{"id":71763,"date":"2014-05-23T17:15:36","date_gmt":"2014-05-23T21:15:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=71763"},"modified":"2019-02-04T17:25:04","modified_gmt":"2019-02-04T22:25:04","slug":"what-were-loving-real-struggle-real-soul-real-tennis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/05\/23\/what-were-loving-real-struggle-real-soul-real-tennis\/","title":{"rendered":"What We\u2019re Loving: Real Struggle, Real Soul, Real Tennis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Karl Ove Knausgaard\u2019s My Struggle<\/em>\u2014judging by the half that\u2019s been translated into English\u2014is a tough book for a critic to grapple with: a six-volume autobiographical novel that can spend fifty pages describing a teenage beer run or a second-grader\u2019s first day at school. The book was a sensation when it appeared in Norway, five years ago; since then it has fascinated (and puzzled) many readers in America, from James Wood and Zadie Smith to Jonathan Lethem. Volume Three is my favorite so far, though no doubt the effect is cumulative: I\u2019ve never read such a vivid depiction of ordinary child abuse\u2014the legal, non-sexual kind\u2014from a child\u2019s point of view; I have never seen a writer evoke the world of child\u2019s play so vividly, or the view from the back seat of a car on a long drive. Not everyone feels the love. In The Nation<\/em><\/a>, the irascible William Deresiewicz dismisses My Struggle<\/em> as a \u201cgiant selfie,\u201d wishes Knausgaard wrote more like John Updike or Saul Bellow, and chalks up the enthusiasm of his fans to narcissism: \u201cThe spectacle of a fellow author\u2019s self-revelation . . . has obvious professional significance.\u201d It\u2019s rarely a good sign when a reviewer vents his spleen on other readers. For a corrective, see Ben Lerner in the London Review of Books<\/em><\/a>. Lerner notices all the same things as Deresiewicz\u2014Knausgaard\u2019s use of cliche, his digressions, his seeming\u00a0lack of form or invention\u2014then tries, brilliantly and persuasively, to explain why they work. Lerner places My Struggle<\/em> in a long tradition of novels at war with novelistic convention, a tradition that he associates with the avant garde and that others might call realism itself. Agree with it or not, this is actual criticism. As Lerner writes: \u201cIt\u2019s easy to marshal examples of what makes\u00a0My Struggle<\/em>\u00a0mediocre. The problem is: it\u2019s amazing.\u201d \u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

On Wednesday night, I had the great pleasure of seeing an interview with D\u2019Angelo, perhaps the most gifted, elusive artist working in R&B\u2014he\u2019s ascended into the pantheon with Sly Stone and Prince, visionary but inscrutable. With 2000\u2019s Voodoo<\/a><\/em>, D\u2019Angelo made what remains the definitive soul record of the past fifteen years, a languid, earthy tour de force that borrows in equal measure from the church and the street. Since then, he hasn\u2019t released a thing; he\u2019s scarcely even performed in public. So his appearance on Wednesday had a sense of anticipation: would he announce a new album? He didn\u2019t, but he was such a gracious, remarkable, casual speaker that it didn\u2019t matter. NPR has posted a transcript of the conversation<\/a>, which was held before a sold-out crowd at Brooklyn Museum. It touches on his adolescence in Richmond, Virginia; his painstaking, deeply hermetic recording process; and his gospel-inflected approach to songwriting. Nelson George, the interviewer, put it best when he told D\u2019Angelo, \u201cYou\u2019re one of the few people who has mystique, you know that. I mean in the age of TMZ and all that stuff \u2026 there\u2019s an aura still about your career. It\u2019s very unusual today for anybody to have any mystery left.\u201d \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/strong><\/p>\n

I recently unearthed a 1999\u00a0LRB<\/em>\u00a0review by\u00a0Edward Said of a tennis anthology edited by the novelist Caryl Phillips<\/a>. When I think of tennis, I don\u2019t think of Said (nor do I imagine Phillips, for that matter)\u2014all the more reason to give it my attention. I also have a vested interest in tennis.\u00a0My father grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, and played near the West Side Tennis Club (the club wouldn\u2019t let Jews join, but he did see early professionals such as Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, and a sixteen-year-old Chris Evert play there); his father played competitive tennis into his early nineties (the pool of players in his age group was quite small, as you might imagine); and\u00a0I grew up watching tennis matches on television with my parents and trying to learn the sport myself. Though I only sometimes watch Wimbledon or the US Open now, I can tell the stakes have changed. As Said bemoans, tennis has largely lost its amateur class, and its league of professional players are \u201ctechnical specialists\u201d ruined\u00a0by commercial interests. Federer is lovely to watch, but his recent dominance of the game was boring. The women\u2019s game, Said points out, retains its \u201chuman pace\u201d and \u201cinventiveness.\u201d That no single woman dominates the sport makes the matches more fun to watch, more exciting, more \u2026 sporting.\u00a0\u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1934, Oscar Reutersv\u00e4rd pioneered the modeling of \u201cimpossible objects,\u201d two-dimensional figures that project a three-dimensional object when viewed from a particular direction. The puzzle game \u201cMonument Valley<\/a>,\u201d available on both iOS and Android, is built on this optical illusion\u2014a sort of architectural Sudoku. It allows the player to interact with the isometric environment of dead-end paths and trick doors, moving the game\u2019s protagonist, Ida, through gaps that seem to defy logic. The game is one of the most beautiful I\u2019ve ever played. It\u2019s like, as many have noted, an M. C. Escher drawing brought to life. The game designer Ken Wong told Wired<\/em>, \u201cWe hope players will stay engaged for the same reasons they might enjoy a walk through a museum or an art gallery.\u201d \u2014Justin Alvarez<\/strong> <\/p>\n

