{"id":120477,"date":"2018-01-19T13:00:53","date_gmt":"2018-01-19T18:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=120477"},"modified":"2018-02-02T11:33:21","modified_gmt":"2018-02-02T16:33:21","slug":"staff-picks-vengeance-evil-grace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/19\/staff-picks-vengeance-evil-grace\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Vengeance, Evil, and Grace"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Still from Phantom Thread<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

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<\/i> made my heart pound and my palms sweat. Friends, this is not a thriller, though it was thrilling. Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s latest film, and allegedly Daniel Day-Lewis\u2019s last, is about a couturier in postwar London<\/span><\/a>. It is about devotion, though depending on who you ask it is either about a man\u2019s devotion to his work or a women\u2019s 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\u2019s 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,\u00a0Phantom Thread<\/i> 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\u2019s beach house. If this is Day-Lewis\u2019s last movie, what a way to go.\u00a0\u2014Julia Berick<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Eka Kurniawan<\/p><\/div>\n

I recently read Eka Kurniawan\u2019s novel Vengeance Is Mine, All\u00a0Others Pay Cash<\/i><\/a> <\/i>as if either the book or I were outfitted with afterburners. Vengeance<\/i>\u00a0is a comic\u00a0picaresque that the publisher has likened to a Quentin Tarantino film;\u00a0Kurniawan\u2019s prose,\u00a0translated from the Indonesian by Annie Tucker,\u00a0<\/span>is pungent and blunt, but there\u2019s more talk<\/i>\u00a0of 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\u2019s protagonist is Ajo Kawir, who suffers a youthful erotic mishap that leaves him impotent (he treats his \u201cbird\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2014Kurniawan\u2019s handling of gay and female sexuality\u00a0is rather awful at times\u2014but the physicality of his prose and his story is invigorating.\u2014Nicole Rudick\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Still from Alias<\/em> Grace<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

An obvious solution to the cold: a Netflix miniseries that keeps your eyes glued to your computer and makes you forget why you\u2019ve ever wanted to be anywhere but inside. This week, I picked\u00a0Alias Grace<\/a><\/i>, and it did just that. The second in a lineup of Margaret Atwood novels being adapted for TV,\u00a0Alias Grace<\/i>\u00a0takes place in nineteenth-century Canada and revolves around Grace Marks, a domestic servant convicted of murdering her employer.\u00a0The show begins as Grace, fifteen years into her confinement, begins meeting with Doctor Jordan in order to tell him her tale. Flashbacks full of neat costumes, colorful flowers, and dark red stains ensue.\u00a0It seems to me, ultimately, to be a series about the bags under their eyes: hers, dark from the start; Dr. Jordan\u2019s, getting darker and darker; the viewer\u2019s, oncoming, as\u00a0a planned forty-five\u00a0minutes turns into two hundred and seventy.\u00a0Is Doctor Jordan meeting with Grace to learn her story\u00a0or for a chance to be near her? Alias Grace<\/i>\u00a0probes the question: Are you watching for the story or are you watching for the teller? Either way, it is certainly worth the bags. \u2014Claire Benoit<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Leonora Carrington<\/p><\/div>\n

I was disappointed but not at all surprised to see Missouri on Fodor\u2019s <\/i>2018 \u201cNo List<\/a>,\u201d the travel publication\u2019s annual assessment of the places in the world least worth visiting. But what I can say in my home state\u2019s favor, aside from mentioning that many of my friends and most of my lovely family live there, is that it serves as the home base for Dorothy<\/a>, a small press with a good heart and a laser-precise focus. I\u2019ve spent the first few weeks of the year lost in the dreamy bliss of Dorothy\u2019s\u00a0The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington<\/a><\/em>. Although I\u2019d been prepared for a lethal dosage of strangeness from\u00a0the French surrealist\u2019s twisted tales, I hadn\u2019t anticipated just how funny these stories would be. \u201cI went to fetch my car,\u201d the narrator of \u201cThe Royal Summons\u201d says, \u201cbut my chauffeur, who has no practical sense at all, had just buried it. \u2018I did it to grow mushrooms,\u2019 he told me. \u2018There\u2019s no better way of growing mushrooms.\u2019 \u201d \u201cThree Hunters\u201d sketches a woman\u2019s visit to the forest manor of three profoundly sad, seemingly immortal brothers who are burdened with an unfortunate curse. After dinner, the narrator follows one of the brothers to a room filled with \u201cnothing but sausages. Sausages in aquariums, sausages in cages, sausages hanging on the walls, sausages in sumptuous glass boxes.\u201d With a tear, he explains, \u201cWhatever trophy we try to preserve becomes a sausage.\u201d Each story is bursting with moments like these, delicious non sequiturs rattling out of the margins like spoons falling from the sky. I am generally a jumpy reader anyway, but with The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington<\/i>, I gallop across the pages, desperate to see what new tricks Carrington will pull, thirsty for the next grotesque turn or unsettling tableau. \u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

