The Paris Review's Blog, page 111

Diving into the Text

Photo: © isman rohimly ibrahim/EyeEm / Adobe Stock.

I first read the Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti in December 2007, when I spent three weeks in the hospital due to an appendectomy gone wrong. Between doses of antibiotics, I asked my father to bring me a book that had just been published, of Onetti’s complete short stories. Before long, I came to one entitled “Convalescence,” which seemed appropriate given my situation. A woman is recovering from an illness in a hotel by the sea. Onetti doesn’t tell us what the illness is. A man keeps calling her on the phone, making threats, insisting she return to the city. I knew it might not be the best idea to read Onetti while laid up in a hospital bed—he’s not exactly the most upbeat writer. But the feeling that came over me as I turned the pages was one of joy.

Back then, I used to go on diving trips with a couple of friends. I was really into it—getting away from São Paulo and heading down to Ubatuba or some other town on the coast, spending the weekend in the water, going out at night to drink acai juice and chat in a sandwich shop or some beach bar, wondering what the next day’s adventures had in store. As my friends exchanged long emails, hammering out the details for their next so-called expedition, like a pair of Jacques Cousteaus setting sail on those windy, unpredictable mornings in the silvery sunshine of our little patch of lush South American coastline, a nurse was changing the dressings on my right abdomen and adjusting the IV in my arm.

I had had two general anesthesias, an infection, two operations. Throughout my entire recovery, I kept reading Onetti. Rather than revolving around a desire to pick apart and reconstruct meaning, these stories seemed to be aimed at revealing something else. It was as if Onetti were saying to me, It’s impossible to have access to everything, a narrator may actually exist to throw us off, and there’s always something we can’t see.

Soon, I had a favorite: “Esbjerg by the Sea.” The narrator situates the reader right off the bat: a couple, Kirsten and Montes, walks along the docks of Buenos Aires and watches the ships depart. The narrator claims to have heard the story, “without understanding it,” one morning when Montes showed up, humiliated, and confessed to stealing from the narrator. At the narrator’s office, Montes, “a pathetic man, a bad friend, a bastard,” explained that he’d concealed a series of bets, planning to cover them himself, so that he could raise money for Kirsten to travel to her native country, Denmark. But his plan didn’t work, and now he was unable to pay back what he’d lost.

“I think he told me the story,” the narrator says, “or almost all of it, that first day, Monday, when he came to see me, cowering like a dog, his face green, revolting, cold sweat shining on his forehead and down the sides of his nose.” More than just signaling the narrator’s one-sided perspective—“I heard the story, without understanding it”; “I think he told me the story, or almost all of it”—Onetti makes this lack of transparency, and everything the reader can’t see or understand, the secret theme of the story.

*

Esbjerg is a seaport town in Denmark. In the story, it’s presented as an obscure place. Kirsten is always miserable, but she won’t say why. She fills the house with photographs of her home country, landscapes with cows and mountains. One day, letters start to arrive from Denmark. Montes doesn’t understand a word of them, and Kirsten says that “she’d written to some distant relatives and these were their replies, though the news wasn’t very good.” There’s a sentence, in Danish, that Kirsten keeps repeating, and this is what impacts Montes the most. He doesn’t understand those words (neither does the reader), but something in Kirsten’s voice makes him want to cry. “It must have been, I think, because the sentence he couldn’t understand was the most remote, most foreign, and it came from the part of her he didn’t know,” the narrator speculates.

After Montes’s plan goes awry, Kirsten begins leaving the house constantly, never saying a word. One day, Montes follows her. Kirsten goes to the port, where she stands for hours, stiff, looking out over the water. The story ends with Kirsten and Montes, side by side, watching the ships depart, “each with his or her own hidden and distinctive thoughts”: a feeling that “each is alone, which always turns out to be surprising when we stop to think about it.”

In the end, the couple’s story hangs like a veil of murky water between us and the narrator, someone who ultimately just makes everything more unclear. What sets in is a feeling of being at the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by schooling fish, octopuses parading their tentacles in the dark, and Onetti saying, You’ll have to excuse me, but you won’t be able to see much here, even up close it will be impossible to make out much of anything besides the uncertainty of another’s thoughts, and you won’t get any satisfactory answers.

*

“When moving, use extra care not to disturb the sediment” is one of the commandments of sport diving on shipwrecks. If a diver’s fin grazes any surface of the boat, it will stir up silt, muddying the water. The same goes for cave diving. Visibility can be reduced to almost zero, so you have to use ropes and cables and be prepared to make a blind ascent. In the Coral Sea, off the coast of Australia, it’s the opposite: the waters there are some of the most crystal clear in the world. Sixty meters of visibility, lending an illusion of total control over your surroundings.

What governs visibility underwater is a concept in physics known as opacity, the measure of how penetrable or impenetrable a given medium is to a wave, electromagnetic or otherwise. For example, an opaque medium doesn’t allow light to pass directly through it; it absorbs, refracts, or reflects. Consequently, the intensity of the beam of light is reduced, and it fails to reach the other side. On Ilha das Palmas, an island south of Ubatuba, underwater visibility is about eight meters, and the seabed is rocky. Thanks to ocean currents, the area is frequently visited by a variety of fish: moray eels, parrotfish, starfish, and sand dollars. That was where we used to go, dreaming of the Coral Sea or the Andros Barrier in the Bahamas, where we’d finally be able to see everything.

I encountered this hope for seeing things clearly in the work of the French surrealist Michel Leiris, whom I’d also started reading at that time. Compared with Onetti, Leiris was a much different diving instructor, so to speak. Leiris promised so much more, with the confidence of someone who’d take us to see reef sharks and dolphins swimming in infinite blue waters. Leiris, who was Onetti’s contemporary, said that literary activity’s “only justification is to illuminate certain matters for oneself at the same time as one makes them communicable to others.” In the essay “De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie” (“Literature Considered as a Bullfight”), a sort of introduction to his confessional autobiography, he wrote that he “intended to elucidate certain still obscure things for which psychoanalysis had attracted my attention when I experienced it as a patient.”

Words like illuminate, communicate, and elucidate gave an idea of how Leiris’s thought interacted with his language (clear, not overdone, ostensibly nonliterary). But while Leiris had wanted to “elucidate,” the interaction between Onetti’s ideas and his language (murky, disjointed, nonlinear) produced an altogether different effect: the search for answers or clarification didn’t exist. The stories I was discovering from my hospital bed seemed to lead the characters (and the reader) into even greater darkness. We could think about our world, a world of shipwrecks and wasted dreams, where visibility, for the most part, was brutally low. And how might we give shape to this world? How much could we really know someone or even ourselves? How might we dive into those murky waters, more saturated with sediment by the day, and communicate this state?

My friends kept exchanging emails, listing dream destinations, equipment, water conditions. It’s important to note that opacity is not absolute—that is, what is opaque for some wave frequencies can be translucent for others. There’s a kind of glass that is transparent to normal light waves (you can see through it) but completely opaque to ultraviolet waves (the ones that burn your skin on a beach in the Bahamas or the Australian Coral Sea). Generally speaking, this has to do with the interaction between the frequency of the medium and the frequency of the wave that’s trying to travel through it. Depending on the degree of syntony between these frequencies, the wave will either pass through or be stopped in its tracks.

One of Leiris’s mantras is to “reject all fable” and “admit as materials only actual facts, and not only probable facts, as in the classical novel.” Leiris wanted to set in motion a kind of realism that was “not feigned, as in most novels,” but made up of “things experienced and presented without the least disguise.” In some way, this felt connected to another world, one that would show itself more and more over the coming years: autofiction, stories where the use of real or biographical events was a value in its own right, an interest in private life, diaries on public display, confessional storytelling, Instagram stories, our painstakingly psychoanalyzed life (the epic of subjectivity), the assumption that there’s a correlation between our perception of the world (“our truths”) and the world itself, the desire to “make clear,” to understand oneself, to see how things “really” are; the belief in the illusion of transparency—when we go to update our Facebook status, the little box prompts us to share, asking, “What’s on your mind?”

*

While there may be many paths that lead us to transparency (a watering down of Leiris’s confident gesture), Onetti is a kind of Zen master of opacity, a diving instructor who takes us to spots where we can see very little. His own image reinforces this: lying in bed, smoking, scribbling on bits of paper, bedsheets reeking of gin. In Onetti, the entrance to this murky-watered world isn’t through the fantastic or the magical, like some of his Latin American contemporaries. Or at least, not only that. His most unforgettable and sorrowful stories—“A Dream Come True,” “Most Dreaded Hell,” “The Face of Disgrace”—are realist narratives that seem to crush the modern hope of seeing everything. There’s a play between the affirmation and negation of reality—a subterranean current that seems to connect his work to Bolaño’s short stories. This is mainly because in Onetti’s stories, these mechanisms of memory, invention, and partial ignorance are contained within what is being told.

When we read, we’re often looking for things to be made clear. We want that beam of light to reach the other side. We want to see and to understand, both of which give us an unmistakable feeling of comfort and happiness. This is what makes us forge ahead in a novel: the search for a reason, a rationale, a purpose. Life, in general, also works like this. But inevitably, there are things we can’t see. All along the way are blind spots, hazards, twists and turns. Like those mornings and afternoons spent diving—when we were immeasurably happy and then all of a sudden, out of the darkness, came some staggering revelation—everything happens somewhere between opacity and transparency. We can compare and contrast these categories for all practical purposes, but the truth is that one does not exist against the other; unbeknownst to us, they’ve been coexisting the whole time. It may seem paradoxical, but Onetti, despite the blurred timelines of his stories—or perhaps because of them—is a transparent writer. He is transparent in his endeavors to produce opacity. His writing lets us see precisely what we cannot.

—Translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry

 

Emilio Fraia was born in São Paulo in 1982. His English-language debut, Sevastopol, translated by Zoë Perry, was recently published by New Directions in the U.S. and Lolli Editions in the UK. Fraia was named one of Granta’s Best Young Brazilian Writers. In English his fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Grand Journal, and Two Lines 19: Passageways.

Zoë Perry’s translations of contemporary Brazilian literature have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Words without Borders, and The White Review. She is a founding member of the Starling Bureau, a literary translators’ collective, and was selected for a Banff International Literary Translation Centre residency for her translation of Emilio Fraia’s Sevastopol.

Aisha Sabatini Sloan Wins the 2021 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary

Aisha Sabatini Sloan. Photo courtesy of Sabatini Sloan.

The Paris Review is pleased to announce that Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s column for the Daily, Detroit Archives, has received the 2021 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary. Sabatini Sloan is the author of the essay collections The Fluency of Light and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit as well as the forthcoming book-length essay Borealis and the father-daughter collaboration Captioning the Archives. She is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. A sampling of the three essays recognized by the award appears below.

From “Ladies of the Good Dead,” May 22, 2020:

My great aunt Cora Mae can’t hear well. She is ninety-eight years old. When the global pandemic reached Michigan, the rehabilitation center where she was staying stopped accepting visitors. There were attempts at FaceTime, but her silence made it clear that for her, we had dwindled into pixelated ghosts. She contracted COVID-19 and has been moved again and again. When my mother calls to check on her every day, she makes sure to explain to hospital staff that my great aunt is almost deaf, that they have to shout in her left ear if they want to be heard.

From “On Immolation,” July 9, 2020:

For a period of time in 2014, I couldn’t stop watching the surveillance video of a person setting fire to the Heidelberg Project, a world-renowned art installation by Tyree Guyton in a residential area of Detroit. The recorded arson struck me as a performance piece in itself. In what appears to be the very early hours of the morning, a figure approaches the threshold of a structure called “Taxi House,” a home adorned by boards of wood that have been painted with yellow, pink, green, and white vehicles labeled “taxi.” There is a painted clock, real tires, and toy cars. A meandering, peach-colored line has been painted along a sagging corner of the roof, then it comes down onto the siding, where it moves geometrically, like Pac-Man.

From “On Doulas,” September 15, 2020:

In 2016, Erykah Badu performed at Chene Park, now called the Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre, a beautiful, outdoor waterfront venue in Detroit overlooking Canada. Badu donated proceeds from that concert to the African American 490 Challenge, an organization trying to raise money to process 11,341 untested rape kits that had been abandoned for years at a Detroit police department storage facility. The initiative was named 490 after the dollar amount needed to test a single kit, each of which represents, the organization’s president Kim Trent emphasized, “a living, breathing victim.” Four years later, thanks to their work, 11,137 kits have been tested, and there have been 210 convictions. Eighty-one percent of the victims were Black women. You could call this an archive of negligence.

The Review also was named a finalist for the 2021 National Magazine Award for Fiction, recognizing Senaa Ahmad’s “Let’s Play Dead” (Spring 2020), Eloghosa Osunde’s “Good Boy” (Fall 2020), and Bud Smith’s “Violets” (Summer 2020).

Congratulations to all! And for more great stories, essays, poems, interviews, and more, don’t forget to subscribe to The Paris Review today.

Redux: Without Wanting to Live Forever

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

Elizabeth Bishop. Photo: Alice Helen Methfessel. Courtesy of Frank Bidart.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re eating our vegetables and celebrating the summer’s bounty. Read on for Elizabeth Bishop’s Art of Poetry interview, Alice Munro’s short story “Spaceships Have Landed,” and Sue Kwock Kim’s poem “The Korean Community Garden in Queens.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off.

 

Elizabeth Bishop, The Art of Poetry No. 27
Issue no. 80 (Summer 1981)

The next day there was a picture in the afternoon paper—they take such things very seriously in Brazil—and the day after that my Brazilian friend went to market again. There was a big covered market with stalls for every kind of comestible, and there was one vegetable man we always went to. He said, “Wasn’t that Doña Elizabetchy’s picture in the paper yesterday?” She said, “Yes, it was. She won a prize.” And he said, “You know, it’s amazing! Last week Señora (Somebody) took a chance on a bicycle and she won! My customers are so lucky!” Isn’t that marvelous?!

 

 

Spaceships Have Landed
By Alice Munro
Issue no. 131 (Summer 1994)

Rhea didn’t think they would pay much attention. They were busy and their life was eventful, though the events in it were seasonal and had to do with the vegetables which they sold in town to earn their living. The vegetables, the raspberries, the rhubarb. They hadn’t time for much else.

 

 

The Korean Community Garden in Queens
By Sue Kwock Kim
Issue no. 148 (Fall 1998)

… Each one lit by what it neighbors

but is not, each tint flaring without a human soul,
without human rage at its passing. In the summer
there will be scallions, mung-beans, black sesame,
muskmelons, to be harvested into zinc buckets

and sold at market. How do they live without wanting
to live forever? Unlike their gardeners in the old world,
who die for warring dreams and warring heavens,
who stop at nothing, life the one paradise they wanted.

 

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives. Or, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off.

Every Poem Has Ancestors

On April 12, The Paris Review announced N. Scott Momaday as the recipient of the 2021 Hadada Award, presented each year to a “distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” In the coming weeks, the Daily will publish a series of short essays honoring the multifariousness of Momaday’s achievements. Today, in an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir Poet Warrior, Joy Harjo recalls how Momaday’s poem “The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee” inspired her to begin writing poetry.

N. Scott Momaday. Photo: Darren Vigil Gray.

Though I loved poetry all of my life, it wasn’t until poems like “The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee” by N. Scott Momaday that I turned to the making of poetry. Like Momaday, I came to poetry as an artist who painted and drew. And both Momaday and I have a love of those traditional rituals that place the speaker/singer into an intimate relationship with a place on earth, a people. I believe every poem is ritual: there is a naming, a beginning, a knot or question, then possibly revelation, and then closure, which can be opening, setting the reader, speaker, or singer out and back on a journey. I can hear the tribal speaker in his voice, in whatever mode of performance. And when I trust my voice to go where it needs to be, to find home, it returns to where it belongs, back to the source of its longing.

*

Every poem has ancestors. Kiowa singers and orators can be found staking words to the ground, with poetic lines appearing as prayer flags waving in the winds in Momaday’s poem “The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee.” I can also hear the long-legged poetry of Walt Whitman, who is considered one of the original American poetry ancestors. I wonder who influenced Walt Whitman to release poetry from the highly stylized European forms, to make a poetry that flowed like the winds rippling over vast fields of leaves of grass.

Whitman had quite the interest in American Indians. His life was framed by the Trails of Tears banishments of tribal nations from the East to the West. The Wounded Knee Massacre occurred near the end of his life. In the first edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1855, American Indians/Natives appear in five of the twelve poems. Whitman was the only American poet known to have worked in the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior, where he met and conversed with Native delegations of tribal nations. It appears, then, that he might have been somewhat familiar with Native oratorical skills, and with the craft apparent in those skills that informs poetry. The Library of Congress holds an original draft of his poem “Osceola,” in which he recounts the death of the Seminole leader by that name. Early in his writing career Whitman also wrote a novella, The Half-Breed: A Tale of the Western Frontier. It’s time that Native nations’ early influences in American poetry be recognized.

Yet Whitman, like others of his age, though he was sympathetic with the “plight” of the country’s indigenous peoples, agreed that American Indians were at the root savages in need of what civilization could offer.

Momaday’s poem, and perhaps every poem, establishes itself as a kind of “I am” assertion. A poem exists because it says: “I am the voice of the poet or what is moving through time, place, and event; I am sound sense and words; I am made of all this; and though I may not know where I am going, I will show you, and we will sing together.”

Like Whitman, like the Kiowa people long before the establishment of what is now called the United States, Momaday’s poem establishes that no matter who we are on this earth, we embody everything, we are related to all life, all beings. This assertion appears at the opening of nearly every ritual gathering in indigenous lands and cultures. We stand at the center of the circle that the poem has established with words and images, and as we do, we are in good relation, and alive.

In this time of a virus roaming methodically across the earth, infecting the earth’s population, this poem centers us in the natural world, and declares a healing. I imagine the voice of Earth speaking the first stanza. The Earth, and all beings, are always moving toward healing. This poem reminds us.

“The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee”

I am a feather on the bright sky
I am the blue horse that runs in the plain
I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water
I am the shadow that follows a child
I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows
I am an eagle playing with the wind
I am a cluster of bright beads
I am the farthest star
I am the cold of dawn
I am the roaring of the rain
I am the glitter on the crust of the snow
I am the long track of the moon in a lake
I am a flame of four colors
I am a deer standing away in the dusk
I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche
I am an angle of geese in the winter sky
I am the hunger of a young wolf
I am the whole dream of these things
You see, I am alive, I am alive
I stand in good relation to the earth
I stand in good relation to the gods
I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful
I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte
You see, I am alive, I am alive

Every poem has poetry ancestors. My poetry would not exist without Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival,” without Mvskoke stomp dance call-and-response, without Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck,” without Meridel Le Sueur or N. Scott Momaday, without death or sunrise, without Walt Whitman, or Navajo horse songs, or Langston Hughes, without rain, without grief, without—

 

Joy Harjo is an internationally known performer and member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation and the first (and current) Native American poet to serve as U.S. poet laureate. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Crazy Brave and ten books of poetry, including An American Sunrise. The essay above is an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir Poet Warrior, which will be published by W. W. Norton & Company on September 7, 2021.

