May 24, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Satire, Suzi Wu, and Starling Days By The Paris Review Ma Jian. Photo: Flora Drew. © Flora Drew. Ma Jian’s China Dream, translated by Flora Drew and published earlier this month by Counterpoint Press, is a short, sharp-toothed satire of Xi Jinping’s China. The novel depicts a corrupt bureaucrat’s attempts to implement a new government initiative to overwrite people’s dreams. Ma, a dissident writer who lives in exile in London, portrays a contemporary China in which consumerism goes hand in hand with totalitarianism, and memories of the Cultural Revolution surface at the most inopportune events. China Dream is funny in a kind of hopeless way—the title itself comes from a slogan popularized by the Chinese government in 2013, and a Red Guard–themed orgy scene halfway through reads like a nightmare—and it raises questions about political violence and the suppression of memory that stay with you long after the book has ended. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
May 17, 2019 This Week’s Reading What Our Contributors Are Reading This Spring By The Paris Review Paul Beatty. Photo: Hannah Assouline. No American novelist riffs like Paul Beatty. His superlative novel Slumberland established his comic mastery years before he won the Man Booker Prize in 2016. Set in Berlin just before (and after) the fall of the Wall, Slumberland is the picaresque tale of Ferguson W. Sowell, a.k.a. DJ Darky, a Los Angeles native on a quest to find the Schwa, a mysterious East Berlin Schallplattenunterhalter who can “ratify” our narrator’s perfect beat. True to the genre of expatriate lit, DJ Darky leverages the wisdom afforded an outsider’s perspective, as Germany’s multikulti breeziness becomes a lens on race relations in the U.S., and on othering more generally. The novel exploits the tragicomic potential of the reversals, slurs, and embarrassments that might befall a black man in Berlin—a “jukebox sommelier” with a penchant for tanning booths, our narrator eventually endeavors to rebuild the Wall—but the boldest joke might be subtly, cheekily metafictional: forget dancing about architecture, Beatty’s written a syncopated novel about sound. I picked up Slumberland after finishing the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s book-length essay The Agony of Eros. Though very different in tone, together the two make a kind of contrapuntal harmony. Like Slumberland, The Agony of Eros is rife with asides on Heidegger and porn. But where DJ Darky eventually aims to make otherness “passé,” Eros takes the opposite tack. Han is concerned with preserving the idea of the Other as a check on contemporary narcissism, according to which “everything is flattened out into an object of consumption.” In other words, by acknowledging the sovereignty of another person as other, not mine—by resisting the temptation to translate difference into familiar, “consumable” terms—we delineate a limit on the Self. It’s as earnest and compelling a diagnosis for social malaise, romantic or otherwise, as any I’ve come across. But as we search for a cure, I’m reminded of another impulse behind Slumberland: often it’s in the face of despair that we reach for the joke. —J. Jezewska Stevens Read More
May 10, 2019 This Week’s Reading Books Only a Mother Could Love By The Paris Review Ali Smith. Photo: Christian Sinibaldi. © Christian Sinibaldi. Dear Mum, I know it’s not Mother’s Day in Scotland, but it is here in America. The Queen has two birthdays—maybe you can have two Mother’s Days? Anyway, I’m only halfway through Ali Smith’s Artful, but it’s already sad and clever and beautiful. The book is composed of four lectures on literature, tangled up with a narrative of mourning, and is gently self-aware in a way that isn’t annoying. You’d like it, I think. I’ve just ordered another copy online and had it posted to you. I’m sorry it won’t arrive in time for Sunday (I didn’t have much forewarning regarding this extra Mother’s Day). What else from New York? I just read Emmanuel Carrère’s My Life as a Russian Novel, and it was a splendid, if somewhat traumatic, experience. Carrère lays bare his faults in such a way as to make one feel very aware of one’s own. It, too, is sad and clever and beautiful, but I can’t recommend it to you, owing to it being occasionally pornographic. If you want to read it, you’ll have to find it for yourself; I can’t be involved. Anyway, Happy Mother’s Day! Again. —Robin Jones Read More
