January 14, 2025 The Review’s Review Glimmer: In Siena By Cynthia Zarin Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Annunciation, 1344, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The last time I was in Siena there was an earthquake. The first time I was nineteen. My boyfriend, who had already graduated from college, had been in Italy most of the year, in Perugia. The plan was to take an intensive course in Italian—he wanted to read Dante—but then he discovered a passion for painting. Could it have been the day after I arrived that we took the train from Perugia to Siena? Even now, from Perugia, one changes train twice, first in Terontola, and then at Chiusi-Chianciano Terme, a station that decades later would become familiar, arriving in the Val D’Orcia from Rome, and where one afternoon we sat deathly ill in the station bar, beset by what—an ability to go on? But then everything was new. In Umbria, the landscape is mist and the hills are often in shadow, the luminous inner life is a long let-out breath, but as the train trundles into the province of Siena, the light sharpens like a scalpel, and the shadows disappear. The usual bustle at the station. Then, a stone’s throw from the Duomo and the Piazza del Campo—which erupts in July with the running of the horses in the Palio—the Pinacoteca Nazionale is housed in two adjacent palazzos. On four floors, it holds the most important collection of Sienese paintings in the world. The core of the collection was assembled by two abbots, Giuseppe Ciaccheri and Luigi de Angelis, painting by painting, between 1750 and 1810. They knew, somehow, that these unfashionable, strange, mystical, transfixing pictures, which hovered between Byzantine art and abstraction, painted in the margins of the history of art, many salvaged from triptychs and altarpieces that had been sold, dismantled, or lost, were worth saving. On that first visit the galleries were nearly empty. I had been brought up on twentieth-century painting—my grandfather had taken me on Saturday mornings to what was then called the Modern, but I had very little idea of painting as narrative. The only picture I knew that had the quality of continually happening in time was Picasso’s Guernica. But that is another story. Here in Siena was one chapter after another of a different story: the Annunciation, the Madonna and child, miraculous episodes, the Cross, the eternally mystifying Second Coming, the Assumption. There were the perplexing lives of the saints. Each figure was aglimmer, as if these narratives were continually occurring, unfolding even then as we looked on. My own understanding of these stories was limited—it amounted to being taken to see the Christmas windows on Fifth Avenue and listening to my father sing carols in the car. But I knew, even as I arrived from that distance, that these paintings from the trecento were ones to which from now on my attention would be directed. Later, when my first child was born—who grew up to become a painter—one of the first places I took her was to see the Italian paintings at the Met, where she fixed her eyes on the gold light. Read More
January 10, 2025 The Review’s Review On Najwan Darwish By Alexia Underwood Ann Craven, Moon (Paris Review Roof, NYC, 9-19-24, 8:40 PM), 2024, 2024, oil on linen, 14 x 14″. “No one will know you tomorrow. / The shelling ended / only to start again within you,” writes the poet Najwan Darwish in his new collection. Darwish, who was born in Jerusalem in 1978, is one of the most striking poets working in Arabic today. The intimate, carefully wrought poems in his new book, , No One Will Know You Tomorrow, translated into English by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, were written over the past decade. They depict life under Israeli occupation—periods of claustrophobic sameness, wartime isolation, waiting. “How do we spend our lives in the colony? / Cement blocks and thirsty crows / are the only things I see,” he writes. His verses distill loss into a few terse lines. In a poem titled “A Brief Commentary on ‘Literary Success,’ ” he writes, “These ashes that were once my body, / that were once my country— / are they supposed to find joy / in all of this?” Many poems recall love letters: to Mount Carmel, to the city of Haifa. To a lover who, abandoned, “shares my destiny.” He speaks of “joy’s solitary confinement” because “exile has taken / everyone I love.” Irony and humor are present (“I’ll be late to Hell. / I know Charon will ask for a permit / to board his boat. / Even there / I’ll need a Schengen visa”), but it is Darwish’s ability to convey both tremulous wonder and tragedy that make this collection so distinct. Read More
