November 8, 2024 The Review’s Review On Mohammed Zenia Siddiq Yusef Ibrahim’s BLK WTTGNSN By Benjamin Krusling Otis Houston Jr., Untitled Cellphone Photograph (2022), from issue no. 240 of The Paris Review. Courtesy of Gordon Robichaux, New York. I love density. Compression is nuclear. Big family, small house—no room (Jeezy). Used to act up when I went to school—thought it was cool, but I really was hurt (Meek Mill). Free Gaza, we on the corner like Israelites (Earl Sweatshirt). It’s opaque / and then it is violent (Ibrahim, “Wittgenstein Tried to Warn Us About Lions”). Poetry is a drama of gaps and leaps but also of gather and charge. One can’t be too precious about it. BLK WTTGNSN, Mohammed Zenia Siddiq Yusef Ibrahim’s forthcoming collection from Tiger Bark Press, is density itself, a kind of reconstructed surrealist epic of black critique that overwhelms with its range and slices with its imagination. Ibrahim’s work has refreshingly little to do with the platitudinous, overly carved (to use my friend S.’s phrase) contemporary poem that sometimes goes viral when bad things happen and people want to confirm their confusion or mystify their position. This book is bold, serious, and so funny, even when it flows like blood and smoke. Read More
October 25, 2024 The Review’s Review On Writing Advice and the People Who Give It By Sheila Heti Drawing by Stephanie Brody Lederman, from Heroic Couplet (The Hustle), a portfolio that appeared in issue no. 75 (Spring 1979) of The Paris Review. The Canadian writer Sam Shelstad’s third book, The Cobra and the Key, is a funny and charming satire of writing advice and the people who give it. The book is in the form of a writing manual, and its prologue begins: Imagine you are standing in a gymnasium with numerous wooden chests spread out across the floor. Each chest contains one of two things: either a cobra, or a story. As much as you do not want to interact with the dangerous snakes, your curiosity is too great. It’s human nature to crave stories. We need them. So you gamble and open up one chest. It’s a story. You sit down and read, relieved to have avoided an encounter with one of the cobras and grateful that you get to enjoy a story. Once finished, however, you find yourself feeling anxious. The story was fine, but nothing special. You need to open another chest in the hopes of finding another, better story. In fact, you will not be satisfied until all non-snake chests have been opened and you have recovered every possible story. And so, inevitably, you open a cobra chest. You are bitten and the poison slowly kills you. Straight-faced, grandiose, slightly lunatic—this man is our guide. A hundred and fifty-three short chapters follow, covering such topics as “Getting Started,” “Plot,” “Style,” “Point of View,” “Revision,” and so on. I think what confuses me so much about those who have prescriptions for how to write is that they assume all humans experience the world the same way. For instance, that we all think “conflict” is the most interesting and gripping part of life, and so we should all make conflict the heart of our fiction. Or that when we think of other people, we all think of what they look like. Or that we all believe things happen due to identifiable causes. Shouldn’t a writer be trained to pay attention to what they notice about life, what they think life is, and come up with ways of highlighting those things? The indifference to the unique relationship between the writer and their story (or between the writer and the reason they are writing), which is necessarily a by-product of any generalized writing advice, is part of what makes the comedy in this book so great. As a teacher, “Sam Shelstad” is so literal, and takes the conventions of how to write successful fiction on such faith, that when he tries to relay these tips to his reader, the advice ends up sounding as absurd as it actually is. Read More
October 18, 2024 The Review’s Review Do Dogs Know What Art Is? By Laura van den Berg Photograph courtesy of Laura van den Berg. Do dogs know what art is? Oscar is a big, “free-spirited” Lab mix. My husband and I adopted him when he was just a few months old. We’ve lived together as a little family for over a decade. When Oscar was a puppy, I did a one-semester residency at Bard College. I used to walk Oscar off-leash on campus, and one afternoon he bounded up to what looked like, from a distance, a small pond. He got into the water—which seemed, in hindsight, a little shallow for a pond—and started splashing around. Within minutes, a furious campus security officer was running in our direction, waving his arms. Turns out the “pond” was actually an installation called Parliament of Reality by the renowned Icelandic Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, though I will forever think of it as the first place I ever saw Oscar swim. How different our experiences with art must be. My initial response is usually cerebral—a judgment, an idea, an association—but when something really moves me I feel it in my body. Once, at a Korakrit Arunanondchai installation in Paris, I fell briefly asleep on a giant beanbag wedged deep inside the light and noise of the exhibit and woke up sobbing. It took me hours to return to earth, and when I did I felt a lightness, as though something had been exorcised. Dogs, meanwhile, are creatures of sound and smell. Oscar moves with his snout to the grass, pausing for deep, forensic sniffs. His impressions are peopled by the smells of everyone who’s made contact with this same patch of earth. Canine perception is collaborative. Dogs are pack animals; they are always among. Read More
