{"id":100442,"date":"2016-07-15T15:30:32","date_gmt":"2016-07-15T19:30:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=100442"},"modified":"2016-07-15T17:40:10","modified_gmt":"2016-07-15T21:40:10","slug":"staff-picks-pink-shells-invisible-animals-unreliably-unreliable-narrators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/15\/staff-picks-pink-shells-invisible-animals-unreliably-unreliable-narrators\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Pink Shells, Invisible Animals, Unreliably Unreliable Narrators"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

An illustration of Moll Flanders from an eighteenth-century chapbook.<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019m glad I never read Moll Flanders<\/a><\/em> in college. Because it was published in 1722 and has the structure of a picaresque, I would have dismissed it as primitive. I\u2019d have thought Daniel Defoe didn\u2019t know how to write an actual novel. Now Moll Flanders<\/em> strikes me as the kind of artwork big enough to invent a way of writing fiction\u2014in the voice of a woman, with all the freedom, moral ambiguity, and sexual complexity of a man. Moll is what James Wood would call an \u201cunreliably unreliable\u201d narrator. Sometimes we get to smile at the gap between her Christian principles and her career as a thief, but just as often there will be a scene\u2014as for example, when she\u2019s a little girl telling her foster mother that she\u2019s afraid of going into service\u2014that have the ring of documentary truth. (Defoe often adapted interviews and eyewitness accounts in his fiction: that ambiguity is at the heart of his novels.) Moll Flanders<\/em> may have impressed me especially because I\u2019d just read Play It As It Lays<\/em>, in many ways a\u00a0descendent of Moll, but whose charm now lies mainly in its period details\u2014the cigarettes, phone booths, and unair-conditioned nights. \u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

I only started reading Music and Literature<\/em>\u2019s newest issue<\/a> on the train this morning, but I\u2019ve already fallen quite ardently for one of their featured writers, Ann Quin. This has happened once before with M&L<\/em>, who brought me the Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik<\/a> in their last issue. At quick glance, the two women aren\u2019t all that dissimilar: both are rather unknown, both were tormented by suicidal inclinations. (Quin took her life just a year after Pizarnik took hers, and at nearly the same age.) Of the two short pieces of fiction in M&L<\/em> by Quin, my favorite is the second, \u201cEyes that Watch Behind the Wind\u201d\u2014an arresting story of lovers in Cuetzalan, Mexico, who sway back and forth in their adoration and disgust for each other. Nearly each one of Quin\u2019s sentences oscillates with sex and with rage, no matter how innocent some of them appear: she writes of the pink shells that hang on the necklace that drapes over one of the woman\u2019s breasts and of burying the man in sand; of the eight bulls hemorrhaging from the mouth after\u00a0banderillos<\/em>\u00a0strike them and how the woman \u201cfelt almost an urge to \u2026 Be ravished. Even Raped.\u201d Quin\u2019s prose never falters; it\u2019s stunning, almost especially when it\u2019s brutal. \u2014Caitlin Youngquist
<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"StayingAlive\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Laura Sims\u2019s poems in Staying Alive<\/a><\/em>, her fourth collection,\u00a0are part creation myth, part apocalyptic remnant, part post-civilization idyll\u2014not that these are mutually exclusive categories, which is why lines like \u201cThe trees. \/ The sound. \/ The water. \/\/ The rider. \/ Wild \/\/ Animals. The trace. The wheels. The fire. Space. The bowl\u201d are so intoxicating. Quoting Sims here doesn\u2019t do her poems justice: her lines are measured and airy on the page, quietly intense, and the poems are shapeless, each an open-ended fragment of at most thirty words or so. They oscillate between wistfulness (\u201cThe wind made a sound, small and lost in such space \/ Here grew the tall trees \/ Here hung the large stars. In the groves they lay down, the invisible animals.\u201d) and horrifying strangeness (\u201cWhat stood in our yard were like demons \/ outside of time. One had a rock in its mouth, \/ another a tree branch.\u201d). I\u2019m almost afraid of reading too much at a time, afraid that climbing out will be far harder than falling in.\u00a0\u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