“The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee” from Again the Far Morning: New and Selected Poems, by N. Scott Momaday. Copyright © 2011. University of New Mexico Press.

Staff Picks: Corner Booths, Skate Shoots, and Ghosts

Kate Zambreno. Photo: Heather Sten. Courtesy of Columbia University Press.

Kate Zambreno’s To Write As If Already Dead just might be the first truly great book about the coronavirus pandemic. Ostensibly a study of the French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert, who died of AIDS in 1991 and became famous for work such as the 1990 novel To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, To Write As If Already Dead divides itself into two distinct parts, both focused on questions of intimacy, interpersonal relationships, and the human body. In the lightly fictionalized first half, a woman working on a study of Guibert ponders an old internet-based friendship that ended abruptly after her anonymous friend deleted her blog. In the second half, Zambreno writes of Guibert, the book’s “ghost, the projected shadow, the echo,” and also her second pregnancy, the failures of the American health care system, correspondences with friends, and the frightening early days of the coronavirus pandemic. “I worry to her,” Zambreno writes of a conversation with a friend, “I’m not cosmopolitan enough or queer enough to write about Guibert, that I would never have been included in Foucault’s circle. I am a mom on a couch!” But literature is slippery; To Write As If Already Dead, in its pairing of fact and fiction—a technique that Zambreno has used before, most notably in Screen Tests and Drifts—elides these boundaries, instead working to create parallels between relationships, spaces, and historical moments. “I wonder if death is the ultimate betrayal, not writing,” she questions near the end. “Writing as a way to mark an ‘I’ before it is extinguished.” —Rhian Sasseen 

Since watching Davonte Jolly’s GODSPEED, I have become an advocate for the restorative powers of the skate video. I don’t skateboard. I can’t even name most of the tricks these guys pull off. And fans of The Paris Review, Bret Anthony Johnston excepted, might not revel in Kevin White’s buttery flow or Alex Midler’s back three off the car wash (if this language doesn’t quite land, try Owen Wilson’s take, from the inventive and playful Yeah Right!). But for me, the best parts of GODSPEED are skate adjacent: Nico Hiraga’s energy after landing a trick for his mom, the cocksure hype of a close friend group, or the look on Zach Saraceno’s face after a close call with traffic. Baker 3 is particularly good at highlighting such human moments, featuring a relentless board recovery by Jim Greco, who dropped his own artful skate video more than twenty years later. Greco’s Jobs? Never!! is like skate though the eyes of Werner Herzog, though Herzog has suggested that if he were to set his cinematic sights on skateboarding, his soundtrack would be a bit more ethereal. GODSPEED delivers on the music, opening with Frank Ocean’s song of the same name and somehow complementing the subsequent tracks with the clatter of a kickflip or the resounding ping of a rail kiss. Whatever ails, maybe the rhythm and laughter and rapturous thrill of the skate video will prove a salve. For best results, play in the background on a workday, volume way up. —Christopher Notarnicola

 

RE Katz. Photo: RE Katz. Courtesy of Dzanc Books.

 

Needless to say, the first line of And Then the Gray Heaven—“I married my electric dishwasher”—grabbed my attention. But what follows, a sincerely beautiful yet devastating story of queer love and grief, held on and didn’t let me go until the final page. RE Katz’s novella, out from Dzanc Books next week, is the story of Jules, whose partner, B, has recently died in an accident. We meet Jules, completely unmoored in their mourning, as they embark on a daring mission to honor B’s memory. Rendered in luminous prose, the novella oscillates between Jules’s grief-filled present and the past, from their difficult childhood in the Florida foster care system to their wonderful life with B. Katz balances these cinematic vistas of recollection with astonishing specificity, dreamscapes, and deep dives into Jules’s inner life. Moreover, Katz manages to sustain a soft haze through the entirety of the novella and, in doing so, captures the surreality of grief. Finishing this book felt like emerging from a dark movie theater into the afternoon sun. I surfaced from the world of And Then the Gray Heaven blinking against the light, with a renewed anger at how the medical system bars queer people from their loved ones in the most difficult of times, a renewed belief in the systems of care that we uphold for one another in the face of suffering, and a renewed faith in the amazing, altering effect that love can have on our lives. —Mira Braneck

I have held a sword—a real sword—once, maybe twice in my life. I don’t remember where I was or how this happened. It was probably a field trip. What I do remember, though, is the surprising heft of the weapon in my hands. Among the many, many admirable aspects of FromSoftware’s sleeper hit Demon’s Souls, which received a loving remake from Bluepoint Games this past year, is its commitment to honoring this weight. Most action games opt for effortlessness, entombing the player within a hollow fantasy of their avatar’s strength. In Demon’s Souls, however, each swing proceeds with the inalterable arc of prophecy: once the button has been pressed, there’s no going back. The game’s most harrowing moments involve a delicate negotiation with the stamina meter, a green bar that depletes with every combat maneuver. A successful run through any of the game’s levels requires another negotiation, though, this one with something not measured on the screen: the player’s own confidence. The overzealous player of Demon’s Souls will find themselves launched back to the Nexus, their progress lost, time and again. The crushing humiliation of defeat—there’s a surprising heft to that, too. —Brian Ransom

The word storyteller gets tossed around a lot these days, often on LinkedIn, but the late Spalding Gray, who would have been eighty this past weekend, was the real, rare thing. Sitting behind a plain desk on an otherwise empty stage, dressed in a plaid button-down, he related the small and large events of his life growing up in Rhode Island, moving to New York, making his way in the downtown theater scene, marrying, divorcing, parenting. In some cases, the stories are fairly mundane. In others, they are profound reflections on world-changing events. Yet somehow each performance is riveting from start to finish. There’s an old piece of advice about writing, that you should think about telling the story to someone in a bar, which I’ve always taken to mean a friend (not, say, a romantic prospect) with whom you are meeting in a relaxed setting. Watching Gray’s monologue “concert films” feels a bit like being that friend, settling into a corner booth with open ears. That’s the key to Gray’s magic—he recognized and reached us not as a distant audience but as trusted members of his own circle, for whom he made his material as entertaining as possible. If you are not yet ready for a real corner booth this weekend, consider pouring a drink and hanging with Spalding. Unfortunately, some of his work is outside the streaming universe, but the Criterion Channel and YouTube offer a nice sampler. —Jane Breakell

 

Spalding Gray in Steven Soderbergh’s Gray’s Anatomy, 1996. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection.

Cooking with C. L. R. James

Photo: Erica MacLean.

The introduction to Mariners, Castaways and Renegades, a 1953 work on Herman Melville by the activist, critic, and novelist C. L. R. James (1901–1989), is electrifying to the Melville lover. It starts with an indelible line: “The miracle of Herman Melville is this: that a hundred years ago in two novels, Moby-Dick and Pierre, and two or three stories, he painted a picture of the world in which we live, which is to this day unsurpassed.” That’s a huge claim, but readers of Moby-Dick know it to be as true today as it was when James’s book was first published. James goes on to write that “a great part” of the volume he is introducing was produced while he was held in detention by the immigration authorities on Ellis Island as he was being deported from the U.S. On Ellis Island he found, “like Melville’s Pequod … a miniature of all the nations of the world and all sections of society,” and he synthesized his American experience with the themes and insights of Moby-Dick. I’ve written recently about Moby-Dick’s significance to modern discussions of race, and I was pleased to come across the scholarship of James, one of the novel’s great interpreters, who was neither white nor American but born on Trinidad when it was a British colony. If Melville shows America as multiracial and entwined, James pans out to show it also as hopelessly entangled in the whale lines of the greater world.

Deservedly, James’s work is undergoing a revival at the moment. His only novel, Minty Alley, was reissued earlier this year as part of Bernardine Evaristo’s series with Penguin Books, Black Britain: Writing Back. His other major works include The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, a still-authoritative history of the world’s only successful slave-led revolution, and Beyond a Boundary, a study on cricket and culture that has been called one of the greatest sports books of all time as well as an important entry in the discourse of postcolonialism. Even many of his minor works are back in print.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

This wide-ranging, autodidactic writer was born on Trinidad to a religious, educated lower-middle-class family with a strong sense of rectitude. His childhood home famously looked out upon a cricket pitch; it “was superbly situated, exactly behind the wicket.” He received an eduction at the island’s best approximation of an English public school and was a passionate reader, but cricket occupied his interest even more, and he became a minor contender among the legendary players of the West Indies. By accident, though, the sport derailed him from a path of upward mobility and sent him toward liberation, a process he believed was writ large for people in the West Indies of his time. In Beyond a Boundary, he writes that through beating the master at “the master’s game … the colonials gained a self-esteem that would eventually free them.”

In 1932, James moved to England to become a writer and cover cricket for the local newspapers there. He published a novel, the aforementioned Minty Alley, in 1936, but in the interim had discovered working-class activism, Marx, and the cause of independence for the West Indies. He gave up fiction—a choice he said he never regretted—in order to devote more time to political matters. A prescient, clear-sighted observer, he pivoted to journalism and opinion writing and became a Trotskyite and member of the Independent Labor Party. He was influential in struggles for independence throughout the Caribbean and Africa and helped shape the postcolonial identity for the Caribbean diaspora. In the collection You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C. L. R. James, he casts the enslaved people at the heart of eighteenth-century global commerce, not as the world’s greatest victims but as the world’s strongest men—the only men who could do the work, the laboring heart of Western civilization.

