{"id":116682,"date":"2017-10-13T13:35:44","date_gmt":"2017-10-13T17:35:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=116682"},"modified":"2017-10-13T13:55:58","modified_gmt":"2017-10-13T17:55:58","slug":"staff-picks-witch-hop-typingpool-salkis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/13\/staff-picks-witch-hop-typingpool-salkis\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Witch-Hop, Typingpool, and Salkis"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

 <\/p>\n

Suzy Hansen\u2019s Notes on a Foreign Country<\/em><\/a>\u00a0is a deceptively narrow book. It seems to be the memoir of a young, untested journalist who finds herself in Turkey, almost by chance, and begins to learn about the U.S. involvement in the Middle East. In reality, it is a book about what it means to be white and American, in the world and at home. I haven\u2019t stopped thinking about it since I picked it up. Among its many virtues, it is the first book I\u2019ve read that gives an honest account of what, for my generation, passed for history class at even a \u201cgood\u201d high school. \u201cI was in high school for the Rwandan genocide and the war in Bosnia, but I was conscious of none of it at the time. During my senior year, I learned twentieth-century American history through the lyrics of Billy Joel\u2019s \u2018We Didn\u2019t Start the Fire\u2019\u00a0… Many years later I unearthed a research project I made about the song.\u201d\u00a0If that doesn’t make you wince, then you may not recognize yourself in Notes on a Foreign Country<\/em>. Not everyone will. If you do recognize yourself, then you may also recognize the connections Hansen draws between American exceptionalism abroad, white supremacy at home, and a national self-image based on virtue\u2014a self-image that could survive in no other free country on earth, and that may finally be falling apart in ours. \u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Maybe it was the cover image of Freeman\u2019s: The Future of New Writing<\/i><\/a>\u00a0that prompted me to pick it up: the bare tree, icy lake, and snowcapped mountains might have been\u00a0a subconscious relief for my all-too-conscious discomfort at this past week\u2019s mid-October mugginess. Mieko Kawakami’s story, \u201cThe Flower Garden,\u201d is aesthetically sparse and cool as well, yet far from simple. It is a brief story that pries with gentle force at the tight societal seam binding female identity and material possessions, and it\u00a0begins in medias res:\u00a0<\/i>a woman is showing her house to a potential buyer, a wealthy, attractive woman much her junior. The narrator, a housewife,\u00a0spent her entire married life decorating the house and curating its interior design. She feels for it a deep and maternal bond. Yet\u00a0her husband\u2019s business went bust, leaving them bankrupt, and she is forced to sell. Shortly after leaving, she begins stalking the house, sitting on the bench outside and going to tend the garden (her husband\u2019s favorite thing about the house and maybe about her)\u00a0after the new inhabitant has left for the day. In a few pages, Kawakami\u2019s austere prose sketches the narrator\u2019s rapidly growing infatuation with both the home and its new owner. Kawakami\u2019s psychological realism is on the expert level of Henry James, suggesting ethereal and nuanced\u00a0feelings through their material representations. However, unlike James, her mastery comes in the form of a skillful economy of language.\u00a0\u00a0The story blossoms hypnotically into a dark and strange ending. \u2014Lauren Kane
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Princess Nokia<\/p><\/div>\n

