October 16, 2017 At Work Suitcase Full of Candy: An Interview with Svetlana Alexievich By Mieke Chew Svetlana Alexievich headlined this year’s Louisiana Literature festival, a gathering of writers, readers, and Scandinavian publishers held twenty-five miles north of Copenhagen, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. The event was conducted in Danish and Russian, and the audience peopled a hill overlooking the Baltic Sea, craning their necks to glimpse the 2015 Nobel Prize winner. Alexievich spoke of the “wild, sacred years” of the Soviet Union, the responsibility she felt to free people from time through her books, and the legislation of memory. She was reluctant, when asked, to describe the evolution of her style. (“Must I explain everything?”) And she assured listeners that women are just more interesting than men. I hovered backstage for two days waiting for our interview. Meanwhile, I occasionally saw Alexievich eat, laugh, and chat with a group of friends, all Swedes (she lived in exile in Sweden for years). More recently, and still at risk of persecution, she returned home, to Belarus. “When I walk my dog in Minsk, I go past a church,” she told the festival audience, “I see the youth with their new cars. The priest comes out to see them. They want their cars to be blessed.” This is how she prefers to answer questions—through details. When we spoke, Tine Roesen, Alexievich’s Danish translator, acted as our interpreter. When the interview ended, after forty minutes, I figured Alexievich had had enough. Outside her hotel, she wrapped a scarf around her head and tied it under her chin; it was starting to rain. She stepped toward me and firmly shook my hand. Back in New York, a few weeks later, I read the transcript: The translator, mindful of Alexievich’s schedule, had suggested we end the interview much earlier than we had. Alexievich declined and started to ask me questions. INTERVIEWER In The Unwomanly Face of War, your first book, you say you hear texts everywhere. How did you start interviewing people? ALEXIEVICH I was born in a big city—Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine—but when I was a child, my father moved us back to his homeland in Minsk. We lived in a Slavic village and in the evening, sitting on benches, people talked, and we, the children, listened, of course—this was after the war, they were all women. This made a big impression on me. A much bigger impression than books, which filled our house. Because in books, the Soviet government made war look like a victory—beautiful, without misery. I don’t think one could even have more than two people killed in a book. What the women said was frightening, different. They would talk of death but also of love. And this, of course, affected a child’s mind. INTERVIEWER And how were you allowed to publish your books, books that changed the past? ALEXIEVICH It was a different time. I would not say it was easy, because no one could understand when I showed up, to a factory, or somewhere else. Why women? Why not men? But it was a different time. I couldn’t get published for three years. Then the times changed, glasnost, perestroika. So, for three years, I wasn’t allowed to publish The Unwomanly Face of War, but then it changed. The manuscript was getting passed around in Moscow, and someone gave it to Gorbachev’s aide. And in Gorbachev’s report on Victory Day, he said, according to one book, War has an unwomanly face. This was quite a signal. Before that, the censors said: what a frightening book, naturalism, pacifism. Who will go to war after this book? Read More
October 13, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Witch-Hop, Typingpool, and Salkis By The Paris Review Suzy Hansen’s Notes on a Foreign Country is a deceptively narrow book. It seems to be the memoir of a young, untested journalist who finds herself in Turkey, almost by chance, and begins to learn about the U.S. involvement in the Middle East. In reality, it is a book about what it means to be white and American, in the world and at home. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I picked it up. Among its many virtues, it is the first book I’ve read that gives an honest account of what, for my generation, passed for history class at even a “good” high school. “I was in high school for the Rwandan genocide and the war in Bosnia, but I was conscious of none of it at the time. During my senior year, I learned twentieth-century American history through the lyrics of Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ … Many years later I unearthed a research project I made about the song.” If that doesn’t make you wince, then you may not recognize yourself in Notes on a Foreign Country. Not everyone will. If you do recognize yourself, then you may also recognize the connections Hansen draws between American exceptionalism abroad, white supremacy at home, and a national self-image based on virtue—a self-image that could survive in no other free country on earth, and that may finally be falling apart in ours. —Lorin Stein Maybe it was the cover image of Freeman’s: The Future of New Writing that prompted me to pick it up: the bare tree, icy lake, and snowcapped mountains might have been a subconscious relief for my all-too-conscious discomfort at this past week’s mid-October mugginess. Mieko Kawakami’s story, “The Flower Garden,” is aesthetically sparse and cool as well, yet far from simple. It is a brief story that pries with gentle force at the tight societal seam binding female identity and material possessions, and it begins in medias res: a woman is showing her house to a potential buyer, a wealthy, attractive woman much her junior. The narrator, a housewife, spent her entire married life decorating the house and curating its interior design. She feels for it a deep and maternal bond. Yet her husband’s business went bust, leaving them bankrupt, and she is forced to sell. Shortly after leaving, she begins stalking the house, sitting on the bench outside and going to tend the garden (her husband’s favorite thing about the house and maybe about her) after the new inhabitant has left for the day. In a few pages, Kawakami’s austere prose sketches the narrator’s rapidly growing infatuation with both the home and its new owner. Kawakami’s psychological realism is on the expert level of Henry James, suggesting ethereal and nuanced feelings through their material representations. However, unlike James, her mastery comes in the form of a skillful economy of language. The story blossoms hypnotically into a dark and strange ending. —Lauren Kane Read More
