{"id":162800,"date":"2022-12-16T10:27:23","date_gmt":"2022-12-16T15:27:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=162800"},"modified":"2022-12-16T15:48:20","modified_gmt":"2022-12-16T20:48:20","slug":"what-the-paris-review-staff-read-in-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/12\/16\/what-the-paris-review-staff-read-in-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"What the Paris Review<\/em> Staff Read in 2022"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

From Mary Manning\u2019s portfolio Ciao!<\/em> in issue no. 242.<\/p><\/div>\n

The sadness of thinking about a year in reading is how little of it endures! As I try to recover lost time by rereading the terrible handwriting in my journal I find so many abandoned or forgotten books, and even the ones that remained in my memory are now reduced to an image or a sentence or a feeling\u2014but maybe this is universal, and therefore not so sad.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The book that stayed with me the most this year was Tove Ditlevsen\u2019s <\/span>The Copenhagen Trilogy<\/span><\/i><\/a>, not just because of how moving it is and how it performs such relentless moves with doom as she details her struggles with external demons (family, class, addiction) but because I still don\u2019t understand exactly how she accomplished this. Whenever I\u2019ve tried to define it in conversation, I end up saying something hopelessly abstract, like, \u201cThe series invents its own authority.\u201d This hopelessness made me want to come up with a corresponding new aesthetic category, something that would precisely and permanently define the compulsive.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In a very different mode: I keep remembering images from Jean-Patrick Manchette\u2019s crime novels, which I read this summer in some of NYRB Classics\u2019s reissues. My favorites, perhaps, were <\/span>No Room at the Morgue<\/span><\/i><\/a> and <\/span>Nada<\/span><\/i><\/a>, which aren\u2019t so much noirs as rapid phenomenologies of politics. There are dense technical descriptions of guns and scenes of people waiting in dark rooms, but operating through these minute details is a sense of a larger system.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These, I\u2019ve realized sadly, are the memories of reading I\u2019m left with now. But maybe this awareness of forgetting has been prompted by an experience I loved at the beginning of the year\u2014listening, online, to Alice Oswald\u2019s <\/span>lectures on poetry<\/span><\/a> at Oxford. The first, from 2019, is called <\/span>\u201cThe Art of Erosion<\/span><\/a>,\u201d and uses the seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick as an example of a writer with a way of working that she admires. It wasn\u2019t only her argument about poetry and erosion that I found both moving and invigorating, her idea that there is a poetry that builds up and a poetry that uncovers or erodes; it was the use of Herrick\u2014someone so apparently outmoded and forgotten!\u2014as her model for thinking through those subjects. Of course, I\u2019ve forgotten many other aspects of those nighttime lectures. So much is already eroded at the moment of listening, or reading. How any writer makes something survive\u2014even for a year\u2014is still a mystery.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Adam Thirlwell, advisory editor<\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

My friend Charlotte and I often attribute moments of temporary insanity to the effects of seasonal change. This is kind of a joke, kind of not, but in any case I\u2019m from New England, I\u2019m obsessed with the seasons, and so when I recall what I read this year I also remember the changes in the weather.<\/span><\/p>\n

1. Winter: Sick with COVID<\/small> on Epiphany, during one of New York\u2019s only snowfalls, I read Painting Time<\/i><\/a> by Maylis de Kerangal. It was not an easy book\u2014long, heavy sentences and little action\u2014but I kept returning to de Kerangal\u2019s gorgeous, breathless, breath-giving descriptions of painting sets for theaters and for movies. Her narrator is even tasked with recreating a replica of the cave paintings in Lascaux, a project that de Kerangal imagines in luscious passages that illuminated something for me about artifice and art.<\/p>\n

2. Spring makes me sad, despite all the flowering trees, because I paradoxically associate it with endings. (The school year, and the sad part of the Resurrection story.) Delayed for hours in the airport in San Francisco, feeling the kind of frightening misery that settles over me fortunately rarely, I read a book of Raymond Carver\u2019s short stories<\/a> back-to-back. This isn\u2019t something I would recommend.<\/p>\n

