June 28, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Lustig, Kiwis, and Carousels By The Paris Review “In the United States, the country with the world’s highest prison population rate (followed closely by Russia), prisoners work for between 93 cents and $5 a day, if they’re paid at all … But the Gulag is an image firmly imprinted on our American brains. It’s easy to imagine—exciting, even, especially since it’s so far away.” A short history of the show trial, with unforgettable digressions, by Daily regular Sophie Pinkham. —Lorin Stein In 1989, historian Arlette Farge published Le goût de l’archive, her account of immersing herself in the ancient records of the archives of the Bastille. While a virtual love letter to historiography may sound less than riveting, this is an engaging and strangely moving evocation of the pleasures of scholarship. Now out in a new translation (The Allure of the Archives) from Yale University Press. —Sadie O. Stein Initially, David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down seems like the perfect summer read: light in conflict, filled with the typical summer escapades that teenagers get into when there’s nothing better to do but get in trouble. However, Ballantyne’s an expert poker player, and a prime example of New Zealand literature (“slaughterhouse fiction”), in which the pastoral paradise initially imagined by Britain as a South Pacific Eden instead morphed from an economy of industrialized violence into casual societal violence. (See the recent Jane Campion miniseries Top of the Lake, for example.) No one leaves this novel unscathed, characters or reader. You’ve been warned. —Justin Alvarez A few nights ago I watched Max Ophüls’s La Ronde. At the beginning of the movie and between each vignette in it, the omnipresent narrator delivers a little sing-song bit about the inevitable turn, turn, turn of romantic affairs while cranking a carousel round and round. And what a magnificent carousel it is—by far my favorite part of the movie. A turn-of-the-century model (La Ronde was filmed in France 1950 but set in fin-de-siècle Vienna), it has a wooden horse or two, but also a bicycle, a step-stool, a swing, an armchair. Oil lamps hang from the interior of its scalloped canopy. When looking for information about the provenance of this particular carousel, I came across images of two astounding modern carousels at the annual Christmas market in Brussels. This article gives the story behind them. —Clare Fentress New Directions has put out the most beautiful set of postcards, featuring the book cover that the legendary Alvin Lustig designed between 1941 and 1953. Almost too pretty to use. —S.O.S.
June 21, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Quaker Meeting, Blue Trout, and the Call of the Wild By Sadie Stein Quaker Meeting in London, c.1723. Why aren’t there more novels about Quaker worship? It’s inherently dramatic, people sitting in silence and waiting for God to speak through them. Dramatic—and really, really funny. For proof look no further than Nicholson Baker’s forthcoming novel, Traveling Sprinkler. The hero, Paul Chowder, spends a lot of time attending Quaker meetings (i.e., church). Most of the rest of the novel he spends trying to teach himself the guitar, write (incredibly dorky) songs, and win back the girlfriend who left him in Baker’s earlier novel The Anthologist. There are lots of reasons to love Traveling Sprinkler: Baker gets sweeter with each new book, and underneath the sweetness lie witty arguments about poetry and song and taste. Among other things, this is the best novel I’ve read about Spotify. It also vividly captures Quaker beliefs and practices at a moment when, as Paul Elie wrote last year in the New York Times, many novelists have trouble writing about religion. —Lorin Stein “Beautiful and brilliant, possessed of an eye protected against sentiment coupled with a steel-trap mind and a tongue feared by all who had been at the receiving end of its talented sarcasm, a sarcasm that for some would always be wickedly amusing, for others just wicked.” So says essayist (and issue 204 contributor) Vivian Gornick of critic and writer Mary McCarthy on The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog. In a piece drawn from her introduction to a new edition of McCarthy’s 1949 novel, The Oasis, Gornick highlights the book’s biting satire but, more importantly, McCarthy’s fearlessness in barely disguising her characters from their real-life counterparts (mostly her Partisan Review colleagues). As McCarthy stated in her Art of Fiction interview, “What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.” —Justin Alvarez Read More
June 14, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Piano Rats, Black Flag, Bolaño By The Paris Review “Pretty Much Every Single Black Flag Poster Designed by Raymond Pettibon” pretty much says it all. This gallery of eighty-two posters, in the collection of Kill Your Idols publisher Bryan Ray Turcotte since 1982, has been keeping me occupied the past few days. I’ve been trying to pick a favorite, but it’s tough. I still remember seeing the Black Flag logo for the first time: it was unmistakable and striking and strangely compelling. It still is. —Nicole Rudick In the search for Roberto Bolaño’s Woes of the True Policeman, I ran across the New Directions edition of his 1980 novel Antwerp tucked between his better-known works. It’s an amalgamation of short, experimental descriptions of conversations and neo-philosophical interpretations of love and life, written when the author was twenty-seven. I haven’t come across something so simultaneously challenging and lucid in a long time. —Ellen Duffer I was in Chicago this past weekend for Printers Row Lit Festival, where the Review shared the Small Press Tent with a handful of old friends (A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Bookforum) and new friends (featherproof books, MAKE magazine, Midwestern Gothic). Over the course of the festival, I picked up Franki Elliot’s chapbook Piano Rats from Chicago publisher Curbside Splendor and spent a plane ride with Elliot’s brief, deeply personal free verse “stories,” which detail her varied interactions with both strangers and current/past lovers. the only sound was our breathingwhen you cleared your throat and said,neither loud nor quiet “I wish there was a God.”I didn’t have to say anything At times mundane, awkward, offensive, and, ultimately, heartbreaking, it takes a while to warm up, but, by the end, leaves a lasting impression. I didn’t sleep a wink on the plane. —Justin Alvarez I was one of the many fans devastated this week when Scottish indie band the Pastels canceled their U.S. shows (the first since 1997!) due to work-visa issues. At least we can derive some solace from listening to their gorgeous new release, Slow Summits, which is as tender, wistful, and thoughtful as all their albums. (And start saving up for tickets to Glasgow.) —Sadie Stein
