{"id":113922,"date":"2017-08-11T13:00:14","date_gmt":"2017-08-11T17:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=113922"},"modified":"2017-08-11T13:36:26","modified_gmt":"2017-08-11T17:36:26","slug":"staff-picks-spooks-oddballs-and-dopes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/08\/11\/staff-picks-spooks-oddballs-and-dopes\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Spooks, Oddballs, Dopes"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Jan Morris.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I went to visit Jan Morris in North Wales a few months ago and heard her saying some of the same things you will hear in this recording<\/a>. Nothing made me miss America\u2014and especially New York\u2014more than hearing this distinctly English woman, ninety years of age, lyrically and lovingly reminisce about her time there. \u201cI\u2019ve loved America since I first knew it twelve presidencies ago,\u201d she says, \u201cand I love and honor all that\u2019s best about it today.\u201d \u2014Mitzi Angel<\/strong><\/p>\n

The current issue of Granta<\/em> contains an essay so good, so expressionistic\u00a0and yet so cooly observed, that it made me think of Didion or Naipaul at their best. In \u201cNotes on a Suicide<\/a>,\u201d Rana Dasgupta uses the death\u00a0of a nineteen-year-old girl, in a town outside Paris, as a prism through which to view contemporary France and what it means to be young today: \u201cOc\u00e9ane was the first person to broadcast a live suicide on today\u2019s social media platforms. During the hours I spent watching her online videos, however, I never got the feeling that she was, in other respects, unusual. I saw traits in her common to a lot of people these days\u2014and possibly to myself, even if they are more pronounced in the young: she was subdued, serious, intermittently funny, distracted by constant electronic tics, slightly unavailable to herself … In so many respects, Oc\u00e9ane seemed entirely normal, and I sensed that her online exploit, too, would become more customary over time.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Lorin Stein\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am a generally lachrymose person, a quality that has invited no shortage of embarrassment into my life. I will shamelessly admit, though, that I wept after finishing the story \u201cMothers\u201d in Carmen Maria Machado\u2019s forthcoming collection,\u00a0Her Body and Other Parties<\/em><\/a>. \u201cMothers\u201d is in Machado\u2019s masterful surrealist style, and by dispensing with traditional narrative structure, she is able to evoke the melancholy of time\u2019s passage, the nostalgia of motherhood, and the pain of a failed and violent marriage. The story\u2019s twenty pages deliver a wallop to the heart that I didn\u2019t see coming. The entire collection is forceful, although it never takes itself too seriously:\u00a0\u201cEspecially Heinous\u201d reimagines synopses of Law & Order: SVU<\/em> episodes; \u201cThe Husband Stitch\u201d riffs on scary fireside stories and suburban legends. But she writes with a sincerity I didn\u2019t realize I was missing until I found it in these pages; it\u2019s rare to encounter an articulation of feminist themes that isn\u2019t self-conscious of them. For instance, her characters enjoy sex, neither shamefully nor aggressively, but simply because they do\u2014no explanation needed. Machado\u2019s work, like her characters, is accessible and nuanced,\u00a0textured without being overwrought. The publication date is October third: mark your calendar. \u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Little Hours<\/em><\/a>\u00a0probably won\u2019t win the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, but it should. Based on a duo of stories in The Decameron<\/em>, the film follows a group of irreverent, sexually frustrated nuns who live in the Italian countryside. The plot is almost nonexistent; instead, the film builds a fourteenth-century play set\u2014complete with period-appropriate garb\u2014and lets loose a cast stacked with some of the best names in comedy (Aubrey Plaza as the wicked sister with a penchant for violence, Dave Franco as the dopey runaway servant with a mop of ridiculous hair, and Kate Micucci, whose tremendously goofy facial expressions carry many of the film\u2019s best scenes, in a breakout performance as the tattletale who desperately wants to fit in). The dissonance The Little Hours\u00a0<\/em>strikes between its humble setting and its thoroughly modern raunch is oddly beautiful. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve seen another movie like it. \u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Aubrey Plaza, Brie Larson, and Kate Micucci, in\u00a0Little Hours<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1900, a group of divers scouting for sponges plunged into the Mediterranean sea off the small island Antikythera and discovered a ship, ancient and massive, full of Hellenistic treasures. Among the artifacts they pulled from the waves was a heavily corroded bronze mechanism with visible gears and wheels. It was stunning in its complexity, but indecipherable. Was it a clock? A machine? They didn\u2019t know. This anecdote comes early in\u00a0Automata<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0a history of \u201cobjects that re-create the rhythms of life mechanically.