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The Daily

August 11, 2021
At Work

Language’s Wilderness: An Interview with Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

By Amina Cain

Photo: Kayla Holdread.

Not many writers can convey both great beauty and horror at the same time, but in Savage Tongues, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi does so deftly. The novel follows Arezu, a woman in her late thirties, as she travels to Marbella, Spain, where she spent the summer when she was seventeen. She has returned to confront the past, the ghost of who she was, and her memories of Omar, an enigmatic older man who introduced her to unfamiliar freedoms even as he harmed her and dispossessed her of her power. Oloomi has written two previous novels, Fra Keeler, a mystery as hallucinatory and menacing as it is comic, and Call Me Zebra, which follows the pilgrimage of a free-spirited exile and autodidact. Though Savage Tongues takes after both, it explores new territory, as Oloomi works through questions of sex, friendship, trauma, and the obliteration of the self, with an inventive approach to time, setting, and character.

The language of the new novel diverges, too, and Oloomi’s sentences, whether evoking pain or pleasure, are electric, filled with life. If I’m honest, when I was reading, I often wished I had written them. The imagery is filmic, and sometimes piercing. Take this passage, in which Arezu has just entered her old apartment building in Marbella—“When I pressed the elevator button, I felt Omar’s hand reaching through mine as if our bodies were superimposed: for a moment, my limbs filled with lead. All of the energy and vitality and strength I’d cultivated over the years drained out of me. I felt the pressure of his finger against the illuminated call button and a cold shiver ran down my spine.”

This summer, Oloomi and I wrote back and forth to each other over Google Docs. She had just returned from a trip to Turkey, and I’d just arrived in the Catskills, both of us readjusting to movement and travel after having stayed still for so long. We talked, among many other things, about pleasure, self-preservation and survival, and literature that is “raw and ruthless.”

INTERVIEWER

Savage Tongues is a book of summer. How has this summer been? What have you been doing?

OLOOMI

It’s been all sorts of ways. I’m directing the M.F.A. program at the University of Notre Dame this year, so work didn’t slow down until mid-June, when I left for Turkey. Like most people, I hadn’t traveled in more than fifteen months, and to go from the static life of quarantine and lockdown to moving across a huge country felt amazing. I spent time in Istanbul and Bodrum. I swam every day. And I ate my heart out. I’m back in the Midwest now, swimming in the lake when I can, though mostly I spend my downtime at a natural horsemanship barn where I lease a horse.

INTERVIEWER

I’m curious if you’ve read anything lately you especially liked, and also, I’d like to know what you read when you were writing Savage Tongues.

OLOOMI

I’ve been reading short story collections, mostly. Hassan Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq and Haruki Murakami’s First Person Singular. I like the way that stories can feel like miniature time capsules. When I was writing Savage Tongues I was reading a lot of radical women writers—Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante, Annie Ernaux, Etel Adnan, Maggie Nelson, Nawal El Saadawi. I went to Claudia Rankine, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Judith Butler, Toni Morrison, and Elaine Scarry as I started to think about the politics of discursive violence. Then I read a lot of James Baldwin, Garth Greenwell, and Hervé Guibert—writers who write brilliantly about sex, who are always aware of the power and the politics underpinning a physical or sexual encounter. So I had different stacks of books, different guides to see me through each dimension of the novel. Read More
August 10, 2021
Redux

Redux: It’s All a Question of Language

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.

Robert Lowell. Drawing by Hans Beck, 1961.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating another year of the best deal in town: our summer subscription offer with The New York Review of Books. For only $99, you’ll receive yearlong subscriptions and complete archive access to both magazines—a 34% savings!

To give you a taste, we’re unlocking pieces from the archives of both The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books. Read on for Robert Lowell’s Art of Poetry interview, paired with his letters to Elizabeth Bishop concerning the founding of The New York Review of Books; Ingeborg Bachmann’s short story “Everything,” paired with Merve Emre’s essay on Bachmann’s novel Malina and other fiction; and a portfolio of art by Kara Walker, paired with an essay by Zadie Smith on Walker’s work through the years.

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and works of criticism, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books and read both magazines’ entire archives?

Robert Lowell, The Art of Poetry No. 3
The Paris Review, issue no. 25 (Winter–Spring 1961)

The ideal modern form seems to be the novel and certain short stories. Maybe Tolstoy would be the perfect example—his work is imagistic, it deals with all experience, and there seems to be no conflict of the form and content. So one thing is to get into poetry that kind of human richness in rather simple descriptive language. Then there’s another side of poetry: compression, something highly rhythmical and perhaps wrenched into a small space. I’ve always been fascinated by both these things.

Read More
August 10, 2021
Arts & Culture

The Best Kind of Vanishing

By Melissa Broder

Today marks the release of Melissa Broder’s Superdoom, a collection of poetry drawn from her first four books. In the introduction, excerpted below, Broder looks back over years of writing and publishing to consider the mysterious genesis of her poetry.

ShaiHuludKitty, NYC Subway Car at Sunset, 2019, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

As of today, March 26, 2021, I no longer know how to write a poem. I have no idea how I wrote the poems in this book.

