September 22, 2023 The Review’s Review J. G. Ballard’s Brilliant, Not “Good” Writing By Tom McCarthy Shuets Udono, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Putting Ballard on a master’s course list, as I’ve done a couple of times, provokes a reaction that’s both funny and illuminating. Asked to read Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition, the more vociferous students invariably express their revulsion, while the more reflective ones voice their frustration that, although the ideas might be compelling, the prose “isn’t good.” This is especially the case with students who’ve been exposed to creative writing classes: they complain that the books are so full of repetition they become machinic or monotonous; also that they lack solid, integrated characters with whom they can identify, instead endlessly breaking open any given plot or mise-en-scène to other external or even unconnected scenes, contexts, and histories, resulting in a kind of schizoid narrative space that’s full of everyone and no one. Read More
September 15, 2023 The Review’s Review Fall Books: Zadie Smith, Moyra Davey, and Maya Binyam Recommend By The Paris Review Work Projects Administration Poster Collection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Pick up Chloe Aridjis’s Dialogue with a Somnambulist and open it somewhere shy of halfway and find a piece of writing called “Nail – Poem – Suit.” It is only one page long. Read it. Ask yourself what it is that you just read. A story? A prose poem? An essay? A portrait? When is the last time you couldn’t quite answer that question when confronted with a piece of contemporary writing? In our world of literary hyperprofessionalization it is not a question that comes up very often, and you may have to reach back into literary history to remember the writers who once provoked a similar uncertainty in you. Writers like Borges, writers like Kafka. Or even further back, to the undefinable and uncontainable prose of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, or those slivers of Sappho. Writers who thought of language as painters think of paint: not as means to an end but as the precious thing in itself. Within this single page of Chloe’s three things collide—that nail, a poem, a suit—and all within one man’s consciousness, although this consciousness is rendered externally, by a voice that comes from who knows where. But describing Chloe is hard: Why not read the whole thing for yourself, right now? Read More
September 8, 2023 The Review’s Review Sentences We Loved This Summer By The Paris Review Bonner Springs City Library, Bonner Springs, Kentucky, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0, A passage about LA (“ellay”) from Henry Hoke’s Open Throat, a novel narrated by a mountain lion: the bright world below the park at night is a blur to me when I try to look out over it but if I get close enough to a creature’s eye I can see what it sees and in the owl’s eye I see ellay clearly more lights than I could ever count stretch out into the darkness and don’t stop stretching I’m scared of how far they go —Spencer Quong, business manager Read More
September 1, 2023 The Review’s Review Apparently Personal: On Sharon Olds By Gunnhild Øyehaug Sharon Olds at left, with a GIrl Scout camp friend at Lake Tahoe, California, ca. 1956. Courtesy of Sharon Olds. Who is Sharon Olds? Sharon Olds is an American poet, born in San Francisco in 1942. She has a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and made her debut as a writer in 1980 with the poetry collection Satan Says. Since then, she has established herself as one of the most read, most decorated, and most controversial North American contemporary poets. “Sharon Olds’s poems are pure fire in the hands,” Michael Ondaatje has said. She became particularly well known after she refused to take part in a National Book Festival dinner organized by Laura Bush, then First Lady, in 2005, and wrote in an open letter: “So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.” Read More
August 25, 2023 The Review’s Review Alejo Carpentier’s Second Language By Alejandro Zambra Alejo Carpentier, 1979. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I like to think of literature as a second language—especially the second language of the monolingual. I’m thinking, naturally, about those of us who never systematically studied a foreign language, but who had access, thanks to translation—a miracle we take for granted all too easily—to distant cultures that at times came to seem close to us, or even like they belonged to us. We didn’t read Marguerite Duras or Yasunari Kawabata because we were interested in the French or the Japanese language per se, but because we wanted to learn—to continue learning that foreign language called literature, as broadly international as it is profoundly local. Because this foreign language functions, of course, inside of our own language; in