February 2, 2024 The Review’s Review The Frenchwoman from Indianapolis By Rosa Lyster Janet Flanner, ca. 1925. Berenice Abbott, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Here is Norman Mailer in his fine black boots, high-cut and shiny and very snug on the ankle, like something you might pick out if you were the prop master for an expensive production of Richard III. Sweating a bit under the TV lights, he seems to be doing an imitation of a scowl, as if to gesture toward his reputation as a guy who goes around scowling. He sits angled toward the host, Dick Cavett, who bends slightly away from him, as do the other two guests. One of them is Gore Vidal. Like Mailer, Vidal is doing an impersonation of himself. He strikes various languorous attitudes as the camera begins to roll, reclining deeper into his chair as Mailer leans forward, toying idly with his glasses and smiling as Mailer yaps and bares his teeth. A cat and a dog. Compared to these two, both positively radiant with the excitement of showing off, the third guest seems to have been invited on by mistake. She is, basically, an old lady. She wears white gloves and a neat skirt suit, with a scarf knotted at her neck. She doesn’t say much at first, waiting patiently as, according to the description on the YouTube clip, “the infamous feud between novelist Norman Mailer and writer Gore Vidal comes to a head in a battle of wit, sarcasm, and condescension with the audience and Janet Flanner”—that’s her—“(reluctantly) in the front row.” Read More
January 26, 2024 The Review’s Review Qishu: Han Song’s Hospital Nightmares By Michael Berry Digital artwork of a science-fictional surgery room by alan9187, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Hospitals play a big role in Yu Hua’s life and fiction—his parents were both doctors, he grew up in and around hospitals as a child, his first job was that of a dentist, and hospitals would later frequently appear in his work as sites of violence and trauma. Yu Hua first made a name for himself in the eighties with a series of dark, violent, experimental short stories, but over the course of his career, his writing became more conventional, earning him a broad readership and fame in the process. But what if Yu Hua had gone the other direction? What if he had gone darker, stranger, more experimental? If one is looking for someone to inherit the lineage of Yu Hua’s early experimentalism today, I would point them to Han Song’s Hospital trilogy, which not only shares a fascination with the medical setting but also presents an unflinching look at the violence lurking just under the surface of the everyday. It is no coincidence then that, during a recent interview I conducted with Han Song when he was speaking of his formative influences, he told me: “I was particularly fascinated by Yu Hua at that time and even imitated him.” Read More
January 12, 2024 The Review’s Review Gravity and Grace in Richard II By Cristina Campo From How do You Hold Your Debt?, Christine Sun Kim’s portfolio in issue no. 241. COURTESY OF CHRISTINE SUN KIM, FRANÇOIS GHEBALY, AND JTT. In the opinion of Simone Weil, King Lear was the only one of Shakespeare’s tragedies completely permeated with a pure spirit of love, and therefore on a level with the “immobile” theater of the Greeks. Perhaps Richard II never caught her attention at an auspicious moment. It is, anyway, very difficult to grasp and wrest into the light this mysterious tragedy, the most silent of all of Shakespeare’s works—this path that is constantly covering its own tracks, this voice that doesn’t want to raise any particular problem or to support any particular thesis. A story recounted with eyes downcast, slowly and, one might say, in the dark: en una noche oscura. For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings— How some have been deposed; some slain in war, Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed. For five long symphonic acts, full of returns and rigorous reprises, confined in the very tight mesh of unbroken blank verse, not a single laugh, in this drama of young people, not one gallantry or a pleasantry, even a lugubrious one, from a clown. Not one of those great breaths of spring or autumn. Not one of those gratuitous songs as natural to Shakespeare as the circulation of the blood. In Richard II, everything falls inexorably down. Everything obeys the law of gravity. And yet it is in Richard II, more than in any other work since Homer, that the royal gestures “continually cross like blinding flashes” and grace blooms, a pure, pale flower, on the dark foliage of necessity. Never, I think, have “gravity and grace” been more exactly encapsulated in a play. Read More
January 5, 2024 The Review’s Review A Dollhouse-Size Hologram By The Paris Review David Levine, Dissolution. Courtesy of the artist. Currently on display at the Museum of the Moving Image is a dollhouse-size hologram that looks straight from the future. David Levine’s Dissolution, on view through March 1, is a sculptural, three-dimensional film: a cube-shaped space projected from below through a vibrating glass plate that hums and whirs like an analog projector. A twenty-minute monologue runs on a loop, voiced by a tired and paranoid human named Vox (Laine Rettmer), who has been trapped inside this machine and turned into a work of art. As Vox bemoans her predicament—existence as both human and artwork—disconnected images come and go: an octopus mining for crypto, fragments of classical sculpture, and a tortoise with a jewel-encrusted shell (the last an homage to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature). The artwork contorts our own bodies, too; I found myself twisting around to see the object from every angle, hypnotized by its miniature beauty and disoriented by its dizzying colors and sounds. A suspicion toward beauty might be the subject of Dissolution, a piece influenced by Brechtian principles of estrangement and alienation: the small, buzzing machine pulls us in only for Vox to spit us back out. —Elinor Hitt, reader Read More
