January 19, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Vengeance, Evil, and Grace By The Paris Review Still from Phantom Thread. As often happens when watching a perfect movie, by the time the first shot bloomed across the screen, I nearly forgot I had a body. I would have forgotten entirely except that Phantom Thread made my heart pound and my palms sweat. Friends, this is not a thriller, though it was thrilling. Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, and allegedly Daniel Day-Lewis’s last, is about a couturier in postwar London. It is about devotion, though depending on who you ask it is either about a man’s devotion to his work or a women’s devotion to a man. Either way, the film itself was made with obvious devotion. The clothing is arresting. What color is that bowtie except, perhaps, Proustian? The interior shots each want to be a still. Each time Day-Lewis’s character drives through the English countryside, his perfect sports car enrobes him like his gowns enrobe his clients. Weather, branches, or crowds be damned, he is a perfect pilot in a perfect vehicle. Both the movie and the characters run the risk of failing to live up to the exacting standards they set. But to my intense satisfaction, Phantom Thread is the picture of success. There is a twist, a fetish introduced so deliciously that it makes the trailer for the final Fifty Shades movie look like it belongs in Barbie’s beach house. If this is Day-Lewis’s last movie, what a way to go. —Julia Berick Eka Kurniawan I recently read Eka Kurniawan’s novel Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash as if either the book or I were outfitted with afterburners. Vengeance is a comic picaresque that the publisher has likened to a Quentin Tarantino film; Kurniawan’s prose, translated from the Indonesian by Annie Tucker, is pungent and blunt, but there’s more talk of fighting than actual fights, and a scene in which a pair of 18-wheelers battle for dominance at high speeds on a two-lane road could not have been reproduced in film to such great effect. The novel’s protagonist is Ajo Kawir, who suffers a youthful erotic mishap that leaves him impotent (he treats his “bird” as a kind of Yorick, delivering monologues to it and wondering whither its gambols). He fights to relieve his frustrations and meets the tough-as-nails Iteung, who kicks his ass and wins his heart. The course of true love doesn’t run smooth, as we know, and Ajo Kawir abandons his old life for one spent making long-distance hauls. There are disappointing moments later in the novel—Kurniawan’s handling of gay and female sexuality is rather awful at times—but the physicality of his prose and his story is invigorating.—Nicole Rudick Read More
January 12, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Obama, Netflix, and Escorts By The Paris Review I never expected to like Netflix’s The End of the F***ing World, but it needed only a few minutes of my attention to have me laughing out loud. Though the description might be off-putting—“Bored with killing animals, seventeen-year-old James is busy plotting his first real murder when brash new girl Alyssa catches him off guard at school”—the show is witty and barefaced in the way that a Wes Anderson film could be if Anderson’s films weren’t so masculine. Alyssa and James have a push-pull relationship that left me refreshed at the end of the show’s eight twenty-minute episodes, wondering where the two and a half hours had gone. —Eleanor Pritchett If you live in the New York City area or are visiting soon, please carve ten minutes out of your day for The New York Earth Room and then, if you have ten more minutes, The Broken Kilometer. These are two strange little rooms, both created by the artist Walter De Maria, both maintained by Dia, both completely free to enter. I won’t (oh god, a pun, why not) soil the surprise of either piece, but I will say that when I visited these two exhibits in quick succession last Sunday, I saw the city open up—almost unfold before my eyes—in ways that it hadn’t for me ever before. What other rooms could be lurking among the tapas restaurants and purveyors of high-end socks? I wondered. What other mysteries does the city hold? —Brian Ransom Read More
January 5, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Dorothy, Oz, and Arkansas By The Paris Review Anna Kavan If a “beach read” is light and easy reading for the warm summer months, then Anna Kavan’s Ice is its cold-season equivalent, a book to complement the contemplative stillness of winter weather. Ice was recommended to me by a colleague, and I picked up Penguin Classics’ fiftieth anniversary edition (it was originally published in 1967). Like the fine intricacy of frost on a window, Kavan’s novel is hypnotically and delicately complex. The plot itself is deceptively simple: a nameless narrator seeks to rescue the object of his affection, the also nameless “glass girl,” from her abusive captor, referred to as “the warden.” The quest traverses a frozen apocalyptic landscape, and the structure of the hero’s journey is subverted by strange, hallucinatory scenes and shifts in narrative perspective. The hero’s antagonists are the totalitarian regimes and unrelenting frigid cold of his environment, but also the obsessive visions occurring in his mind. The introduction and afterword of this edition offer insight into the character of Kavan herself, and how the political and social allegories of the novel are layered with allegories for Kavan’s personal struggle with trauma and addiction. Even half a century later, the concerns of the Ice find serious foothold in the preoccupations of today, and, much like the substance for which it is named, brilliant and blinding moments are refracted through clear, sharp prose. —Lauren Kane Read More
