September 26, 2025 The Review’s Review What You Know Most Deeply: On Eileen Chang’s Little Reunions By Zhang Yueran Eileen Chang’s Little Reunions. Photograph courtesy of Zhang Yueran. “Little Reunions ought to be burned,” Eileen Chang wrote to her friend and literary executor, Stephen Soong, in 1976, the year she finished what would be her last novel. When it was finally published, in 2009, fourteen years after her death, Little Reunions seemed to carry this curse with it; the book received widespread criticism for its cryptic narrative and for not sounding like Eileen Chang. At the time she was writing Little Reunions, Chang had been living in Los Angeles for two decades. She was born in Shanghai in 1920, to an aristocratic family in decline; shortly after her birth, her father grew addicted to opium and her mother emigrated to Britain. Chang harbored literary ambitions from a young age, and studied English while attending an all-girls Christian school in Shanghai. At the age of twenty-four, she published the short story collection Chuanqi (Romances), whose astonishing assuredness and glamorous portrayal of Shanghai’s cosmopolitan milieu quickly made her the most prominent female author in China of her time. After the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, though, Chang found herself unable to adapt to the new political climate. She left Mainland China in 1952 and spent several years in Hong Kong, where she wrote a pair of anti-Communist novels at the behest of the U.S. government, before arriving in the United States in 1955. Read More
September 19, 2025 The Review’s Review Fall Books: On Cesare Pavese’s The Leucothea Dialogues By Alec Mapes-Frances The Centrale Montemartini. Photograph by Briner2306, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Cesare Pavese referred to his Dialoghi con Leucò (The Leucothea Dialogues) as “a conversation between divinity and humanity.” In the twenty-seven dialogues, written between 1945 and 1947, figures from ancient Greek mythology discuss things like desire, fate, language, memory, nature, and death. The speakers, many of whom have been extracted from the narratives in which they serve as tragic heroes or gods, exchange words in a space that might be nowhere or anywhere. They reflect on their own existences and dilemmas, debating, interrogating, or confiding in one another. What is it to be Orpheus, Prometheus, Oedipus, Sappho, Endymion, Hermes, or Ixion? What is it to be in love, to be cursed, to be lost, to lose one’s love, to remember, to smile? And what is it to be mortal, to be subject to death, or to be immortal, to lack a death of one’s own? (The author’s suicide, three years after the publication of the Dialogues, gives many of these questions an autobiographical resonance, and has made the book, which he was carrying at the time of his death, into a mythical object.) Read More
September 19, 2025 The Review’s Review Fall Books: On Chris Kraus’s The Four Spent the Day Together By Sophie Madeline Dess Chris Kraus, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Chris Kraus is the author of a book called I Love Dick. Chris Kraus is also the author of The Four Spent the Day Together, a new novel in which the main character, Catt Greene, is the author of a book called I Love Dick. Catt jokes that I Love Dick is “the one with the cover everyone posed with and tweeted.” Catt suspects at least a few of the people who pose with her book haven’t actually read it, but they like what owning the book implies: that they, too, love dick. It makes no difference that the novel is not exactly about loving dick, but about loving Dick, a particular man, not a sex organ. Read More
September 19, 2025 The Review’s Review Fall Books: On Tarjei Vesaas’s The Birds and The Ice Palace By Karl Ove Knausgaard Vesaas’s home in Telemark, Norway. National Library of Norway, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. There are books that don’t leave you once you have finished reading them but remain with you, some for the rest of your life. To me Tarjei Vesaas’s two masterpieces, The Birds and The Ice Palace, are such books. This is not just because they are good—the world is full of good books—but also because they did something to me, changed something in me. I think of The Birds as a place, a place where something vital becomes visible, something that is always present but goes unnoticed, something that Vesaas’s novel, through its great attentiveness, allows to appear. The protagonist is named Mattis. He is mentally disabled and lives with his sister, unable to provide for himself. In social settings he is helpless, he senses other people’s wills and demands but is unable to satisfy them, he gets all tangled up inside. But when he is by himself, in the forest, for instance, or out on the lake below the house they live in, his being opens up, and the world he knows, the world of nature, flows through him; in his