December 23, 2016 On the Shelf So This Is Christmas, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Still from Toni Erdmann. One of my favorite movies of 2016 is Toni Erdmann, which is full of madcap genius and a deep generosity of spirit. It turns a fairly ordinary, even archetypal premise—the reunion of an estranged father and daughter—into a deadpan comedy of embarrassment unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Francine Prose writes of the movie, “It’s rare that a film can have one of its characters pose a question that so baldly states its larger philosophical concerns—What does it mean to be human and how should a human being live?—without seeming overly obvious or sanctimonious. But Toni Erdmann gets away with it, in part because its characters are so complex and precisely drawn (we are fully persuaded that this father would ask his daughter that) and in part because the film is at once so understated, so broad, and so funny; in fact, humor and the ways in which humor expresses our humanity and allows us to get through the day is one of Toni Erdmann’s themes … Nothing in Toni Erdmann is predictable, though, as we gradually realize, we have been prepared for everything that occurs by a minor detail or casual exchange that we recall from earlier in the film.” I’ve also spent an inordinate amount of time watching the Instagram videos of Paige Ginn, who specializes in falling over, very publicly, very painfully. Philippa Snow writes, “Ginn films herself not only in a state of collapse, but also while getting there; in the process she’s gone viral, and somehow succeeded in making, by accident or by design, some of this year’s best and most interesting video work … A body count only really matters when the body counts, in purely capitalist terms, which helps to explain why the news cares so deeply about young, white bodies from upper- to middle-class backgrounds, and so very little about others at all. White male bodies have a great value in the sense that the people who inhabit them make the most money, but it’s ultimately female bodies that carry greater value as bodies, aka de facto objects. Blonde American girl-flesh offers, to the pound—up to about 115 of them, at least—which is why Paige Ginn is the KLF of the Instagram stunt. It takes real guts to say, Here is this object of supposed value, this fictionally delicate thing, being messed up, and here I am doing the damage.” Read More
December 22, 2016 From the Archive Living in the Now By Sylvie McNamara 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. We’ll use this space to feature recommendations from our staff. This week, our intern Sylvie McNamara recommends Joy Williams. We live in an age of fervent, misguided, conspiratorial belief. Fluoridated drinking water is poisonous. Michelle Obama was born a man. There are incriminating references to “pizza” in John Podesta’s e-mails. We might try to buy our way out: with yoga, green tea, reusable grocery bags, or a two-week fast in Bavaria. But regardless, ideology “proliferates … as merchandise,” as Jia Tolentino has written. “We can buy anything that suits us and nothing that we really need.” “The Yard Boy” is Joy Williams’ answer to 2016, though it was published in The Paris Review’s Winter 1977 issue. It’s a story about a true believer: a self-professed spiritual materialist who does not understand this term to be derisive, a label for those who would seek spirituality through consumerism or ego. He’s a zealot entrapped by platitudes with a New Age aura (“nothing is more obvious than the hidden” or “the moon can shine in one hundred different bowls”). His quest to live “in the Now” unravels his life. Read More
December 22, 2016 Best of 2016 Staff Picks: Our Favorite Reads of 2016 By The Paris Review From Gone with the Mind. So many of our contributors brought out new books this year—Amie Barrodale, Emma Cline, Peter Cole, Rachel Cusk, Kristin Dombek, Garth Greenwell, Benjamin Hale, Fanny Howe, Ishion Hutchinson, Alexandra Kleeman, Karl Ove Knausgaard, April Ayers Lawson, Nathalie Léger, Ben Lerner, Jonathan Lethem, Mark Leyner, Sarah Manguso, Luke Mogelson, Mary Ruefle, David Salle, Brenda Shaughnessy, Zadie Smith, Karen Solie, David Szalay … I worry I’m forgetting some, but these are the ones on my shelf. After these, my favorite new books of 2016 were probably a couple of reissues from New York Review Classics. First there was Henry Green’s masterpiece, Loving, about servants on an Irish estate during World War II; then there was Sybille Bedford’s multigenerational saga, A Legacy. First published in 1956, this is the story of two German families—one, rich Berlin Jews; the other, country aristocrats—whose fates intertwine in the years before World War I. If you like any two of the following—The Radetzky March, The Hare With Amber Eyes, or Love in a Cold Climate—then A Legacy should be on your short list. Things get a tiny bit slow at the very end, only because Bedford seems to lose interest in the plot. What she cares about is scenes, character, and atmosphere. She is also very good at food: “The sea-urchins came heaped in a great armorial pile, sable and violet, tiered on their burnished quills, like the unexplained detail on the hill by the thistles and the hermitage of a quattrocento background, exposing now inside each severed shell the pattern of a tender sea-star.” And that’s just the first course. —Lorin Stein With such wildness going on around us, it’s beginning to feel like an even more difficult task than usual to make writing equal to the gargantuan thing we keep melancholically calling reality. The essays by Mark Greif in Against Everything are a rare example of patient, complicated clarity; while I hope someone is translating Nous by the French novelist and philosopher Tristan Garcia, a book that brilliantly examines what we mean when we use that pernicious and inescapable word we. I guess in the end it just comes down to some kind of accuracy of voice, like the disillusioned, festive thinking on display, in very different ways, in Frederick Seidel’s Widening Income Inequality and Maureen McLane’s Mz N: the Serial. Or maybe there’s no need to expect the contemporary to be equal to the contemporary … The woozy inventions on display in Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories (I know it came out last year, but still …) seem more and more alarming and persuasive. —Adam Thirlwell Read More