October 13, 2017 Humor Jewish Comedy Is Serious Business By Jeremy Dauber From Nize Baby by Milt Gross (1928). “You want to hear a joke? I’ll tell you a joke. What’s green, is nailed to the wall, and whistles?” “ … I give up.” “A herring.” “A herring’s not green!” “Nu, you can paint it green.” “But it’s not nailed to the wall!” “You could nail it to the wall. If you wanted to.” “ … But a herring doesn’t whistle!” “All right, fine, so it doesn’t whistle.” Or: “I just threw in that part to confuse you.” Or: “All right, all right, so it’s not a herring.” Or: “What am I, some kind of herring expert?” And on and on. Is this joke, with its multiplicity of potential punch lines, a Jewish joke? And if so, why? Is it the syntax, with its faint Yiddish overtones? The slightly smart-ass sensibility? The comfort with its meta-jokiness, or, put another way, the subversive, near-parodic jab at the joke’s very form? Is it the particular refusal to provide the closure of a punch line, which could be taken, by an overzealous interpreter, as a metaphor for a Jewish historical consciousness ever in wait for messianic redemption? Or is it just a joke about herring? While you think about that, here’s a story about telling Jewish jokes. It’s an old story, a tale of the Preacher of Dubno, an eighteenth-century Hasidic rabbi famous for his apt and witty parables. Asked by an admirer how he always managed to find such an appropriate parable for each and every sermon, he answered, not uncharacteristically, with another parable. He told the story of a general visiting his troops who was struck by the results of their target practice: while most of the chalk circles drawn as makeshift targets on the wall revealed your regular variety of hit-or-miss results, one showed nothing but bullseyes—dead center, every shot. Gasping, the general demanded to see this marksman; he was even more surprised to discover the shooter was a Jew, a conscript forced to serve in the tsar’s army. He asked the Jew the secret of his success at arms. The Jew looked at the general as if he were cockeyed and responded: “Well, it’s very easy. First you fire the gun, and then, once you see where the bullet hole is, you draw a circle around it.” This had always been his technique, the maggid concluded: find a good joke or story, then figure out the larger point to draw from it. Read More
October 13, 2017 Eat Your Words Cooking with Ivan Doig By Valerie Stivers Whipping up recipes from a fictional 1930’s creek picnic. Ivan Doig’s characters take their food seriously. Doig (1939–2015), a canonical writer of the American West, was shaped by the effects of the Great Depression. His family were Scottish farmer-settlers. In his 1978 memoir, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind, Doig recounts his ancestors’ struggle to ranch the poor, high-altitude land of the Tierney Basin. It was a “peculiar” and “maybe treacherous” country where instead of homesteads, the land “turned out to be landing sites, quarters to hold people until they were able to scramble away to somewhere else.” In English Creek, the first novel in Doig’s acclaimed McCaskill trilogy, the 1930s landscape is littered with abandoned farms. The thirteen-year-old narrator, Jick, cursed with a teenage boy’s appetite in a rural environment of relative scarcity, is always on the lookout for his next meal. I find reading and rereading Doig’s work to be a moral tonic. It’s soothing to encounter a writer who values small communities, stewardship of the land, and the merits of human endeavor. He extracts meaning from the simplest things—a teenage boy’s appetite, for example—and when pleasure comes along for his characters, he celebrates it fully. Cooking to keep up with Doig’s women, though, is a challenge. Here’s a description, through Jick’s hungry eyes, of a Fourth of July creek picnic prepared by his mother and a friend: Read More
October 13, 2017 Comics Jonathan Franzen Says No By Tom Gauld From Baking with Kafka, by Tom Gauld. Printed with the permission of Drawn & Quarterly.
October 12, 2017 Arts & Culture Henry Green Is As Good As His Word By Michael Gorra Dean Cornwell, Options, 1917, oil on canvas. Evelyn Waugh could push a joke to the outer edge of our ability to bear it, stopping just when laughter turns to tears, and he’s had his imitators for the better part of a century now. So has Graham Greene, who blanched despair into a weary disillusionment; the contemporary thriller is inconceivable without him. Each of them added to the novelist’s grab bag of tricks. Their contemporary Henry Green didn’t quite manage that. In such early novels as Living (1929) and Party Going (1939) he experimented with dropping out the definite articles in a way that gave his language a tense angularity, the nouns and prepositions grating on each other, uncushioned: “Water dripped from tap on wall into basin and into water there. Sun. Water drops made rings in clear coloured water.” Nobody followed him and he left no codifiable body of technique. But Green may have had something better—not followers but admirers, and admirers among all writers. Very little connects such disparate figures as Eudora Welty, John Ashbery, and John Updike, or indeed those who have introduced Green’s other books in this series: little beyond their fondness for this strange elusive figure, not a model but an inspiration. Welty probably put it best. His work was ever changing and yet always the same, his books “to an unusual degree unlike one another … yet there could be no mistaking the hand … [with its] power to feel both what can and what never can be said.” Green’s peers recognized his originality; that’s achievement enough. For a long time, though, it seemed as if only other writers had spotted him. In the early fifties, he was often described as the most innovative novelist in England; by the eighties, he looked always in need of introduction. His American editions went in and out of print, and I had to order his 1940 autobiography, Pack My Bag, from abroad; those of us who read him got a lot of practice in explaining who he was, the Green without an e. Or maybe not Green at all. He was born Henry Yorke, and rich, the younger son of a Gloucestershire landowner turned industrialist; the family’s Birmingham foundry made both plumbing fixtures and equipment for the brewing industry. The boy’s parents sent him to Eton as a matter of course, and then Oxford. He left without a degree but had already finished his first novel, a Künstlerroman called Blindness (1926), and published it under the pen name of Henry Green when he was just twenty-one. Read More