{"id":131540,"date":"2018-12-07T13:08:58","date_gmt":"2018-12-07T18:08:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=131540"},"modified":"2018-12-07T17:11:54","modified_gmt":"2018-12-07T22:11:54","slug":"staff-picks-whisky-priests-worlds-end-and-brilliant-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/12\/07\/staff-picks-whisky-priests-worlds-end-and-brilliant-friends\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Whisky Priests, World\u2019s End, and Brilliant Friends"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Still from Episode 1 (debut 11\/18\/18) of HBO\u2019s My Brilliant Friend<\/i>, \u201cLe Bambole (The Dolls).\u201d Photo: Eduardo Castaldo\/HBO.<\/p><\/div>\n

I tend to be suspicious of film and television adaptations of my favorite books. This might stem from a kind of jealousy\u2014the slow unraveling of a narrative or the exact right word used for the exact right idea are part of the pleasures of literature, but sometimes, as a writer, I wish I could borrow from film the immediacy of a jump cut or image. So it was with some apprehension that I began to watch My Brilliant Friend<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0HBO\u2019s new adaptation of Elena Ferrante<\/a>\u2019s Neapolitan novels. Would this first season\u2014eight episodes in total, dedicated entirely to portraying the first novel in the series\u2014water down the source material, with its unflinching portrayal of the violence and poverty of postwar Naples and the simultaneous terror and joy of girlhood and female friendship? After devouring the first few episodes this past weekend, I can assure you that, so far, it does not. Rather, this is the rare adaptation that both hews closely to its source material and yet manages to escape any stiltedness. And while Ferrante\u2019s novels remain first in my heart, there are moments in the television series\u2014the visual shock of a red menstrual stain amid the otherwise muted color palette\u2014that might work even better on film.\u00a0\u2014Rhian Sasseen\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

At a party recently, I nodded along to an anecdote about a critic\u2019s deathbed utterance: \u201cI am nothing.\u201d My interloper\u2019s point was that critics lead a negative existence; they\u2019re parasitic and contribute nothing. Yes, but \u2026 this week I read two extraordinary reviews of a minisuite of new Lucia Berlin books: Evening in Paradise<\/em>, a short-story collection,\u00a0and Welcome Home<\/em>,\u00a0a memoir. Berlin is a fascinating figure\u2014not difficult but, just like a woman, difficult to categorize. The New York Times Book Review<\/em> enlisted none other than\u00a0The Paris Review<\/em>\u2019s\u00a0own online editor, Nadja Spiegelman, to write about the books<\/a>, and the London Review of Books<\/em> called on Patricia Lockwood for yet another knockout review<\/a> in that bimonthly. As I settled myself against the pillows Wednesday night to treat myself to these reviews, I felt nearly spiritually grateful. I was able to appreciate the reestablishment of Berlin\u2019s rightful place in the palace of American letters and the simultaneous rise of a new generation of bright young writers, because neither Spiegelman nor Lockwood are merely critics. Though they have their bite and display their talents as reviewers, they are memoirists both, and Lockwood is also a poet. \u201cHomesick for Chile, she wrote to remember until each flower appeared in front of her,\u201d Spiegelman says of Berlin\u2019s motivation, and Lockwood calls Welcome Home<\/em> \u201ca little uncut ruby of a memoir.\u201d In his first orbit, John Glenn described the celestial blessing of watching a sunset and a moonrise simultaneously. I think I know just what he means. \u2014Julia Berick<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Alexander Calder, Black Beast<\/i>, 1940. Photo: Charlotte Strick.<\/p><\/div>\n

