April 2, 2025 First Person Father and Mother By Constance Debré PHOTOGRAPH BY KALPESH LATHIGRA. The setting: sixties Paris, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, full of rich men’s sons, and their daughters, too. On my mother’s side there were four sisters, just as on my father’s side four brothers, the same madness on each side of the family, because families are always mad. She was the youngest, born in a château. When they met she was living in a large apartment on the rue Bonaparte, with the sister closest in age, the one who’s going to die of alcohol and pills. Overdose or suicide, hard to tell in these cases. The building belonged to her family, to their family, to my family, in the entrance hall there was a marble bust of an ancestral baron and they had cousins on every floor. Her own father, my grandfather, died when she was fourteen, he was also an MP, a government minister even, but he had been dead for a long time. Her mother, my grandmother, lived in the southwest with her dogs, and came to Paris from time to time to see what was happening. There were arguments, tears, scenes. Everyone in that family was violent. Aristocracy makes you crazy. Not because of the inbreeding, but because of faith. Faith that it is possible to be noble. In that family they raised children like they raised horses, to be beautiful. Being beautiful meant lots of different things. The rest was of no importance. Read More
April 1, 2025 On Books William and Henry James By Peter Brooks William and Henry James. Marie Leon, bromide print, early 1900s, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. When Henry James decided to come to America in 1904 and 1905, his elder brother, William James, was not immediately pleased. William said that while his wife, Alice, would welcome his visit (she and Henry had a firm bond), he felt “more keenly a good many of the désagréments to which you inevitably will be subjected, and imagine the sort of physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you.” There follows an account of how traveling Americans ate their boiled eggs, presumably in hotels and on trains, “bro’t to them, broken by a negro, two in a cup, and eaten with butter.” As a source of physical loathing, this seems a bit excessive: one might linger over William’s attempts to keep Henry’s visit at bay. William’s letter seems more to the point when he notes: “The vocalization of our countrymen is really, and not conventionally, so ignobly awful … It is simply incredibly loathsome.” William’s discouragement provoked from Henry a declaration of his determination not to be deterred from coming. “You are very dissuasive,” he wrote to William. Henry, in a plaintive reply, noted that whereas William had traveled much, he had not been able to—he not been able to afford it nor to leave the demands of producing writing for money. It’s as if Henry must plead for his brother’s approval before he can travel back to his native land. And yet the pleading is accompanied by Henry’s self-assertion, he’s thought it through, analyzed the consequences. There is so often in their dialogues this deference of the younger brother to the elder, mixed with self-assertion, an insistence that the pathetic younger brother does know what he’s doing. I suppose we might, in contemporary psychobabble, call Henry’s relation to William passive-aggressive. William’s to Henry, though, has a tinge of sadism that we will see take more overt forms. His response to Henry’s desire to travel home is a strange mixture of welcome and repulse, a recognition of their sibling bonds along with the sense that they bind annoyingly, that he’d rather not have his brother around. Read More
March 31, 2025 On Philosophy from Lola the Interpreter By Lyn Hejinian Photograph by ZeroOne (on Flickr), via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. We make the best and the worst use of time by relegating it to postponement, deferral, waste, irrelevance; we send it out and away from things that can be thought or done; we estrange time from reality and thus from life’s activities; and in the process we either liberate ourselves or find ourselves stranded, and it’s probably the latter. Just as baboons, ill at ease and querulous as the sun sets, move about restlessly and shout to no effect, so humans in March, the twilight of winter, grow irritable, anxious, and uncomfortable as the long familiar routines of everyday life deplete rather than sustain interest, energy, and appetite. Reality, lacking energy, begins to lose credibility; the past, running out of reality, begins to lose possibility. Lola quickly laughs sardonically when she spots the title of a book on display in the window of the bookshop on Higher Ave. March: A Comprehensive History of Humanity. Universality for Idiots, she thinks. Unity—coherence congealing into a whole—is illusory. Tony van Heuvel, nonetheless, refusing to blink a way out of a state of willed self-deception, gazes out a window into the midground of trees blown by the wind as if expecting to see the perpetual play of time with truth though there’s nothing but mist to be seen between the boughs. With what goals do we engage in introspection? There’s always the grand plenitude to come, the promised comedy when everything comes out, but this is just another labyrinthine day in the life, etc., with fence fibers half buried in rain. The past of the man of the hour recedes by the