A couple weeks ago, I received a text from my older brother. \u201cWow, I can\u2019t stop listening to these two Princess Nokia songs,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt\u2019s like electronic music with Crime Mob Lady rapping.\u201d This might not sound revelatory, but we Ransom boys speak of \u201cCrime Mob Lady\u201d (whose rap alias, coincidentally and forgettably, is Princess) with reverence. We used to listen to Crime Mob\u2019s crunk classic \u201cKnuck If You Buck<\/a>\u201d religiously, and at one point, we both bragged of our ability to recite Princess\u2019s verse verbatim. I\u2019m happy to report that my brother is correct: Princess Nokia is a worthy heir to the throne. Like the Princess before her, Nokia delivers her rhymes with a blistering cadence. One need only listen to her song \u201cBrujas<\/a>\u201d to discover her lyrical acuity, her knack for evocative imagery. \u201cCasting spells with my cousins,\u201d she raps. \u201cI\u2019m the head of this coven.\u201d It\u2019s the best and only witch-hop song I\u2019ve heard. (I\u2019d also be remiss not to mention Princess Nokia\u2019s participation in the takedown of a racist on the subway this week, which culminated in her throwing hot soup on the bigot<\/a>.) \u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From\u00a0Charm<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Last week, I had the pleasure of seeing Philip Dawkins\u2019s play Charm. <\/em>It\u00a0opened in New York City\u00a0in late September,\u00a0<\/i>but\u00a0if you hurry, you may be able to catch one of the final performances this weekend. It would be worth it for the costumes alone\u2014flashes of color that transform the fluorescently lit stage, meant to resemble the grim interior of a community center, into a riveting riot of color and exposed skin. Mama Darleena Andrews, a sixty-seven-year-old, black, transgender woman played by Sandra Caldwell, has come to teach the trans youth manners and etiquette \u00e0\u00a0la Emily Post. When she dictates\u00a0different rules for gentlemen\u00a0than for ladies, she clashes with the head of the community center, D., who goes by gender-neutral pronouns. But that\u2019s not where the heart of the\u00a0story is\u2014it\u2019s in\u00a0Caldwell\u2019s performance\u00a0of a woman who\u2019s\u00a0had to be tough\u00a0for far too long and finally dares to expose some of her own vulnerability. Sandra Caldwell has been acting since she was a teenager, but now, at sixty-five years old, in taking this role, she\u2019s\u00a0finally decided to come out as trans. She\u2019s giving it everything she\u2019s got. \u2014Nadja Spiegelman<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the concise stories that make up\u00a0Everything, Then and Since<\/i><\/a>, Michael Parker creates worlds that are defined as much by what they exclude\u00a0as by what they\u00a0include. Though Parker\u2019s collection is a slim ninety-seven pages, it includes twenty-three stories of impressive variety and emotional complexity. Parker often writes of life\u00a0on the margins in the South, and some of the\u00a0best moments come when those margins are brushed\u00a0by global tragedy, as in \u201cTypingpool\u201d and \u201cBeamon\u2019s Woods,\u201d which are both ultimately about the enduring pain of World War II. The stories range from six pages to the 186-word \u201cHold On,\u201d an exemplar of the collection. Every word holds particular weight; much is asked of every descriptor. The narrator of \u201cHold On\u201d gives a recliner-ridden old woman (his mother? his patient?) her first-ever television with a remote: \u201cShe held onto that clicker as if it were her first ever doll baby, carved from a corncob by her daddy before the dust kicked up and blew them out of the Panhandle.\u201d Much is told to the reader; much is left for the reader to tell themselves. Indeed, that\u2019s the accomplishment of these stories: they pack a great deal into the pages given to them, and then ask the reader to take it further. They challenge and expand the reader\u2019s imagination, as all good stories ought to do. \u2014Joel\u00a0Pinckney<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Robert Redford and Jane Fonda in The Electric Horseman<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

I have a suspicion that the 1979 film\u00a0Electric Horseman<\/em><\/a> was released to Netflix audiences in order to build interest in Our Souls at Night<\/em>, a new film featuring the same megastars, Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. I don\u2019t care if it was. I watched rapt for the entire two-hour run time. Redford is Sonny Steele, a washed-up rodeo star, who\u00a0gained a fortune when he sold\u00a0his soul as a breakfast-cereal spokesman. Jane Fonda is Hallie Martin, a wicked-sharp reporter from back East. Steel may have lost his self-respect, but he can\u2019t abide by the treatment of a horse who costars alongside him in the\u00a0Las Vegas promotion for the cereal company. He rides the horse right off the set, off the strip, and into the Nevada night. The horse happens to be expensive and Fonda\u00a0follows Redford\u00a0and the story. Electric Horseman<\/em> was released in 1979, but\u00a0last weekend it seemed to be set in some parallel universe where things might have worked out differently. Vegas is still the center of lavish American lust, corporations are swayed\u00a0by a moral majority, the media is interested in a good story but more so in stories\u00a0of good, reporters always check their sources. Steele says to Hallie, \u201cI like that you\u2019re smart.\u201d No kidding! Redford and Fonda sing \u201cAmerica the Beautiful\u201d to distract Fonda from the pain of hiking in her high heels. With the craggy handsome Red Rock Canyon behind the craggy handsome Redford, everything sure looks<\/em> okay. \u2014Julia Berick<\/strong><\/p>\n