May 3, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Color, Crags, and Croatia By The Paris Review Daša Drndić. Photo: Mavric Pivk. Daša Drndić’s EEG is a sequel of sorts to her novel Belladonna, also translated by Celia Hawkesworth and also published by New Directions. Like Belladonna, EEG is narrated by the retired psychologist and academic Andreas Ban, and its plot consists mainly of Ban sifting through documents, photographs, ephemera, and memories related to Croatian complicity with Nazism and the Yugoslav ethnic conflicts of the nineties. A traditional plot, though, isn’t necessarily what’s important to this story; truth is. “Autobiographical books don’t exist,” Ban observes near the novel’s beginning, “autobiographies don’t exist, there are multigraphies, biographical mixes, biographical cocktails, the whole melange of a life through which we dig, which we clear out, from which we select fragments, remnants, little pieces that we stuff into our pockets, little mouthfuls that we swallow as though they were our own.” “Little pieces” make up much of the book, as seen in one section concerned entirely with listing chess players who committed suicide or who collaborated with totalitarian regimes. EEG frequently stretches the definition of the novel to devastating effect, akin to Thomas Bernhard or Elfriede Jelinek, two writers Drndić has cited as influences. “Art should shock, hurt, offend, intrigue,” she told Dustin Illingworth in a 2017 interview featured on The Paris Review Daily, “be a merciless critic of the merciless times we are not only witnessing but whose victims we have become.” Sadly, Drndić passed away last June at the age of seventy-two, but her books—concerned as they are with the crimes of the twentieth century—offer a blueprint as to what the novel in the twenty-first century could look like. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
April 26, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Chili’s, Chapbooks, and Childcare By The Paris Review Mary Miller. I’m inclined to call Mary Miller’s new novel, Biloxi, a lonely book. The narrator, sixty-three-year-old Louis McDonald Jr., is perhaps how one might cynically imagine the average late-middle-age man. He’s recently divorced, distant from his daughter, anticipating an inheritance from his father’s death, and living a quiet, burger-and-beer-fueled existence in front of TV marathons of Naked and Afraid. On a detour to avoid his ex-wife, he impulsively adopts a dog named Layla, and his solitude becomes a strange, blundering parenthood. Louis oscillates between embitterment and naivete, cloaking his anxieties in a devotion to Layla that verges on delusion. But even as he falls prey to shortsighted impulses—which include neglecting his medications, burning through his bank account, and impersonating a Baptist missionary to meet a woman—Louis retains a genuine desire for connection, despite his insistence otherwise. The narrative remains intimate throughout, swinging between neuroses and hilarity to create an empathetic depiction of masculinity. Biloxi is everything I want in a story: a man with an affinity for leftover Chili’s, an antisocial dog with digestive challenges, and a bunch of truly dislikable people I love regardless. —Nikki Shaner-Bradford Read More
April 19, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sapphics, Scandals, and Skies By The Paris Review Richardson Bay as seen from Ring Mountain, Tiburon, California. Photo: Frank Schulenburg (CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)). In the May issue of Harper’s, Joe Kloc tells a story about a community of people called anchor-outs, who live “on abandoned and unseaworthy vessels” in California’s Richardson Bay, “doing their best, with little or no money, to survive.” The story is compelling, the prose unfussy and clear—and the photographs, by Therese Jahnson, are the perfect complement—but there is more going on here. The real miracle is how the article resists, gracefully yet firmly, the temptations of this kind of reporting, the very real traps it could have fallen into. It would be easy for an outsider to impose a straitjacket of meaning on this community, as writers have done for generations, or to see himself as a savior patronizing them with the boon of his voice, as more than one writer has seen himself; Kloc does neither. Gently, he suggests another way of looking at our world, maybe scarier but more honest, and another way of looking at those with whom we share it. —Hasan Altaf Read More