{"id":99716,"date":"2016-06-24T12:19:26","date_gmt":"2016-06-24T16:19:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=99716"},"modified":"2016-06-24T13:09:44","modified_gmt":"2016-06-24T17:09:44","slug":"staff-picks-bad-calls-bad-books-breakups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/24\/staff-picks-bad-calls-bad-books-breakups\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Bad Calls, Bad Books, Breakups"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"From<\/a>

A still from Apichatpong Weerasethakul\u2019s film Cemetery of Splendor<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Tate Modern, in London, recently showed Cemetery of Splendor<\/em>, the new and wonderful movie by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It was part of a weekend homage to the sly, metaphysical Thai filmmaker, including an all-night sequence of his complete works. Now, I am no longer young enough to watch movies all night, so I contented myself with my own home retrospective, including the wonderful bipartite movies Tropical Malady<\/em> and Syndromes and a Century<\/em>. In the new Tanks space at Tate Modern, which just opened this weekend, you can also see his installation Primitive<\/a><\/em>, a nine-video extravaganza. There are few people thinking more rigorously, or more joyfully. \u2014Adam Thirlwell<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was so relieved to read Tim Parks\u2019s review of The Vegetarian<\/em><\/a>, the Man Booker\u2013winning novel by Korean Han Kang. The novel came recommended by a friend, so I persisted till the bitter end, despite grousing about every awkward sentence, every clich\u00e9, every narrative contradiction. I spent much of the first section wondering whether it was the fault of the writer or the translator. Parks was bothered by the same question and spends the space of his review examining the way content and style in the English translation work in relation to one another. He concludes that \u201cthe prose is far from an epitome of elegance, the drama itself neither understated nor beguiling, the translation frequently in trouble with register and idiom.\u201d But for Parks, The Vegetarian<\/em> isn\u2019t merely a bad book badly translated; it\u2019s representative of a \u201cshared vision of what critics would like a work of \u2018global fiction\u2019 to be.\u201d The desire to always see oneself in a story necessarily limits one\u2019s view of the world, and seems to me to be the exact opposite reason for reading a book\u00a0in\u00a0translation\u2014or any book, for that matter\u2014in the first place. \u2014Nicole Rudick
<\/strong><\/p>\n

Just yesterday I was given two gorgeous chapbooks, both part of a series called Se\u00f1al of contemporary Latin American poetry in translation. I began the first in the series\u2014Sor Juana y otros monstruos<\/em><\/a>, a dissertation (of sorts) in verse by Luis Felipe Fabre, translated by John Pluecker\u2014this morning, and I haven\u2019t been able to put it down. Fabre muses on the scholarship buzzing around the seventeenth-century poet Sor Juana In\u00e9s de la Cruz, tackling one assertion in particular. \u201cYes: Sor Juana was a monster,\u201d he writes. It\u2019s a claim most academics accept as true, but \u201cwhere they differ\u2009\/\u2009is\u2009\/\u2009\/\u2009on what kind of monster she was.\u201d Was she a phoenix? A sphinx? Will she, as Fabre imagines, return at night to devour her scholars because her body has never been found? And yet, the most striking question Fabre goes on to ask is this: \u201cWhat kind\u2009\/\u2009of monster is it whose power\u2009\/\u2009resides in language?\u201d Whatever it is, Fabre would be one, too; Sor Juana y otros mostruos<\/em> is like nothing I\u2019ve read in a long while. \u2014Caitlin Youngquist
<\/strong><\/p>\n

Who among us hasn\u2019t fantasized about going back\u2014or forward\u2014in time? It may seem like one of the basic human fantasies, but, apart from a few marginal cases like Rip van Winkle, nobody traveled in time until the end of the nineteenth century. As James Gleick shows in Time Travel: A History<\/a><\/em>, the idea of moving from one historical era to another is quintessentially modern\u2014a secret key to the philosophy, physics, and literature of the last hundred years.\u00a0\u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n


\"so-much-for-that-winter\"<\/a>What I find most refreshing about Dorthe Nors\u2019s So Much for That Winter<\/a><\/em> is how both novellas concern themselves only with the bones of narrative. The first, \u201cMinna Needs Rehearsal Space,\u201d is a story about a text-message breakup, told only in short, declarative sentences that act as their own paragraphs; the second, \u201cDays,\u201d is composed of lists, and while each numbered item corresponds with a new action or shift in thought, they read more like lines of poetry more than any sort of directive or Buzzfeedish clickbait. I often felt like I was reading two very different diaries, both written by lonesome people who are terrified by the passage of time, who lend meaning to their days by parsing them out into the smallest of moments, each one worthy of record because there isn\u2019t a second that goes by when the characters aren\u2019t thinking. And if free thought doesn\u2019t make time meaningful, what does? Here, when the protagonist of \u201cDays\u201d\u2014a semidepressed, late-thirties woman who lives by herself\u2014describes the turn from winter to spring, we see that even resolutions can read like abstract inventories of thought: \u201c11. so forget it,\u2009\/\u200912. forget the view that day across the canal, 13. forget the winter-gray roofs, 14. the way the mitten got snagged on the bannister,\u2009\/\u200915. the hoarfrost and the sort of things that remain, 16. shrug it off, forget it, 17. the injustice of it all, 18. for now it is spring.\u201d \u2014Daniel Johnson<\/strong><\/p>\n