3. In July I got around to reading my Christmas present from my friend Rebecca: John Williams\u2019s Stoner<\/i><\/a>! I was totally absorbed in this quiet portrait of one man\u2019s consciousness, from cradle to grave\u2014there\u2019s no other book quite like it, is there? This was almost certainly a book for a different season\u2014the descriptions of the crackling frost and the streetlights in Missouri winter cast a long shadow over my memory of it\u2014but instead I finished it on the roof of the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles in August, so hot, waiting for someone to meet me. I will never forget my favorite sentence: \u201cAnd so he had his love affair.\u201d<\/p>\n

4. While in Boston over Thanksgiving, wearing too light a coat for the chill and feeling restless, I picked up The Pursuit of Love<\/i><\/a> by Nancy Mitford at a new bookstore on Charles Street. Immediately I was laughing. It\u2019s so indisputably English! It\u2019s biting in its satire and yet fundamentally warm\u2014there\u2019s a kind of sharp joy that felt compatible with November coziness, and that made it seem like the right thing to read as the year draws slowly and suddenly to a close.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014Sophie Haigney, web editor<\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A Dance to the Music of Time<\/span><\/i><\/a> may have temporarily ruined my life. Not only did it turn me into an insufferable person whose main subject of conversation was a little-read twelve-volume novel cycle about interwar Brits, but it made all other books read like thin gruel. Anthony Powell\u2019s novel follows a young man and his school friends from late teenagedom through middle age. We watch them try to achieve writerly fame, sleep around, conjure Marx with a Ouija board, start leftist literary magazines, and go to war. What interests Powell aren\u2019t people bonded together by strong ties like marriage but all the people who are usually cut out of novels in service of the central relationship: friends\u2019 exes whom one keeps running into, parents\u2019 pals with whom one must establish uneasy adult discussions, professional nemeses, golden boys gone bad. Because it leaves room for these awkward encounters, second divorces, and the chance that what someone thinks is their most secret love affair is actually all anyone else can talk about, the book is among the most lifelike things I\u2019ve ever read.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In my work as a journalist, I\u2019ve been thinking more and more about how traditional reporting, which often focuses on a single exemplary person, can never be entirely true. No one, no matter how powerful or famous, is actually operating alone. Powell\u2019s novel is the first literary work I\u2019ve read that maps out what a social life actually looks like: byzantine, random, and usually embarrassing. Powell is often compared to Proust, because both authors have written long books and have last names that start with <\/span>P<\/span><\/i>. But his purview is nothing like Proust\u2019s. He doesn\u2019t care about his narrators\u2019 thoughts. Powell\u2019s is a world of exteriors. He wants gossip.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Madeleine Schwartz, advisory editor<\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For me, 2022 was a year of historical fiction. The farthest back my reading took me was the twelfth century A.D., via Lauren Groff\u2019s <\/span>Matrix<\/span><\/i><\/a>, a tale of nun-power that thrills though it occasionally steers close to corny (this is the danger of historicals, particularly the swashbuckling type). Stay for the reinvented Pentecost scene, with hot flashes standing in for tongues of flame. The nearest it took me was the nineties, through Elif Batuman\u2019s <\/span>Either\/Or<\/span><\/i><\/a>, which includes the trappings of that era\u2014Alanis Morissette, <\/span>The Usual Suspects<\/span><\/i>, cottage cheese diets\u2014but, in its rendering of campus \u201cromance\u201d and the attendant anxieties, took