The strength and value of the ordinary man is a through line in James’s diverse body of work, and nowhere is this interest more evident than in Minty Alley, which eschews the world stage in favor of a single yard in a back alley in Port of Spain. In this book, Haynes, a young, passive middle-class intellectual, is forced after his mother’s death to rent lodgings in a working-class neighborhood, the kind of place where men kept mistresses and things that were improper to discuss occurred, according to the James documentary Every Cook Can Govern. Here, Haynes’s life is vastly, if temporarily, enriched by the people he meets and the relationships he develops. James himself was not from such a neighborhood, but while conducting research for the book, he interviewed local women about their lives. The results are, as Evaristo writes in her introduction, “a story about a Caribbean community in relationship with itself” and “a peek into a society of nearly one hundred years ago, which shows us that while the circumstances are different, our essential passions, preoccupations and ambitions remain the same.”

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

For my purposes, Minty Alley was fascinating because Haynes’s landlady, Mrs. Rouse, has a business making “cakes,” and it’s the view into her kitchen that first compels Haynes to take more of an interest in life than he’d previously mustered. Her various employees and family members, as well as her other lodgers, make up the cast of characters Haynes becomes entangled with, and her tireless work at keeping this business running becomes the book’s moral center, enriched and complicated by the fact that her wellspring of strength to carry on comes from her love for a philandering partner, Benoit. (This formidable woman was long previously abandoned by Mr. Rouse.) Haynes soaks up the drama and intrigue generated by his new neighbors, but he fails to imagine anything about the real conditions of their lives. It’s only late in the book, after Benoit has left Mrs. Rouse and her business has fallen into disarray, that he discovers how precarious her financial situation is. The ingredients for the cakes are begged and borrowed on credit, and often she and the staff have nothing to eat. Haynes is horrified—if only briefly—to learn that his own carelessly late rent payments have resulted in people going hungry.

Perhaps predictably, given his age and class background, Haynes’s narration describes nothing about the cakes themselves. Flour is mentioned. There’s a glancing reference to “meat” and “jam,” which implied to me that the “cakes” would be more like the turnovers or patties known as “pies” in contemporary Trinidad. People in the book cook and eat—a loyal family servant cooks for Haynes until the other women at Mrs. Rouse’s push her out, and he barely protests despite having enjoyed her cooking—but the food and drinks are not described except in the most general terms. One blowout feast has “beef, pork and a three-pound chicken, pigeon peas and rice.” The tradition at Mrs. Rouse’s Christmas meal is to drink Guinness mixed with champagne. Nor does James, despite an essay entitled “Every Cook Can Govern” (after which the 2016 documentary about James is named), talk much about food. Beyond a Boundary is something of a memoir, and in its early pages he describes a rigorous old aunt cooking a lavish meal, “with that sumptuousness which the Trinidad Negroes have inherited from the old extravagant plantation owners,” as a family tradition to commemorate a particular cricket game. When the meal is served, she says, “I am not feeling so well,” sits down, puts her head on the table, and dies. James’s point is the link between this kind of moral fiber and cricket. I can’t help but wonder if the aunt wouldn’t have found her final menu to also be of note. Perhaps the most detailed discussion of food anywhere in his work comes in The Black Jacobins, when he approvingly and at length discusses the enslaved people’s expertise and vigor in using poison to shape various ends on the plantation.

James had goals loftier and worthier than mine, but the poison aside, I wanted to know what these women he writes about were actually cooking. I called a Trinidadian bakery for advice and referred to several food blogs, learning about meat pies and tarts filled with guava jam. According to my bakery source, the meat should be chopped (not ground) and flavored with a local condiment known as green seasoning. I also found reference online to the multiethnicity of Trinidad, where Black populations live alongside those descended from Chinese and Indian immigrants. Philomen, one of the servants in Minty Alley, is described as “Indian” and “a coolie,” and James writes that she is harder working and worse treated than the others. The character is an example of James’s tendency, as mentioned by Evaristo, to focus on how communities of color relate to each other.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

In order to pay tribute to the heroic labors of Mrs. Rouse, Philomen, and James’s own aunt, I decided to make an entire cake business’s worth of pies. I made a meat pie flavored with green seasoning and a jam pie with guava. For a version of the local aloo pie, I chose a recipe that used slow-cooked beef shin in addition to peas and potatoes, because beef shin seemed like a cut of meat of the kind Mrs. Rouse could have afforded and because the recipe suggested a delicious-sounding cardamom-turmeric dough. Directions from the bakery and on the internet were contradictory about what the appropriate crust for an aloo pie should be, but unfortunately for me the most likely candidate for the other two seemed to be puff pastry, something I’ve until now vowed is a bridge too far for home baking. Figuring I was going to need it after the puff pastry, I also tried making that Guinness-and-champagne cocktail, and the results were light, malty, and drinkable, a good beverage for a hot day. (There’s no recipe below for that—just pour the Guinness, wait for the foam to subside some, and top gently with champagne.)

I’ve discovered previously that any dish that calls for a dough, a filling, and then an assembly-and-cooking process is a recipe for getting stressed out and making mistakes as things come together. Three fillings and two doughs—one of them puff pastry!—was truly a dangerous plan. It all went well, though, as I blended my green seasoning (a delicious combination of onions, scallions, peppers, coriander, marjoram, thyme, ginger, and lime juice) and slowly simmered the beef shin in a fragrant mixture of onion, tomato, cumin, curry powder, and garlic. I was ahead, even, because the doughs had been made the night before and were comfortably chilling in the refrigerator. But then, in a trial bake, all the butter oozed out of my puff pastry (it was incorrectly processed and handled as I rolled it out), and it needed to be made again from scratch. And my other dough, a turmeric-and-cardamom one for the aloo pies, turned out to be too small, so it also needed to be made again. By the time I had made two more doughs and was rolling out, filling, and shaping the pies, I was starving, there was flour everywhere, and all that work had turned into a mess. Fortunately, it turns out that puff pastry is delicious even when it’s greasy, incorrectly laminated, and slightly under baked. And while the pies didn’t look professional, the Caribbean- and Indian-inspired meat fillings made it impossible to go too far wrong. The combination of the hot guava jam and the crispy, buttery pastry was also straight through the wicket (to make up a cricket metaphor). Given that the women I was emulating had a lifetime’s experience making this food, I thought mine was not so bad for a first try.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

In writing about James, I would be remiss not to point out that we diverge somewhat—and not just on our interest levels in food. He was a Marxist, which I’ve always found to be a system of thought that, despite the many essential causes it has played an important role in, is ultimately unrealistic about human nature. In a similar vein, I also never understood Ahab in Moby-Dick as a real character with a real human psychology; I instead saw his unproductive labor (of killing the white whale) as a kind of madness, uninteresting in itself, a rickety plot device allowable only because Melville needed it in order to pursue his quest for truth. James loved Ahab and found him a compellingly passionate man and an embodiment of Marxist principles, so our disagreements are consistent.

James also loved the workers, the women in the kitchen, the cricket fans having a much-deserved afternoon off, the enslaved people who powered the Western world, and their heirs, whose rights he would do so much to win. He was a meticulous scholar, an insightful critic, and a tireless activist, always on the right side of history. And even my objections to the utopian strains in his thinking melt away when I read “Every Cook Can Govern,” in which he advocates a form of democracy based on the ancient Athenian one of choosing the government by lot, on a rotating basis, from among the mass of citizens. At first it sounds bad—not every cook can cook, let alone govern—but perhaps in fact “politicians chosen by random lottery” would be a huge improvement on the ones we choose ourselves. I proved the principle with my pies: there’s much to be said for an inexperienced but honest attempt.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Puff Pastry (Master Recipe)

Makes eighteen five-inch pies. For this recipe, a bench scraper is helpful.

3 cups flour
1 cup ice water (not to be used all at once)
1/2 tsp salt
2 sticks cold high-quality unsalted butter

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

First, make a “lean dough” of just flour, salt, and water. Mix the flour and salt together in a large bowl. Run your fingers down the center to make a trough, then sprinkle a tablespoon of water in the trough, and fluff with your fingers. You should be trying to incorporate the water without forming gluten. Repeat until the dough is moist and clumpy and will stick together in a shaggy ball when pressed. (You probably will not need the full cup of water.) Wrap with saran wrap, and refrigerate at least thirty minutes.

Now, prepare the butter. The goal is to keep it cold but make it pliable, so that eventually it will roll out in thin, flat sheets without breaking. (In the photos for this piece, I tried doing this between sheets of plastic wrap, which didn’t work.) Cut the butter into a few large chunks, sprinkle with a teaspoon of flour, and pound until flat with a rolling pin. Experts use a French rolling pin, but I used an ordinary one. Experts also have a bench scraper to manipulate the butter without warming it up by touching it with your hands. If the butter releases water or sticks to the rolling pin as you pound, sprinkle with more flour. Once the butter is flat, use the pastry scraper to gather it up, then sprinkle with another teaspoon of flour, and pound it out again. Repeat several times until the butter is pliable and doesn’t break when you fold it. Shape into a six-inch square (size matters here), wrap in plastic, and chill for ten minutes (but no longer).

Roll the lean dough out into a roughly nine-inch square, making it as square as possible. Place the butter in the middle of the dough, and fold the sides of the dough over so they meet in the middle. Pinch to seal. Flour the work surface lightly, and flip the dough over so it’s seam-side down. Roll it out to a rectangle sixteen inches long by eight inches wide. Fold the top third over the middle third, then the bottom over both, like a letter. Rotate the folded dough so it looks like a book about to be opened. Roll it out again into a sixteen-by-eight rectangle, then fold again. These were your first two turns. Refrigerate for thirty minutes and repeat twice more, making six turns in all. If you notice any butter coming through, pat it with a little flour. The idea is that the butter is rolling out in long, thin sheets between the sheets of dough. If you see the dough cracking like little tiles (as I did), it’s “broken”: your layers will fuse, and the butter will all fall out and puddle on the sheet during the baking process (which still tastes good, honestly, but isn’t correct).

