January 27, 2017 On the Shelf A Sip of This Cream, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Thomas Frognall Dibdin. Nonalternative fact: our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, is also an accomplished translator. In a new interview with Jessie Chaffee, he offers some of his favorite metaphors for translation: “A translator with only one metaphor is lost—he or she needs three, four, dozens! One of the great things about Benjamin’s ‘Task of the Translator’—a thrillingly unfathomable essay for me—is the number of metaphors he gives us for translation, without settling on any one of them. He says translation is like a royal robe that amply enfolds the original; or else it is a series of vessel fragments which one pieces together with those of the original; or else it is like a tangent line that touches the sense of the original fleetingly at one point (which makes all the difference). He also says it’s like a transparency that lets the light of pure language shine upon the original. All of these analogies have appealed to me at one time or another and I don’t feel compelled to decide between them. Translation is most fun when it is ad hoc. I use whatever I have to hand. Sometimes a royal robe, sometimes a transparency.” Looking for the roots of bibliophilia—a tragic condition wherein otherwise sane people start to say shit like “I just love the smell of old books!”—Lorraine Berry looks back to Thomas Frognall Dibdin, a nineteenth-century English cleric who “was obsessed with the physical aspects of books, and in his descriptions paid an intense attention to the details of their bindings and printings (rather than the content) that betrayed his own love … Men who collected books were often portrayed as effeminate. In 1834, the British literary magazine the Athenaeum published an anonymous attack implying that one of the prominent members of Dibdin’s club was homosexual. Dibdin’s language, which has been noted for its sensuality, is full of double entendres and descriptions of book collecting in sexualised language; from his Bibliographical Decameron, some characteristic dialogue: ‘Can you indulge us with a sip of this cream?’ ‘Fortunately it is in my power to gratify you with a pretty good taste of it.’ ” Read More
January 26, 2017 From the Archive A Comic Masterpiece from the Seventies By Dan Piepenbring From Carcanet’s edition of The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium. Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. Harry Mathews, who died yesterday at eighty-six, was a prolific contributor to the Review. His fifth book, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, was the first novel this magazine ever serialized; it ran in four installments, starting with our Spring 1971 issue. Mathews claimed he was rejected twenty-five times before he found a publisher for it. Reviewing it for the New York Times in 1975, Edmund White called it “a comic masterpiece, as funny as Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, as intricate as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire … [Mathews] has created a seamless fabric, as tense, light, and strong as stretched silk.” The truth in that assessment is clear from the novel’s opening paragraphs. It opens midsentence: Read More
January 26, 2017 Our Correspondents White-Lady Tears By Amy Gentry This is the last entry in a series about domestic thrillers. Still from Obsessed. Obsessed, as they are, with both the trappings and traps of the middle class, most domestic thrillers are invested in interior decoration to a degree that would make Nancy Meyers blush. Part of the joy of watching these films lies in decoding their object fetishes, which tend to come to a head in the final reel, as improvised weapons define each film’s understanding of the terms of domesticity at stake. Consider the menacing household objects that come into play in the films I’ve covered in this series: the shovel in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (fertility!), the nail gun in Pacific Heights (home improvement!), those perfectly straightened cans and towels in Sleeping with the Enemy (housework!). Which is why, on watching Obsessed, the 2009 film starring Idris Elba, Beyoncé Knowles, and Ali Larter, I was at first nonplussed by the aggressive blankness of its sets. What, if anything, is Obsessed obsessed with? This is an important question, because the future of the domestic thriller is black (or at least nonwhite). While Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, both glossy, self-conscious literary adaptations about downward white mobility, did well, they’ve barely nudged Hollywood’s focus away from teenage-boy-friendly, big-budget action franchises. Meanwhile, Screen Gems, Sony’s small-budget genre subsidiary, has released a black-fronted thriller every September since 2014: No Good Deed, The Perfect Guy, and When the Bough Breaks. Critically reviled, these films nevertheless make healthy returns on their modest budgets while giving actors like Regina Hall, Morris Chestnut, Sanaa Lathan, and Taraji P. Henson something to do that doesn’t involve being a cop, a maid, or someone’s black best friend. Read More
