{"id":124254,"date":"2018-04-13T12:00:36","date_gmt":"2018-04-13T16:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=124254"},"modified":"2018-04-13T15:07:24","modified_gmt":"2018-04-13T19:07:24","slug":"staff-picks-birds-borders-and-broadway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/04\/13\/staff-picks-birds-borders-and-broadway\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Birds, Borders, and Broadway"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo: Carl Fuldner and Shane DuBay.<\/p><\/div>\n

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In 2009, Edwin Rist stole hundreds of bird skins from England\u2019s Natural History Museum at Tring, which holds one of the largest ornithological collections in the world. Among the collection were a number of\u00a0specimens collected by Alfred Russel Wallace, the British naturalist whose work is often credited with goading Charles Darwin to publish On the Origin of Species<\/em>. Why did Rist steal them? To tie the world\u2019s most exotic and expensive fishing flies. So begins Kirk Wallace Johnson\u2019s charming The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Centur<\/em>y<\/em><\/a>, a truly bizarre tale that traces the history of exotic-bird collecting and the feather trade through scientific harvesting, millinery fads, the Victorian era\u2019s fly-fishing boom, up to Rist\u2019s caper and Johnson\u2019s own attempts at retrieving the stolen feathers with the help of some international fly-tying elites. There\u2019s a lot to Johnson\u2019s book, and he ties it together well, reeling you into disparate historical subjects in a thrilling catch-and-release style. The book is\u00a0The Orchid Thief<\/em> for the fly-fishing and birding set: worth its weight in exotic bird feathers, which you\u2019ll learn are very expensive. \u2014Jeffery Gleaves\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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I don\u2019t know anything about anything, which is why I assumed Tony Kushner\u2019s Angels in America<\/em>\u00a0was a play for patriots and, after having seen its Broadway revival last weekend, lauded the performance of \u201cAnthony\u201d Lane to anyone who would listen. My tickets were garnered last minute,\u00a0<\/b>through a Facebook friend of a Facebook friend of my mother\u2019s,\u00a0<\/b>and I accidentally lit my hair on fire between the two acts, but even from my shitty seat, hair still singed, I was mesmerized. Nathan Lane acted like Nathan Lane, and Andrew Garfield was awful\u2014in the words of Hilton Als, \u201cFlouncing around doesn\u2019t make you gay; it makes you a well-toned actor trying to play an AIDS<\/small> victim.\u201d The real star was the Angel, played by Amanda Lawrence, and the people who propped her up. Together, they scaled the stage, moving like a spider tangled in its web. \u2014Maya Binyam<\/strong><\/p>\n

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I\u2019ve always been thoroughly delighted by the fifties imagination of outer space: the simplicity, the wonder, and especially the atomic-age aesthetic.\u00a0Christina Wood Martinez\u2019s story \u201cThe Astronaut,\u201d in the most recent issue of\u00a0Granta<\/em><\/a>, populates the mid-century Space Age with astronauts who plunk down from the sky at random, wordless and faceless in their helmets and spacesuits. One such spaceman lands on a manicured lawn belonging to a suburban couple (the wife is the narrator), who immediately take him into their home. What Martinez does with this character is as mesmerizing as the Milky Way on a cloudless night. He never speaks, and the only thing that can be seen by looking at his helmet is a reflection of the looker. It is in the shiny mirror of his headgear that the couple sees all of their disappointments about their childless, passionless marriage. The husband sees him as a son he can take out back to throw the ball around, while the astronaut simultaneously becomes an object of desire for the narrator (who continues to harbor motherly feelings toward him as often as dream about his hands between her legs). The complexity of the strange intersections of motherhood, marriage, and desire are expertly done through this one silent character, while the story as a whole examines agency and intimacy. It\u2019s a tightly woven achievement that you want to sit with and dissect carefully, and one that will stay with you long after you’ve finished. \u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n