September 20, 2024 The Review’s Review New Books By Emily Witt, Vigdis Hjorth, and Daisy Atterbury By The Paris Review Erin O’Keefe, Circle Circle, 2020, from New and Recent Photographs, a portfolio in issue no. 235 (Winter 2020) of The Paris Review. I did not have a good time reading Vigdis Hjorth’s novel If Only. I felt, in fact, kind of abject—but something about the novel compelled me forward, in a way that sometimes actually confused me. I found myself reading fifty pages, putting it down, picking it up a week later and once again being unable to stop reading, then abandoning it for another week. It was a discomfiting instance where in returning to the bleak narrative world of the novel I felt almost like I was mirroring the behavior of its main character, Ida, who returns again and again to a love affair that seems to offer her nothing but pain. Why was I reading this book that made me so angry, uncomfortable, irritated? Because it was, maybe, the kind of discomfort that can reconfigure certain aspects of the way you see the world, whose insights or the shadows of them seem to recur long after you’ve closed the book—and so they have, as I thought last night of an image from it, Ida and her lover at a restaurant in Istanbul, gorging on champagne, telling the waiter they were just married even though they weren’t. If Only—published in Norwegian in 2001, but published in English translation by Charlotte Barslund for the first time this month—is a novel about obsessive love. It is one of a spate of recent novels that take all-consuming desire as a theme: Miranda July’s All Fours and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos both deal with a passion that veers into misery at times, the kind of passion that is transformative only because it shatters lives. But If Only is by far the bleakest of these; in fact, it is one of the bleakest depictions of a relationship I have ever encountered. The affair obliterates Ida; it cuts her off from the people around her, including her young children; it makes her act erratically and occasionally dangerously. The relationship has many of the same qualities as prolonged substance abuse—and it is no coincidence that Ida and her lover constantly binge on alcohol, too. The novel offers neither redemption nor transcendence as its resolution. And yet Hjorth makes this relationship and its aftermath legible to us as a part of the human experience—one that we can’t extract from the type of love we do consider desirable or healthy. At the end of the book, we might find ourselves wondering, as Ida does: “If only there was a cure, a cure for love.” And we might realize, even as we wish this, that we don’t actually mean it at all. —Sophie Haigney, web editor Read More
August 23, 2024 The Review’s Review Another Life: On Yoko Ono By Cynthia Zarin Yoko Ono, Half-A-Room, from Half-A-Wind Show, Lisson Gallery, London, 1967. Photograph by Clay Perry, courtesy of Tate Modern and Yoko Ono. Recently, I found myself at the Tate Modern in London, accompanied by my youngest daughter, to see Music of the Mind, a retrospective of the work of Yoko Ono: her drawings, postcards, films, and musical scores. Accompanied is perhaps too easy a word. When told my daughter I wanted to go, she said, “Really?” “Yes,” I said. “Really.” Read More
August 16, 2024 The Review’s Review On Asturias’s Men of Maize By Héctor Tobar Asturias, ca. 1925. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. For millions of people in the Americas, our Indigenous heritage is something tinged with mystery. We look into a mirror and believe we see the Mayan, the Aztec, or the Apache in our faces. The hint of a high cheekbone; the very loud and obvious statement of our cinnamon or copper skin. We sense a native great-great-grandparent in our squat or long torsos, in the shape of our eyes, in our gait, and in the emotions and the spirits that drift over us at times of joy and loss. But the particulars of our Indigeneity, the weighty and grounded facts of it, have been erased from our history. In my Guatemalan-immigrant childhood, the great Mayan jungle city of Tikal was a symbol of the civilization in our blood. Despite the humility of our present in seventies Los Angeles—my mother was a store cashier, my father a parking-lot valet—we were once an empire. My father suggested that a personal, familial greatness was there in our Mayan heritage, waiting to reawaken. I could not trace who my Mayan forebears were, exactly. But I knew the Maya were in me because I was a guatemalteco; or, in the hyphenated ethnic nomenclature of the time, a “Guatemalan-American.” Only now do I realize how deeply fraught the idea of being “Guatemalan” truly is. “Guatemala” is a way of glossing over the cultural collisions and the racial violence that produced a country centered in the mountain jungles and river valleys where Mayan peoples ruled themselves until Europeans came. Read More