me back to my own college experience in the early aughts (Death Cab, <\/span>Kill Bill<\/span><\/i>, the South Beach Diet). My favorite book I read this year, though, was <\/span>Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch<\/span><\/i><\/a> by Rivka Galchen, set in seventeenth-century Germany. Despite the title, it\u2019s a quiet book: accused of witchcraft, Katharina Kepler, a slightly Olive Kitteridge-like character, goes about the defense of her life and reputation (which are the same) in a matter-of-fact if not always practical way, keeping appointments with bureaucrats. Meanwhile, life goes on for her and her family and neighbors; they go to work, they spend time with their cows, they dab makeup on their acne. Chilling how like us they are, as they bumble toward a killing. The gem of the novel is Simon, Katharina\u2019s widower neighbor, who \u201cfirmly believe[s] that the life of a spinster is often better than that of a married woman. No dying in childbirth. No beast in the house.\u201d It\u2019s refreshing for an author to allow centuries-old characters real insight into their own time, rather than assigning them the beliefs we are told most people had\u2014and this is perhaps the best reason to write about them at all. Like us, they are caught up in absurdities that turn to atrocities; like us, they know it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Jane Breakell, development director<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This year seemed very long to me, though not in a bad way\u2014it just kept adding new chapters. The longest book I read, which also took me the longest to read, was Dickens\u2019s <\/span>Bleak House<\/span><\/i><\/a>, which I began in January but didn\u2019t finish until October. I doubt most people read the book to learn the outcome of Jarndyce v Jarndyce;what I remember most is its flood of indelible \u201cflat\u201d characters: Mrs. Jellyby\u2019s maniacal humanitarianism, the delusional \u201cdeportment\u201d of Old Mr. Turveydrop, the obsequiousness and ambition of Mr. Guppy. I read all kinds of books this year, but I was drawn to the ones that, in the spirit of <\/span>Bleak House<\/span><\/i>, overflow\u2014books crammed with people and images and possibilities. Books that remind you there can always be more, and more vivid, life. There was the ramshackle odyssey of Charles Portis\u2019s <\/span>The Dog of the South<\/span><\/i><\/a>; the infinite gradations of flower and fabric and season in Sei Sh\u014dnagon\u2019s <\/span>The <\/span><\/i>Pillow Book<\/span><\/i><\/a>; the still deepening roots of Lucille Clifton\u2019s <\/span>Generations<\/span><\/i><\/a>; the rich, devastating twilight of a culture in James Welch\u2019s <\/span>Fools Crow<\/span><\/i><\/a>; the seemingly endless rooms of the decaying Irish hotel (and the endless cats who haunt it) in J. G. Farrell\u2019s <\/span>Troubles<\/span><\/i><\/a>. And, of course, Bernadette Mayer\u2019s <\/span>Midwinter Day<\/span><\/i><\/a>, which enacts the fullness of every second and every stray thought passing. After reading something like that, who wouldn\u2019t want to try to feel their morning, their afternoon, a little more keenly?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014David S. Wallace, advisory editor<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the winter, I joined a small reading group that was being hosted by the Russian poet Maria Stepanova at Columbia University. She guided us in reading intergenerational and autobiographical writings from the Soviet Union and from present-day Ukraine that reveal a different historical narrative than Putin\u2019s. One of them, the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich\u2019s <\/span>Voices from Chernobyl<\/span><\/i><\/a>, is the most intimate oral history that I have ever read. Alexievich brings together brutal testimonies of the Chernobyl disaster from thousands of interviews with the victims, scientists, and Communist Party members who witnessed it firsthand. The journalistic \u201cI\u201d is nowhere to be found.<\/span><\/p>\n

