May 3, 2016 At Work The State of the Political Novel: An Interview with Édouard Louis By Ane Farsethås Édouard Louis, born in 1992, grew up in Hallencourt, a village in the north of France where many live below the poverty line. Now his account of life in that village, written when he was nineteen, has ignited a debate on class and inequality, foisting Louis into the center of French literary life. En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (Finishing off Eddy Bellegueule) is unsparing in its descriptions of the homophobia, alcoholism, and racism that animated Louis’s youth in Hallencourt. “We thought the book would be as invisible as the people it describes,” said Louis, who rejects any romantic views of the “authenticity” of working-class life. His publisher thought the first edition, two thousand copies, would last years. But hundreds of thousands of copies have sold in France, and the book is being translated into more than twenty languages. The novel, which has earned Louis comparisons to Zola, Genet, and de Beauvoir, is set to appear in English later this year. Eddy Bellegueule can be read as a straightforward coming-of-age story, but beneath its narrative is an almost systematic examination of the norms and habits of the villagers—inspired, Louis has said, by the theories of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. It’s as if he’s taken the whole place and put it behind glass—like observing the inner workings of an anthill. Who is Eddy Bellegueule, and why do you want to finish him off? Eddy Bellegueule is the name my parents gave me when I was born. It sounds dramatic, but yes, I wanted to kill him—he wasn’t me, he was the name of a childhood I hated. The book shows how—before I revolted against my childhood, my social class, my family, and, finally, my name—it was my milieu that revolted against me. My father and my brothers wanted to finish off Eddy Bellegueule long before, at a time when I was still trying to save him. Read More
May 3, 2016 On Food A Taste of The Photographer’s Cookbook By Caitlin Love Stephen Shore, New York City, New York, September–October 1972. © Stephen Shore, Courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery, New York. Our dual subscription deal with Lucky Peach technically ended last week, but we’re extending it because we’ve still got food and drink on the mind—especially after flipping through The Photographer’s Cookbook, out next month from Aperture and the George Eastman Museum. Commissioned by the latter in the late seventies, the book showcases recipes and pictures from the era’s leading photographers; it was never published before now. Below are five of our favorite photo/recipe combos, including Stephen Shore’s Key lime pie supreme, Imogen Cunningham’s borscht, and a classic down-South dish from the master of seventies color photography himself: William Eggleston’s cheese-grits casserole. —Caitlin Love Read More
May 3, 2016 On the Shelf Marisol’s Marathon Silences, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Marisol, in 1963. Marisol, the mononymic pop-art sculptor known for her carved wood figures and legendarily long silences, has died at eighty-five. “Marisol was a star of the New York art scene in the 1960s, breaking through with a 1962 solo show at the Stable Gallery that featured her bright, boxy sculptures of people representing a range of American life—everyone from the Kennedys to a dust-bowl farm family to the artist herself. The works, which combined painted and minimally carved wooden figures with found objects like shoes and doors, were funny but incisive, simple-looking but expertly made. They helped launch a career that included great artistic success and stardom, followed by decades of obscurity and, more recently, a revival and renewed appreciation of her exceptional work.” (Marisol designed a print for The Paris Review in 1965.) While we’re on sculptors: Liene Bosquê works in souvenirs. As Sarah Gerard recalls, “I first saw her work in the MoMA PS1 show ‘Greater New York,’ where she was showing a piece called Recollection, comprising dozens of hand-sized souvenirs from her travels, laid out on a plain, wooden table in a grid pattern resembling Manhattan’s. Though the souvenirs are found objects, she also uses them to make molds for other small sculptures in clay or plastic. With a background in architecture and an interest in history’s relationship to memory, Bosquê gives equal consideration to mathematical precision and sensory stimulation in her pieces—she has a rule that all of the souvenirs she uses in her work must be hand-sized, small enough to carry in her pocket as she picked them up on her travels over fifteen years. ‘Something that’s close to you,’ she explains.” Hold the phone, everybody. Paul Simon’s dancing again. He’s dancing and using cuss words. He’s limbering up. “In June,” Kelefa Sanneh writes, “Simon will release his thirteenth solo album, Stranger to Stranger, which is friskier and funnier than its recent predecessors—his most danceable music in decades. He meets his old nemesis near the end, in a song called “Cool Papa Bell,” named for the great Negro League center fielder. ‘Motherfucker,’ Simon mutters … Simon doesn’t apologize for his conviction that music should be easy on the ears. He has shown little interest in the grit and grunge that often signal rock-and-roll authenticity, and even now, at seventy-four, he sings in a voice that is boyish and clear. More than any other musician of his age and stature … he seems unburdened by the years, and by his own reputation. He has managed to become neither a wizened oracle nor an oldies act, and his best songs convey the appealing sensation of listening to a guy who is still trying to figure out what he’s doing … Not long after Simon’s fiftieth birthday, on an episode of MTV’s Beavis and Butt-head, Beavis referred to him as ‘that dude from Africa that used to be in the Beatles.’ ” You know that old saying, “It’s always the inveterate masturbators who try to censor the mail”? Well, that’s true. It’s true now, and it was true in the 1870s, when Anthony Comstock, an intrepid dry-goods salesman whose diaries reveal that he liked to jerk off a lot, began his crusade to suppress erotic materials through the postal service. “As Comstock told it, a fellow employee at the dry-goods store became afflicted with a sexually transmitted disease after developing an interest in erotic literature. Comstock went to the bookstore where his friend made his purchases, bought some illicit reading material, and returned with a police captain who arrested the dealer … In February 1873, Comstock asked [Morris] Jesup to send him to Washington to plead for a more stringent federal postal law. Jesup bought him a ticket and Comstock boarded the train with an assortment of offensive items from his trove … Republican leaders gave Comstock an enthusiastic welcome. [Schuyler] Colfax allowed Comstock to set up an exhibit of his unspeakable wares in his Senate office.” In closing, let us meditate, as we are wont to do, on the role of hedgehogs in Slavic folktales: “These adorable animals are predominantly found in Russian movies and fairy stories but they appear, also, in tales from neighboring countries. The Bulgarians have two particularly interesting accounts of the hedgehog, both of which point to his wisdom. In one tale, he advises God on how to use the sky to cover the earth, while in another he is the only animal not to attend the wedding of the Sun and the Moon. When asked for the reason, he says that he’s busy learning to eat rocks, for if the union takes place and the Sun has lots of little sun children, all the plants in the world will dry up … In the Soviet animated film Ezhik v tumane (Hedgehog in the Fog, 1975), Hedgehog is the bridge between the conscious and the dream world, evoking sympathy from the audience as they watch him lost in a thick mist, chasing after the mirage of a white horse in the clouds.”
May 2, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles Anagramming the News: The Answers By Dylan Hicks Child’s play. Ed. Note: last week’s puzzle contest is officially over—thanks to all who entered. Our winner this time is Daria Mikolajczak, who gets a free subscription to the Review. Congratulations, Daria! Below, the solution to Dylan’s puzzle. Read More
May 2, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Fabric of Our Lives, Part 2 By Sadie Stein Karl Herbsthoffer, Junge Dame im Boudoir, 1829. Last Friday I wrote about an encounter with the platinum card–carrying elite. But this is a two-part story, you see. For many years later, long after that glimpse into the lives of the rarefied, I found myself at the local flea market. This is a sort of addiction in my family: even when houses are being sold and divested or apartments are bursting at their meager seams or neighbors have called the city to complain about the sheds on our property (depending on the generation), we are incapable of curbing our need for “bargains.” We brake for thrift shops; we brake hard for furniture on the curb; we scour the local papers for tag, yard, or garage sales. Read More
May 2, 2016 Bulletin It’s Back: The Paris Review Commencement Gift Box By Dan Piepenbring Rumor has it that our founding editor George Plimpton was once called upon to give a commencement speech at Bennington College. Instead of bringing an armful of platitudes about inspiration and the future, he brought an armful of fireworks—maybe more like a truckload of fireworks, actually. There was one for each graduate, each carefully labeled. Rather than intoning from behind a podium, Plimpton set off the fireworks one by one, shouting each graduate’s name just before the rockets went screaming into the sky. If you want a gift for your graduate that isn’t highly flammable and illegal in most states, try our Commencement Gift Box. It includes a one-year subscription to The Paris Review; a copy of The Unprofessionals, our new anthology, featuring the best young writers at work today; and two archival issues of the magazine—200 and 214—in which James Salter, Eileen Myles, Robert Caro, Jane Smiley, and Luc Sante share their memories of starting out as writers, with plenty of good advice for the graduate in your life. The boxes are available from now through the end of June. You’ll find all the details here—order now. It’s the next best thing to lighting something on fire.