March 6, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cinema, Sebald, and Small Surprises By The Paris Review Still from And Then We Danced Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire captured critics’ hearts, and seemed a sure shot to capture mine. An acclaimed French lesbian film? Made for me! And yet, though I did like looking at Adèle Haenel’s incongruously contemporary face in period garb, the overblown, gestural romance left me un-aflame. “Do all lovers feel that they’re inventing something?” Heloise asks Marianne before they first sleep together, and I wished that something more precise, more personal, were being invented. I found that specificity in a different international gay film, And Then We Danced, which follows a delicate-boned dancer as he tries to keep his hands from fluttering during traditional Georgian dance, his only path out of a country where he cannot survive. Shot in four weeks on a minuscule budget, the film received a standing ovation at Cannes. In Georgia, it was met with such violent far-right protests that it closed after three screenings, but a queer Georgian youth movement has mobilized around the film, and its soundtrack, as a beacon of hope. The movie’s portrayal of first love made me bite my lip, but even more vivid were the moments of tenderness between two brothers, between grandparents and grandchildren, and the spaces the camera inhabits in Tbilisi, from nightclubs to cramped apartments to ballrooms. It’s a love letter to Georgia that asks simply: Love me back. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More
February 28, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Long Walks, Little Gods, and Lispector By The Paris Review Jessi Jezewska Stevens. Photo: Nina Subin. Anyone who has googled their own name knows the curious thrill of watching the page populate with alternate identities. Percy, the narrator of Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s debut novel, The Exhibition of Persephone Q (out next week), suddenly finds herself awash in that potent mix of familiarity and alienation. She indeed googles herself not long after receiving a new exhibition catalogue of photographs, taken by her ex-fiancé, of a naked woman with a hidden face. Percy feels certain the woman is her—she recognizes the apartment, the body—but she cannot prove it, and the more she insists, the less plausible it all starts to seem. Previously a person of apathy, Percy has long been satisfied to be taken through life by a slow-moving current as invisible to herself as it is to those around her. She learns she is pregnant and keeps not mentioning it to her husband; she goes out for long walks at night, makes money in vaguely nondescript ways, and seems generally on the brink of disappearing from her own life. The arrival of the catalogue upends her complacency and sends her reeling into a quest of self-discovery and assertion amid the social landscape of post-9/11 New York. Stevens uses her wry perspective and lucent style to pose a deceptively simple question of personhood: How could you prove who you were? —Lauren Kane Read More
February 21, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Menace, Machines, and Muhammad Ali By The Paris Review Anna Kavan. Anna Kavan’s short story “Ice Storm” begins in winter, with the narrator leaving Grand Central Terminal to visit friends in Connecticut, to clear her head and make a decision (about what, is left unspecified). They can’t understand why she has chosen to leave her “nice warm Manhattan apartment” for the relentless chill of the country. A similar question: Why would we leave the warmth of a relatively comfortable life to enter fiction like Kavan’s, which is often fraught and frigid? Her masterful lucidity and dispassionate tone—on display in Machines in the Head, a collection of Kavan’s short fiction, out this week from NYRB Classics—is a journey into the cold to clear your head. Unlike her most popular work, the excellent novel Ice, which skids along planes of disrupted reality, these stories (selected from the span of her writing life) are tighter and more focused. The psychological reality of her characters is rendered sharply: in the title story, the narrator awakens “just in time to catch a glimpse of the vanishing hem of sleep as, like a dark scarf maliciously snatched away, it glides over the foot of the bed and disappears in a flash under the closed door.” Her narrators are often faceless, unnamed, and ungendered; rather than being alienating, this instead asks you to imagine your way inside. Her narratives are uncanny enough to ultimately forge a safe distance, but her characters familiar enough to make one understand anew what it means to wake up and be unable to fall back asleep, or feel unable to decide one’s future. —Lauren Kane Read More
