June 1, 2015 Bulletin Relax—It’s Our Summer Issue By The Paris Review Our new Summer issue features work in and about translation. There’s a story from Andrés Neuman and a sneak peek at Michel Houellebecq’s controversial novel, Submission, plus poems by Coral Bracho, Xi Chuan, Radmila Lazić, and Iman Mersal. At its center are two interviews in our Art of Translation series—first with Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who have been married for thirty-three years and whose thirty-odd translations include The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Chekhov’s Selected Stories. “Very naive readers think you take the Russian and you put it in English, and then you’re done,” Pevear says. Read More
June 1, 2015 On the Shelf The Moral Foulness of the Age, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A 1799 cartoon by Gillray: an obese, gouty man drinking punch with two companions. Our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, writes with Bernard Haykel on jihadi poetry: “Analysts have generally ignored these texts, as if poetry were a colorful but ultimately distracting by-product of jihad. But … it is impossible to understand jihadism—its objectives, its appeal for new recruits, and its durability—without examining its culture. This culture finds expression in a number of forms, including anthems and documentary videos, but poetry is its heart. And, unlike the videos of beheadings and burnings, which are made primarily for foreign consumption, poetry provides a window onto the movement talking to itself. It is in verse that militants most clearly articulate the fantasy life of jihad.” And Garth Greenwell—whose story “Gospodar” appeared in our Summer 2014 issue—on Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life as the definitive gay novel of our times: “Just as Yanagihara’s characters challenge conventional categories of gay identity, so A Little Life avoids the familiar narratives of gay fiction. Yanagihara approaches the collective traumas that have so deeply shaped modern gay identity—sickness and discrimination—obliquely, avoiding the conventions of the coming-out narrative or the AIDS novel … But queer suffering is at the heart of A Little Life.” Writing on the Internet is full of hostility, melodrama, and blind ego-mongering, but there’s an easy way to fix that: by adopting the voice of a Jane Austen character. “You can make your contribution to a better, more Austenesque world in every email, letter, tweet, update, blog post that you write.” Copulation, excretion, fungus growing from a dunghill: you’ll find all these and more in the work of the eighteenth-century caricaturist James Gillray, whose work was so prickly that “a history of caricature published in 1904 suggested his pictures came from an unclean and unbalanced mind and symbolized ‘the moral foulness of the age.’ ” In 1945, before Chester Himes found fame for his detective novels, he published If He Hollers Let Him Go, which in its “sheer dark rage” is an exemplar of a genre that hadn’t really been invented yet: “Even by the conventions of noir literature, it is Himes’s debut novel that was, inadvertently, truest to the form.”
May 29, 2015 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Peasantry, Propaganda, Playground Crises By The Paris Review A still from Forbidden Films: a nitrate film vault in the Federal Film Archive in Hoppegarten, Germany. After several years of hearing Norwegians describe Dag Solstad as their greatest living novelist, I finally read Shyness & Dignity—and got some idea of what the fuss is all about. Like the title, the plot is defiantly unprepossessing: a high school teacher notices something new about the play he’s teaching (for the umpteenth time), and this discovery triggers an existential crisis on the playground. The part that every Norwegian remembers is when the hero beats his umbrella to death against a water fountain, but behind this moment of high drama lies an amazingly compact story of one career, two marriages, and the history of Western philosophy, with particular attention to Kant and 1968. It is suggestive, sad, and extremely funny. I’ve already forced my copy on a friend. —Lorin Stein Felix Moeller’s disturbing new documentary, Forbidden Films, begins outside the fortified bunker where Nazi propaganda films, still banned by the German government, are stored. There’s such a high quantity of nitro-celluloid, an archivist tells the camera, that the facility officially qualifies as an explosive device. It’s a somewhat heavy-handed attempt to literalize Moeller’s central metaphor: seventy years after their creation, the films still have the capacity to ignite controversy and endanger viewers. Moeller documents the rare screenings the government allows, as audiences turn up in droves for … what, exactly? the novelty? the danger? a dose of national guilt? (Film archives take note: turns out you can sell out a black-and-white movie just by slapping on a ringing endorsement from Joseph Goebbels.) I left the theater stunned at the propaganda films’ ability to grab and sway 2015 audiences—to frighten elderly Germans, to shock students, and to galvanize neo-Nazis, who still use the films to attract teenage followers. It’s worth seeing the look on the face of a middle-aged German man as he walks out of a screening and praises an anti-Polish film for its educational qualities: more people should know, he says, that it was really the Polish who started Word War II by persecuting and interning ethnic Germans. —Rebecca Panovka Read More