December 15, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sohyang, Sacred Deer, and Steamers By The Paris Review Rowan Ricardo Phillips. Photo by Sue Kwon. Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s poem “The Peacock,” in The Paris Review’s Winter issue, begins with the line, “Music for when the music is over.” It’s how he defines a poem and it’s a phrase that appears as the title of a piece in his 2012 collection, The Ground. Musical is exactly what the poems in this collection are. The language flows and skips within and between lines, pausing on occasion to cycle through refrains, so gracefully that you are nearly stunned when you remind yourself that the words are unaided by instruments. They are in many ways mythic, making characters of Orpheus, Eurydice, and Dante, as well as the poet himself. But don’t be put off by the nominal associations with the realm of the dead; these poems are very much alive with sensuality and they exist in Phillips’s physical world, which includes Harlem, the West Indies, and Barcelona. This collection is charged with urgency, which is signaled at the start, in the final lines of the first poem: “Tonight I touched the tattooed skin of the building I was born in / And because tonight is curing the beginning let me through. / And everywhere was blurring halogen. Love the place that / welcomed you.” —Lauren Kane My girlfriend likes to poke fun at my family for resembling the cast of a wholesome sitcom. She claims that our fluffy dogs and our deep love for one another make us seem like we just marched off the set of 7th Heaven or some other toothless WB trash. Her points are valid. Our adoption of the Icelandic tradition Jolabokaflod (roughly translated: Christmas book flood) lends significant weight to her argument. As I understand it, Jolabokaflod is a tradition borne out of a paper ration in Iceland during World War II that involves exchanging books as gifts on Christmas Eve and then immediately sitting down to read said books. My family did this for the first time last year, when I received Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, but I screwed up and didn’t start the book on the twenty-fourth. I still haven’t. This year will be different. What better way to spend the evening before the holiday chaos, before the shuffle of extended family and the flurry of wrapping-paper scraps, than to nestle in with a new book? “’Twas the night before Christmas / when all through the house / every Ransom was reading / curled up on a couch.” —Brian Ransom Read More
December 8, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Interwar, War, and Postwar By The Paris Review Tracy K Smith “Our bodies run with ink dark blood. / Blood pools in the pavement’s seams. Is it strange to say love is a language / Few practice, but all, or near all speak?” So begins Tracy K. Smith’s poem “Unrest in Baton Rouge,” from the forthcoming collection, Wade in the Water. Like many of the poems in this slim yet searing book, “Unrest” is at once a haunting testimonial of the foulness on which the country was built and an homage to the love—however scant it may at times feel—that’s persevered despite it all. From start to finish, the collection traverses American history, comprising imagined letters between slaveholders, between black men or women and “Mr abarham lincon” or “My Children” or “Excellent Sir”; erasures, using the Declaration of Independence as source material; and poems about “our magnificent roads, / Our bridges slung with steel, / Our vivid glass, our tantalizing lights … ” But Smith writes, too, of more personal moments—the wonders of motherhood, the terrors of womanhood—so that by the collection’s end, we’ve listened to a choir of voices from generations past and present who have shown us the beautiful alongside the monstrous. In the poem “New Road Station,” Smith writes that “history is not a woman,” but in Wade in the Water, she most certainly is. —Caitlin Youngquist I have carried Joy Williams’s The Visiting Privilege around with me for the past year and a half as though it were my bible. For all intents and purposes, it is: Williams is a powerhouse of a writer, one who could level an entire city with a single sentence, and I feel a devotion to her work that borders on dogmatism. Yet as with most spiritual matters, the exact cause of this fierce allegiance eludes me. After sixteen months with Joy, I don’t think I’m any closer to articulating, or even understanding, why I love her stories so much. What I can say is this: in each of the tales collected in the career-spanning Visiting Privilege, there is a sense that something is shifting just behind the veil. The machinations of daily life take on an Old Testament weight. Things mean what they mean until, suddenly, they don’t. The protagonists are alien to everyone they encounter, alien even to the reader, and their fundamental unknowability captures the desperate isolation of our modern era. I started reading The Visiting Privilege in August last year. Over the months, I’ve bounced my way through story after wonderful story, scratching my head, drinking in the sentences, trying to hold on to each word just a little longer than usual. And now, here I am, interning at The Paris Review, who just announced this week that Williams will receive the 2018 Hadada Award for lifetime achievement. This whole chain of events has a whiff of the beyond for me. Surely, this means something, I say, and then I turn the page, knowing it either does or does not, and making peace with this lack of understanding all the same. —Brian Ransom Read More
December 1, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Nerds, Necromancers, and New Wave Poetry By The Paris Review From the cover of American Nerd. In American Nerd: The Story of My People, Benjamin Nugent weaves a web of surprising cultural connections—from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to nativism, to the use and abuse of Morse code—to explain the advent of the nerd in the late twentieth century. As the subtitle suggests, Nugent also reports firsthand on the connections that hold nerds together: “It was no coincidence, I think, that we generally came to D&D from home lives that tended toward the unpredictable and confounding … In the fantasies we made together, you weren’t always king, but you could always point to him.” Ten years after it was first published, American Nerd remains absorbing, touching, entertaining and, to this reader, enlightening even at its most offhand (e.g., “A pretty good definition of sci-fi … is fiction that focuses exclusively on monumental events: plagues, comets, interspecies wars, the return of the dinosaurs.”) Highly recommended for fans of Stranger Things. —Lorin Stein Ah, yes. It’s that time of year once again. Say it with me now: it’s black-metal season. When the sky is gray and the cold claws at my flesh, I bundle myself in layers of distortion. Ash Borer’s self-titled album, which thunders and howls, is my go-to November music. Nothing better reflects this miserable, wonderful weather. —Brian Ransom Read More