January 19, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Vengeance, Evil, and Grace By The Paris Review Still from Phantom Thread. As often happens when watching a perfect movie, by the time the first shot bloomed across the screen, I nearly forgot I had a body. I would have forgotten entirely except that Phantom Thread made my heart pound and my palms sweat. Friends, this is not a thriller, though it was thrilling. Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, and allegedly Daniel Day-Lewis’s last, is about a couturier in postwar London. It is about devotion, though depending on who you ask it is either about a man’s devotion to his work or a women’s devotion to a man. Either way, the film itself was made with obvious devotion. The clothing is arresting. What color is that bowtie except, perhaps, Proustian? The interior shots each want to be a still. Each time Day-Lewis’s character drives through the English countryside, his perfect sports car enrobes him like his gowns enrobe his clients. Weather, branches, or crowds be damned, he is a perfect pilot in a perfect vehicle. Both the movie and the characters run the risk of failing to live up to the exacting standards they set. But to my intense satisfaction, Phantom Thread is the picture of success. There is a twist, a fetish introduced so deliciously that it makes the trailer for the final Fifty Shades movie look like it belongs in Barbie’s beach house. If this is Day-Lewis’s last movie, what a way to go. —Julia Berick Eka Kurniawan I recently read Eka Kurniawan’s novel Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash as if either the book or I were outfitted with afterburners. Vengeance is a comic picaresque that the publisher has likened to a Quentin Tarantino film; Kurniawan’s prose, translated from the Indonesian by Annie Tucker, is pungent and blunt, but there’s more talk of fighting than actual fights, and a scene in which a pair of 18-wheelers battle for dominance at high speeds on a two-lane road could not have been reproduced in film to such great effect. The novel’s protagonist is Ajo Kawir, who suffers a youthful erotic mishap that leaves him impotent (he treats his “bird” as a kind of Yorick, delivering monologues to it and wondering whither its gambols). He fights to relieve his frustrations and meets the tough-as-nails Iteung, who kicks his ass and wins his heart. The course of true love doesn’t run smooth, as we know, and Ajo Kawir abandons his old life for one spent making long-distance hauls. There are disappointing moments later in the novel—Kurniawan’s handling of gay and female sexuality is rather awful at times—but the physicality of his prose and his story is invigorating.—Nicole Rudick Read More
January 19, 2018 Arts & Culture Falling in Love with an Empty Man: The Work of José Leonilson By Elisa Wouk Almino In general, I do not want to meet the artists I fall in love with. I’m keen to preserve the relationship between the art and myself. But that changed when I saw José Leonilson’s work in person for the first time, in the exhibition “Empty Man” at the Americas Society in New York. In Brazil, Leonilson is considered one of the most important artists of his generation. Born in the northeastern city of Fortaleza, he came of age in the 1980s, in the years immediately following Brazil’s twenty-year dictatorship. Emerging from oppressive times, he and his peers embraced the pleasures of painting, and they made bright and figurative work. But Leonilson’s art was also uniquely personal and literary; words float alone or in poetic arrangements (“here comes your man / full of numbers and words”). His presence looms over almost everything he left behind. Read More
January 19, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking from Sixteenth-Century Fairy Tales By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The first and most deliciously weird collection of European fairy tales comes not from the Brothers Grimm but from Giambattista Basile (1575–1632), a poet, courtier, and feudal administrator from Naples. Because Basile wrote in the Neapolitan dialect, The Tale of Tales—in the original, Lo cunto de li cunti—has been obscure for most of its history. The first authoritative English translation, by Basile scholar Nancy Canepa, appeared only in 2007. For those of us who read to enter different skins and live in different worlds, the book is a treasure box of estranging language and metaphor. The tales are fantastical, but the greater thrill is how the writing brings alive the details and sensibilities of daily life in Baroque-period Italy, six hundred years ago. Here is Basile describing a pretty young girl: She truly was a delectable morsel: she looked like tender curds and whey, like sugar paste; she never turned the little buttons of her eyes without leaving hearts perforated by love; she never opened the basin of her lips without doing a little laundry of souls. Read More
January 18, 2018 Arts & Culture The Academic’s Guide to Academese By A Community of Inquiry The following definitions are culled from a critical glossary written by a group of Princeton graduate students and faculty. The glossary defines fifty-eight terms common to academic life, in a style intended “to prick both egos and consciences.” art. Most generally, the ability, manner, or “knack” essential to the realization of some task or goal, especially when tricky or specialized (e.g., “the art of losing isn’t hard to master”). Also, a large class of objects and/or nonmaterial phenomena privileged for their putative ability to occasion unpredictable but significant responses (particularly aesthetic, but sometimes sentimental or political) in individuals and groups. A term substantially defined by resistance to definition. Hence, difficult to define satisfactorily, if also satisfactory to define difficultly. canon. A sacred weapon within academic departments, fired ritually upon the uninitiated or wayward. Injuries suffered may generate the scars requisite for entry into the relevant sodalities and/or encampments. Read More
January 18, 2018 Arts & Culture Finding Science Fiction and Fantasy for Female Readers By Dara Horn “Why don’t you write anything fun? You know, like about an alternate universe or time travel or something?” That’s my twelve-year-old daughter, an obsessive reader who plows through four or five books a week, disappointed that her novelist mom hasn’t invented a tweenage dystopia like the ones she devours daily. For her, like for so many readers her age, reading means plunging into the supernatural, fantasy, science fiction, some wild imagined world where new rules apply. I watched endless alternate universes with daring heroines pile up on my daughter’s nightstand, baffled by how different her tastes were from mine at her age—until I finally understood one very obvious answer to her question. My daughter’s fascination with nonrealistic literature began a few years ago with one of my own childhood favorites: Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, first published in 1962. And that was where the wrinkle between my daughter’s time and mine began. Read More
January 18, 2018 Arts & Culture Writing Fiction in the Shadow of Jerusalem By Moriel Rothman-Zecher I started writing fiction while a cloud of death and mourning hung heavy over Jerusalem. To be clear: death and mourning are always hovering in the air over Jerusalem. It is not a joyful city. But in this period, beginning in early fall of 2015, death and mourning were increasingly part of the daily reality of almost every Jerusalemite I knew, and were spreading elsewhere, throughout Israel-Palestine. In late September of that year, a car driven by a sixty-four-year-old Israeli man named Alexander Levlovitz was stoned by a number of Palestinian youths in Jerusalem. He crashed into a pole and was killed. A few days later, an Israeli couple were shot and killed by Palestinian gunmen while driving in the West Bank with their four children, who were not physically harmed. In the days and weeks that followed, the Israeli military began a trigger-happy campaign of suppressing any form of Palestinian uprising, whether armed or not. By mid October, some two hundred Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces—some of them armed with lethal weapons and attempting to carry out attacks; some of them throwing stones at army posts, vehicles, or checkpoints; some of them entirely unarmed; some of them small children, like thirteen-year-old Abdel Rahman Obeidallah. During the same period, twenty-eight Israelis had been stabbed, axed, run over, or shot to death by Palestinians, and an Eritrean refugee named Haftom Zarhum was beaten to death in a bus station after a group of Israelis mistakenly identified him as the Palestinian perpetrator of a shooting attack that had just taken place there. Read More