May 26, 2023 The Review’s Review “The British Male!”: On Martin Amis By The Paris Review Amis in Léon, Spain, 2007. Photograph by Javier Arce. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. To be British is a very complicated fate. To be a British novelist can seem a catastrophe. You enter into a miasma of history and class and garbage and publication—the way a sad cow might feel entering the abattoir. Or certainly that was how I felt, twenty years ago, when I entered the abattoir myself. One allegory for this system was the glamour of Martin Amis. Everyone had an opinion on Amis, and the strangeness was that this opinion was never just on the prose, on the novels and the stories and the essays. It was also an opinion on his opinions: the party gossip and the newspaper theories, the Oxford education and the afternoon tennis. The British male! Or at least the British bourgeois male, with his many father figures, both real and acquired. From certain angles, in certain photos, Amis looked like Jagger, and so he became the Jagger of literature. He was small, true—I feel a permanent pang of camaraderie at his line in The Pregnant Widow about a character who occupies that “much-disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven”—but he was also hypermasculine. It wasn’t just his subjects: the snooker and the booze and the obsession with judging all women “sack artists.” It wasn’t even just the style: an inability to leave a sentence alone without chafing at every verb, the prose equivalent of truffle fries. It was also the interview persona, all haughtiness and clubhouse universality, however much that could be contradicted in private by thoughtfulness and generosity of conversation. Read More
May 19, 2023 The Review’s Review Shadow Canons: Danzy Senna and Andrew Martin Recommend By The Paris Review Snow on snow in Geneva, Switzerland, courtesy of jenny downing, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Over the last few years, I’ve been reading unappreciated and erased novels by Black artists from the twentieth century. They’ve helped me think about the idea of illegibility—about what the literary world has historically deemed too wild, complex, radical, experimental, or challenging to be included in the precarious and burgeoning Black canon. I’m also interested in why some promising writers give up after only one or two books. What conditions are required to be a writer over a lifetime? Some of these forgotten novels have since been rediscovered, like Nella Larsen’s twenties classics and Fran Ross’s 1974 Black feminist picaresque, Oreo. Others are still fairly unknown, like William Melvin Kelly’s dem and Willard Savoy’s Alien Land, his only novel, published in 1949, about mixed-race identity and passing. My most recent addition to this “shadow” canon is Alison Mills Newman’s Francisco. Originally published by Ishmael Reed’s press in 1974, it’s a California road-trip story about a Black woman artist, musician, and actress whose husband, the eponymous Francisco, is a Black indie filmmaker. Reading it, I can see how it rubs against that era’s prescribed notions of uplift, chastity, and even Black feminism in its celebration of Black love, sensuality, and joy. It doesn’t deal in the familiar tropes of trauma or alienation, and the female narrator is enthralled by her male lover at a time when narratives about Black men as absent or as abusers were more palatable to the mainstream. Thanks to New Directions, who reissued the book a couple weeks ago, it’s found its way back into the world in time for the author herself to experience its discovery. —Danzy Senna Read Danzy Senna on Robert Plunket here. Read More
May 12, 2023 The Review’s Review The Review’s Review: Don Carlo and the Abuse of Power By Krithika Varagur Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara, El Greco. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Don Carlo is the kind of opera that has gone out of fashion. I cruised through half-empty rows when I saw it last fall, just days after attending a packed-to-vibrating weeknight production of The Hours – the two-act opera adaptation of a 1998 novel and its 2002 film adaptation. Verdi’s four-hour-long political tragedy, set during the Spanish Inquisition in the sixteenth century, feels more like eating your operatic vegetables. Its place in the canon was actually secured by the Met, whose onetime general manager Rudolf Bing fished it out to open the 1950 season. Based largely on a historical play by Friedrich Schiller, Don Carlo imagines a backstory to some real events in the life of Carlos, Prince of Asturias, who was briefly engaged to Elisabeth of Valois before she instead married his father, King Philip II of Spain. Schiller invented an anachronistic friend for Carlos: Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa, who distracts the heartsick prince with the political cause of Flemish independence. Meanwhile, Philip, bitter and paranoid over his loveless marriage, contemplates getting rid of his son and his treacherous friend with counsel from the blind and ruthless leader of the Inquisition. Read More