Be vigilant, friend, for we live in the age of the BuzzFeed Quiz. (New today: \u201cWhat Kind of Cereal Are You?<\/a>\u201d and \u201cCan You Tell Payless Shoes Apart from Others?<\/a>\u201d) Beneath every expression of preference is a rat\u2019s nest of prejudices, insecurities, and empty assertions of selfhood. Fortunately, there\u2019s Evan Kindley\u2019s Questionnaire<\/a><\/em>, one in a new crop from Bloomsbury\u2019s Object Lessons series\u2014it offers a rich primer on humankind\u2019s submission to inane paperwork. In the questionnaire, Kindley demonstrates, bureaucrats found a ridiculously simple solution to a long-standing problem: How do you get people to open up about themselves to total strangers? Turns out that just asking, ideally with some veneer of officialdom, is a great way to start. As Kindley writes in his introduction, \u201cThe decision to provide information about oneself, as irresistible as it sometimes seems, is neither a natural human instinct nor an automatic social good\u201d; it takes a finely tuned questionnaire to coax us out of our shells, and there are dubious intentions behind just about every form. Eugenics, managerial power-plays, electoral politics, Christian matchmaking, latent fascism, female desire\u2014you name it, some questionnaire has interrogated it. Kindley\u2019s book provides a lucid, distressing look at the backbone of demography. It brought to mind the epigraph to Wallace\u2019s The Pale King<\/em>, taken from a Frank Bidart poem called \u201cBorges and I\u201d: \u201cWe fill pre-existing forms<\/em> and when \/ we fill them we change them and are changed.\u201d \u2014Dan Piepenbring
<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"9781501314797\"<\/a><\/p>\n

David Thomson\u2019s New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Fifth Edition, Completely Updated and Expanded<\/a><\/em> has, over the years, become my favorite book to browse. It subverts all expectations of reference book. Yes, its entries have biographical facts and filmographies, but most entertaining is Thomson himself, whose prose style and opinion seep into every line. Thomson\u2019s entry on Tom Hanks begins, \u201cPeople like Tom Hanks. They find him amiable, decent, and nonthreatening \u2026 He is a given; he is the makeup\u201d (which is why he was picked to play the lawyer in Philadelphia<\/em>, according to Thomson). Of Keira Knightley, he writes, \u201cShe is astonishingly beautiful \u2026 but she is about as interesting as a cr\u00e8me br\u00fbl\u00e9e where too much refrigeration had killed flavor with ice burn.\u201d He makes it clear that Murder She Wrote<\/em> was a waste of Angela Lansbury\u2019s talent, and has a tendency to compare female actresses born in the early eighties to Anna Paquin, on whom he has a very apparent crush: \u201cScarlett Johansson, an actress who seems pale and flimsy next to Paquin\u2019s immense versatility and daring.\u201d As opinionated as it is, it\u2019s a handy tome, one in which I continually find new treasures. \u2014Jeffery Gleaves<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m glad I never read Moll Flanders in college. Because it was published in 1722 and has the structure of a picaresque, I would have dismissed it as primitive. I\u2019d have thought Daniel Defoe didn\u2019t know how to write an actual novel. Now Moll Flanders strikes me as the kind of artwork big enough to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[438],"tags":[22986,23276,3776,5620,23277,79,23278,23275,15132,23280,7221,165,22520,9619,883,23279,18020],"class_list":["post-100442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-alejandra-pizarnik","tag-ann-quin","tag-daniel-defoe","tag-david-thomson","tag-evan-kindley","tag-film","tag-laura-sims","tag-moll-flanders","tag-music-literature","tag-new-biographical-dictionary-of-film","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-questionnaires","tag-recommended-reading","tag-staff-picks","tag-staying-alive","tag-unreliable-narrators"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Daniel Defoe, Laura Sims, Ann Quin, Evan Kindley<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What the staff of The Paris Review is reading this week.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/15\/staff-picks-pink-shells-invisible-animals-unreliably-unreliable-narrators\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Staff Picks: Pink Shells, Invisible Animals, Unreliably Unreliable Narrators by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"July 15, 2016 \u2013 I\u2019m glad I never read Moll Flanders in college. Because it was published in 1722 and has the structure of a picaresque, I would have dismissed it as\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/15\/staff-picks-pink-shells-invisible-animals-unreliably-unreliable-narrators\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-07-15T19:30:32+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2016-07-15T21:40:10+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/moll_flanders.png\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1543\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1348\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta 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