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The midcentury American masters Alexander Calder and Ellsworth Kelly, who in life were close friends, are once again in conversation on Manhattan\u2019s Upper East Side, at L\u00e9vy Gorvy\u2019s exhibition \u201cCalder \/ Kelly<\/a>,\u201d on view through January 9. Please relinquish any doubt, gallery-goers, that visual surprises await you within. I let out an audible gasp upon entering the dazzling, street-level gallery, which is dominated by Calder\u2019s triumphant nine-foot-tall Black Beast<\/em> (1940). This work looms large and doesn\u2019t look like it would play well with others. But instead it\u2019s kept in joyous company by the artist\u2019s much beloved kinetic mobiles as well as by Kelly\u2019s brilliant Yellow Curves<\/em> (2014)\u2014a painted aluminum wall sculpture that lights up the room like a mighty Chroma Color light bulb, despite its lack of wired electrics. Plant II<\/em> (1949)\u2014a small, striking oil on panel painted by Kelly a mere sixty-five years earlier\u2014hangs near by. Unbelievably, this is the first major exhibition of the two landmark artists that seeks to explore their common interest in color and movement\u2014and, just as compellingly, their shared fascination with the absence of color and movement. Brava to the curator, Veronica Roberts, who has seen to it that the three dozen paintings and sculptures in this show, each composed of strong, organic, distilled shapes, really sing to one another; the viewer experiences intentional shifts in mood from the playful to the profound. Poems by\u00a0Dan Chiasson, Forrest Gander, and Simon Perchik in response to the exhibition are quite literally writ large on the stairwell walls that link the galleries, so be sure to skip the elevator as you explore the show. If you do, you\u2019ll also be rewarded by oversize facsimiles of the artists\u2019 correspondence with each other during the midfifties. These letters capture a moving exchange of mutual admiration and artistic support, addressing one another by their famed surnames.\u00a0\u2014Charlotte Strick<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re always in the garden. Even Jesus wasn\u2019t always<\/em> in the garden.\u201d This admonishment comes about a third of the way through Paul Schrader\u2019s latest film,\u00a0First Reformed<\/em><\/a>, and is directed at the main character, Reverend Ernst Toller. The \u201cgarden\u201d is a reference to Jesus\u2019s solitary suffering in the garden of Gethsemane, and our Reverend Toller is indeed always in the garden\u2014he is also almost always alone in the largely unfurnished clergy house, tending to the historic First Reformed church and meticulously journaling, until a concerned parishioner asks him to council her husband, a climate-change activist with increasingly radical and violent ideas. The couple\u2019s appearance in Toller\u2019s life is a spark to the dark gasoline pool of his soul, and the fire spreads quickly, consuming and eroding his internal life at a rate matched only by his nightly whiskey consumption. (He willfully ignores the painful signs of kidney failure, mixing Pepto-Bismol with booze.) Schrader\u2019s character study of hopelessness and despair is a Frankenstein\u2019s monster of sorts: Pastor Tomas Ericsson of Bergman\u2019s Winter Light<\/em>, Graham Greene\u2019s \u201cwhisky priest,\u201d the protagonist of Bresson\u2019s Diary of a Country Priest<\/em>, and Thomas Merton are all present, though only Merton is named. However, the humanity of Ethan Hawke\u2019s performance saves his character from archetypal abstraction. For a man striving to occupy the cerebral realm, Toller\u2019s existence is a very physical one: the agony of an alcoholic\u2019s slow death is on his face, in his jaw set against pain; he sits with his knees tucked up, arms crossed across his chest, back and shoulders hunched, as though folding in on himself. It\u2019s a movie of concepts; not much actually happens until the incendiary final scene, but there are many conversations about the characters\u2019 concerns. And yet I never felt like I was having anything explained to me, even during the low, rumbly voiceovers reading from Toller\u2019s journal. First Reformed<\/em> is a haunting film about the psychological toll of powerlessness, specifically American powerlessness, and how the seeds of destruction are sown in the minds and hearts of those forgotten by American institutions. \u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cMother is a circle\u2014a complete and perfect hole.\u201d From that void, the lyrical prose of Sophia Shalmiyev\u2019s memoir, Mother Winter<\/em><\/a>, splits open like layer after layer of an ornate matryoshka<\/em>. With a mesmeric voice and scathing vulnerability, Shalmiyev peels her past down to its hollow core: the vacancy left by her absent mother. Her early memories of \u201cElena. Mother. Mama\u201d as a child in Communist Leningrad are marked by chronic alcoholism and starvation: \u201cmen\u2019s cologne to force down when out of vodka\u201d and \u201cthin blue veins on stark white breasts.\u201d When Russia crumbles into capitalism and Shalmiyev and her father abandon Elena for a tumultuous journey to America, Shalmiyev starts to write letters to her mother on index cards to chronicle her life as an \u201cAmerican changeling.\u201d One vignette at a time, she works hard to slough off her Russian accent, struggling to grow into an alien culture as well as her equally foreign adult body. Across time and geography, Shalmiyev stitches together the diffuse pieces of her fractured narrative in order to find out what it truly is that makes someone the right \u201ctype\u201d of woman, the right \u201ctype\u201d of mother\u2014especially as she becomes a mother herself.\u00a0\u2014Madeline Day<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Sophia Shalmiyev. Photo: Thomas Teal.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 stands in the midst of a midcentury art bromance, watches Ethan Hawke down Pepto cocktails, and admires \u2018My Brilliant Friend.\u2019<\/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":[42928,1084,14298,4499,35,42926,749,42921,14345,8618,80,6500,3156,38577,478,16586,280,42930,425,13206,21780,15865,39711,20651,42918,42917,79,42927,3686,42932,706,2029,42919,23422,15894,4324,18169,8362,42923,759,18318,24897,4027,42934,635,2270,36538,7481,202,6090,28388,30428,4329,42916,38721,12509,9741,42929,42925,24582,5561,447,261,42920,42922,36539,3939,882,883,25349,42931,7746,39699,42933,42924],"class_list":["post-131540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-a24","tag-adaptation","tag-alcoholism","tag-alexander-calder","tag-art","tag-black-beast","tag-book-recommendations","tag-calder-kelly","tag-capitalism","tag-christianity","tag-cinema","tag-climate-change","tag-communism","tag-critic","tag-criticism","tag-critics","tag-dan-chiasson","tag-diary-of-a-country-priest","tag-drama","tag-elena-ferrante","tag-ellsworth-kelly","tag-ethan-hawke","tag-evening-in-paradise","tag-favorites","tag-ferrante","tag-ferrante-fever","tag-film","tag-first-reformed","tag-forrest-gander","tag-frankensteins-monster","tag-graham-greene","tag-hbo","tag-i-am-nothing","tag-immigrant","tag-ingmar-bergman","tag-jesus","tag-john-glenn","tag-leningrad","tag-levy-gorvy","tag-london-review-of-books","tag-lucia-berlin","tag-lyrical","tag-manhattan","tag-matryoshka","tag-memoir","tag-mother","tag-mother-winter","tag-mothers","tag-movie","tag-movie-adaptations","tag-my-brilliant-friend","tag-nadja-spiegelman","tag-naples","tag-neapolitan-novels","tag-new-york-times-book-review","tag-patricia-lockwood","tag-paul-schrader","tag-pepto-bismol","tag-plant-ii","tag-reading-recommendations","tag-robert-bresson","tag-russia","tag-short-story","tag-short-story-collection","tag-simon-perchik","tag-sophia-shalmiyev","tag-soviet","tag-staff","tag-staff-picks","tag-starvation","tag-thomas-merton","tag-ussr","tag-welcome-home","tag-winter-light","tag-yellow-curves"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff 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