When you’re done, divide the dough in half, and refrigerate until ready to assemble.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Green Seasoning (Master Recipe)

Adapted from Unpeeled .

1/4 onion
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1/4 green pepper
1/4 cup celery
1 tbs ginger
juice of a lime
1 tbs white vinegar
handful fresh cilantro
3 scallions
leaves from 4 sprigs of thyme
leaves from 2 branches of oregano
a hot red pepper
1/2 tsp salt

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Combine the onion, garlic, green pepper, celery, ginger, lime juice, and vinegar in a food processor, and blend until smooth. Add more vinegar as needed to loosen. Add the rest of the ingredients, and blend again.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Meat Pies and Jam Pies

Adapted from Trini Cooking with Natasha . Makes nine five-inch pies of each filling (eighteen total). A pizza cutter and a bench scraper are helpful implements to have for this recipe. Be aware that the meat filling needs to cool before assembly.  

For the meat pies:

1/2 recipe puff pastry (recipe above)
1 tbs oil
a small onion, diced
1/4 cup celery, chopped
1/2 lb ground beef
1/2 hot red pepper, diced
2 cloves garlic, diced
3 tbs green seasoning (recipe above)
salt (to taste)
pepper (to taste)

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

To make the filling:

Heat the oil on medium-low in a large skillet, and add the onions and celery. Fry until the onions are translucent and wilted, about fifteen minutes. Then, add the hot pepper, garlic, and green seasoning, and fry until fragrant, two minutes. Turn the heat up to medium-high, add the meat, and fry until brown and cooked through. Season with plenty of salt and pepper, to taste. Set aside to cool.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

For the jam pies:

a 14 oz block of guava paste (you’ll need about half that much)
1/3 cup sugar (for simple syrup)

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

To make the simple syrup:

Combine a third of a cup of sugar with an equal amount of water in a small saucepan, and bring to a boil. Boil until slightly thickened, about three minutes. Set aside.

To make the jam filling:

Cut the block of guava paste in half lengthwise so you have two rectangles that are roughly the dimensions of sticks of butter. Slice off eighteen quarter-inch-thick slices and reserve.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

To assemble (either pie):

Preheat the oven to 400. Line two nine-by-thirteen cookie sheets with parchment paper, and ideally prepare some space in your fridge or freezer to store one during the assembly process. (Prepare something flat that fits in the fridge, like a cutting board, if you don’t have two cookie sheets.) Fill a bowl with cold water, and place it by your work surface.

Flour a clean work surface. Working quickly, roll out half your dough into your best approximation of a square, about fifteen by fifteen, making sure it’s not sticking as you go. You will be cutting the dough into nine equal squares, and if they’re rectangular, they won’t fold evenly when it’s time to stuff and shape them. If your dough hasn’t rolled out square, measure and trim. Cut the square of dough into nine equal smaller squares (like a tic-tac-toe board). A pizza cutter is helpful for this. Separate out one square so you don’t make a mess. A bench scraper is helpful in moving the dough.

If filling a meat pie, place a heaping tablespoon of the cooled filling in the center of the square of dough. If filling a jam pie, put two slices of guava paste in the center of the square (you need less than you think).

Moisten a finger in the cold water, and run it around the perimeter of half of the dough, to help it stick. Fold the dough over the filling, and pinch to seal. Place the pie on the baking sheet, and repeat. Once the sheet is full, pop it in the oven, and bake for twenty minutes, until the pies are puffy and golden on top and golden and crispy on bottom. Continue assembling the remaining pies, placing them on the remaining cookie sheet, and refrigerate until you’re ready to bake.

For the jam pies, brush with simple syrup when they come out of the oven, to make the crust shinier.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Aloo Pies

Adapted from Insight Flavour. Needs to marinate overnight. Be aware that the filling needs to cool down before assembly. Ideally, you’d start two days ahead and have the filling cooked and cooled before assembly time.

For the marinade:

1/2 lb beef shank, cleaned and sliced into small pieces
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper
a scallion, sliced
a few sprigs fresh coriander, chopped
1/2 medium tomato, diced
2 tsp ketchup
1/2 tsp mild curry power
a few squirts of lime juice

For the filling:

2 tbs neutral oil
1/2 onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1/2 hot red chili
1/2 tsp cumin
1 1/2 tsp curry powder
1/2 cup potatoes, chopped
1/2 cube of beef stock
1/4 cup and 1/2 cup water, divided
1/4 cup green peas
salt (to taste)
pepper (to taste)

For the dough:

2 cups plain flour
1/4 tsp ground cardamom
1/2 tsp ground turmeric
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder
3/4 cup water
vegetable oil (for frying)

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

To marinate:

Combine the beef and all the ingredients for the marinade in a gallon freezer bag, and refrigerate overnight.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

To make the filling:

In a frying pan, heat two tablespoons of oil on medium-low, then fry the onion until it is wilted and translucent, about fifteen minutes. Turn up the heat to medium-high, add the garlic and chili, and fry for two minutes more, until the ingredients begin to release their scents. Add the curry powder and cumin, and cook for two more minutes. Add a quarter cup of water, and cook for five more minutes, until all the liquid evaporates. Add the contents of the marinade bag, stir, turn down the heat, cover, and cook for thirty-five minutes.

Add potatoes, a half cup of water, and half a cube of beef stock to the mixture. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Cook, uncovered, for about an hour. You want the mixture to be thick, almost without any water. Add the peas near the end of the cooking time. Taste for seasoning, and adjust if necessary. Set aside to cool.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

To make the dough:

Combine flour, cardamom, turmeric, salt, and baking powder in a medium bowl. Add water, and stir to combine. Knead for a few minutes, until the dough is smooth and comes together. Let rest, covered, at least thirty minutes.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

To assemble the pies:

Flour a work surface. Set out a bowl of cold water next to it. Using your hands, roll the dough out into a snake about a foot long, and cut it into ten equal pieces. Roll them out, one at a time, in circles about six inches in diameter and an eighth of an inch thick. Dollop a heaping tablespoon of filling in the middle of the circle (or as much as you can fit and still seal the pie properly). Dip a finger in the water, and run it along one half of the circle of dough, to aid in sealing. Flip one half of the dough over the filling. Pinch to seal. Repeat with the remaining dough circles.

 

 

To cook:

Heat about a half-inch of a neutral oil to medium-high in your skillet. Fry the pies in batches, flipping once, until golden and crispy and the dough is cooked through.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Valerie Stivers is a writer based in New York. Read earlier installments of Eat Your Words.

A Jackpot in the Archive

Photo: © Sean Gladwell / Adobe Stock.

One cannot talk about the lottery in a literary context without a tip of the hat to Shirley Jackson’s infamously dystopian story, which received an “incredibly misleading” pulp cover treatment back in 1950 and was more recently reimagined in the comically brief form of the fortune cookie by Jean-Luc Bouchard: “Expect an invitation to an exciting event.” A quick web search of “The Lottery” turns up no shortage of adaptations of Jackson’s story, and a search through our own archives yields a wonderful array of stories showcasing the appeal and versatility of the lottery as a literary trope, covering a range of topics such as the ethics of the Florida Lottery, one family’s struggle with the allocation of public housing, and a classic NFL football play reenactment.

Let’s begin with the Review’s most recent presentation of this timeless game of chance, Camille Bordas’s “The Lottery in Almería,” which appears in issue no. 237:

Andrés played the European lottery every Tuesday and Friday, and the charity lottery to benefit the visually impaired on Mondays and Wednesdays. He played the national Christmas lottery every Christmas, too, but that didn’t mean much: everyone in Spain, even the king, played the Christmas lottery. Most every Spaniard, too, could be guilted into buying a ticket from a tired blind man once in a while—they were all around, these blind men, hamming it up by wearing socks that didn’t match, bumping into your café table while they tried to sell you your lucky number, or stationary behind their street kiosks, their long faces not easy to ignore when you were having a good day. But the European lottery, that was Andrés’s little guilty pleasure.

Issue no. 214 sees the implementation of an absurdly elaborate lottery drum in Chris Bachelder’s “The Throwback Special: Part 2”:

Really, any container of appropriate size would have worked just fine. An ice bucket, a duffel bag, an empty case of beer. Just something large enough to hold twenty-two Ping-Pong balls. In the early years, the men used whatever was handy, and there were never any problems. But eight or nine years ago, Steven showed up with a huge lottery drum that he had built in his basement. The spinning drum rested on a detachable metal frame constructed of heavy metal poles that screwed together. The drum itself was a plexiglass barrel with a small latched door on one end and a superfluously large crank on the opposite end. The barrel would have held four hundred Ping-Pong balls. The commissioner spun the drum with the crank, then unlatched the door, reached into the barrel (often up to his shoulder), and drew out a ball on which was written one of the men’s names.

In “Will and Lou’s Boy,” from issue no. 96, Rose Tremain writes:

Then we heard about the housing lottery. The coming of the news about the housing lottery was like the coming of malaria. Lou began to sweat. It was like the jungle had suddenly surrounded her.

And William Ferguson deals with similar concerns in “Dies Irae, Morrissey,” from issue no. 90:

Raquel has just won the lottery. It’s a small amount compared to the grand prize, but large enough to pay off the second mortgage and have quite a bit left over. The strange thing is that she had no premonition of success, and she’s famous for the accuracy of her premonitions. I’m glad but terrified at the same time, I mean I’m afraid of our winnings because they seem to hint at a breakdown in other areas; I feel naked, alone, as if everyone had abandoned us…

Michael LaPointe addresses the exploitation inherent in monetary lotteries in his essay “Unlucky Numbers” from the Daily:

Just as lottery play tracks along class lines, so does it have a racial skew. A study of the Virginia lottery showed that 61 percent of its sales are made to just 8 percent of the total population, and more than one in three of that very small slice are Black. It remains an open question whether lotteries intensify marketing campaigns in Black communities—and how effective such campaigns would be—but it’s indisputable that the business would crumble without players like Abraham Shakespeare.