minute, the past of queen for a day has lost relevance. Her past is only a receding dim version of the woman who repeatedly steps slightly away from the life she has led, leaving dull fragments of it behind. What we have is a sequence of parts that can be unified only (mis)conceptually by an imagination bent only on eliminating details, the devilish essentials that are the sine qua non of reality. It’s only with a pencil drawn over a rough ridged surface that the illusory continuities on which a coherent imaginable life is predicated can be seen. Continuities are lost, only commas remain where long sentences and full paragraphs used to fill some time across some space. Penelope moves among her suitors or Penelope sits by day and again by night at her loom, she is either performing domestic labor or, as one fifth-century B.C.E. Greek philosopher proposed, she projects “an image of the faithful labors of the philosophers.” Read More
March 28, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Nora Fulton on “La Comédie-Française” By Nora Fulton For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Nora Fulton’s poem “La Comédie-Française” appears in the new Spring issue of the Review, no. 251. How did this poem start? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? I wrote this poem in September 2024, but it was a reflection of a three-day seminar I’d attended the month before. The seminar, organized by two brilliant friends, Matt Hare and Sam Warren Miell, was about the French film production company Diagonale, and focused on the work of its central director, Paul Vecchiali. Of the films we watched, Encore and Corps à cœur were especially on my mind while writing. Both are romantic melodramas, but they undercut that tendency in lots of interesting ways—I think I find them moving precisely because they undercut that part of themselves. The seminar focused on the way that Diagonale functioned as a collective of people who would take up different roles in each film, both in front of and behind the camera. This was likened to the troupe established by Molière, to which the title of this poem refers. Were you thinking of any other poems or works of art while you wrote it? At the time of writing I was thinking quite closely alongside the poetry of the Swiss Francophone author Philippe Jaccottet. I had begun reading and translating his early poems during the summer, mostly just for myself—I was working on them between sessions of the seminar, and continued this work into the fall. I was particularly enamored with the way Jaccottet uses hesitation as a formal device in both his poetry and his journals (the incredible translations of which, by Tess Lewis, I was devouring during these revisions). It’s not easy to write hesitation without seeming either arrogant or naïve. How can one hesitate in the field of language, at all, anyway? But Jaccottet finds ways to write through a reticence that manages to fully surrender to knowing that it has no idea what it is reticent in the face of, as in his journal entry for May 1971. “I write exactly as I have said one should not write. I am not able to grasp the particular, the private—the exact details escape me, slip away; unless it is I who shies away from them.” Read More
March 26, 2025 First Person Tracings By Sarah Aziza At center, the author with her father and her grandmother. Photograph courtesy of Sarah Aziza. Occasionally, when we were small, our father spoke to us of geography. Daddy is from a place called Palestine, he said, in a lesson captured by my mother on the family’s camcorder. In the footage, my father sits in a small rocking chair, brown eyes intent, a little shy. My younger brother and sister are absorbed by the array of blocks on the floor, but I am close to my father’s feet, my fluffy blond head thrown back, mouth pink and agape. He holds up a globe, his fingers sliding toward a sliver of brown and green. He tilts it toward me to reveal cramped lettering: Israel/Palestine. Read More
March 25, 2025 The Review’s Review Happy Hundredth Birthday, Flannery O’Connor! By Jamie Quatro Blair Hobbs, Birthday Cake For Flannery, 2025, mixed media on canvas board, 30 x 24″. Courtesy of the artist. A painting in Blair Hobbs’s new exhibition features a cut-out drawing of Flannery O’Connor in a pearl choker and purple V-necked dress. She’s flanked by drawings of peacocks and poppies; a birthday cake on metallic gold paper floats above her head. It is titled, like the exhibition, Birthday Cake for Flannery. The number 100 sits atop the frosting, each digit lit with an orange paper flame—marking O’Connor’s hundredth birthday, today, March 25. Glitter and sequins, gold thread and fabric scraps everywhere. The image is candy to my eyes. I grew up in a stripped-down fundamentalist Protestant church—think Baptist but with a cappella singing. Violence and grace, sin and redemption, idolatry and judgment: When I read O’Connor’s stories for the first time, in high school, I recognized her religious concerns as my own. Fifteen years later I moved to Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where O’Connor’s Southern milieu—backwoods prophets, religious zealots, barely concealed racism and classism—was my literal backyard. I raised chickens in homage to her, then repurposed the coop as my writing studio, where I drafted a collection of stories wrestling with Christianity and sexuality in the American South. Read More