{"id":64024,"date":"2013-12-20T13:28:52","date_gmt":"2013-12-20T18:28:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=64024"},"modified":"2014-03-07T13:58:18","modified_gmt":"2014-03-07T18:58:18","slug":"what-were-loving-racetrack-murals-lovers-a-childs-christmas-in-wales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/12\/20\/what-were-loving-racetrack-murals-lovers-a-childs-christmas-in-wales\/","title":{"rendered":"What We\u2019re Loving: Racetrack Murals, Lovers, A Child\u2019s Christmas in Wales"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/A-Childs-Christmas-in-Walelarge.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-64028\" alt=\"A-Childs-Christmas-in-Walelarge\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/A-Childs-Christmas-in-Walelarge.jpg\" width=\"600\" height=\"591\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/A-Childs-Christmas-in-Walelarge.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/A-Childs-Christmas-in-Walelarge-300x295.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>One of my favorite novels of the past few years is Andr\u00e9s Neuman\u2019s <em>Traveler of the Century<\/em>, an ambitious \u201ctotal novel\u201d that is many things: a love story, a murder mystery, and, most of all, a novel of ideas. While his latest, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0374167532\/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&#038;camp=1789&#038;creative=9325&#038;creativeASIN=0374167532&#038;linkCode=as2&#038;tag=theparrev0f-20\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Talking to Ourselves<\/em><\/a>, is much more brief and intimate, it is no less moving and intelligent. And while <em>Traveller<\/em> was set in an imaginary place, <em>Talking to Ourselves<\/em> is grounded in our reality, alternating between the voices of a father, mother, and son as they all deal with the father&#8217;s illness. None of them dares to express the complete the truth to the other two; instead, it\u2019s up to us to put the pieces together. As the mother, Elena, expresses near the end, \u201cLet&#8217;s be honest. All honesty is a little posthumous.\u201d\u00a0<strong>\u2014Justin Alvarez<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>When I last left America, an airport official confiscated Dos Passos\u2019s <i>USA<\/i> trilogy to reduce my hand-luggage; I learnt my lesson and flew back in bearing only one light paperback, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.indiebound.org\/book\/9780812980097?aff=theparisreview\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Open City<\/i><\/a> by Teju Cole. As I read it over three months, its narrator, Julius, walked through the same streets of New York (then Brussels and back to New York) in a headspace James Wood astutely calls \u201cproductive alienation,\u201d nourishing common encounters on the street with memories (of his father&#8217;s funeral, Nigeria, schoolmates illnesses, the first illicit consumption of a pornographic magazine or a Coca Cola).\u00a0His narrative is besieged by loss, and calibrated, in the end, to omit rather than include. Cole&#8217;s novel is paradoxical, \u201cturned in on itself\u201d as Manhattan itself is: \u201cwater was a kind of embarrassing secret, the unloved daughter, neglected, while the parks were doted on, fussed over, overused.\u201d\u00a0<strong>\u2014Lucie Elven<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u201cYears and years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.\u201d If one story conjures the youthful enchantment of tossing snowballs at neighborhood cats and building snowmen, of chimneys emitting plumes of smoke, surely it must be Dylan Thomas\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.indiebound.org\/book\/9780811215602?aff=theparisreview\" target=\"_blank\"><i>A Child\u2019s Christmas in Wales<\/i><\/a>. Published in a slim blue volume by New Directions, this comic tale of family and friends of Christmas past is sure to delight; I joyfully revisit Thomas\u2019s word-drunk reverie each year. <strong>\u2014Adam Winters<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This week I\u2019ve been reading the Barbara Bray translation of Marguerite Duras\u2019s <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.indiebound.org\/book\/9780375700521?aff=theparisreview\" target=\"_blank\">L\u2019amant<\/a><\/em> (<em>The Lover<\/em>). On more than one occasion I found myself reading it aloud, not just to hear the pleasant tensions of translation, but to also listen to the heartache of Duras\u2019s language. Against the backdrop of prewar Indochina, Duras paints the most tempestuous of love affairs. Yet amidst the novel\u2019s unabated despair\u2014the <em>affaire de coeur<\/em>, the family torn asunder by poverty, the mother\u2019s madness, the young girl\u2019s insatiable desire for another young girl\u2019s body\u2014shines a beacon of hope: the narrator\u2019s inexorable determination to become a writer. \u201cI\u2019m still part of the family, it&#8217;s there I live to the exclusion of everywhere else. It\u2019s in its aridity, it\u2019s terrible harshness, its malignancy, that I\u2019m most deeply sure of myself, at the heart of my essential certainty, the certainty that later on I\u2019ll be a writer.\u201d To second Maxine Hong Kingston\u2019s remarks in her Introduction to the novel, \u201c<em>The Lover<\/em> is a story about a girl and a woman becoming an artist.\u201d <strong>\u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Sportswriter Joe Palmer once warned that those of us who\u2019ve spent time at the races may develop an \u201cunreasonable fondness for certain places,\u201d and if you\u2019ve ever been to Aqueduct\u2014the neon lights, the cinderblock walls, the geriatric thugs crowding the parimutuel windows\u2014no doubt you\u2019re familiar with the sentiment. <i>A certain charm<\/i>, one might say, if one were drunk on Wild Turkey\u2014and yet the kids have not caught on, or at least not yet. The New York Racing Association recently commissioned thirteen street artists to liven up those cinderblock walls, resulting in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aqueductmurals.com\/home.html\" target=\"_blank\">several murals<\/a> diverse in style, size and subject matter (including portraiture based on archival photos supplied by the NYRA). On a recent afternoon the grizzled throngs were still in evidence, though I also spied a few fresh-faced twenty-somethings looking only slightly ill at ease. Aqueduct\u2019s current meet runs through December 31. <strong>\u2014Abby Gibbon<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of my favorite novels of the past few years is Andr\u00e9s Neuman\u2019s Traveler of the Century, an ambitious \u201ctotal novel\u201d that is many things: a love story, a murder mystery, and, most of all, a novel of ideas. While his latest, Talking to Ourselves, is much more brief and intimate, it is no less [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115,438],"tags":[12435,2453,2475,12012],"class_list":["post-64024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-barbara-bray","tag-dylan-thomas","tag-marguerite-duras","tag-teju-cole"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>What We\u2019re Loving: Racetrack Murals, Lovers, A Child\u2019s Christmas in Wales by Sadie Stein<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"December 20, 2013 \u2013 One of my favorite novels of the past few years is Andr\u00e9s Neuman\u2019s Traveler of the Century, an ambitious \u201ctotal novel\u201d that is many things: a love story,\" \/>\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\/2013\/12\/20\/what-were-loving-racetrack-murals-lovers-a-childs-christmas-in-wales\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What We\u2019re Loving: Racetrack Murals, Lovers, A Child\u2019s Christmas in Wales by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 20, 2013 \u2013 One of my favorite novels of the past few years is Andr\u00e9s Neuman\u2019s Traveler of the Century, an ambitious \u201ctotal novel\u201d that is many things: a love story,\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" 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