September 23, 2022 The Review’s Review Michelle de Kretser and David Orr Recommend; Our Editors Remember Hilary Mantel By The Paris Review Gabriel Mälesskircher, Saint Guy Healing a Possessed Man, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. This week, we remember Hilary Mantel (1952–2022), and bring you recommendations from two of our issue no. 241 contributors. On holiday in France, I went to Colmar to see the Isenheim Altarpiece in the Musée Unterlinden. Afterward, wandering through the museum’s collection of medieval and Renaissance art, I came across a small oil painting: part of an altarpiece attributed to Gabriel Mälesskircher, a fifteenth-century German artist from Colmar. Saint Guy Healing a Possessed Man has clear, singing colors, predominantly reds and greens. While Saint Guy looks on, the possessed man in question is being restrained by three other men. His head is thrown back, and the expelled demon, a tiny black humanoid, has just flown out of his gaping mouth. I thought at once of Mavis Gallant’s story “In the Tunnel,” which ends with the protagonist, Sarah, writing a jokey, flirtatious invitation to dinner on the back of a postcard that shows a miniature human figure cast out from a man’s body: “This person must have eaten my cooking.” I remembered that another of Gallant’s stories, “Virus X,” is set partly in Colmar, and I felt certain that she knew Mälesskircher’s painting. I imagined her looking at it, taking in its detail as I was, and the thrill of connection ran through me like bright wire. Read More
September 16, 2022 The Review’s Review Helen Garner, Daniel Halpern, and Keith Hollaman Recommend By The Paris Review Marilyn Monroe’s hand and footprints outside the Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Photo by Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, This week, we bring you recommendations from three of our issue no. 241 contributors. Twenty-two years late I picked up Blonde, Joyce Carol Oates’s enormous novel about Marilyn Monroe. At first it jolted me with its jangling, sick vulgarity. My pulse rate shot up. I was trembling. I wanted to throw it across the room. But I also had to acknowledge immediately that it was brilliant. Three days later I dragged myself out the other end, shaken by a sort of angst and awestruck by Oates’s manic power, her huge imagination, her ability to command great cataracts of material—to convey a soul mortally wounded in childhood, laboring in its squalor to recreate itself. —Helen Garner, interviewed in “The Art of Fiction No. 255” Read More
September 9, 2022 The Review’s Review Ben Lerner, Diane Seuss, and Ange Mlinko Recommend By The Paris Review Claude Monet, The Beach at Trouville, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. This week, we bring you recommendations from three of our issue no. 241 poetry contributors. This August I read three great books. In Anahid Nersessian’s Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (about to be reprinted by Verso), red life streams again through Keats’s poems. It is a risky, passionate criticism that—in addition to yielding all sorts of insights into the man and his writing—tests what of her own life the poems might hold (and quicken). This is living in and through and with and against poetry, a brilliant and refreshingly unprofessional book. I’ve also been reading and admiring Elisa Tamarkin’s Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance, a beautifully written account of the development of the concept of “relevance” in nineteenth-century Anglo American thought and art. The book says almost nothing about our own century—“the Internet,” for instance, doesn’t appear in the index—but that just makes its relevance to the present more acutely felt. Tamarkin has all sorts of insightful things to say about attention and “attentional communities,” which leads me to a final recommendation: the big strange wonderful In Search of the Third Bird, which describes itself as “the real history”—although much of it is quite fake—“of the covey of attention-artists who call themselves ‘the Birds,’ ” an actual group (or “attentional cult”) of scholars and artists who have been conducting experiments in sustained, collective attention. That James Tate line occurs to me: “Everything is relevant. I call it loving.” —Ben Lerner, author of “The Readers” Read More
September 2, 2022 The Review’s Review On Cary Grant, Darryl Pinckney, and Whit Stillman By The Paris Review Cary Grant in North by Northwest. During the COVID confinement and afterward, I watched around sixty films starring Cary Grant. What a comfort to have him in my mind before I slept. No matter if he is comic or desperate, self-possessed or wounded, romantic or cool, he is ridiculously good-looking and seems never to know this. I love it when he puts his hands on his waist and pushes his hips forward as if about to dive or perform some acrobatic trick. His slim, athletic torso and long arms are always tanned. Sometimes he wears a fine shimmering gold medal around his neck. I love his dark eyes that have not forgotten his youthful suffering. He makes me laugh when he rolls his eyes around with his own special brand of sophisticated nonchalance. Though he isn’t aggressive, he doesn’t seem weak either. I find him buoyantly masculine. I can’t resist watching him. A few days ago, on a flight to Los Angeles, I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s hugely entertaining thriller North by Northwest again. Grant was fifty-five when he made this film and long past his box office peak in the screwball comedies that made him famous. In the Hitchcock film he wears a nice-fitting, light gray suit with a gray silk tie and cuff links. The suit gets dirty, sponged off and pressed, then dirty again. Grant’s hair is a little gray, too. I don’t wear ties anymore, but I would wear a tie worn by Cary Grant. North by Northwest appeared in 1959, around the time that he was experimenting with medical LSD and searching for more “peace of mind,” as he called it. I don’t really know what a great actor is, but I think Grant is sensational. —Henri Cole Read Henri Cole’s recent essay on James Merrill here. Read More
August 26, 2022 The Review’s Review Our Favorite Sentences By The Paris Review Sentence diagram of the sentence Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Craig Butz, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. From Stoner by John Williams: And so he had his love affair. And: In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another. These two sentences, pages apart, are both perfect. It should be obvious why, but perhaps they are more perfect because the first precedes the second, and the second is a kind of cracking open of the first or maybe a kind of blooming, grammatically and otherwise. —Sophie Haigney, web editor Read More
August 19, 2022 The Review’s Review Abandoned Books, Anonymous Sculpture, and Curves to the Apple By The Paris Review Bernd and Hilla Becher photographs at Galerie Rudolfinum Praha. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. In August, I become regretful about everything that I haven’t squeezed into my summer and probably won’t. Here is an incomplete list of books I have started and not finished: First Love by Gwendoline Riley, At Freddie’s by Penelope Fitzgerald, The Palace Papers by Tina Brown, Sex in the Archives by Barry Reay, and—many times—Swann’s Way (the first few pages). I abandoned all these books at different points and for the usual reasons; I was busy, bored, or left my copy at the beach. It seems like they are no longer going to be my summer reading—maybe in September. —Sophie Haigney, web editor Read More