February 14, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Swans, Sieves, and Sentience By The Paris Review The male swan ensemble in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. Photo: Johan Persson. When I was a dancer, performing Swan Lake was a rite of passage. My memories of doing so, though, involve only pain—the pain of standing in regimental lines for impossible stretches of time, of finding the will not to walk offstage. Swan Lake epitomizes balletic femininity as much as it does the exploitation of the female body in dance. But Matthew Bourne’s adaptation, which recently concluded a two-week run at City Center, challenges the ballet’s traditional gendering by featuring a cast of male swans. Setting Swan Lake in Kensington Gardens after dark, Bourne evokes the London of Henry James or Robert Louis Stevenson—where a man walking alone at night might come face to face with the supernatural, if not his own psyche. Bourne’s men pound the ground and heave collective, audible breaths. Their movements accentuate the weight of the physical body rather than creating an illusion of birdlike lightness. I am always wary, however, of Bourne’s indulgence in spectacle. Scenes set in present-day London are so saturated with cinematic gimmicks, so staged for a laugh, that their humor undercuts the psychological and choreographic complexities of the darker sections. That said, the Royal Ballet principal Matthew Ball’s performance as the Swan/Stranger was one of the best New York has seen in years. Bourne’s Swan Lake, kitsch aside, is a testament to the choreographer’s ingenuity and to the enduring allure of the ballet itself. —Elinor Hitt Read More
February 7, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Scenes, Screens, and Snubs By The Paris Review Still from Mark Jenkin’s Bait. This Sunday the Oscars, like seasonal depression or unwashed salad, returns with a grim inevitability. It also provides a good juncture to rave with righteousness about films that were overlooked. I wrote about Atlantics two weeks prior and would be happy to rattle on about its snubbing, but I have other reasons to shake my fists. Also ignored was my other favorite film that ends with a freeing glance into the camera, the wry and ruthless The Souvenir, with a scalpel-sharp script in my mother tongue, passive-aggressive British condescension. The marvelous oddity Bait charts the battle between a Cornish fisherman and the gentrifiers of his town. They buy him out of his house and drag it up with nautical kitsch and knotted ropes—“like a sex dungeon,” he fumes. Bait has the “fuck the rich” fury of Parasite but is filmed as a throwback, in grainy black-and-white film stock, with dubbed sound. The abrasive aesthetic unsettles: it drains the familiar romance of Cornwall’s coast and shows the present as if it were a prophetic nightmare from the past. Another bewildering experiment is the gorgeous Long Day’s Journey into Night, which should have got a nod for every technical award. It is a lonely man’s reverie, as expected, full of the flickers and fragments of lost love. There is weeping and gnashing of apples. There are curlicues of cigarette smoke and telling smudges of lipstick. Lovers speak vaguely in flooded rooms, as if this were a perfume ad directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Then it all converges in a single take: an hour-long dreamscape that gathers and riddles all that came before. The camera loops and plummets; fate is tempted as a horse bucks fruit into its path, and a man bets he can sink the eight ball in the pool hall. It’s no spoiler to say the spell does not break—this melancholy is intoxicating, immaculate. If only real sadness felt so good. —Chris Littlewood Read More
January 31, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Gossip, Ghosts, and Growth By The Paris Review Alma Mahler and her husband, Gustav, 1909. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Sometimes you just want to read something juicy, and Cate Haste’s Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler delivers that in spades. Alma is remembered primarily as the wife and muse of three major cultural figures in fin de siècle Vienna: the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, and the novelist and poet Franz Werfel. But Haste’s biography reveals a woman with artistic ambitions of her own, sidelined in no small part because of the social expectations of the time. To be perfectly honest, though, I read this book for the gossip, of which there is plenty. Haste has a knack for capturing Alma’s world in all its art house fervor. Alma’s first kiss is with Klimt (she refuses his sexual advances by quoting Goethe’s Faust). During the birth of their second child, a panicking Gutav tries to soothe Alma’s pains by reading Kant aloud to her (it doesn’t work, unsurprisingly). Gropius and Alma exchange extremely explicit letters concerning their sexual fantasies (including possibly the most florid description of a blowjob I’ve ever read). We haven’t even reached the second half of the book, which includes Alma’s intense, sadomasochistic affair with the Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka (culminating in Kokoschka creating a lifelike doll of Alma and dragging it around Vienna before beheading it) as well as her dalliance with and subsequent marriage to Werfel, whom she helps escape Austria by foot in a perilous journey on the eve of World War II. Alma herself comes across as wildly unpleasant—she’s a monarchist and Hapsburg supporter who’s constantly getting into fights with Werfel, a committed communist; she makes frequent anti-Semitic remarks despite two of her husbands and most of her closest friends being Jewish; she constantly criticizes her daughter for marrying for love (five times) instead of marrying geniuses. But Haste portrays Alma Mahler in all her whirring and feverish complexity, and the result is as engrossing as it is jaw-dropping. Read it and you, too, can know entirely too much about the sex lives of almost every major artist, composer, and writer in early-twentieth-century Vienna. —Rhian Sasseen Read More