Let’s let Miranda July take us out with some wisdom from her story “Birthmark,” in issue no. 165:

Have you ever wanted something very badly and then gotten it. Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be. Poor people who win the lottery do not become rich people. They become poor people who won the lottery.

 

Christopher Notarnicola is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and holds an M.F.A. from Florida Atlantic University. His work was featured in The Best American Essays 2017 and has been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Consequence Magazine, Image, North American Review, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. Find him in Pompano Beach, Florida, and at christophernotarnicola.com.

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Eibhlín Dubh’s Rage and Anguish and Love

Edvard Munch, Vampire or Love and Pain, 1895, oil on canvas. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries.

Look: I am eleven, a girl who is terrible at sums and at sports, a girl given to staring out windows, a girl whose only real gift lies in daydreaming. The teacher snaps my name, startling me back to the flimsy prefab. Her voice makes it a fine day in 1773, and sets English soldiers crouching in ambush. I add ditchwater to drench their knees. Their muskets point toward a young man who is tumbling from his saddle now, in slow, slow motion. A woman rides in to kneel over him, her voice rising in an antique formula of breath and syllable the teacher calls a “caoineadh,” a keen to lament the dead. Her voice generates an echo strong enough to reach a girl in the distance with dark hair and bitten nails. Me.

In the classroom, we are presented with an image of this woman standing alone, a convenient breeze setting her as a windswept, rosy-cheeked colleen. This, we are told, is Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, among the last noblewomen of the old Irish order. Her story seems sad, yes, but also a little dull. Schoolwork. Boring. My gaze has already soared away with the crows, while my mind loops back to my most-hated pop song, “and you give yourself away … ” No matter how I try to oust them, those lyrics won’t let me be.

*

By the time I find her again, I only half-remember our first meeting. As a teenager I develop a schoolgirl crush on this caoineadh, swooning over the tragic romance embedded in its lines. When Eibhlín Dubh describes falling in love at first sight and abandoning her family to marry a stranger, I love her for it, just as every teenage girl loves the story of running away forever. When she finds her murdered lover and drinks handfuls of his blood, I scribble pierced hearts in the margin. Although I don’t understand it yet, something ricochets in me whenever I return to this image of a woman kneeling to drink from the body of a lover, something that reminds me of the inner glint I feel whenever a boyfriend presses his teenage hips to mine and his lips to my throat.

My homework is returned to me with a large red X, and worse, the teacher’s scrawl cautions: “Don’t let your imagination run away with you!” I have felt these verses so deeply that I know my answer must be correct, and so, in righteous exasperation, I thump page after page down hard as I make my way back to the poem, scowling. In response to the request “Describe the poet’s first encounter with Art Ó Laoghaire,” I had written: “She jumps on his horse and rides away with him forever.” But on returning, I am baffled to find that the teacher is correct: this image does not exist in the text. If not from the poem, then where did it come from? I can visualize it so clearly: Eibhlín Dubh’s arms circling her lover’s waist, her fingers woven over his warm belly, the drumming of hooves, and the long ribbon of hair streaming behind her. It may not be real to my teacher, but it is to me.

*

If my childhood understanding of this poem was, well, childish, and my teenage interpretation little more than a swoon, my readings swerved again in adulthood. I had no classes to attend anymore, no textbooks or poems to study, but I had set myself a new curriculum to master. In attempting to raise our family on a single income, I was teaching myself to live by the rigors of frugality. I examined classified ads and supermarket deals with care. I met internet strangers and handed them coins in exchange for bundles of their babies’ clothes. I sold bundles of our own. I roamed car boot sales, haggling over toddler toys and stair gates. I only bought car seats on sale. There was a doggedness to be learned from such thrift, and I soon took to it.

My earliest years of motherhood, in all their fatigue and awe and fretfulness, took place in various rented rooms of the inner city. Although I had been raised in the countryside, I found that I adored it there: the terraces of smiling neighbors with all their tabbies and terriers, all our bins lined up side by side, the overheard cries of rage or lust in the dark, and the weekend parties with their happy, drunken choruses. Our taps always dripped, there were rats in the tiny yard, and the night city’s glimmering made stars invisible, but when I woke to feed my first son, and then my second, I could split the curtains and see the moon between the spires. In those city rooms, I wrote a poem. I wrote another. I wrote a book. If the poems that came to me on those nights might be considered love poems, then they were in love with rain and alpine flowers, with the strange vocabularies of a pregnant body, with clouds and with grandmothers. No poem arrived in praise of the man who slept next to me as I wrote, the man whose moonlit skin always drew my lips toward him. The love I held for him felt too vast to pour into the neat vessel of a poem. I couldn’t put it into words. I still can’t. As he dreamed, I watched poems hurrying toward me through the dark. The city had lit something in me, something that pulsed, vulnerable as a fontanelle, something that trembled, as I did, between bliss and exhaustion.

We had already moved twice in three years, and still the headlines reported that rents were increasing. Our landlords always saw opportunity in such bulletins, and who could blame them? Me. I blamed them every time we were evicted with a shrug. No matter how glowing their letters of reference, I always resented being forced to leave another home. Now we were on the cusp of moving again. I’d searched for weeks, until eventually I found a nearby town with lower rents. We signed another lease, packed our car, and left the city. I didn’t want to go. I drove slow, my elbow straining to change gear, wedged between our old TV and a bin-bag of teddies, my voice leading a chorus through “five little ducks went swimming one day.” I found my way along unfamiliar roads, “over the hills and far away,” scanning signs for Bishopstown and Bandon, for Macroom and Blarney, while singing “Mammy Duck said Quack, Quack, Quack … ” until my eye tripped over a sign for Kilcrea.

Kilcrea—Kilcrea—the word repeated in my mind as I unlocked a new door, it repeated and repeated as I scoured dirt from the tiles, and grimaced at the biography of old blood and semen stains on the mattresses. Kilcrea, Kilcrea, the word vexed me for days, as I unpacked books and coats and baby monitors, spoons and towels and tangled phone chargers, until finally, I remembered—Yes!—in that old poem from school, wasn’t Kilcrea the name of the graveyard where the poet buried her lover? I cringed, remembering my crush on that poem, as I cringed when I recalled all the skinny rockstars torn and tacked onto my teenage walls, the vocabulary they allowed me to express the beginnings of desire. I flinched, in general, at my teenage self. She made me uncomfortable, that girl, how she displayed her wants so brashly, that girl who flaunted a schoolbag Tipp-Exed with longing, who scribbled her own marker over layers of laneway graffiti, who stared obscenely at strangers from bus windows, who met their eyes and held them until she saw her own lust stir there. The girl caught in forbidden behaviors behind the school and threatened with expulsion. The girl called a slut and a whore and a frigid bitch. The girl condemned to “silent treatment.” The girl punished and punished and punished again. The girl who didn’t care. I was here, singing to a child while scrubbing old shit from a stranger’s toilet. Where was she?

*

In the school car park, I found myself a little early to pick up my eldest and sought shelter from the rain under a tree. My son was still dreaming under his plastic buggy cover, and I couldn’t help but admire his ruby cheeks and the plump, dimpled arms I tucked back under his blanket. There. In the scrubby grass that bordered the concrete, bumblebees were browsing—if I had a garden of my own, I thought, I’d fill it with low forests of clover and all the ugly weeds they adore, I’d throw myself to my knees in service to bees. I looked past them toward the hills in the distance, and, thinking of that road sign again, I rummaged for my phone. There were many more verses to the caoineadh than I recalled, thirty, or more. The poem’s landscape came to life as I read, it was alive all around me, alive and fizzing with rain, and I felt myself alive in it. Under that drenched tree, I found her sons, “Conchubhar beag an cheana is Fear Ó Laoghaire, an leanbh”—which I translated to myself as “our dotey little Conchubhar / and Fear Ó Laoghaire, the babba.” I was startled to find Eibhlín Dubh pregnant again with her third child, just as I was. I had never imagined her as a mother in any of my previous readings, or perhaps I had simply ignored that part of her identity, since the collision of mother and desire wouldn’t have fitted with how my teenage self wanted to see her. As my fingertip scar navigated the text now, however, I could almost imagine her lullaby hum in the dark. I scrolled the text from beginning to end, then swiped back to read it all again. Slower, this time.

The poem began within Eibhlín Dubh’s gaze as she watched a man stroll across a market. His name was Art and, as he walked, she wanted him. Once they eloped, they led a life that could only be described as opulent: oh, the lavish bedchambers, oh, the delectable meals, oh, the couture, oh, the long, long mornings of sleep in sumptuous duck-down. As Art’s wife, she wanted for nothing. I envied her her home and wondered how many servants it took to keep it all going, how many shadow women doing their shadow work, the kind of shadow women I come from. Eibhlín dedicates entire verses to her lover in descriptions so vivid that they shudder with a deep love and a desire that still feels electric, but the fact that this poem was composed after his murder means that grief casts its murk-shadow over every line of praise. How powerful such a cataloging must have felt in the aftermath of his murder, when each spoken detail conjured him back again, alive and impeccably dressed, with a shining pin glistening in his hat, and “the suit of fine couture / stitched and spun abroad for you.” She shows us Art as desired, not only by herself, but by others, too, by posh city women who

always
stooped their curtsies low for you. How well, they could see
what a hearty bed-mate you’d be,
what a man to share a saddle with,
what a man to spark a child with.