relation to it, he is free and unfettered. The linguistic sensibility that Vesaas evinces to accomplish this is unsurpassed. The same sensibility is found in The Ice Palace, which is about an encounter between two eleven-year-old girls, Siss and Unn. They are drawn to each other without knowing why, and their encounter—where everything that is at stake, everything that happens between them is wordless—takes place in an indefinite zone between sensations, emotions, and thoughts, a zone in the novel with its own animal alertness. Seen from the outside, it is difficult to imagine a literature further from the center than these two books. The center of power, the center of money, the center of the entertainment industry. We are in the Norwegian countryside in the fifties, in the mind of a village idiot and in the mind of an eleven-year-old prepubescent girl. And the author himself, Tarjei Vesaas, came from a small, isolated inland village, surrounded by deep forests and high mountains, where he lived his entire life, and he wrote his books in Nynorsk, a language used by a mere half a million people. But when you open The Birds or The Ice Palace and begin to read, you are transported not to the periphery of the world but to its very midst. The circumstances of life in which the main characters, Mattis and Siss, find themselves, are far removed from the reader’s, but their being, their existential presence, is not. And this span of the reading experience is in a sense built into the books themselves, in their rhythm and overarching theme: the interplay between the familiar and the foreign, the near and the far, the graspable and the unfathomable. Vesaas himself called this the “Great Cycle.” Read More
September 12, 2025 The Review’s Review Fall Books: On Shamanism: The Timeless Religion By Marta Figlerowicz From a portfolio by Jacques Hérold, originally published in the Fall 1961 issue of The Paris Review. In Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Ethnographer,” a white American graduate student named Fred embeds himself into a Native American tribe. Eventually, he penetrates its “secret doctrine.” His advisor then summons him back to report on it: He made his way to his professor’s office and told him that he knew the secret, but had resolved not to reveal it. “Are you bound by your oath?” the professor asked. “That’s not the reason,” Murdock replied. “I learned something out there that I can’t express.” “The English language may not be able to communicate it,” the professor suggested. “That’s not it, sir. Now that I possess the secret, I could tell it in a hundred different and even contradictory ways. I don’t know how to tell you this, but the secret is beautiful, and science, our science, seems mere frivolity to me now.” Borges’s story plays with the view that Western and non-Western cultures are fundamentally untranslatable. Stepping into a non-Western belief system makes one fall off the edge of purportedly rational, secular knowledge. Read More
September 12, 2025 The Review’s Review Fall Books: On George Whitmore’s Nebraska By Paul McAdory George Whitmore in his New York apartment, 1980. Photograph by James Steakley, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. I’m going to make a man out of you yet. Parents have probably been making variations on this threat for as long as they’ve had to tolerate weird sons. All sons being weird, that adds up to many threats. But some sons are queer; what then? Two years before his death from AIDS in 1989, George Whitmore—a one-time member of the Violet Quill, the short-lived early-eighties gay-male writing group that also included Edmund White and Andrew Holleran—published his third and final novel, Nebraska, on the theme of anguished man-making. The long-out-of-print text asks what combination of forces and tactics might induce manhood in a fruity kid: isolation, kidnapping, alcoholism, neglect? Now the Song Cave has reissued the book, and, in addition to an inventory of mom-and-pop solutions for correcting aberrant masculinities, we’ve recovered a perfect expression of horniness: “There came a singing in my head.” Desire is an earworm. Nebraska is a stubby gay bildungsroman that tracks an amputee named Craig Mullen, our narrator, from his bedridden preteens in fifties Flyoverlandia to his desperate twenties in SoCal. The novel is a stomach turner that plays sick tricks on the reader. Craig levels false accusations of sexual abuse against a closeted family member, and the results are catastrophic, as his relative undergoes a forced infantilization that runs parallel to Craig’s growing up. When Craig encounters the man again years later, genuine abuse rockets into the frame as a kind of outrageous punchline. The prospect of happiness for the gay characters of this era is rendered as a book-length joke. The novel twists its horrors into funny shapes, like balloon animals filled with poison gas. Read More