May 29, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Good Digestion By Sadie Stein Hieronymus Bosch, The Seven Deadly Sins (detail), ca. 1500. It’s impossible to be completely happy when you have no appetite—or when you’re sated. People talk about the contentment that comes with a full belly, but to the food lover, this seems paradoxical. After all, if you are of the sort who lives to eat, rather than the other way around, being full means that, for the moment, you don’t have much to live for. I’ve quoted Iris Murdoch on the subject before, but the quote bears repeating: “Every meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.” Read More
May 29, 2015 At Work Ruthless Levity: An Interview with Our London Editor, Adam Thirlwell By Emily Stokes Photo: Eamonn McCabe “As usual the world was powdery and blue, like a rococo miniature. I was driving underneath the tree canopy and behind those trees were mansions and their many vehicles, gently arranged on the drive. It was the world as I had always known it, when being driven by my parents to music lessons or football practice or the first ever parties of my youth, the ones that ended at dawn with everyone staring at each other calmly in a field, feeling tired. That was how I always lived, out here on the outskirts of a giant city: the world occurred to me as a series of impressions seen from the windows of a car.” Adam Thirlwell’s third novel, Lurid & Cute, is made up of such impressions—charming, nostalgic, not quite tethered to reality. The unnamed narrator—formerly a child prodigy, he tells us—is a privileged young man who has quit his office job to pursue his art, and who now lives with his wife at the house of his adoring parents. His talent, as he puts it, is mostly for thinking. The observations above occur to him as he drives his bloodied, comatose best friend to the emergency room, having discovered her suffering some kind of hemorrhage in his hotel bed after a night of ketamine and sex. At thirty-six, Thirlwell dresses like a youngish teenager—silver sneakers, jeans, T-shirts emblazoned with the Eiffel Tower—and looks perpetually exhausted. In our Skype conversation, he had a way of speaking that, like one of his characters, “sometimes seemed like teasing and sometimes seemed like it wasn’t and it wasn’t always easy to be able to tell the two apart.” “Multiplicity! Levity! World History!” he later wrote to me in an e-mail about what he seeks in his reading. “Those kind of T-shirt slogans.” Your dialogue is very funny. It seems very stylized but then, when you read it aloud, it’s perfectly realistic. Do you have rules for dialogue? Whose do you admire? Maybe perversely, I love Henry James’s The Awkward Age, which is written almost entirely in dialogue and is therefore almost incomprehensible. Everyone is speaking in intimation and allusion—which is so much like life that the reader has desperately to work out what the degrees of irony and lying are. That kind of flatness seems to me the ideal. There’s a great moment in a Lampedusa essay where he praises the dialogue in Stendhal’s novels, because none of it is celebrated, nothing is quotable. I wonder if in novels, rather than plays or screenplays, the dialogue can become this baroque surface thing, because it’s free to be as close to audiotape as possible, without the burden of meaning anything, or conveying plot. Although I don’t know if this is some kind of London problem—how little is actually said in conversation. Okay, sure, there might be mutual understanding—but the sentences are only nonsense, or nonsense poetry. Read More
May 29, 2015 My First Time Christine Schutt on Nightwork By Dan Piepenbring “My First Time” is a new video series in which we invite authors to discuss the trials of writing and publishing that first novel, that first play, that first book of poems. Consider it a chance to see how successful writers got their start, in their own words—it’s a portrait of the artist as a beginner and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria. We conclude our first installment today with Christine Schutt, whose first collection of stories, Nightwork, appeared in 1996, when she was forty-eight; John Ashbery said it was the best book of the year. Here, Schutt recalls her early attempts at writing, in her twenties, and the feedback she invariably received: “You can write very beautiful sentences and beautiful descriptions, but it may take you twenty years to figure out how to do a story … I thought, Twenty years, my god! I’d be in my forties!” Be sure to watch the three other “My First Time” interviews we’ve posted this week: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on his play, Neighbors Gabrielle Bell on The Book of … series, her early cartoons J. Robert Lennon on his debut novel, The Light of Falling Stars Later this summer, we’ll introduce the next chapter in the series; this trailer gives a preview of what’s to come. This series is made by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling; we’re delighted to collaborate with them.