December 20, 2024 The Review’s Review The Best Books of 2024, According to Friends of the Review: Part Two By The Paris Review Wilhelm Amberg, Reading from Goethe’s Werther (1870), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Colored Television by Danzy Senna: among its subjects (not in order of importance) are LA, the vagaries of a writer’s life, and race—often in terms of a word that, coming from New Orleans, I am deeply familiar with, but which I thought I was not allowed to use. Until Danzy Senna said it was OK. More than OK. She prefers it to any less specific word. What is this word? Mulatto. The book’s heroine is writing a gigantic historical novel on this topic, which her husband describes as the “mulatto War and Peace,” and which is destined for failure—a failure resonant with universal poignance. Danzy Senna’s novel is deeply hilarious, though the passages I highlighted are not: “She’d never understood so profoundly how much being a novelist was at odds with domestic life, with sanity. … That kind of writing had no beginning and no end. It just crept around the house, infecting every element of family life.” The new (posthumous) Gabriel García Márquez novel, Until August (translated by Anne McLean), which he did not think was good enough to publish, is so good that its essential García Márquez qualities put one to shame—the quality of his vision, the quality of his prose, of his emotional capacity, and basically of his entire life. No, it isn’t his best, but I reveled in the memory of a master whose mere scraps I scarfed up adoringly, such as: “torrential geniuses with short and troubled lives,” as he remarks of Mozart and Schubert. —Nancy Lemann, author of “The Oyster Diaries” Read More
December 13, 2024 The Review’s Review The Best Books of 2024, According to Friends of the Review: Part One By The Paris Review Issunshi Hanasato, The Timeless Treasures of Literature (ca. 1844–1848), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain, One more year has passed: the humanoid robots are coming, my taxi has no driver (not even a metaphor), and ChatGPT tells me “there is hope even in the most hopeless times.” In our unreal reality, I’m inspired by a genre of compassionate absurdism: Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Leonora Carrington, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon. Another such writer is Enrique Vila-Matas, whose brilliant essay-fiction Insistence as a Fine Art (translated by Kit Schluter) came out this summer. Beginning in somewhat ekphrastic mode with Julio Romero de Torres’s painting La Buenaventura, Vila-Matas embarks on a playful defense of “insistence”: how authors echo themselves and others in their works; how these spiraling repetitions create an imaginary world more truthful than the adamantine pseudofacts of general reality. The publisher—Hanuman Editions—is also an expert practitioner of “insistence”: reimagining the legacy of Hanuman Books, a cult series of chapbooks produced between 1986 and 1993. —Joanna Kavenna, author of “The Beautiful Salmon” Joseph Andras’s writing favors the political: his novella Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us, published in translation by Simon Leser in 2021, is narrated by a pied-noir during the Algerian Revolution, and in Faraway the Southern Sky, released in English this spring, the author traverses Paris to retrace the steps of Ho Chi Minh’s life there. Andras hunts down the houses where Ho Chi Minh allegedly resided and the offices where he worked, constructing a map of the relationship between France’s capital and Ho Chi Minh’s burgeoning radicalism. Descriptions of Paris’s underbelly intermingle with Andras’s account of a twenty-something-year-old who, dreaming of liberating his country, would one day dictate the assassination of his political enemies. The novel is a story of how ideologies transform but also, largely, of hope: “If the rebel intoxicates, the revolutionary impedes. … If the first is accountable only to himself, the other embraces humanity as a whole.” —Zoe Davis, intern Saskia Vogel’s translation of Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan: A Novel in Verse does what you want a translation to do: take you inside a world and an experience that you couldn’t otherwise access, and make you ache for it. This epic follows three generations of Sami people in Norway as they try to preserve their way of life in the face of shifting borders and encroaching modernity. This spare and beautiful book will haunt you. —Megan McDowell, translator of Samanta Schweblin’s “An Eye in the Throat” Read More