January 26, 2017 Look Hothouse By Yevgeniya Traps Louise Bourgeois’s holograms at Cheim and Read. Louise Bourgeois, Untitled (detail), 1998–2014, suite of eight holograms, each about 11” x 14”. Holography is a curious technology: at once of the past and of the future, charmingly quaint but also coldly precise, marked by old sci-fi dreaming about the aesthetics of tomorrow. Equal parts kitschy and surreal, it’s sometimes eerily beautiful, seeming to deconstruct itself in its present absence. From the Greek holos (“whole”) and gramma (“message”), the hologram is like a private communiqué, delivered across space and time while respecting the conventions of neither. Unlike a photograph, which records only intensities of light, a hologram produces a three-dimensional view of an object by re-creating, through diffraction, the original light field. (In this way, a hologram is perhaps more like a sound recording than like a photographed image.) Because they require precise lighting conditions and the viewer’s active complicity to achieve their full effect, holograms have a kind of romance to them—the same intimacy borne of circling an object at dusk or twilight and emerging with a memory that isn’t quite yours. Read More
January 26, 2017 On the Shelf Mr. Coffee Mansplains, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “This is how a man makes coffee … ” The churlish “alternative facts” coming out of the Oval Office have led to an uptick in sales of 1984, which remains America’s go-to dystopian fiction: whenever our liberties are trampled on, someone’s reaching for the Orwell. Yes, Orwell, Orwell, he’s our man, if he can’t articulate the all-consuming dread of the totalitarian surveillance state, no one can! But Josephine Livingstone argues that there are better metaphors for our times: “When we suspect that we are living in a dystopia characterized by clumsy propaganda, it’s the book we buy from Amazon.com … But there is no Amazon.com in Nineteen Eighty-Four, because it is not a novel about globalized capital. Not even slightly! Nineteen Eighty-Four does not pastiche a world ravaged by capitalism and ruled by celebrities—the kind of world that could lead to the election of someone like Trump. Instead, it depicts suffering inflicted by state control masquerading as socialism.” Better, Livingstone says, to pick up some Kafka, which is right on the money: “In The Trial, Josef K. wakes up on his thirtieth birthday and is arrested. He cannot really conceive of what is happening: ‘K. was living in a free country, after all, everywhere was at peace, all laws were decent and were upheld, who was it who dared accost him in his own home?’ ” But did you ever wonder about what the other side of the Iron Curtain was reading? Before we were oohing and ahhing over Orwell, the Soviet Union was gaga for Ethel Voynich’s The Gadfly, an 1897 novel about “revolutionary zeal, religious devotion, clerical betrayal and romantic love.” Benjamin Ramm writes, “It was in the newly created Communist states of the Soviet Union and China that the book found its most dedicated readership. Arthur, the embodiment of a Romantic tragic hero, was repeatedly voted Russia’s most popular literary figure, and cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova, the first man and woman in space, credited its influence.” Read More
January 25, 2017 In Memoriam Harry Mathews, 1930–2017 By The Paris Review We’re sad to report that Harry Mathews has died, in Key West, at the age of eighty-six. In Harry, the Review has lost one of its most faithful and best-loved contributors, a writer we’ve worked with for more than fifty years—beginning in 1962, when we ran an excerpt from his first novel, The Conversions. Now, in our new Spring issue, we’ll publish an excerpt from the novel he just finished, The Solitary Twin. Our publisher, Susannah Hunnewell, interviewed Harry in 2007 for our Art of Fiction series. In her introduction she sketched his unique place in American fiction: He is usually identified as the sole American member of the Oulipo, a French writers’ group whose stated purpose is to devise mathematical structures that can be used to create literature. He has also been associated with the New York School of avant-garde writers, which included his friends John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch. After forty-five years of congenital allergy to convention, he rightfully belongs to the experimentalist tradition of Kafka, Beckett, and Joyce, even though his classical, witty style has won him comparisons to Nabokov, Jane Austen, and Evelyn Waugh. Yet while he enjoys the attention of thousands of cultishly enthusiastic French readers, Mathews remains relatively unknown in his native land and language. “When I go into an English bookstore, I always ask the same question,” a Frenchman told me with the sly smile that infects all Mathews fans. “ ‘Do you have Tlooth?’ ” “I think what good writers do is rework sentences and paragraphs so that their prose works exactly the way they want it to work, whatever it may be saying,” Mathews says in the interview. “And for me that is a musical phenomenon … In America there’s a tradition that says that what literature should do is give you the real thing. But for me, the only real thing is the writing.”