other words, our language comes to seem, thanks to literature, foreign, without ever ceasing to be ours. It’s within that blend of strangeness and familiarity that I want to recall my first encounter with the literature of Alejo Carpentier, which occurred, as I’m sure it did for so many Spanish speakers of my generation and after, inside a classroom. “In this story, everything happens backward,” said a teacher whose name I don’t want to remember, before launching into a reading of “Viaje a la semilla” (“Journey to the seed”), Carpentier’s most famous short story, which we would later find in almost every anthology of Latin American stories, but which at the time, when we were thirteen or fourteen years old, we had never read. The teacher’s solemn, perhaps exaggerated reading allowed us, however, to feel or to sense the beauty of prose that was strange and different. It was our language, but converted into an unknown music that could nonetheless, like all music, especially good music, be danced to. Many of us thought it was a dazzling story, surprising and crazy, but I don’t know if any of us would have been able to explain why. Because of the odd delicacy of some of the sentences, perhaps. Maybe this one: “For the first time, the rooms slept without window-blinds, open onto a landscape of ruins.” Or this one: “The chandeliers of the great drawing room now sparkled very brightly.” Read More
August 18, 2023 The Review’s Review On Friendship: Juliana Leite and Devon Geyelin Recommend By The Paris Review Friendship bracelets, Ra’ike, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. I’m interested in stories that gently erase the boundaries between love and friendship, featuring characters who shuffle the two feelings in unexpected ways. I like narratives that navigate contradictions and do away with false binaries, illustrating the complexity of what we humans call intimacy. Who is really capable of drawing a hard boundary between feelings? My story in the Summer issue of the Review, “My Good Friend,” follows two elderly friends who have shared a lifetime of friendship right in the neighborhood of romance. For these two old folks, friendship is the mountain one climbs to reach a deeper viewpoint on love. Simone de Beauvoir’s novel The Inseparables, about the friendship between two young girls, Sylvie and Andrée, is one of the many gems I’ve encountered. Based on de Beauvoir’s own passionate friendship that began in youth, with a girl named Zaza, the book was written five years after she published The Second Sex, and it’s clear how the feelings born from that friendship structured her personality and helped to shape even her philosophical interests. “Nothing so interesting had ever happened to me,” Sylvie says of the first time she met Andrée. “It suddenly seemed as if nothing had ever happened to me at all.” Young Sylvie wants to express this feeling somehow, to tell her friend about the transformation that has happened inside her. On Andrée’s thirteenth birthday, Sylvie carefully and anxiously sews a silk purse by hand as a gift, hoping it will tell her friend something that words can’t quite. Sylvie hands the bag to Andrée and, seeing her astonishment, she has the impression that something would have happened between them, maybe a tender kiss, had it not been for the presence of their mothers. Together they become teenagers, and Andrée, the more extroverted of the pair, begins a little romance with a boy against her mother’s wishes. Sylvie starts to feel jealous before she even knows the name of the feeling. Andrée is forced to admit to her mother that, yes, she had kissed the boy, she had kissed him because she loved him. She later tells Sylvie, who is overcome by complete shock: “I lowered my head. Andrée was unhappy and the idea of it was unbearable. But her unhappiness was so foreign to me; the kind of love where you kiss had no truth for me.” After a few pages we realize that a kiss is something of a metric of passion for the two young girls, the naive way in which they measure the beginnings of love even as they wrestle with the ambiguity of their own relationship. Simone and Zaza eventually left home for their studies—literature for Zaza, philosophy for Simone—and they reported life’s many novelties, love stories, and discoveries in careful letters to each other. In one of her letters to Zaza, de Beauvoir wrote, “Every page is always bliss, happiness in bigger and bigger lettering. And I love you more than ever at this moment, dear past, dear present, my inseparable darling.” This was the last letter between the two. Zaza died prematurely of an illness, and de Beauvoir would always carry with her the gift of this precious love for a friend. Like a silent river flowing beneath the papers and theories that would influence all Western thinking, there Zaza was with Simone. Zaza and a friendship’s love. —Juliana Leite, author of “My Good Friend” Read More