December 6, 2024 The Review’s Review New Poetry: Margaret Ross, Nora Claire Miller, and Richie Hofmann Recommend By The Paris Review Photographs courtesy of Nora Claire Miller. Whenever I open the fridge, the same poem falls off the door: “you against the green screen, a place / without history,” from Tracy Fuad’s collection about:blank. The poem is printed on a postcard, and it has been falling off my fridge for over a year now. I sometimes think about moving it or using a better magnet. But I like that the postcard can be dislodged easily. Wherever the poem falls, the surface it lands on—linoleum floor, grocery bag, shoe—becomes its own green screen, its own substance disconnected from time. Each month, I get two copies of a new letterpress-printed poem in an envelope—one to keep and one to send, according to Kate Gibbel, the editor of the Vermont-based Send Me Press. Founded in 2021, SMP only sells two things on their website: postcards, and a bumper sticker that says I LOVE POEMS. I’ve sent a few of the duplicate postcards to friends, but I usually forget, so there are two copies of lots of poems around my house. I like to place the postcards situationally. I put a poem by Liam O’Brien on the kitchen table. “cold salt hot little hand,” I say to myself every time I grab the salt. I have a poem by Micky Bayonne propped beside a lava lamp: “I buried into the fissure, the glow! / How could I not be drawn in? Spun down?” There’s also a copy in my car. The fissure, the glow! I think often as I drive, my car yelling I LOVE POEMS at the world. Recently I drove to visit Kate while she was printing. I watched her pick up each metal letter and arrange them on a tray. It takes many hours of work to typeset a poem like this, print the copies on the giant press, and then to cut the postcards, address and stamp each envelope, and mail them out. I sometimes ask Kate if she’d ever consider switching to a less tedious way of making postcards. But Kate always says no. Like the poem that keeps falling off my fridge, the time it takes is the whole point. —Nora Claire Miller Read More
November 27, 2024 The Review’s Review The Cookbook Review By The Paris Review Photograph by Pierre André Leclercq, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The Bean Bible is at once an apologetic for the world’s legumes and also somewhat apologetic about them. The Bible is dedicated to the author’s husband, who “never objected to endless nights of bean meals”; a blurb identifies its subject as the ultimate underdog: “oft-maligned, subjected to ridicule, and despised by children everywhere.” Twenty-four years after its publication, things have changed. Beans are no longer synonymous with flatulence alone, and the only reason you wouldn’t be able to purchase a quarterly heirloom bean subscription is because Rancho Gordo is sold out. When I find myself yearning for an ideologically purer legumania, however, I still find myself turning to the Bible, a time capsule of the far more ascetic era of vegetarianism that raised me on black bean quesadillas and chickpea soup. Caveat here: The Bean Bible is not actually a vegetarian cookbook. (It includes nearly half a dozen recipes for duck alone.) But it reflects a world in which meatless staples were far less ubiquitous than they are today, purporting to introduce readers to “the Lebanese chickpea spread hummus” and canned beans from “the Puerto Rican brand Goya.” Directed at an adventurous but naive readership, the Bible remains worldly enough to have earned the ire of at least one Goodreads reviewer frustrated by the book’s focus on “East India cooking.” But I don’t read the Bible for its recipes. What makes it special is its systematic review of the legumes themselves, particularly chapter one’s genealogical (beanealogical?) charts, which I like to meditate upon as though they catalogued the names of my ancestors: cowpea, goober pea, lady pea; mortgage lifter bean and blue shackamaxon; beluga lentil and pardina lentil and speckled minisink. (Rumor has it that the European soldier bean and the French navy bean are still fighting it out on page eight.) Whether or not I ever cook any of those pedigreed varietals—almost certainly I will not—I’m honored to be just one of a long, long line of FODMAP enthusiasts. —Emmet Fraizer, intern Read More