I also inhaled Thomas Bernhard\u2019s <\/span>The Loser<\/span><\/i><\/a>, in one bleak fall afternoon<\/span>. <\/span><\/i>The book-length soliloquy is narrated by a fictional pianist who studies alongside Glenn Gould and lives in the shadow of his musical genius. The prose is propulsive, rhythmic, and filled with Nietzschean ressentiment. I listened to Glenn Gould\u2019s early interpretation of the <\/span>Goldberg Variations<\/span><\/i> repeatedly as I read, imagining Gould slouched<\/span> over the piano, just as obsessive as Bernhard\u2019s narrator playing Bach\u2019s arias hours after his listeners had gone home.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Campbell Campbell, intern<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I begin each year committed to documenting my reading with the discipline of an accountant. But by February I\u2019ve forgotten about the existence of my ledger, and by the spring I\u2019ve convinced myself that my memory\u2014partial, unreliable\u2014is a better reflection of the strange communions that happen while reading, which are otherwise cheapened by the determinism of obsessive list-making. The year\u2019s basic plot points, anyway, are easy to recount. For whatever reason, in 2022 I tended to read anthropologically. The winter was all about Scandinavia. I read, in quick succession, <\/span>Son of Svea<\/span><\/i><\/a> and <\/span>Willful Disregard<\/span><\/i><\/a> by Lena Andersson\u2014both excellent\u2014and then <\/span>Long Live the Post Horn!<\/span><\/i><\/a> and <\/span>Will and Testament<\/span><\/i><\/a> by Vigdis Hjorth. By the spring, I was motivated by resentment. I get an addictive, sick feeling reading books about scorned white women in love: a mixture of identification, rejection, defensiveness, and disgust. I indulged that feeling completely in my reading through the summer, and weaned myself off it only in the fall, when I turned toward books about settlers and immigrants in colonial and post-independence Africa. (For <\/span>research<\/span><\/i>, I told myself, burned by the books I had been seeking out for pleasure.) I read <\/span>Waiting for the Barbarians<\/span><\/i><\/a> by J. M. Coetzee, <\/span>A Bend in the River<\/span><\/i><\/a> by V. S. Naipaul, and then the stunning <\/span>letters <\/span><\/a>exchanged between<\/span> Pankaj Mishra and Nikil Saval on the occasion of Naipaul\u2019s death. Of Naipaul\u2019s legacy, Mishra writes: \u201cIn retrospect, his analysis of the failings of postcolonial states and societies does not seem unique; it could seem unprecedented only in the West\u2019s intellectually underresourced and politically partisan mainstream press. … Cold-war liberals warmed to anyone who attributed ideological\u200a\u2014\u200aand therefore suspect\u200a\u2014\u200amotives to those they deemed illiberal (or knew little about), while claiming perfect rationality for the free world, along with aesthetic and moral superiority.\u201d I didn\u2019t relate to A Bend in the River<\/em>\u2019s fatalism, even if I found it sociologically fascinating: What is it about the postcolony that enables its interlopers to declare life over? Finally, in November, I decided to combine my two most recent anthropological interests and read books about scorned white women in love in post-independence Africa. I reread the beginning of <\/span>The Golden Notebook<\/span><\/i><\/a> by Doris Lessing, and am now wading through <\/span>Mating<\/span><\/i><\/a> by Norman Rush, which seems to be having a moment; having read only a third of it, I\u2019m finding myself so far perplexed. I have a troubled preoccupation with the genre, which tends to recycle its set pieces: the promise of good, liberatory sex, usually extramarital, and an ongoing, if out of sight, literal liberation movement on the margins. (The theme of my year in reading, I guess, has been morbid curiosity.) Tayeb Salih\u2019s <\/span>Season of Migration to the North<\/span><\/a><\/em>, a reread, was my favorite book of the year, and last year, and probably the year before. The mythic figure at its core\u2014an English-educated Sudanese economist who appears in a small village, disappears just as quickly, and leaves a wake of terror at home and in the metropole\u2014tends to avenge the year\u2019s disappointments.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>\u2014Maya Binyam, contributing editor<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The best fiction I read this year was Seth Price\u2019s \u201cMachine Time,\u201d published in <\/span>Heavy Traffic 1<\/span><\/i><\/a> this summer. Most fiction is basically a simulation engine for human emotions and relationships<\/span>\u2014c<\/span>onversations with imaginary friends, etc<\/span>\u2014that<\/span> elides<\/span> a basic feature of both novels and humans: they are given form\u2014and feeling\u2014by something not so <\/span>warm and fuzzy, something abstract, like<\/span> the syntax of sentences or by a social system. Isn\u2019t the human condition also one of relating to the inhuman?<\/span> The charm of this story\u2014in which a contemporary artist attends a party at the \u201copen-air, Tropical-modern\u201d island fortress of a wealthy character named Trader\u2014is that it filters our world through the stylistic excesses of sci-fi, making it more alien rather than more \u201crelatable.\u201d Price steps neatly between manifesto-like interior monologue and precise prose that renders objects both specific and exotic, like a video game graphics engine: \u201cHis family had crossed the room in advance of their wheeled luggage like four new coins rolling across the carpet.\u201d \u201cMachine Time\u201d isn\u2019t magic realism; it is realism for a reality (our own) in which all forms, sociopolitical and otherwise, are in flux. Price\u2019s narrator is in the business of such metamorphoses: he has \u201cdesigned business envelopes that could be slipped into and worn to a party.\u201d His job, like those of many of us today, is \u201cto express without end.\u201d He\u2019s a creative professional, a bit like the \u201ccorporate anthropologist\u201d of Tom McCarthy\u2019s <\/span>Satin Island<\/span><\/i>, only funnier and more ruthless. He has \u201cdiscovered that with a slight tilt of the head all the meanings flickered and vanished, and it fill[s] [him] with a vertiginous, darkly ecstatic feeling.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In winter, spring, and fall I read three <\/span>mysteries<\/span><\/a> by <\/span>Raymond<\/span><\/a> Chandler<\/span><\/a>, whose narrator is a<\/span>lso <\/span>an investigator and<\/span>, inevitably,<\/span> an instrument, of his times.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor<\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I am decidedly allergic to flowery prose. I take the fact that I\u2019ve just employed an adverb as a sign of personal growth. It\u2019s unlike me to work through a Victorian novel and consider it anything less than a massive chore. But as a reluctant New Yorker, a country mouse confined to a city mouse life, I was drawn to the title of Thomas Hardy\u2019s farmer love-triangle classic<\/span>.<\/span> Far<\/span><\/i> from the Madding Crowd<\/span><\/i><\/a>.<\/span><\/i> Hardy can certainly wax pastoral; I felt quite at home in the dreamy green acres of that whimsical Wessex kingdom. I also found his joyfully absurd British humor a welcome antidote to a certain post-COVID<\/small> brand of urban humorlessness<\/span> that, if I\u2019m not careful, does occasionally infect my own soul.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