December 22, 2016 Our Correspondents Monsters for Grown-ups By Jane Stern Learning the ins and outs of our Reptilian overlords. An artist’s rendering of the coming lizard-human war. This election was a nightmare. As the day grew close, I sequestered myself at home. I would not watch the news, read the paper, or visit any site more taxing then CuteKittenOfTheDay.com. I didn’t visit my relatives on Thanksgiving because I knew that turkey and dressing would devolve into torture and debacle. Instead, I hid at home, baked cookies, and binge watched Mystery Science Theater 3000. Read More
December 22, 2016 On the Shelf Champagne Is for Chumps, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “It looks like sparkling urine, but I promise it tastes good.” Champagne has become so synonymous with luxury that you’d think it was produced in an elaborate, secret ritual involving bolts of crushed velvet and diamond-tipped drill bits and the blood of rosy-cheeked virgins from spa towns in the Swiss Alps. But it’s just wine, Tim Crane reminds us: “It is worth reflecting on how extraordinary the champagne phenomenon is. The winemakers and merchants of Champagne—the Champenois—have somehow managed to persuade people who would not dream of spending £15 on a bottle of wine to spend more than twice that for champagne—especially at Christmas, weddings and other celebrations … More depressing than supermarket champagne (for the oenophiles, at least) is the champagne houses’ attempt to secure more luxury status for their cuvées, greedily hiking up the price of an already expensive product, when it is not obvious that the quality justifies it. This is one way in which the champagne business balances precariously between courting the vulgarity of the super-rich, and desiring to make genuinely exquisite, age-worthy wines of the standard of those made a few miles away in Burgundy.” Fiona Pitt-Kethley had a booming career in the eighties, writing travel books and the especially successful Literary Companion to Sex. Now she struggles to get agents to return her calls. Her story of the publishing industry should strike fear into the hearts of anyone who thinks the business is essentially fair-minded: “I started to apply for an agent and after being turned down by several did the cheeky thing of advertising for one. Giles Gordon of Sheil Land was amused enough to take me on. Under his wing my income improved greatly … A few years later, Giles decided to move to Edinburgh … For a while I was with his assistant, Robert Kirby, who was pleasant enough but never had the same kind of enthusiasm for my work. When I made a minor criticism of his inability to sell my project on the red light districts of the world he showed a desire to shed me and we went our separate ways. At this stage I was still relatively well-known and I assumed I would be able to acquire another agent. I still bumped into Giles occasionally at literary parties but he said he thought I would be better with a London-based agent. Soon after this, he died in an accident falling downstairs. This is why I sometimes sum the whole story up as ‘I had an agent but he died.’ ” Read More
December 21, 2016 Best of 2016 Our Contributors Pick Their Favorite Books of the Year By The Paris Review From Society of the Spectacle. This was a year of path-breaking books of poems—the taut intensity of Ishion Hutchinson’s House of Lords and Commons, the striking diction and bitter tenderness of Monica Youn’s Blackacre. It was also a year of culminating ones—John Koethe’s wise, prescient The Swimmer and John Kinsella’s Drowning in Wheat, which gathers thirty years of his work. Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees jolted my sense of the forest and the trees—and parts and wholes everywhere. Finally, Michael McCarthy’s The Moth Snowstorm, a meditation on species plenitude and extinction, sent me back to Audubon on passenger pigeons, “obscuring the light of noon as by an eclipse.” Chased by a single hawk, “they darted forward in undulating and angular lines, descended and swept close over the earth with inconceivable velocity, mounted perpendicularly so as to resemble a vast column, and, when high, were seen wheeling and twisting within their continued lines, which then resembled the coils of a gigantic serpent.” —Susan Stewart (“Channel”) Some stories are simply imagined. Others are birthed. Jacqueline Woodson’s novel Another Brooklyn has been birthed from fragments of memory of what it feels like to grow up “Girl,” not just in Brooklyn, not just in brown skin, but in bodies that betray us and make us vulnerable, even as we are young and magical, powerful and fierce. Set against a backdrop of loss, death, war, and the constant threat of physical violence—for these things will always be the background music to becoming a woman—this book is both heartbreaking and beautiful, and it is especially meaningful and necessary in today’s current climate. I wish every woman would read this book: the young women who have just embarked upon their pilgrimage of becoming unapologetically themselves, and the older women who may have forgotten they were ever searching. —Christine Lincoln (“What’s Necessary to Remember When Telling a Story”) Read More