My lack of prison experience notwithstanding, I\u2019ve been raving about the realism of David Mackenzie\u2019s prison drama, Starred Up<\/a><\/em>, which feels, to my unincarcerated mind, powerfully true to life. Adapted from Jonathan Asser\u2019s firsthand account of his work as a volunteer therapist, the film follows Eric Love, a young man who has been \u201cstarred up\u201d\u2014transferred from a juvenile program to an adult prison\u2014because of his violent tendencies. Convincing performances from Jack O\u2019Connell and Ben Mendelsohn pave the way for a brutal, Cormac McCarthy\u2013type vision of hardened men, their anger and their attempts to exorcise it. Neville Love, Eric\u2019s father and fellow convict, does his best to guide Eric safely out of the system and steers him toward a therapy program run by Asser\u2019s fictional counterpart. The writing is deft, the drama is intense and engaging, and the plot manages to find moments of warmth amidst piercing brutality.\u00a0\u2014Ty Anania<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m finally reading A Manual for Cleaning Women<\/em><\/a>, the posthumous collection of short stories by Lucia Berlin that came out last year. I\u2019m not sure why I waited so long to pick it up. I loved the first reviews, Joy Williams\u2019s<\/a> especially, and\u00a0Lydia Davis\u2019s foreword<\/a> (two brilliant endorsements by women whose work reaches a similar register of soul-baring high art). Maybe it was that the reviews were thorough, so praising, that I felt as if I\u2019d read the stories already. Now I realize I should have rushed to the bookstore at once. Like her own vivid and chaotic life (Berlin held many jobs, was a mother of four, struggled with alcoholism, and migrated between Colorado, New Mexico, El Paso, Alaska, Chile, Mexico, and other locales), the action in her stories springs (see \u201cB.F. and Me<\/a>\u201d), resulting in an inevitable propulsion: you find yourself absorbed in one, then vaulted into the next\u2014and the next and the next. \u201cThese stories make you forget what you were doing, where you are, even who you are,\u201d Lydia Davis writes. Reading on the train this morning, soaking up \u201cTiger Bites,\u201d I almost missed my stop. It wasn\u2019t until I heard the conductor announce the next that I saw this was me and rushed out while the doors crunched shut behind. \u2014Caitlin Love<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Detail<\/a>

Detail of a portrait of Sor Juana In\u00e9s de la Cruz.<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s only natural: when you\u2019re young, you read historical accounts of terrible events\u2014not the earthquakes and floods but the elections of dictators and the wars of no pressing urgency\u2014and you ask yourself, What were they thinking? Didn\u2019t they know? And then you get a little older and you realize that some of them did know, but not enough of them did, or not the right kind. And then you get a little older still and you recognize that even if history is nothing other than the story of what people have done, that is not to say that history is reducible to the story of what individual people have done. There are currents and flows, systems and structures, and these are not only metaphors, not only heuristics. But press on even longer and you see that sometimes it really is just as simple as you once believed: a person, one person, makes a bad call, and the rest of the world suffers. So it seems to be with David Cameron, whose decision to hold a referendum on whether the UK ought to leave the EU will, I expect, earn pride of place in the annals of unforced errors, right up there alongside the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. I can\u2019t pretend any special insight into British or European politics\u2014for a good pr\u00e9cis of the issues, or rather the emotions, at stake in the Brexit referendum, see Anthony Lane at The New Yorker<\/em><\/a>\u2014but already I possess too much expertise in waking up in the grip of a world-historical mistake. Someone on Twitter wrote this morning about recognizing that we\u2019re living through the sort of year whose four numerals will serve as the common title for a whole genre of retrospectives. It\u2019s a sobering thought, made more terrifying by the inescapable corollary: this is only June. \u2014Robert P. Baird<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tate Modern, in London, recently showed Cemetery of Splendor, the new and wonderful movie by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It was part of a weekend homage to the sly, metaphysical Thai filmmaker, including an all-night sequence of his complete works. Now, I am no longer young enough to watch movies all night, so I contented myself with […]<\/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":[19181,4735,21510,35,22948,22952,8294,22949,79,22740,17364,22955,7285,18318,22954,576,165,8902,22953,22950,7938,22741,7014,15066,530,22951,2080],"class_list":["post-99716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-a-manual-for-cleaning-women","tag-anthony-lane","tag-apichatpong-weerasethakul","tag-art","tag-brexit","tag-cemetery-of-splendor","tag-david-cameron","tag-david-mackenzie","tag-film","tag-han-kang","tag-james-gleick","tag-john-pluecker","tag-joy-williams","tag-lucia-berlin","tag-luis-felipe-fabre","tag-lydia-davis","tag-poetry","tag-prison","tag-sor-juana-ines-de-la-cruz","tag-starred-up","tag-tate-modern","tag-the-vegetarian","tag-tim-parks","tag-time-travel","tag-translation","tag-tropical-malady","tag-video"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Han Kang, Luis Felipe Fabre<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What the staff of The Paris Review is reading this week.\" \/>\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\/2016\/06\/24\/staff-picks-bad-calls-bad-books-breakups\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Staff Picks: Bad Calls, Bad Books, Breakups by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"June 24, 2016 \u2013 Tate Modern, in London, recently showed Cemetery of Splendor, the new and wonderful movie by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. 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