January 24, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Dolls, Dakar, and Doomsday Preppers By The Paris Review Francis Bacon’s studio at the Hugh Lane, Dublin, Ireland. Photo: antomoro (FAL or FAL). At this magazine, we like to think we know a thing or two about interviewing. But to read Interviews with Francis Bacon, the art critic David Sylvester’s book-length dialogue with the painter, is to find a proudly messy rejoinder to our own tidy conversations. Sylvester chronologically presents nine sessions with Bacon over two decades, condensed for length but never edited for clarity or precision. Over the years, in a kind of psychological time-lapse video, the two return to the same topics again and again, and Bacon’s philosophies mutate and crystallize. His interest in the narrative quality of triptych painting evolves to include plans to construct sculptures that can be adjusted and moved. His hedonistic lifestyle becomes a way of thinking about his all-consuming attitude about his work. His desire for realism gives way to a resignation to the artifice of creation. The result is a portrait in dialogue, as warped and fascinating as Bacon’s own depictions of twisted faces and writhing bodies. —Lauren Kane Read More
January 17, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Diamonds, Dionysus, and Drowning By The Paris Review Silvina Ocampo. Photo: Adolfo Bioy Casares. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I love a good hundred-page novel. Too many books go for quantity over quality, choosing to bloat their page counts with unnecessary plot twists—and don’t even get me started on that silly term novella. Not so for Silvina Ocampo’s The Promise, recently translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell. Ocampo—an aristocratic Argentine who was friendly with Borges and whose elder sister Victoria was the founder of the prestigious literary journal Sur—purportedly took twenty-five years to finish The Promise, and every sentence glints with precision. The plot is minimal at best: While traveling from Buenos Aires to Cape Town to visit family, the narrator falls ill. On the way back to Argentina, she falls off the side of the ship and spends the rest of the book swimming—and presumably, eventually drowning—as she recalls various persons and experiences from her life back home. A few characters reoccur: Leandro, an untrustworthy doctor; Irene, his lover; and Gabriela, also known as Gabriel, Irene’s daughter. Entire paragraphs repeat themselves with small variations, and water seeps in again and again. The confusion is part of the appeal—what you’re after are the sentences, which have the feel of epigrams: “I envy people who cry; they show off their tears like necklaces,” goes one. “Women love with their eyes closed, men with their eyes open,” goes another. I think I took a photo of nearly every other page so as not to forget them. The twenty-five years of work were worth it. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
January 10, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sex, Stand-Up, and South Korea By The Paris Review Ha Seong-nan. There’s something pleasingly matter-of-fact to the many off-kilter moments found in Ha Seong-nan’s short story collection Flowers of Mold (translated from the Korean by Janet Hong). When problems arise for her characters—a potential intruder in a woman’s farmhouse bedroom, a woman’s loss of memory following the arrival of a new neighbor, a group of tenants faced with eviction by a spoiled and wealthy landlord—their approaches to solving them are no-nonsense, even as the stories themselves border the surreal logic of dreams. The tenants hatch a plan to kill their landlord; the woman’s memory loss betrays her own place within her family; the intruder may exist and may be buried in the orchard. Ha lends a critical eye to capitalism, advertising, and gender in contemporary South Korea, and in each story, she combines the ordinary with the extraordinary to truly disquieting effect. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
December 13, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bas, Beauvoir, and Britain By The Paris Review Damon Daunno as Curly and Mary Testa as Aunt Eller in Oklahoma! © Little Fang. My junior year of high school, I was not asked to the prom. Bear in mind that my high school had 4,500 students and that although 2,250 of them were eligible to attend this dance, not a single person deigned to be my date. I went, instead, to see Oklahoma! A lovely time, to be sure, but boring as all get-out. While my peers enjoyed a disastrous evening of sex, drugs, and revelry, I watched that bland production from a blurry distance. At Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! last weekend, I found these two evenings had merged into a marvelous party, to which I had finally, belatedly been invited. Twitter chatter informed me this was “Sexy Oklahoma!,” and while it certainly is sexy, it’s also so delightful I beamed through much of the first act. It’s funny and warm. The house lights are almost always up, and they serve chili during intermission. First, we are primed with tenderness; then, tragedy unfolds, and its arrival is shocking, cold, and truthful. I loved it, and I’m pretty darn sure it loved me back—if only for one night. —Noor Qasim Read More
December 6, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Battle Hymns, Boarding Schools, and Bach By The Paris Review Sarah M. Broom. Photo: Adam Shemper. Over the holiday weekend, I devoured The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom’s remarkable and deeply researched memoir about her family’s New Orleans home. The youngest of twelve siblings, Broom grew up in a lively—and at times chaotic—shotgun-style house in the neighborhood of New Orleans East. Bringing together oral history, archival research, and first-person narrative, Broom weaves a multigenerational story of place that celebrates and complicates one of our nation’s most mythologized cities. “The Yellow House was witness to our lives,” writes Broom. And indeed, the house itself is essentially the protagonist of the story, a living organism animated by the decades of life that course through it like a pulse. Broom is an uncommonly thoughtful archaeologist of her own past, uncovering fragments of near-forgotten stories, dusting them off, and delicately piecing them back together. What emerges is an astonishing and kinetic portrait of the way places shape, and are shaped by, the people who love them. —Cornelia Channing Read More
November 22, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Royals, Rothkos, and Realizations By The Paris Review Lawrence Ferlinghetti at Caffe Trieste, 2012. Photo: Christopher Michel (CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)). Via Wikimedia Commons. I have always loved November. I don’t know if that’s because I was born in it or because it’s when fall becomes the cruelest version of itself. The air bites; the final leaves fall to the ground. Either way, the month is tailor-made for nostalgia. At times like these, I often turn to the first poet I ever loved, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In high school, I memorized “The Pennycandystore beyond the El” and recited it to myself daily as a strange sort of mantra. At the time, I thought myself the girl in the poem, a heaving form full of tragedy and potential. But now, I see I am the cat, strolling among the sweets, unhurried and unbothered. I don’t know if I’ll ever be the man. Or maybe that’s all I’ve ever been, sitting in the “semigloom,” “in love with unreality.” —Noor Qasim Read More