Perhaps there is some subconscious urge to shorten time when the calendar flips over to April but the weather remains stubbornly wintry. Or perhaps my attention span has simply been flagging. Whatever the case, collections of short stories have been appealing of late, and I found myself reading two of them this week, ostensibly for the comfort the medium itself provides. Both proved to be revelatory and immersive in their own right, and an oddly ideal combination when read together. The first, L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai\u2019s\u00a0The World Goes On<\/i><\/a>, is not so much a collection as an interconnected puzzle\u2014each narrative its own little universe and yet related, in only the way that stories completely grounded in the mundane insanity of human society can be, to all the others. They build, among them, a resonant reflection on obsession, speed, anxiety, minutiae, and how each of these infects the way we live in the world. The stories create a view of humanity that feels timelessly relevant, while Krasznahorkai\u2019s stylistic insistence on the use of emphatic punctuation (\u201c?!?!\u201d) is guiltlessly modern. The second, Yukio Mishima\u2019s 1953 collection,\u00a0Death in Midsummer and Other Stories<\/i><\/a>, is a similarly self-contained creation, though more concerned with slow sadness than frantically impending doom. Reading \u201cPatriotism,\u201d which contains perhaps the most graphic and affecting description of ritual suicide I\u2019ve ever encountered, felt like slipping seamlessly into a cold pool, goosebumps rising unbidden. Mishima\u2019s endings feel like inevitabilities, while Krasznahorkai\u2019s conjure jump cuts and sharp edges. This aside, Mishima and Krasznahorkai\u2019s shared interest in Noh\u00a0<\/i>theater is a perfect demonstration of how these authors overlap\u2014like two overpasses of Shanghai\u2019s Nine Dragon Pillar\u2014right at the intersection of practiced artifice and dissonant beauty. Reading them simultaneously and discovering this interplay was a stroke of luck, but now I cannot imagine recommending one without the other.\u00a0\u2014India Ennenga<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In the act of mothering, women often quote or misquote their own mothers. In the epilogue of Nadja Spiegelman\u2019s brilliant memoir and family history, I\u2019m Supposed to Protect You From All This<\/em><\/a>, Nadja\u2019s mother misquotes her daughter. She\u2019s trying to compliment a line from her manuscript: \u201c\u2009\u2018The bear was seen.\u2019 That\u2019s a great line.\u201d But the bear was actually a heron, and the anecdote, like all anecdotes in this deceptively digestible but deeply complex book, is fourfold. The original line is uttered by the novelist Siri Hustvedt, who remembers seeing a heron with her daughter while her husband is sleeping. Her husband, on the other hand, remembers the same tale but with Siri asleep. Regardless, Siri says, \u201cthe heron was seen.\u201d In assembling her remarkable family history, Nadja encounters inconsistencies and contradictions that both she and her mother\u2014the shimmering, accomplished Fran\u00e7oise Mouly\u2014struggle to break. The book emerged in part from Nadja\u2019s careful interviews with Fran\u00e7oise, who becomes almost a sister and a friend. There are many dangers in reading your colleague\u2019s much-lauded book, but I suffered none of them, save a few too-late nights by my reading lamp. I knew Nadja had caught me in her beautiful family web long before the epilogue, but when I reached \u201cthe bear\u201d and called out, \u201cNo, it was a heron,\u201d to my empty living room, I realized how much I wanted in. \u2014Julia Berick<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Jhumpa Lahiri begins the introduction to her translation of Domenico Starnone\u2019s\u00a0Trick<\/a><\/em>\u00a0by discussing how she picked the title.\u00a0Trick<\/em>\u2019s narrator is an illustrator in his seventies who returns to his childhood home (where his daughter lives) to spend a few days looking after his four-year-old grandson. Eager grandson and grouchy grandpa chat, play, set the table, argue, draw, and\u2014to greater delight to the four-year-old than to the old man\u2014play tricks. Lahiri hovers between \u201ctrick\u201d and \u201cgotcha\u201d as a translation of\u00a0scherzetto<\/em>, which titles and recurs throughout the Italian original. The story hovers there, too, somewhere between the fun of playing tricks together and the antagonism of one person playing a trick on another. The relationship between the two characters is tense, playful, exasperating, and touching, most deeply in the moments when the two act together. \u201cThen I, too, took off my shoes,\u201d the grandpa narrates. \u201cI got up on the bed, and we jumped for a while, holding hands. I felt my heart in my chest like a huge ball of live flesh that went up and down from my stomach to my throat and back again.\u201d It\u2019s been almost a year since I last jumped on a bed (maybe not so long as one might expect), and\u00a0reading\u00a0Trick<\/em>\u00a0brought back the feeling: in some ways exhilarating, in some ways weighty, and in all ways exultingly self-reflexive. \u2014Claire Benoit<\/strong><\/p>\n