December 22, 2023 The Review’s Review On Sven Holm’s Novella of Nuclear Disaster By Jeff VanderMeer Vedbæk, Denmark. MchD, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Halfway through Sven Holm’s taut unfolding nightmare, Termush, the unnamed narrator encounters “ploughed-up and trampled gardens” where “stone creatures are the sole survivors.” Holm describes these statues as “curious forms, the bodies like great ill-defined blocks, designed more to evoke a sense of weight and mass than to suggest power in the muscles and sinews.” Later, a guest of the gated, walled hotel for the rich from which the novel takes its name relates a dream in which “light streamed out of every object; it shone through robes and skin and the flesh on the bones, the leaves on the trees … to reveal the innermost vulnerable marrow of people and plants.” The same could describe the novel, which accrues its strange effects via both this stricken, continuous revealing and the “curious forms” of a solid, impervious setting, in which the ordinary elements of our world come to seem alien through the lens of nuclear catastrophe. Read More
December 15, 2023 The Review’s Review The Paris Review’s Favorite Books of 2023 By The Paris Review Henry Taylor, UNTITLED, 2010. From Untitled Portfolio, issue no. 243. © HENRY TAYLOR, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND HAUSER AND WIRTH. PHOTOGRAPHS BY MAKENZIE GOODMAN. Book that made me cry on the subway: Stoner, John Williams Book that made me miss my subway stop: Prodigals, Greg Jackson Book I was embarrassed to read on the subway: The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis Book someone asked me about on the subway: The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty Book I saw most often on the subway: Big Swiss, Jen Beagin —Camille Jacobson, engagement editor My reading this year was defined by fascinating but frustrating books. Reading to explore, reading for pleasure—sometimes the two don’t converge. In January and February, I battled against Marguerite Young’s thousand-plus-page Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, reading a pdf of it on my computer (why did I do this? I honestly don’t know) and developing a (hopefully temporary) eye twitch in the process. Among other things, the novel is about a bedridden woman in a decrepit mansion experiencing vertiginous opium hallucinations for pages on end. I’m glad I read it but I’m not sure I would recommend it. Speaking of opium, I also finally finished Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, another kind of fever dream (originally written for money, it’s a mishmash of autobiography, philosophy, and outright plagiarism) that is both completely bonkers and a foundation of modern literary criticism—in it, Coleridge coined the term “suspension of disbelief.” One early reviewer of it expressed “astonishment that the extremes of what is agreeable and disgusting can be so intimately blended by the same mind.” Maybe I relate to this more than I’d like to admit. But a primary purpose of these lists is to give people ideas of what they might enjoy, more than what they might profitably suffer through. So, these books gave me pleasure this year: among others, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring, Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Hannah Sullivan’s Was It for This, Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining, and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World. I learned a lot from all of them, too. —David S. Wallace, editor at large The text that looms largest in my mind this year is Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette. The novel first appeared in the U.S. in 2020, but it reentered the public consciousness this fall when the organization Litprom, citing the war in Gaza, canceled an award ceremony for the novel. Over a thousand authors formally rebuked the decision. Meanwhile, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians continues, abetted by U.S. funds and rhetoric; since October 7, as of this writing, Israel has murdered over 18,200 people in Gaza and the West Bank. Minor Detail is a fictional telling of true events—the documented rape and murder of a Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers in the Negev desert, in the summer of 1949. In the first half of the novel, Shibli imagines the day-to-day activities of the commanding officer in the lead-up to and aftermath of the girl’s capture. In the latter half, Shibli fast-forwards to the near-present, narrating from the perspective of a Palestinian woman who has become fixated on the girl’s story and travels out of the West Bank—with a borrowed ID card that will allow her passage through the intervening military checkpoints—to research the crime. I am especially interested in the rote style of the first act, in which acts of violence bleed together with the mundane. Shibli meticulously describes, for example, the officer’s obsessive daily washing routine, including shortly before the execution of the girl: He took the towel, dipped it in the bowl, rubbed it with the bar of soap, and passed it over his face and neck. Then he rinsed it, rubbed it again with the soap, and wiped his chest and arms. He rinsed it, passed the bar of soap over it again, and wiped his armpits. Then he rinsed it, rubbed more soap on it, and wiped his legs, without removing the bandage from his thigh. When he had finished wiping down his entire body, he rinsed the towel once more and hung it where it had been before. The effect is hypnotic. The style makes even brief distraction feel impossible. I admire Shibli’s refusal to abbreviate action, the patience and fortitude with which she illustrates the minutiae that surround and constitute violence. —Spencer Quong, business manager Read More