May 12, 2023 The Review’s Review The Review’s Review: Emma Bovary at the Opera By Ann Manov Lucie de Lammermoore. Victor Coindre, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. My first memory of opera is Bugs Bunny or maybe The Pink Panther Show: those Saturday-morning cartoons where the fat lady sings and shatters a glass. Much later I began to date a man who had been to hundreds of opera performances (a fact I found not only shocking but literally unbelievable) and so I went from watching no operas to almost one a month. The one I’ve enjoyed the most by far was the Met’s spring 2022 production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, staged in a town in the depressed Rust Belt. I had already read about Lucia: it’s the opera that inspires Emma Bovary to cheat on her husband (again, and more dramatically). And yet I didn’t know anything about its plot, because Flaubert doesn’t describe it; the opera serves merely to connect Emma to her younger self, the pretty country girl who had had bigger dreams than a failure of a husband and a cad of an (ex-)lover. At the opera, Flaubert writes, “d’insaissibles pensées” come over her: “elusive thoughts,” uncapturable thoughts, incomprehensible thoughts. What’s coming over her is fantasy. Nabokov said about Emma Bovary that she was the quintessential “bad reader,” the one who reads “emotionally, in a shallow juvenile manner, putting herself in this or that female character’s place”: above all, in the place of Lucia di Lammermoor, the tragic sister of a warlord, kept from the man she loves, who slaughters her husband on their wedding night in a crazed delirium and herself dies. But to read Madame Bovary as purely reprobative seems to me cold to the point of insanity; as Flaubert said, of course, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” We are all fantasists, incomplete and incoherent actors in search of a character, and who can blame or even fail to admire Emma: so moved by art that she too will destroy her life for a fantasy of love, and die. Read More
May 5, 2023 The Review’s Review Movie Math By The Paris Review Sauvagette, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. I love movie math. I love microrationalizing macroabsurdities, laser-focusing on hyperspecific justifications. 13 Going on 30 is a perfect proof. Once upon a time, it’s Jennifer Garner’s (Jenna’s) thirteenth birthday. She wishes she were thirty, she claims to her mom, having read a Poise magazine article touting the thirties as the prime of one’s life. “You’ll be thirty soon enough,” says her mother—and indeed, if Mom had known the film’s title, she might have clocked just how prescient she was. Jenna’s invited the popular clique, the Six Chicks, over for her birthday, despite the truth bomb from the boy next door, Matty, that “there can’t be a seventh sixth chick. It’s mathematically impossible.” The Chicks trick Jenna into “seven minutes in heaven,” that is, waiting blindfolded in a closet for a kiss (that never comes). When she realizes she’s been duped, she desperately chants the mantra she learned from Poise: “Thirty, flirty, and thriving.” By law of rhyme and the rule of threes, exactly thirteen minutes in, counting the opening credits, Jenna falls out of bed in her sprawling Fifth Avenue apartment. Read More
April 28, 2023 The Review’s Review Michael Bazzett, Dobby Gibson, and Sophie Haigney Recommend By The Paris Review Pete Unseth, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. I don’t usually write to music. I’m too susceptible; I find it can give what I’m writing a false, unearned resonance, like slipping a poem into Garamond to make it “better.” But there are two songs that are rhythmic enough, each in their own way, that I sometimes put on a loop when I’m revising. There’s something about the cadence and the breath in them that works for me, that creates a kind of chamber that keeps the outside world at bay. And though I’ve heard “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” (a quote so apt, it’s attributed to no less than a dozen people), here goes: “Spiegel im Spiegel,” 1978—Arvo Pärt The piece—in English, “Mirror in the Mirror”—begins with a simple ascending arpeggio, little triads that subtly alter, reflected back and forth like light on water, a mirror looking into a mirror. The melody stretches over and through the scales, extending like a long breath. The left hand on the piano arrives, eventually and sparingly, to ground the upward yearning, trees reaching toward light from the roots. The work is minimal in its composition, yet never fails to tug me out of my momentary preoccupations into a broader sense of time, drawing me into eternity through the little window of now. There are many beautiful recordings, but Angèle Dubeau’s version is a good place to begin, I think. If you put it on and close your eyes, everything will soon feel softer. “Fleurette Africaine,” 1962—Duke Ellington Mingus starts the song with a spiraling, skeletal stuttering on the upright bass, a sleeping animal rousing itself, a little tousled. It’s all very organic, the rise and fall of a breathing body. Ellington’s piano wanders in, elegant, stately. Max Roach’s drumming is the nest—he drums around the song as much as into it—weaving the thatch that holds the bird that sings the song. —Michael Bazzett, author of “Autobiography of a Poet” Read More