Janet Malcolm\u2019s books are like a full moon\u2014perfectly round, very remote, and tidally forceful.\u00a0She often writes\u00a0about semi-obscure specialists, she withholds the central narrative until sometime around page fifty, and she uses\u00a0huge undigested block quotes\u2014and yet I am always inevitably riveted by her work. Malcolm’s practice is to find a fight that is seemingly over, or at a stalemate\u2014a lawsuit brought against a journalist by his jilted subject, an alleged murder for hire in Forest Hills, the struggle over Freud\u2019s archives, the various dueling biographies of Sylvia Plath\u2014and to survey it from a great height, to masterfully tell the story by telling the stories of the story (for a dispute inexorably reduces to competing fictions), the ways in which the story has been manipulated in each hand, how manipulation is the nature of hands, and thus how her own handling is a further manipulation. She is not a tricky author. Her sentences are crisp and decisive, but her writing is one great ouroboros<\/em>,\u00a0which is what makes her so wickedly fun. Her own philosophical grasp of the slipperiness of truth, and the pretensions of tale weavers toward truth, allows her to puncture the pretensions of the storytellers she encounters. Malcolm calls to mind Fred Hitz, the CIA inspector general during the Clinton administration who said, during an overhaul of the agency, that his job \u201cwas to walk through the battlefield while the smoke cleared and shoot the wounded.\u201d Malcolm\u2019s work requires immense patience. She has\u00a0the talent to be bored for great stretches of time, watching, until a true character flares up. How else but by persistence and patience could she have found the comically curmudgeonly downstairs neighbor of Sylvia Plath? How else could she have elicited the insane rambling gush of the court-appointed child guardian in the Forest Hills murder case? In short, she has a feel for life, and life is everywhere if we care to look long and close enough. I will read a book about anything so long as it is Janet Malcolm writing about it. \u2014Matt Levin<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Wojciech Nowicki\u2019s new book\u00a0Salki<\/i><\/a>\u00a0(his first translated into English)\u00a0<\/i>opens with its narrator awake in a too-small bed during a storm. He is awash in memories\u2014of his family and other Eastern European peoples who have been separated or driven from their homelands.\u00a0I was particularly moved by the account of a large migration of Turks the narrator encounters on the highway\u2014\u201cthe Turkish nation in exile.\u201d He sees \u201ca Turk from Germany helping a Turk from the Netherlands, and while according to the passports it\u2019s a German helping a Dutch, it\u2019s a sham and they know it.\u201d Most painful is the notion that the place from which they\u2019ve traveled isn\u2019t home\u2014not exactly\u2014and the place to which they\u2019re going will have changed so much in the intervening years that it\u2019s no longer the home they left. \u201cIn Milosz\u2019s writing, eons separate villages, deep forests and languages collapse. His world has hatred and belching swamps. There you can hear the splash of boots in mud; in Milosz\u2019s realm there\u2019s peeping on women of the village, and ecstasy felt in the herb garden. But now it\u2019s a little bit like everywhere else, reddish asphalt, clean and flat, and the vastness of snow. It\u2019s empty. The real place can\u2019t keep up with the memories. It just won\u2019t.\u201d The people Nowicki writes about seem to have become memories, too\u2014forgotten, in-between people. I recognize them now everywhere: in Syria, Myanmar, South Sudan, and, maybe soon, in Puerto Rico. \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

  Suzy Hansen\u2019s Notes on a Foreign Country\u00a0is a deceptively narrow book. It seems to be the memoir of a young, untested journalist who finds herself in Turkey, almost by chance, and begins to learn about the U.S. involvement in the Middle East. In reality, it is a book about what it means to be […]<\/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":[9942,31054,22501,31049,31055,23634,31052,31051,31043,16797,31047,31056,23291,1299,31048,31045,16695,31046,2704,11833,31050,31053,31044],"class_list":["post-116682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-billy-joel","tag-electric-horseman","tag-everything","tag-freemans-the-future-of-new-writing","tag-jane-fond","tag-janet-malcom","tag-michael-parker","tag-mieko-kawakami","tag-milosz","tag-myanmar","tag-notes-on-a-foreign-country","tag-our-souls-at-night","tag-puerto-rico","tag-robert-redford","tag-rwandan-genocide","tag-salki","tag-south-sudan","tag-suzy-hansen","tag-sylvia-plath","tag-syria","tag-the-flower-garden","tag-then-and-since","tag-wojciech-nowicki"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Witch-Hop, Typingpool, and Salkis<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week, \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 reads \u2018Freeman\u2019s,\u2019 goes to a play, and listens to Princess Nokia.\" \/>\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\/10\/13\/staff-picks-witch-hop-typingpool-salkis\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Staff Picks: Witch-Hop, Typingpool, and Salkis by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 13, 2017 \u2013   Suzy Hansen\u2019s Notes on a Foreign Country\u00a0is a deceptively narrow book. 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