March 7, 2018 Arts & Culture On Tania Franco Klein’s “Our Life in the Shadows” By Anna Furman In Tania Franco Klein’s photo series “Our Life in the Shadows”—on display last month at Mexico City’s Material art fair and San Francisco’s Photofairs—women stare blankly at static television screens, mirrored toaster ovens, and hazily lit window curtains. A sense of ennui permeates the images, which depict domestic life in rich cinematic detail. Each subject is cropped so that her face is never fully in view. Often, the women are distorted by a reflection or an obfuscating prop. In The Waiting, one of the fifty images that comprise the series, a bowl of lipstick-marked cigarettes is perched ceremoniously atop a pillow. The living room is saturated with a moody cobalt blue. (Other images are steeped in jewel-toned reds and deep emerald greens.) Unpeopled and static, the photo is, conceivably, a portrait; the alluring mise-en-scène bears only traces of the person out of view. “My main character is emotions,” says the twenty-seven-year-old Mexico City–based photographer, who treats houses, furniture, and human subjects as vessels for those emotions—which range from anxiety and melancholy to existential stress. On February 23, at San Francisco’s Photofairs, three self-portraits from the series were on view. In the photographs, Franco Klein is topless, gazing out at a mattress-littered desert road; lying on a carpeted floor, facing her muddled reflection; and in a kitchen, keeled over in exhaustion. Anxious and rudderless, her characters are ill at ease in their environments. Though Franco Klein envisions each subject, including herself, in what she calls a “private jungle”—bathroom, sofa, train seat—there is invariably a voyeuristic element at play. By looking or even physically turning away from the camera, Franco Klein’s subjects are almost—but never completely—able to evade our gaze. Read More
March 7, 2018 Arts & Culture Too Much / Not Enough: Translating Reed Grachev By Sabrina Jaszi A tram outside the Leningrad metro in 1987. Two years ago, while translating the stories of Reed Grachev, a suppressed Russian writer of the mid twentieth century, I encountered a passage told from the perspective of a bus driver: He observes that the bus is very full, then looks in the mirror at an unnamed someone and wonders why she isn’t giving the “signal.” He starts the bus and sees that some people have been left behind at the stop. Unstated, but self-evident to any Russian reader, is that the unnamed someone is the conductor (in charge of selling tickets), who should have given the driver a “signal” to close the doors when the bus was at capacity. Grachev’s stories are full of public transportation. On trams, buses, trains, and trolleybuses, people are jostling and crowded. The sensory overload of these tight spaces contrasts with the emotional state of his characters, who are, almost without exception, alienated. Each is searching for a connection beyond the physical and is thus, one could say, in transit. The bus driver observes that the bus is packed, and yet not everyone has made it on. This dynamic of “too much / not enough” is omnipresent in Grachev’s work, which poignantly evokes the heightened isolation of individuals within a collectivized system. Read More
March 7, 2018 Bulletin Isabella Hammad Wins 2018 Plimpton Prize; David Sedaris Wins Terry Southern Prize By The Paris Review The Paris Review’s Spring Revel is a month away—tickets are available here—and the editorial committee of our board has chosen the winners of two annual prizes for outstanding contributions to the magazine. It’s with great pleasure that we announce our 2018 honorees, Isabella Hammad and David Sedaris. Read More
March 6, 2018 Redux Redux: Luisa Valenzuela, Gordon Lish, Thomas Healy 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. This week, to celebrate the publication of The Writer’s Chapbook, the second volume from Paris Review Editions, we bring you a sampling of writers on writing. Read More
March 6, 2018 Hue's Hue Marian Blue, the Color of Angels, Virgins, and Other Untouchable Things By Katy Kelleher Still from Lady Shanghai Blue, by David Lynch. In a strip mall, next to a CVS Pharmacy, and tucked behind a Burger King, I learned about my angel. While I waited for a prescription to be filled, I wandered into the only New Age store in this small northeastern city. A woman with long gray hair led me into a back room—I suspect it was a repurposed broom closet—for a fifteen-minute psychic reading. The walls were covered with Turkey-red-calico fabric and faded yellow-ditsy floral tablecloths hanging from a constellation of multicolored thumbtacks. We sat together on a set of metal folding chairs, and she held my cold hands in her warm wrinkled ones. She told me in hushed tones that I had an angel, a ball of light that beamed out from behind my left shoulder. My angel, she said, was with me always, glowing steadily like a frosty star, invisible to everyone but her. She had always been able to see angels, she explained, and they were always the lightest, purest, sweetest baby blue. Read More
March 6, 2018 Arts & Culture Mean Streets: The Life and Afterlife of Berlin Alexanderplatz By Dustin Illingworth George Grosz, Panorama (detail), 1919. The German artist George Grosz emerged from the decadence of Weimar culture as an unlikely moralist. His grotesque paintings of Berlin street life—seething, ugly, claustrophobic, often thick with malice—skewered the city’s lurid postwar demimonde. Though today Grosz is best remembered as a gifted caricaturist, his contemporary Hannah Arendt considered him a documentarian: “[his] cartoons seemed to us not satire so much as realistic reportage,” she wrote. Within the crucible of the metropolis, Arendt suggests, one must be prepared to enlarge one’s conception of the real. One of Grosz’s works, Panorama (Down with Leibneicht), adorns the cover of a new edition of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 Expressionist masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz, published by New York Review Books and translated from the original German by Michael Hofmann. Dense, death-haunted, bleakly erotic, Panorama pairs perfectly with Döblin’s immense and splendidly gritty novel, on whose shoulders rests, as Hofmann has it in his afterword, “the literary name and fame of the city of Berlin, if not the idea of modern city literature altogether.” The book follows the petty criminal Franz Biberkopf—“transport worker, housebreaker, pimp, manslaughterer”—as he attempts to go straight after a stint in Tegel, a Berlin prison, for beating his girlfriend to death. His fate, as relayed through dozens of slangily titled episodes (“Reunion on the Alex, Bitching Cold”), unspools with the sensational power of tabloid melodrama. While Biberkopf regains his bearings in the city, he vows to lead the life of a respectable man, selling newspapers and tie holders in the proletarian Alexanderplatz district. But after a friend’s betrayal upsets this delicate stasis, he returns to a life of crime, falling in with a band of con men, and eventually losing an arm after a failed heist. Following a period of convalescence, he meets and falls in love with Mitzi, a prostitute, who is then murdered by the devious, predatory Reinhold, a criminal associate. Biberkopf, distraught, opens fire in a crowded bar, and wounds a policeman. While in custody, he starves himself and enters a self-induced catatonic state. After a climactic confrontation with the figure of death, he returns to his senses and finds a stable but much diminished life as a menial laborer. Ground beneath the boot of rude, rapacious Berlin, Biberkopf, in lieu of love or purpose, is left “sniffing the air, sniffing the streets, to see if … they will still accept him.” The final chapter concludes with bitterly humbled wisdom: “We know what we know, we had to pay dearly enough for it.” Read More