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I\u2019ve heard that\u00a0Border Districts<\/em>\u00a0is not the ideal place to start with the work of Gerald Murnane. I\u2019d love to experience every piece of art in the ideal way, and my obsessive tendencies render me militantly obedient to order when possible, but that\u2019s just not how life works. (I am the same man who saw the second\u00a0Hunger Games<\/em>\u00a0movie without watching the first and walked out thinking it one of the best action movies in years.) Stubbornly, I did not heed the warning about Murnane and have now found myself plunged into the baffling, sometimes tedious, sometimes remarkable world of\u00a0Border Districts<\/em>, a snail\u2019s-pace wonderland brimming with\u00a0marbles, memories, and stained-glass windows. Murnane is not one for plot or characters or even scenes. From the sixty or so pages of\u00a0Border Districts<\/em>\u00a0I\u2019ve read so far, I can assume the narrator is a proxy for Murnane himself: an aging man living out the rest of his days in rural Australia, physically, but mentally immersed in the images that have haunted him his entire life. No detail is insignificant. Murnane spends several paragraphs describing the quality of light that emerges from a church\u2019s window, for example.\u00a0The word\u00a0obsession<\/em>\u00a0doesn\u2019t quite cut it.\u00a0What concerns Murnane and his narrator most is how we see the world.\u00a0\u201cI was too clumsy as a child to paint with my moistened brush the scenery that I would have liked to bring into being,\u201d he says at one point. \u201cI preferred to leave untouched in their white metallic surroundings my rows of powdery rectangles of water-colours, to read aloud one after another of the tiny printed names of the coloured rectangles, and to let each colour seem to soak into each word of its name or even into each syllable of each word of each name so that I could afterwards call to mind an exact shade or hue from an image of no more than black letters on a white ground.\u201d I am flailing here, but I\u2019m also utterly captivated. The narrator stares at photographs until phantom details emerge. He holds different marbles up to the light. He arranges similar shades of his expensive colored pencils in various sequences until he can conjecture the hues operating in the chasms between them. As dull as it can be, the story is so thoughtful and observant that I can\u2019t help but envy Murnane\u2019s focus, his monklike reverence for the minutiae of daily life. God is dead, he seems to say, but the images we form in our minds are worthy of worship. They are just as real as any tangible object and form the basis for our own private mythologies. \u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n

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In Deborah Levy\u2019s forthcoming memoir,\u00a0The Cost of Living<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>she attempts to discover who she is in the\u00a0aftershocks of a shipwrecked marriage and the death of her mother. She is\u00a0no longer a wife, no longer a daughter, yet still herself a mother, still a woman, still a writer. Other writers\u2014Proust, de Beauvoir, Camus\u2014join the chorus of her thoughts, and although Levy\u2019s career is ascendant (she has just been shortlisted for the Booker Prize when the story opens), she shows us her own work life\u2014a friend\u2019s dusty back-garden shed, a computer on the brink of extinction\u2014as anything but glamorous. Many of Levy\u2019s novels are set in faraway places\u2014the French Riviera, a chateau in Normandy, Spain\u2014and track the lives of vacationers or foreigners, the uneasy relationship between self and place. This memoir is set in the mundane\u2014after the divorce, she moves her two daughters to a block of North London flats, whose grim peeling hallway she ironically nicknames \u201cthe corridor of love\u201d\u2014and yet it is the mundane rendered unfamiliar, abrasively, perversely defamiliarized by a seismic internal shift. A pearl necklace bursts on its string,\u00a0grocery bags explode on a busy road: sometimes things have to break before they can be made whole. Levy teaches us how to\u00a0gather our lives,\u00a0ourselves, our whole chicken flattened by a car\u2019s tires, and move forward.\u00a0The pain floats beneath the surface, the book trembles with it, and by the end, we sense the courage and honesty Levy\u00a0required to submerge herself, breath held, fully into the past, the strange new present, and the future. \u2014Nadja Spiegelman<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  In 2009, Edwin Rist stole hundreds of bird skins from England\u2019s Natural History Museum at Tring, which holds one of the largest ornithological collections in the world. Among the collection were a number of\u00a0specimens collected by Alfred Russel Wallace, the British naturalist whose work is often credited with goading Charles Darwin to publish On […]<\/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":[33721,33724,33723,23212,33725,33727,15677,12059,2388,33726,2094,33722,30428,25564,16297,33728,33720,7677],"class_list":["post-124254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-and-the-natural-history-heist-of-the-century","tag-andrew-garfield","tag-angels-in-america","tag-border-districts","tag-christina-wood-martinez","tag-deborah-levy","tag-domenico-starnone","tag-gerald-murnane","tag-granta","tag-im-supposed-to-protect-you-from-all-this","tag-jhumpa-lahiri","tag-kirk-wallace-johnson","tag-nadja-spiegelman","tag-nathan-lane","tag-obsession","tag-the-cost-of-living","tag-the-feather-thief-beauty","tag-ties"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Birds, Borders, and Broadway<\/title>\n<meta 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