Although the couple were living through the regime of fear and cruelty inflicted by the Penal Laws, her husband was defiant. Despite his many enemies, Art seemed somehow unassailable to Eibhlín, until the day that “she came to me, your steed, / with her reins trailing the cobbles, / and your heart’s blood smeared from cheek to saddle.” In this terrifying moment, Eibhlín neither hesitated nor sought help. Instead, she leaped into that drenched saddle and let her husband’s horse carry her to his body. In anguish and in grief, then, she fell upon him, keening and drinking mouthfuls of his blood. Even in such a moment of raw horror, desire remained—she roared over his corpse, ordering him to rise from the dead so she might “have a bed dressed / in bright blankets / and embellished quilts / to spark your sweat and set it spilling.” But Art was dead, and the text she composed became an evolving record of praise, sorrow, lust, and reminiscence.

Through the darkness of grief, this rage is a lucifer match, struck and sparking. She curses the man who ordered Art’s murder: “Morris, you runt; on you, I wish anguish!— / May bad blood spurt from your heart and your liver! / Your eyes grow glaucoma! / Your knee-bones both shatter!” Such furies burn and dissipate and burn again, for this is a poem fueled by the twin fires of anger and desire. Eibhlín rails against all involved in Art’s betrayal, including her own brother-in-law, “that shit-talking clown.” Rage. Rage and anguish. Rage and anguish and love. She despairs for her two young sons, “and the third, still within me, / I fear will never breathe.” What losses this woman has suffered. What losses are yet to come. She is in pain, as is the poem itself; this text is a text in pain. It aches. When the school bell rang, my son found me in the rain, my face turned toward the hills where Eibhlín Dubh once lived.

That night, the baby squirmed inside me until I abandoned sleep, scrambling for my phone instead. My husband instinctively curled his sleeping body into mine; despite his snores, I felt him grow hard against the dip of my back. I frowned, holding very still until I was sure he was asleep, then inching away to whisper the poem to myself, conjuring a voice through hundreds of years, from her pregnant body to mine. As everyone else dreamed, my eyes were open in the dark.

 

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a poet and essayist. In addition to A Ghost in the Throat, she is the author of six critically acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Awards for her writing include a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the Ostana Prize, a Seamus Heaney Fellowship, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.

From A Ghost in the Throat , by Doireann Ní Ghríofa. Copyright © Doireann Ní Ghríofa, 2020. Reprinted by permission of Biblioasis.

Read an interview with Doireann Ní Ghríofa.

Redux: Mother for Whom the Whole Sky

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

Vladimir Nabokov.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating the release of the Summer 2021 issue and highlighting work by issue no. 237 contributors who have previously appeared in the Review. Read Vladimir Nabokov’s Art of Fiction interview, Anuk Arudpragasam’s short story “Last Rites,” Kaveh Akbar’s poem “Mothers I Once Was,” and Roz Chast’s “The Art of Revelry.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or, choose our new bundle and you’ll also receive Poets at Work for 25% off the cover price.

 

Vladimir Nabokov, The Art of Fiction No. 40
Issue no. 41 (Summer–Fall 1967)

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel you have any conspicuous or secret flaw as a writer?

NABOKOV

The absence of a natural vocabulary. An odd thing to confess, but true. Of the two instruments in my possession, one—my native tongue—I can no longer use, and this not only because I lack a Russian audience, but also because the excitement of verbal adventure in the Russian medium has faded away gradually after I turned to English in 1940. My English, this second instrument I have always had, is however a stiffish, artificial thing, which may be all right for describing a sunset or an insect, but which cannot conceal poverty of syntax and paucity of domestic diction when I need the shortest road between warehouse and shop. An old Rolls-Royce is not always preferable to a plain jeep.

 

 

Last Rites
By Anuk Arudpragasam
Issue no. 230 (Fall 2019)

It was a little past four in the afternoon, the light softer now and more diffuse, the intensity of the day’s heat beginning to wane, and standing by himself in a corner of the garden Krishan was observing the people gathered in Rani’s house for the funeral, somewhat unnerved, after his long and meditative journey, by how quickly he’d found himself in this place so different from his point of origin, this setting that, despite conforming to all his abstract expectations, had nevertheless managed to catch him off guard.

 

 

Mothers I Once Was
By Kaveh Akbar
Issue no. 228 (Spring 2019)

Mother fingers in the mud. Mother begging bowl.
Mother lace weaver drumming her web, babies
eating her whole. Bleachable mother. Mother apron
smeared with blood and flour. Mother flower. Mother Florida,

the wet bone. The marble throne. Mother sent back.
Mother bent back curling like script. Mother depended
on light. Mother? Depends on the night.

Mother for whom the whole sky …

 

 

The Art of Revelry
By Roz Chast
Issue no. 95 (Spring 1985)

PROPOSAL: Marcel Proust shown dipping his madeleine cookie into his tea circa 1909, the famous mnemonic act which produced a rush of childhood memories culminating in the noted madeleine episode of Swann’s Way and providing the framework for Remembrance of Things Past.

REJECTED: Too obscure. Not enough action.

 

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives. Or, choose our new bundle and you’ll also receive Poets at Work for 25% off the cover price.

Chronology of a Body

Hervé Guibert, Les lettres de Mathieu, 1984, gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the Estate of Hervé Guibert, Paris, and Callicoon Fine Arts, New York.

CONTRACTING

It was the fall three years ago, massively pregnant, bouncing on an exercise ball to try to stimulate contractions, trying to not stroke out while watching the presidential debates, the one where he loomed menacingly over her like a horrible phantom, when I received an email. Would I be interested in writing a short book, a study, about a novel of my choice, for Columbia University Press? I thought I could write it fast in those early months. It took me almost two years before I could even begin thinking through it. Now, I set myself a deadline, amid the deadline of my body. One month before I find out my news, whether or not I will choose to terminate this pregnancy, whether this pregnancy will decide to end itself, whether it will continue, I will finally write this study of Hervé Guibert.

LIKE A DEAD MAN

It is always in the midst of a medical emergency or crisis of the body when I resume work on it. Perhaps it is when I feel the most isolated that I feel relief returning to the pages of Guibert—the complaint of illness, which is always an experience of isolation. No one can ever really know the experience of your body, an experience worsened by the alienation of medical bureaucracy. The summer before last, I contract shingles, exhausted after having finished a book in a month in order to finally satisfy my contract to my previous publisher and make enough money to pay health insurance and cover rent that summer. Of course, I think immediately to this mirroring with Guibert, like a bodily possession. Guibert, always the unreliable narrator, initially tells us he left his previous doctor, Dr. Nacier, for his gossipy indiscretion as to the celebrities he treated, but really, he tells us, it is because, when diagnosing him with shingles in 1987, he also mentioned that they were seeing a resurgence of this particular variety of chicken pox in seropositive patients, which Dr. Chandi later confirmed, seeing the shingles as diagnostic, even when the narrator was still refusing to be tested, putting in drawers over the years the lab requisitions, either in his name or an assumed one. What is the purpose of knowing, he tells us, the knowledge of which could drive someone like him to suicide? This is repeated, circled around, negated, throughout—Guibert’s desire to know or not to know whether or not he was seropositive, and then, once he knew, what that knowledge felt like to experience within the body. Which was, at that time, the knowledge that he was going to die.

I didn’t know how to decode the strange symptomry over the past months—headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, the excruciating shoulder blade and rib pain on the left side, along with a painful left breast, scaly, blistered, itchy, a feeling of glass shards within it when Leo sucks. I am up at night weeping, always weeping at night so as not to disturb the child, panicked that I have inflammatory breast cancer, the fastest-growing and most malignant form. I consult with one of those call-a-docs on my shitty marketplace insurance and upload for him a photo of my sad, rashy breast, like the saddest sext ever to have existed. After speaking to me for all of a minute on the phone, the male doctor confidently diagnoses a staph infection and prescribes antibiotics, which do nothing. Finally, I beg my ob-gyn to see me, despite her now not taking my shitty, yet still inordinately expensive, insurance. Shingles, my doctor says immediately, when I take off my bra. She is arrogant in a way that I always trust from women of authority. She bikes to Manhattan from Brooklyn every day, her sleek bicycle is next to her desk, I imagine her strong thighs wrapped in bike shorts underneath her medical coat. I don’t have the correct anatomy for shingles, she says to me, since I’m breastfeeding, ideally the rash would be on the torso, but she is certain she is right. I don’t have the peau d’orange—she pronounces it with a French accent, the skin like an orange peel. She’s only ever seen one case of it in her twenty-five years of practice.

That summer, it is as if I am afflicted with leprosy and on an island. As I’m trying to write these notes Leo comes in naked, having peed on her practice potty, and climbs into bed, pulls down my white nightgown and nurses. I bicker with John that he should take her, I’m supposed to rest. I mean, I am supposed to rest, but instead I have just begun a secret book. I kick everyone out of bed so that I can heal. Sickness is one of the only times I can attempt to demand my solitude. Perhaps a book is also a solitude, so I can try to be alone. A quote from Kafka in my notes: “I need solitude for my writing, not ‘like a hermit’—that wouldn’t be enough—but like a dead man.”