David Axelrod<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019ve only just discovered the producer\/arranger\/composer David Axelrod, and so I\u2019m still in the stage where I\u2019m picturing Obama\u2019s chief strategist behind a mixing board, bobbing his head with his eyes closed. But this David Axelrod, who died in February 2017, was a jazzy, soulful Los Angeles studio rat, unafraid of flutes and spoken-word poetry. I\u2019m starting my journey with The Edge:\u00a0David Axelrod at Capitol Records 1966\u20131970<\/i><\/a>. Track after track, he pushes his LA studio musicians to go further out into the desert, while he flips through a Rolodex of orchestras, and records the congas so closely you\u2019d expect the percussionist\u2019s hands to knock the mics. Right away, I recognized the palm-muted guitar on the collection\u2019s title track, famously sampled by Dr. Dre, as well as the song\u00a0called \u201cHoly Thursday<\/span><\/span>,\u201d which is not on that album,\u00a0but present, strangely, as a melodic foundation\u00a0for about fifty percent of Axelrod\u2019s songs\u00a0and also served as\u00a0the basis for Lil Wayne\u2019s \u201cDr. Carter.<\/i>\u201d\u00a0I\u2019ve always wondered who was responsible for the sound of those toms on the drum fills, and the majesty of the horn and string arrangements. Turns out it was a turtle-necked sorcerer with the same name as David Axelrod. His songs work so well in hip-hop because the performances are saturated with what my middle school drumming book called \u201cdeep groove.\u201d If you like Ennio Morricone, the Alan Parsons Project, and other music that makes you feel like a giant on a quest, then buckle up: there\u2019s a new David Axelrod in your life, and he wants to take you on a journey. \u2014Brent Katz<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Uzodinma Iweala. Photo: Ruthie Abel<\/p><\/div>\n

I spent these past few days immersed in\u00a0Uzodinma Iweala\u2019s second novel,\u00a0Speak No Evil<\/a><\/em>, forthcoming in March. It\u2019s a small\u00a0novel, if measured by page count, but a large\u00a0one if measured by impact. When Niru, a private-school student born of Nigerian parents in Washington, D.C., voices his queerness to himself and his best friend, Meredith, the consequences are devastating. I was struck again and again by Iweala\u2019s ability to impart the experience of Niru\u2019s queer, black, teenage turmoil. It left me feeling as if I\u2019d made two new friends\u2014or, to withhold a \u201clikability judgement,\u201d at least two close acquaintances. \u2014Eleanor Pritchett<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Samuel Menashe<\/p><\/div>\n