I was recently sent a book of poetry called A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind<\/em><\/a>, by a poet I\u2019d never heard of, Alfred Starr Hamilton. He wasn\u2019t widely read or published in his lifetime; this is the first full collection of his work. The book, with its childlike, lonely, careful poems, was a revelation to me. Hamilton writes often in metaphor (my sub-pick for this week, if I\u2019m allowed one of those, is Denis Donoghue\u2019s latest<\/a>, a book on how metaphor changes the world) and manages to create sweet optimism in feelings of sadness or wistfulness, though his life didn\u2019t seem to contain much encouragement. In the preface and introduction to this book, you can read about the forty-five or so poems per week that Hamilton sent to Cornell\u2019s Epoch<\/em> magazine\u2014a volume that exceeds even The Paris Review<\/em> record for submissions per week from a single poet\u2014which accumulated in shoeboxes, and about the time Hamilton was arrested for refusing to take shelter during an air raid drill in 1961. Like a gentleman, he notified the police in advance of the necessity for his arrest: \u201cPeaceably protesting the air raid siren on April 28, 4 P.M., I will be sitting in the park at Watchung Plaza by the flag pole, reasonably refusing shelter, I will not resist being arrested impersonally, and may peaceably be taken to the station.\u201d \u2014Anna Heyward<\/strong><\/p>\n

On Monday night,\u00a0Fun Home<\/em>, the musical based on Alison Bechdel\u2019s graphic memoir,\u00a0cleaned up at the Obie Awards<\/a>. And just a few weeks ago, Bechdel and the cast and crew of the musical\u00a0went down to South Carolina<\/a>\u00a0to speak and perform in support of the College of Charleston, after the institution\u2019s budget was cut for assigning Bechdel\u2019s gay-positive\u00a0Fun Home<\/em>\u00a0to incoming freshman. Book burners have an unintentional habit of pointing us straight to the good stuff, and the South Carolina legislators are no exception, having led us to this brilliant, thoughtful memoir. In graphic frames, Bechdel curates the accumulated artifacts of her life\u2014drawings, photographs, diary entries, letters, maps\u2014to craft a witty, erudite reflection on her relationship with her complex and secretive father.\u00a0Childhood habits and quirks, like an original font character that crops up in Bechdel\u2019s early diaries, become fodder for Winnicottian analysis, to delightful effect. A thought-provoking and visually beautiful addition to your summer reading list, perhaps best enjoyed in the company of Bechdel\u2019s masterfully deployed interlocutors, from Winnicott to Joyce to Wilde. If you\u2019ve already read\u00a0Fun Home<\/em>, check out Bechdel\u2019s equally hilarious and heartfelt follow-up,\u00a0Are You My Mother?<\/em> \u2014Chantal McStay<\/strong><\/p>\n

Before traveling abroad, some people pick up a Lonely Planet guide or two, maybe create a rough itinerary for each day, even go tanning to avoid an early sunburn. I read the local literature, as impractical as it may be. I\u2019m going to Brazil next month, and I can\u2019t tell you about what the weather may be or what the critic\u2019s picks are for restaurants or bars in Rio de Janeiro. But I can<\/em> tell you, as I read through Hilda Hilst\u2019s novel With My Dog-Eyes<\/em><\/a>, about the country\u2019s \u201cvertiginous-precise landscape done with a Japanese paintbrush.\u201d Or the labyrinthine \u201cveredas\u201d described in Jo\u00e3o Guimar\u00e3es Rosa\u2019s The Devil to Pay in the Backlands<\/em><\/a>,\u201d \u201cwhere a criminal can safely hide out, beyond the reach of the authorities \u2026 God himself, when he comes here, had better come armed!\u201d Or the fused language of formal Portuguese and native Brazilian in M\u00e1rio de Andrade\u2019s Macuna\u00edma<\/em><\/a>, whose titular hero was born \u201cin a far corner of Northern Brazil, at an hour when so deep a hush had fallen on the virgin forest that the brawling of the Uraricoera River could be heard.\u201d In these books I can understand, to paraphrase Jan Morris in our Art of the Essay interview<\/a>, not just how someone feels about a country but something powerful about the country itself. \u2014J.A.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Karl Ove Knausgaard\u2019s My Struggle\u2014judging by the half that\u2019s been translated into English\u2014is a tough book for a critic to grapple with: a six-volume autobiographical novel that can spend fifty pages describing a teenage beer run or a second-grader\u2019s first day at school. The book was a sensation when it appeared in Norway, five years […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[438],"tags":[14047,7451,3263,14044,14045,8542,14046,14043],"class_list":["post-71763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-alfred-starr-hamilton","tag-alison-bechdel","tag-ben-lerner","tag-dangelo","tag-edward-said","tag-karl-ove-knausgaard","tag-monument-valley","tag-william-deresiewicz"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat We\u2019re Loving: Real Struggle, Real Soul, Real Tennis<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week\u2019s staff picks, including the mystique of D\u2019Angelo, the changing stakes of tennis, and the struggle with Karl Ove Knausgaard.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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