THE WEEP AND OOZE OF POISON

At my appointment my doctor asks for one week to see if the antiviral works before scheduling a biopsy. By September, I will have better, partially subsidized, though even more outrageously expensive, health insurance for at least one year from the college, more if they keep renewing my contract. If I can wait, I could see any doctor within their much wider HMO. How precarious my health has felt, partially because of this instability. I am haunted by the fact that both Susan Sontag and Kathy Acker didn’t have health insurance when they were diagnosed with breast cancer. Marie texts to ask how I’m feeling. The check-in feels dutiful, what Guibert in the novel derisively refers to as “friendship’s daily bulletins.” It’s better than late pregnancy, I write to her. It’s true, although like then I feel like Job, covered head to toe with boils. It’s also better than the postpartum period, the tear ripped through my perineum and anus, a tear between the third and fourth degree, as it’s measured, so that I have to sit on a foam donut for weeks, the unbearable hemorrhoids and constipation, like a block of shit trapped inside of me, the crack and burn of sore nipples, the sleeplessness, of course, but everyone knows that part. I guess I’ve become accustomed to being rundown. Finally unable to bear the burning pinpricks on my breast, I try the pink calamine lotion John picked up for me. The label on the bottle states that the lotion “dries the oozing and weeping of poison.” It strikes me that this is also the potential of writing through the body under capitalism. I take the Guibert into my oatmeal bath, attempt to read a few pages. I feel I understand in a different register Guibert’s need to write of doctor’s visits and his sick body. A way to not just be a malady to be treated. To be more fully human. Sofia writes me that she longs for “a book that would also be a tonic. Not a course of study but a course of treatment.”

In the advanced stage of his illness, his nurses and doctors his only companions, as documented in his sequel Compassion Protocol, Guibert writes of finally fulfilling his father’s dream of him studying medicine. Already in the first book of his illness, there is a fascination with the virus as a narrative acting upon him. I look up shingles online, caused by the varicella-zoster virus, the same virus that causes childhood chickenpox, living in the body dormant, reactivated in nerves, which feels like a narrative of trauma housed inside of me. There has been no official link made between the postpartum period and shingles, it usually afflicts the elderly, because why would they run studies on the health and mortality of mothers? Yet there are forums online self-diagnosing “postpartum shingles,” “shingles and breastfeeding,” a pandemic of this, it seems, like so many other postpartum maladies that are ignored, all of these mothers at home, without adequate help, wrung-out, exhausted, unable to get childcare to go to a doctor. I was up at 4:30 A.M. with Leo, as I didn’t feed her before she fell asleep last night, we just moved her from car to crib after stealthily putting on her pajamas. Now as I write this she is draining my swollen breast—my armpits still swollen, my ribs tender. With one hand on my phone I look up “swelling” and “shingles.” I’m still certain I’m dying, dizzy with this certainty that the shingles are symptomatic of something more severe, will the rash spread, weep, open. The only way I can exist within this borderless state of worry, the velocity of my panic, is by writing in my notebook. Guibert’s panicked hypochondria throughout his journals—the almost vertiginous desire for his death, a “fear and longing.” Even at the age of thirty-one, in the translated published diaries, which I read that summer of shingles, smudges all over the massive white paperback, he is obsessed with death, he has various premonitions about contracting what is known then as a gay cancer. “When I am told I am in great shape, and I feel myself dying.” I go into the kitchen to take the large stone-blue antiviral, along with two raw vitamin C tablets and two B-complex capsules recommended to bolster my immune system. I guzzle my horse pills down with yet another cup of coffee, what a paragon of good health I am. Adrenal fatigue, the internet tells me. Wired and tired. Yes, wired and tired wired and tired wired and tired.

CHRONOLOGY OF A BODY

A chronology of a body is not linear. One must piece together dates, doctors, like a detective novel. In October 1983 the narrator’s partner Jules is hospitalized at the Cité Universitaire with the fever and swollen lymph nodes beginning to be associated with that “famous plague,” whose origins were not narrowed down to being caused by a virus and which was still cloaked in fantastic rumor—that it was a biological weapon launched by Reagan, that you could get it by sniffing amyl nitrate—although throughout Guibert makes clear that there was at least a strong suspicion it was caused by sharing bodily fluids. At the same time the narrator was returning from Mexico with a parallel attack of high fever, and soon after an abscess appeared at the back of his throat, which made him convinced that they both had AIDS, although they wouldn’t get the test for seropositivity until later in the decade. When he becomes certain that he has it, a calm goes over him—the calm of the hypochondriac who has been preparing for a calamity his entire life. “In an instant, this certainty changed everything, turned everything upside down, even the landscape, and this both paralyzed and liberated me, sapped my strength while at the same time increasing it tenfold; I was afraid and light-headed, calm as well as terrified: I had perhaps finally achieved my end.”

In the novel Guibert travels in time to the beginning of the decade, a series of portraits, like a Rolodex, of incompetent doctors recommended by friends who inflict both absurd examinations as well as ludicrous diagnoses and cures in response to his feeling that something is wrong with him. It is unclear, to both the narrator and the reader, whether these are the confessions of a hypochondriac, as he is often dismissed by these paternalistic doctors, his wandering pain the result of “undoubtedly imaginary ailments that tormented me,” including his conviction that he has liver cancer following a case of hepatitis. First he is diagnosed with “benign renal malformation” and told by a urologist to drink large quantities of sparkling water with lemon, then he finally gets an appointment with a homeopath, who his rich and famous friends see several times a week (including Marine, who is based on the actress Isabelle Adjani), and who prescribes a daily intake of dozens of pellets and pills that nearly kill another friend’s son suffering from appendicitis. Guibert’s gleeful vivisection of this celebrity quack doctor and his sadistic herbal remedies foisted on mostly female patients:

[The office] where he conducted his most titillating experiments on his most famous female patients, shutting them up nude inside metal chests after affixing all over their bodies needles filled with concentrates made from herbs, tomatoes, bauxite, pineapples, cinnamon, patchouli, turnips, clay, and carrots, from which lockers they would stagger out as if drunk, and a handsome shade of scarlet.

The doctor prescribes him with spasmophilia, not exactly psychosomatic, as Guibert explains to us, but still involving the unconscious decisions on the part of the patient where to localize his pain. Finally Muzil, the character based on Michel Foucault, recommends another doctor, a “pale, translucent manikin” who diagnoses him with dysmorphophobia, another word for body dysmorphic disorder, an obsessive focus on the flaws of the body that the doctor patronizingly describes as an illness of youth, prescribing him antidepressants. But of course Muzil, who is coughing up a lung, medicating with large doses of antibiotics, doesn’t take any of his friend’s ailments seriously, even though following the dating of the novel the philosopher will only have eight months to live. Eventually, Muzil’s cough will become severe enough that he will consult an elderly internist in his neighborhood, who proclaims him in perfect health, just before he collapses unconscious in a pool of blood in his kitchen and must be hospitalized, one month before he dies.

Guibert tries to outline the specific dating of his body’s history, a decade of (collective and personal) repression as to how AIDS was transmitted underlined by a constant fear and deferred diagnosis. 1980 was the year of hepatitis. 1987 was his shingles. By the next year the “revelation” of his illness, which he tells us in a later hallucinatory, Genet-like passage he suspects he contracted on a dance floor in Mexico after being kissed by an “old whore,” the raw white wound later appearing in his throat (some less-than-latent misogyny there, to assume that he contracted the virus from the kiss of a woman portrayed as a Felliniesque succubus, despite chronicling his unprotected sex throughout the decade). “That’s the chronology that becomes my outline, except whenever I discover that progression springs from disorder.”

TO THE FRIEND

The title of Guibert’s novel provides some of the suspense. Who is his addressee? Is it the friends who are either dead or dead to him because of past treacheries? He connects the constellation of his famous circle all somehow linked to the early onset of what in France was called le sida, which was mired in paranoia and conspiracies. He is telling the narrative of a body and a disease through gossip and the experience of himself and his intimates, an act of revenge, to all who didn’t save him.

ROOM

There are a hundred sections in To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. Guibert referred to them as rooms. Entering them, we can access the solitude and intimacy of this work, witness the performance and endurance of the body while writing the novel within the work. Are these days? Writing sessions?

Hot and fuzzy, a metallic taste in my mouth from the antivirals. I am not resting as I should be. I am working on revisions of the manuscript—always another revision, just as Guibert writes of revising a manuscript in To the Friend. I want to be rid of it, like being cured of it. Leo runs around naked, climbing on me, nursing. Twice today she squatted and laid a turd, once on the rug, luckily solid, then a softer one on the wooden floor. And now, later in the afternoon, I only have fifteen minutes to think before the babysitter leaves. I beg for fifteen clear minutes to read a couple pages of the Guibert, to write these lines in my notebook. The door open so she doesn’t cry for mommy. During the hour the babysitter has been here I have corralled Leo to pee on her practice potty, then cleaned it up. The babysitter leaves her food everywhere—her half-eaten apple, the half-finished ravioli she brought with her. I walk around like a mom or maid cleaning after both of them. Finally I entice them to go on the porch to blow bubbles.

BHANU

On her blog Bhanu posts about a line from César Aira in The Paris Review: “The novel requires an accumulation of time, a succession of different days: without that, it isn’t a novel.” What does this say, Bhanu asks, about the labor of caretaking? If a writer takes care of others, or must take care of themselves, time is of course disrupted. She writes: “Without these days, in succession, can a person be a novelist?” I read the original essay. “You cannot write a novel the night before dying,” writes Aira. But isn’t that what Guibert was doing? Writing novels the night before dying? Early on in his diaries, years before his diagnosis: “It’s death that drives me (that would be the end of the book).” In many ways Guibert is more of a diarist than a novelist. The diary feeling is a shape of fragmented consciousness. Then what does he mean when he writes in Compassion Protocol, in a classic aphoristic flourish closing a section, “It is when what I am writing takes the form of a journal that I most strongly feel that I am writing fiction”?

 

Kate Zambreno is the author of eight books, most recently Drifts, out now in paperback from Riverhead, and To Write As If Already Dead, a study on Hervé Guibert, now out from Columbia University. She is the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University. She is at work on an essay collection, The Missing Person, to be published by Riverhead, and a novel, Foam. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction. Four of her short stories appeared in the Spring 2019 issue.

Edited excerpt from  To Write As If Already Dead , by Kate Zambreno. Copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.