As a thin rain fell outside, I browsed\u00a0the lovely, homey Mercer Street Books\u2014much bigger than its exterior suggests\u2014where the owner plucks his favorite books out of the stacks and sets them front-wise against the rows like eyes. I found, and was overwhelmed by, a water-beaten copy of The Niche Narrows: New and Selected Poems of Samuel Menashe<\/em><\/a>. Menashe, who died in 2011 at the age of eighty-five, was a New York poet of short, close-packed intensity. A private mystic bemused by the writing compulsion, he paid\u00a0a religious attention to the inner and outer worlds. A typical Menashe poem,\u00a0\u201cIn My Digs,\u201d reads in its entirety: \u201cCaked in a glass \/ That is clear \/ Yesterday\u2019s dregs \/ Tell me the past \/ Happened here.\u201d Most Menashe poems rhyme but do not flow as we expect rhymed poems to. They have a stopped-up rhythm, each line break like somebody gasping for breath, the syntax convoluted. This is intentional. It is the genius and the mission of Menashe\u2019s poetry to cause us to trip, to arrest our attention on the words instead of allowing us to lightly glaze over them like someone breezing through a museum. Menashe wants us to see and think more like Menashe, and it is a hard yoke. His poetry opens no wide gate to the reader. Unsurprisingly, Menashe is best known for being unknown. Every appreciation of Menashe that I have read begins with his long obscurity, sporadically leavened by critical attention in England. In 2004, Poetry<\/em>\u00a0literalized this status by awarding Menashe its first-ever Neglected Masters Award. Ecce Homo Neglectus! <\/em>At least it\u00a0came with a fifty-thousand-dollar prize: Menashe was always poor. Throughout his life, with attention and money and without, Menashe\u2019s style stayed consistent\u2014he was hunting for something private and self-sufficient. As I was checking out the collection, dedicated by Menashe on the front page in a humbly legible blue cursive to \u201cThe Williams Club, 2003,\u201d the owner said that Menashe had been a regular at Mercer Street Books, and a patient browser. As I was leaving, the owner told me that once, after Menashe had come back to the store after a long absence, he exclaimed, \u201cSam, Thank God! I thought you were dead!\u201d Menashe just tossed his head back and laughed. \u2014Matt Levin<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Zadie Smith<\/p><\/div>\n

One of the essays in Zadie Smith\u2019s forthcoming collection, Feel Free<\/i><\/a>, is a previously published piece, adapted from a speech she gave at a German literary ceremony, called \u201cOn Optimism and Despair.\u201d I read it when it first ran<\/a>\u00a0in December of 2016, and still return to it every now and then. I could explain why, but this is a case in which it seems best to let the writing speak for itself:<\/p>\n

I maintain that people who believe in fundamental and irreversible changes in human nature are themselves ahistorical and naive. If novelists know anything it\u2019s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world\u2014and most recently in America\u2014the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind. Here in Germany you will remember these martial songs; they are not a very distant memory. But there is no place on earth where they have not been played at one time or another. Those of us who remember, too, a finer music must try now to play it, and encourage others, if we can, to sing along.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014Spencer Bokat-Lindell<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Li-Young Lee<\/p><\/div>\n

Much like the feathered white wings unfolding against the light blue background of its cover, Li-Young Lee\u2019s forthcoming poetry collection, The Undressing<\/i><\/a>, has a\u00a0softly shrouded intricate grace. The four parts of the collection are seamlessly linked by transitions in tone that step artfully from the end of one to the start of the next. They are also tautly conceived in a way that I can only call novelistic: the breadth and depth of plot and character are robed in lyrical lines and images.\u00a0Lee guides his narrator from the throes of youthful passion and love through the pain of adulthood\u2014reckoning with family history and humanity\u2019s violence\u2014and concludes with a climactic defense of poetry against a harpy-like characterization of self-doubt. The arch of the collection stretches gracefully toward a stunning ending, and I was left short of breath by a verse in the penultimate poem: \u201cAnd of all the things we\u2019re dying from tonight<\/span><\/span>, \/ being alive is the strangest. \/ Surviving our histories is the saddest. \/ Time leaves the smallest wounds, \/ and your body, a mortal occasion \/ of timeless law, \/ is all the word I know.\u201d \u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  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 […]<\/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":[32600,32599,32601,19645,32607,32602,32605,11612,32608,32606,740,32609,2832,3463,32604,32603,32610,32598,1079],"class_list":["post-120477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-alias-grace","tag-all-others-pay-cash","tag-dorothy-a-publishing-project","tag-eka-kurniawan","tag-feel-free","tag-fodors","tag-iweala","tag-leonora-carrington","tag-li-young-lee","tag-mercer-street-books","tag-netflix","tag-on-optimism-and-despair","tag-quentin-tarantino","tag-samuel-menashe","tag-speak-no-evil","tag-the-complete-stories-of-leonora-carrington","tag-the-undressing","tag-vengeance-is-mine","tag-zadie-smith"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Vengeance, Evil, and Grace<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 discusses optimism and despair, teenage turmoil, neglected masters, avian Yoricks, and phantom threads.\" \/>\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\/2018\/01\/19\/staff-picks-vengeance-evil-grace\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Staff Picks: Vengeance, Evil, and Grace by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"January 19, 2018 \u2013   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. 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