June 7, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: George Packer, Joe Carstairs, Nick Laird By The Paris Review In a virtuosic long poem from his recent collection, Go Giants, Nick Laird inveighs against “the monotony of always being on a side!” Laird was born in Northern Ireland, but the complaint isn’t aimed only at sectarianism. His poetry, which shuttles between New York, Rome, and Cookstown, in County Tyrone, consistently escapes monotony and one-sidedness (including, in this case, a cricketeer’s pun on the word side). His book includes versions of Juvenal, Antoine Ó Raifteirí—a wandering bard and one of the “giants” of Laird’s title—and Anglo-Saxon poetry. You can also hear the nimble diction of Muldoon (“an atmosphere / flecked like emery paper, the finest grade, / that whets the seriffed aerials and steeples”) and the more ponderous music of Heaney (a summer job at a meatplant is spent “lugging plastic / crates of feathercut and paddywhack / and prime off the belt and onto palettes”). “Progress,” a long poem that rewrites Bunyun’s allegory, is a gathering of all these voices and ends up sounding like no one except Laird: “A fine baroque example / of how successfully the choral template / might adjust itself to fit an elliptic / non-contiguous life.” —Robyn Creswell I recently visited my parents to help them sort through a lifetime of acquisitions in anticipation of a mammoth yard sale. Looking through boxes of my old books, I came across a favorite, The Queen of Whale Cay, and promptly reread it. Kate Summerscale’s biography is a vivid picture of Marion Barbara “Joe” Carstairs, a flamboyant figure of the Lost Generation. A boat racer, womanizer, dandy, and, yes, queen of her own island, Carstairs (an oil heiress) was also known for traveling everywhere with a doll, Lord Tod Wadley, who sported an equally dapper wardrobe. Summerscale was working on the Telegraph’s obit desk when she ran across the story of this forgotten figure; I’m so glad she did, and that I rediscovered my copy. (The office also acquired, from this foray, a brass whale, a crystal ball, and a harpoon.) —Sadie O. Stein Read More
May 31, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Illuminations and Despair By The Paris Review “Illuminating Faith: The Eucharist in Medieval Life and Art” opened at the Morgan Library earlier this month. The exhibition packs an astounding range of illuminated manuscripts, each depicting an aspect of the relationship between the body of Christ and medieval culture, into a single room. Though there are a few archetypal works on display, with their colorfully wrought letters, floral detailing, and flattened and disproportional bodies, many of the manuscripts are particularly particular. A German work depicts King David feeding the hungry; he holds a large skewer of meat in one hand and oversized pretzels in the other. Another is a parody of the Mass; I didn’t write down the provenance of the volume, but I did record some of the descriptive text provided by the curator, which narrates the drawings on the pages to which the book is opened: “A fox, dressed in a chasuble, ‘celebrates’ Mass—not on an altar but on the naked buttocks of a man standing on his head. With folded paws, the fox priest bows—not to a chalice but a tankard of ale.” Cheers. —Clare Fentress “Dear Lorin,” the note read, “I saw this book and thought you might like it, even though it is full of despair.” The book in question is Jean-Pierre Martinet’s 1979 mini-novella The High Life, newly translated by Henry Vale. The narrator, Adolphe Marlaud, is a midget who lives next to the Montparnasse cemetery. He works in a funerary shop, where he passes the time making advances (unwanted) toward the grieving female customers; evenings he spends in the arms of his concierge, an older (and much bigger) woman whom he calls Madame C. Then one night Madame C suggests that they see a pornographic movie, and the drama begins—except, as Marlaud observes, “There’s no drama with us, messieurs, nor tragedy: there is only burlesque and obscenity.” Many thanks to Matt Bucher, administrator of the David Foster Wallace listserv wallace-l, for turning me on to The High Life (even though it is full of despair). —Lorin Stein Read More
May 24, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Boar Hearts, Panic, and Shirley Jackson By The Paris Review Laurel Nakadate, Kalispell, Montana #1, 2013. I stayed up much too late finishing Shirley Jackson’s newly reissued Hangsaman—and then was so spooked it took me another two hours and a warm milk to finally fall asleep. The novel, loosely based on the unsolved 1947 disappearance of Bennington College student Paula Jean Welden, is as scary as The Haunting of Hill House, as chilling as “The Lottery,” and as weird as We Have Always Lived in the Castle. (And that’s saying something!) Perfect reading for a gloomy weekend, if not a work night. —Sadie Stein “Head shot for boar! Open him up! There’s no taste like live boar-heart while it’s still beating in your hand!” Thus Hermann Göring in The Hunters of Karinhall, a movie script by Terry Southern. The script was never produced, oddly enough—but it is newly excerpted in Hot Heart of Boar & Other Tastes, a little chapbook of Southern snippets and outtakes and put-ons that had me laughing before my second cup of coffee. —Lorin Stein Read More