February 11, 2022 The Review’s Review Mathematics of Brutality By The Paris Review Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery,” goes Mao’s famous dictum. “A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence in which one class overthrows another.” The aftereffects of this kind of violence on a nation’s citizens is the subject of the South African writer C. A. Davids’s new novel How to Be a Revolutionary, out from Verso this month. In chapters that crisscross between present-day Shanghai, apartheid-era Cape Town, Beijing during the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests, and a series of McCarthy-era letters from Langston Hughes to a South African friend, Davids follows the friendship of Beth, a South African diplomat, and Zhao, a Chinese writer, as they come to terms with the moments of betrayal, naivete, and political cowardice in both of their pasts. Read More
February 4, 2022 The Review’s Review Out of Time By The Paris Review TGV 9576 // Munich – Strasbourg. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. For years, John Edgar Wideman has been dropping simple words from his sentences. Here’s the opening line from “Nat Turner Confesses,” featured in his collection American Histories: “Nat Turner no stranger to me.” Why not “Nat Turner is no stranger to me”? Various answers to that question. Wideman’s prose has long had a breathless, out-of-time quality to it, which becomes more pronounced as he gets older. Wideman, a Pittsburgh-raised writer as versatile and openly ambitious as his late friend, the underappreciated Chicago author Leon Forrest, is now eighty years old. He has published four books with Scribner in the last six years: Writing to Save a Life and three short story collections featuring old and new work—American Histories, You Made Me Love You, and Look for Me and I’ll Be Gone. Read More
January 27, 2022 The Review’s Review Blue Geometries By The Paris Review Photo by Ken Heaton, via Wikimedia Commons. Early in the morning last week, in a funk of sleeplessness, I tuned in to the afternoon matches of Round Three at the Australian Open. The cool blue geometries of the courts in Melbourne—especially when the sound is off—are usually a balm to my mind. But there’s always a danger that the match will be exciting, and when the Spanish up-and-comer Carlos Alcaraz fought through to a fourth set against Matteo “The Hammer” Berrettini, I gave up and made coffee. Then I reread (for the fourth or fifth time) the opening pages of Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s The Circuit, his account of the year 2017 in tennis—a year that witnessed the comebacks of Nadal and Federer, just when they seemed ready to pack it in—and a rival to John McPhee’s Levels of the Game for the best book out there on the sport. Phillips watches games the way we all do—on television—but he sees more, and more clearly, than the rest of us. Before I knew it, I had read half the book, Berrettini won in five sets, and I was ready to face the day. —Robyn Creswell Read More
January 20, 2022 The Review’s Review Back to the Essence By The Paris Review Three-year-old girl riding an Arabian horse. Miragexv at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. “The Bridge 94 (Demo),” by Mobb Deep featuring Big Noyd, went unreleased for twenty years. The fact that you could make something that good and decide not to put it out says everything about Mobb Deep’s seat in the pantheon. The whole thing is a kniving, wintry blast of phonetic artistry, but the last lines are Shakespearean. The rapper is Prodigy, a twenty-year-old Albert Johnson the Fifth (Albert the Third was Albert J. “Budd”Johnson, a major early bebop saxophonist who came out of Dallas and got his break recording with Louis Armstrong in the early thirties). Prodigy will die in his early forties from problems related to sickle-cell anemia, but at the moment he’s talking about his home ground in the vast housing projects of Queens. The song is a warning to would-be intruders or, in Big Noyd’s words, “motherfucking violators.” In six seconds Prodigy draws an eerie picture of cops surveilling the block: “As jakes look over the hill, their eyes see nothing but nighttime,” while in the buildings, “due murders” happen “at an unseen right time.” Whoever is being spoken to fails to listen and gets “two to his dome so his last thought is hot.” At that point the story needs to make a pivot from “Be careful or you’ll get killed” to “You weren’t careful and now I’ve been forced to shoot you.” Prodigy: You came as a whole But you’re leaving In incomplete pieces And didn’t expect to meet Jesus In your adolescence Sending you back to the essence So you can feel at home And safe in God’s presence Whole, home. He murders you, and he blesses you. Even in the act of taking your young life, he retains the power to confer his blessing on you, and gives it. That’s how far above petty bullshit he’s hovering. Chills. —John Jeremiah Sullivan Read More
January 13, 2022 The Review’s Review You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory By The Paris Review Publicity photo of the Ronettes—Nedra Talley, Veronica Bennett (Ronnie Spector) and Estelle Bennett—by James Kriegsmann. On Wednesday, in the hours after Ronnie Spector’s family announced her passing from cancer at seventy-eight, I played, on loop, her cover of the Johnny Thunders punk anthem “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.” Recorded for The Last of the Rock Stars, her 2006 comeback album, the song is also a dirge for Thunders, who died in 1991; he had been one of Ronnie’s crucial supporters in the period after she left her abusive ex-husband, the megalomaniac, murderer, and iconoclastic music producer Phil Spector. On YouTube, you can watch her perform a live version of the song from 2018: after showing footage from an archival interview the Ronettes did with Dick Clark sometime in the sixties, she comes out, to applause, and says, “Sorry, I was backstage crying.” Dabbing her eyes, she mourns the breakup of her iconic girl group, which also featured her older sister, Estelle, and cousin Nedra. “I thought 1966 was the end, no more Ronettes, no more stage, no more singing. I was out here in California and out of show business for seven or eight years. Let me tell you, life was a bitch.” She then describes starting over back in New York City in the ‘70s (she was raised in Spanish Harlem), and meeting Thunders while singing at the legendary gay club and bathhouse Continental Baths, where he cried all through her set. Later, she also met Joey Ramone, who produced an EP of hers and whose contributions to The Last of the Rock Stars include backing vocals on “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.” Read More
January 7, 2022 The Review’s Review Wives and Daughters; Love and Light By The Paris Review Elizabeth Gaskell’s House in Manchester, Greater Manchester, England, UK. Photo by Michael D Beckwith, with permission of the administration. Agnès Varda’s 1967 Uncle Yanco is the earliest—and, at under twenty minutes long, the shortest—of her “California films.” Through greetings, dinners, interviews, and house tours, which she stages and reenacts for the camera as they occur in real time, the short documents the director’s first encounter with a distant relative, the painter Jean Varda, whose nickname titles the project. Jean lives on a houseboat in the endlessly quirky “aquatic suburbia” of Sausalito, where he paints, sails, naps, muses on love and light, receives his mail in the mouth of a jack-o’-lantern, and hosts a community of young, suntanned, bamboo-flute-playing hippies. The film is just as concerned with place as it is with person, and what makes Jean Varda’s home more stunning and fantastical than any movie set is that it actually exists, or existed. Read More