\u201d A few examples of the automata featured: elaborate, ancient clocks that use water to mark the passage of time, dolls that could perform Gluck for Marie Antoinette. I was surprised while slipping through this gorgeous volume, released by Editions Xavier Barral in May, that humans have been making automata for thousands of years. But then: the Western Roman Empire fell, the Dark Ages stormed through, and\u00a0humans forgot (or destroyed) the most ancient of these technologies. Even after\u00a0the Antikythera (as the mechanism came to be known) was found, it took more than a hundred\u00a0years to unlock its secrets, a feat that was accomplished with the help of\u00a0a special X-ray called\u2014I\u2019m not kidding\u2014the Blade Runner. Turns out, it\u2019s a 365-day calendar that once indicated the movements of the heavens with dials and pointers and is \u201cthe world\u2019s first analog computer.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>\u2014Caitlin Love<\/strong><\/p>\n

I hadn\u2019t heard of Camille Bordas or her new novel, How to Behave in a Crowd<\/em><\/a>, before picking it up on the staff shelf earlier this week, but enticed by George Saunders\u2019s blurb, I thought I\u2019d give it a try; it didn\u2019t take long for me to see its charm. The story is told from the perspective of eleven-year-old Isidore Mazal, the youngest of six and the oddball among the children in that he is not hyperintellectual (by the novel\u2019s conclusion, three of his five siblings have completed dissertations). Isidore, for his part, is kindhearted and thoughtful, emotionally sensitive, and befuddled that others are not the same (and self-doubting for that same reason). Unbeknownst to him, Isidore becomes the cornerstone of the family as they face a tragedy they are ill-equipped to handle. Bordas, in her first novel written in English\u2014she has two previously published novels in French\u2014brilliantly inhabits the mind of Isidore, convincing the reader that Isidore can be, and indeed appropriately is, both emotionally healthy and emotionally insecure. The reader is left with a felt sense of his emotional state that is perhaps the only way to approach understanding the mind of a sensitive eleven-year-old boy.\u00a0\u2014Joel Pinckney<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gather round to hear a chilling tale about \u2026 a talking mongoose named Gef. Okay, it\u2019s not exactly campfire material, but Christopher Josiffe\u2019s account of the real-life Dalby Spook, in Gef! The Strange Tale of an Extra-Special Talking Mongoose<\/em><\/a>, is seriously weird stuff. Gef first appeared to the Irving family on the Isle on Man in 1931; initially a malevolent presence in the house, he later becomes something of a Gollum\u2014curious, mercurial, and anomalous\u2014and rarely showed himself to strangers. (\u201cI won\u2019t talk for these people,\u201d he once exclaimed of some reporters. \u201cThey are all liars.\u201d) Josiffe\u2019s book is exhaustive, and his enthusiasm for the project is borne on every page. He covers the media sensation around Gef from every possible angle, drawing upon contemporaneous opinions of spiritualists, mediums, newspapermen, neighbors, and more, leaving no archival stone unturned in his quest to flesh out the mystery of the \u201cman-weasel.\u201d Josiffe draws no satisfactory conclusions but notes, rather tenderly, that unlike other cryptids, \u201cGef has a palpable, definite personality \u2026 It is this sense of his being an actual individual that endears him to so many, and engenders the strange feeling that one knows him.\u201d \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  I went to visit Jan Morris in North Wales a few months ago and heard her saying some of the same things you will hear in this recording. Nothing made me miss America\u2014and especially New York\u2014more than hearing this distinctly English woman, ninety years of age, lyrically and lovingly reminisce about her time there. […]<\/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":[30084,30081,7610,22968,30085,30078,30092,30089,30090,30080,79,30086,970,2388,30079,411,30088,11270,30082,12989,1263,30087,12729,1830,6024,30091,3991,30083,2455],"class_list":["post-113922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-antikythera","tag-aubrey-plaza","tag-automata","tag-blade-runner","tag-camille-bordas","tag-carmen-maria-machado","tag-christopher-josiffe","tag-cryptids","tag-dalby-spook","tag-dave-franco","tag-film","tag-gef","tag-george-saunders","tag-granta","tag-her-body-and-other-parties","tag-humor","tag-isle-of-man","tag-jan-morris","tag-kate-micucci","tag-law-and-order","tag-marie-antoinette","tag-mongoose","tag-nuns","tag-rana-dasgupta","tag-suicide","tag-talking-mongoose","tag-the-decameron","tag-the-little-hours","tag-wales"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Jan Morris, Carmen Maria Machado, and a Talking Mongoose<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 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\/2017\/08\/11\/staff-picks-spooks-oddballs-and-dopes\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Staff Picks: Spooks, Oddballs, Dopes by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"August 11, 2017 \u2013   I went to visit Jan Morris in North Wales a few months ago and heard her saying some of the same things you will hear in this recording. 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