In some ways, this state of unknowing is exciting. A poetry teacher of mine once said, quoting the poet Muriel Rukeyser, “You need only be a scarecrow for poems to land on.” Perhaps, then, my amnesia as to how I made these poems indicates that I’ve been, at times, a scarecrow: a landing place, a vessel, a channel for poems. I like that. To me, it seems preferable to be a channel than what I usually am: a self-will-er, a scrambler, a filler of holes, a looker in “glittery shitdoors” for love (as I note in the poem “Man’s Search for Meaning”).

To be a channel is great, actually. To be a channel is to be reminded that I do not need to struggle to fill the holes inside with anything glittery. It is to be reminded that I actually like going inside the holes. I just keep forgetting I like it in there.

As a daily reminder that I actually do like the holes, I’ve been reciting the Prayer of Saint Francis for sixteen years. The first line of the prayer asks that I be made a channel, so my attention is directed right away to that emptiness as something ideal. Read More
August 9, 2021
On Sports

No Balls, No Nets

By Kyle Beachy

Liene Vitamante, Venice Skateboarder on Ramp, 2016, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

What percentage of skateboarding, I wonder, is talking about skateboarding? Half, probably. There is such rich joy to be found in these debates without stakes, these endless recollections that go nowhere, slowly. And if the impulse to write grows from the impulse to converse, one could reasonably suggest that writing about skateboarding is a natural extension of the activity, too. But skaters tend to have a cautious relationship with the written word. Our culture has produced an array of photographers and filmmakers and sculptors, so it’s not a lack of work ethic or creative energy that’s kept us from producing poets.

At some point in my early twenties, I decided I wanted to become a novelist. So, I worked very hard to become one. By necessity at first, and then by habit, I viewed most any non-novel writing as a threat to my primary purpose. For my second novel, it seemed obvious that I should write about skateboarding. It proved difficult. I hit a snag, as happens, and then another. By the third snag, which was substantial, I decided to send out an email to friends in the name of research. It was four questions, a brief survey about a basic paradox or conundrum central to our practice: Is skateboarding inherently competitive, I asked, like diving or gymnastics? Is it possible for any of us to treat going skateboarding like going for a stroll in the countryside? Or does something within the activity, some internal characteristic, urge its practitioners toward improvement? Read More
August 6, 2021
This Week’s Reading

Staff Picks: Comics, Keys, and Chaos

By The Paris Review

Nicole Claveloux. Photo courtesy of New York Review Books.

The topic of night terrors has come up in a slew of my conversations lately. In part, this is due to the fact that I’ve been hanging out with a precocious two-year-old with rare but potent insomniac nights. But I also have Nicole Claveloux to thank for my current fixation on hypnagogic hallucinations, those surreal visions that crop up at the threshold of consciousness. Claveloux’s graphic short stories from the late seventies, originally written in French and published for the first time in English in 2017 as The Green Hand and Other Stories, are not literal renderings of night terrors. But the comics are nightmarish in the best sense—absurd, sharply funny, visceral, revealing. I read the collection in one big gulp, prickling with affection for the band of outsiders that populates its pages: a root vegetable with aspirations of becoming a panther, a misanthropic bird, a talking houseplant, a devilishly clever kid on the cusp of puberty. —Jay Graham Read More
August 5, 2021
On Politics

The Genealogy of Disaster

By Charif Majdalani

© Vyacheslav Argenberg, Beirut, Lebanon, 2008, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

We walked over to the olive trees, he and I. There were three of them, and some little holm oaks. On the horizon, to the east and the south, you could see mountain ridges, and in the two other directions it was so wide that you couldn’t make out the boundary of the plot. The fellow had offered me another one, with a sea view, and I had replied that I didn’t care. I can look at the sea often enough, every day at home, and if I’m going to be in the mountains I might as well gaze up at the peaks and the canopy of sky above them, with its ballet of stars at night. I don’t think he understood a word I was saying. He was strapped into a kind of vest, with a buttoned-up shirt underneath it, although it was already starting to get hot. When we got past the olive trees, walking through the dry grass that sometimes covered the remains of hardened furrows, toward a little tumbledown shack that I’d like to have rebuilt, he asked me if I could possibly pay him in cash. I burst out laughing and asked him how he thought I could get hold of dollars in cash. He didn’t comment. We had agreed on payment by check. He was just trying his luck. A few days ago, I asked Jad why landowners would ever sell their assets for cashier’s checks, and he replied that it’s usually because they have debts they need to repay as soon as possible, before the complete collapse of the pound. As for me, I want my every last penny out of the bank.

When I got home, Mariam announced that the washing machine was making a weird noise. And indeed, the noise was disturbing—a kind of regular clacking, almost rhythmical, to the beat of the rotating drum. I had actually just gotten it repaired a few days ago, the day before yesterday in fact. So I called the repairman, who didn’t answer, of course. These details of daily life which are out of our control are frustrating and make me angry. It’s easy to get angry these days.

On social media it’s always the same thing, inexhaustible, ad nauseam: economic collapse, the bankruptcy of the country, capital control, exchange rates, the pound in free fall, inflation, and penury lying in wait for us all. Read More