only a book you are holding. I already had synesthesia in the form of seeing letters as different colors, so in many ways I was grateful to the author of The Scarlet Letter. Perhaps it was Hawthorne who inspired me to see prose as poetic. Read More