More in keeping with my usual tastes: <\/span>Also a Poet<\/span><\/i><\/a> by <\/span>Ada Calhoun<\/span>, in which she <\/span>sets out to do what her father, <\/span>the <\/span>art critic Peter Schjeldahl<\/span>,<\/span> could not: compose the seminal biography of Frank O\u2019Hara. Her project takes a fortuitous turn when O\u2019Hara\u2019s estate refuses to approve. What results is not only a love letter to Frank O\u2019Hara, his charismatic cronies, and the glorious New York in which they lived<\/span> but a tribute to Calhoun\u2019s relationship with Schjeldahl<\/span>,<\/span> and to her feral East Village upbringing. Anyone with a brilliant but difficult father should read<\/span> Also a Poet.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014Morgan Pile, business manager<\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I was looking for something to help me cope with a grim January, so I bought\u00a0 a copy of <\/span>The Group<\/span><\/i><\/a>, Mary McCarthy\u2019s 1963 novel. I spent a wintery weekend with McCarthy\u2019s cast of eight Vassar grads as they figure out their burgeoning lives in New York. The book was my favorite this year and stayed with me long after I put it back on the shelf: I reread passages, watched the (terrible) 1966 film, pined after a beautiful <\/span>first edition<\/span><\/a>, and became obsessed with the book\u2019s<\/span> public reception<\/span><\/a>, particularly with Robert Lowell\u2019s dismissive claim: \u201cNo one in the know likes the book.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In late spring, I picked up <\/span>The Spare Room<\/span><\/i><\/a>, the first book of Helen Garner\u2019s that I\u2019ve read,<\/span> in anticipation of our <\/span>interview<\/span><\/a> with her in our Fall issue. I was moved and inspired by the frankness of her writing\u2014how her spare prose captured the sometimes painful and complicated nature of best friendship.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the middle of summer, preparing for a trip to Paris, I read <\/span>Cher Connard<\/span><\/i><\/a>, <\/span><\/i>Virginie Despentes\u2019s humorous, ultracontemporary new epistolary novel. In France, whole billboards were taken up by Despentes\u2019s cover art, posters of the book\u2019s cover lined every bookstore window, and Despentes made various television appearances. I felt pleased to have come prepared.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fall was full of books I started and stopped, until I came across an <\/span>interview<\/span><\/a> with Paula Fox in our archives and was immediately charmed by her way of speaking, especially when describing the difficulties she\u2019d faced in her young life: \u201c<\/span>I often thought of killing myself but then I wanted lunch.\u201d<\/span> The very next day, as though he\u2019d read my mind, my boyfriend gave me a copy of <\/span>Desperate Characters<\/span><\/i><\/a> for us to read together.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Camille Jacobson, engagement editor<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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