The Paris Review's Blog, page 194

Now’s The Time: An Interview with David Amram

One of the highest compliments in my lexicon of praise is the term lebenskuntsler, German for “an artist of life”—and high in my pantheon of the lebenskuntslers I’ve known is the musician/composer/conductor David Amram. Still flourishing at age eighty-nine, Amram has an impressive resume. As the New York Philharmonic’s first composer-in-residence, for which he was chosen by Leonard Bernstein, he has created funky jazz numbers as well as classical symphonies and concertos. Then there is the rich music Amram has written for Arthur Miller’s plays, including After The Fall; for Joe Papp’s earliest Shakespeare in the Park productions; and for legendary films such as Elia Kazan’s Splendor In The Park and John Frankenheimer’s Manchurian Candidate.

But Amram does far more than write scores (or “figure out which correct notes to choose and then write them down on each day’s new empty page,” as he puts it). He’s often on the road, teaching students of all ages, leading orchestras, “sitting in” with any musician who asks him to, and performing his own public concerts. These “Amram Jams” can last up to five hours, and feature Amram scat-singing improvised songs along with a diverse array of guest artists. Amram has jammed with local musicians from all over Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East, becoming, according to the New York Times, “multicultural before multiculturalism existed.”

True to the title of his seminal 1971 double album No More Walls, he has played Latin music to audiences in China, played Kenyan music in Latvia, and worked frequently with Native American artists. This last connection led, in 1977, to The Trail of Beauty, a piece for mezzo-soprano, oboe, and orchestra whose libretto featured traditional indigenous texts.

Amram frequently plays the piano, the penny whistle, the French horn and the Spanish guitar, but he can also coax melodies from the shanai and the dumbeg and other instruments that few Americans have heard of, much less heard. During his daily life he even wears some of these instruments around his neck, along with amulets and other gifts he’s received.

Over the decades, Amram has preserved his artistic adventures in three memoirs: Vibrations (1968), Offbeat: Collaborations with Kerouac (2002), and Upbeat: Seven Lives of a Musical Cat (2008). He’s currently working on the fourth, to be entitled “David Amram: The Next Eighty Years.” Born in Philadelphia in 1930 to a Sephardic Jewish family, Amram was raised on a dairy farm in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, where, he says, his father was a major ethical influence and where he loved hearing “the old hog callers, who excelled in this special style of performing art,” he writes. “Whether or not they impressed any hogs, these farmers made me see that you can find music and beauty anywhere if you pay attention. They also made me see that you can transform anything into a form of expression all your own.”

After studying history at George Washington University, serving as a soldier with the Seventh Army in Europe, and working as a busboy, a soda jerk, a janitor, a gym teacher, a moving man, and an amateur boxer, Amram wound up in postwar Paris, where he spent time in cafes with George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen as they created The Paris Review. Back in New York, he joined Charles Mingus’s band. Around 1959, Amram acted alongside the writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso, as well as the painter Larry Rivers, in Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s groundbreaking short film Pull My Daisy (for which Amram also composed the soundtrack). This “promising young composer,” as he now waggishly describes himself, has made music with Bob Dylan, Charlie Parker, Johnny Depp, Willie Nelson, Thelonius Monk, John Prine, Frank McCourt, Dizzy Gillespie, Paddy Chayefsky, and Patti Smith.

Apart from kunst, Amram is equally impressive with the leben part of the lebenskuntsler equation. He’s been an indefatigable social activist, a prodigious raconteur, and, as the critic Nat Hentoff aptly phrased it, “a ubiquitous deliverer of good cheer.” Recently I visited Amram at his home in Beacon, New York, which overflows with books, CDs, framed photos, DVDs, instruments and awards. We had a long and lively conversation, presented here in condensed and edited form. —Gary Lippman

 

INTERVIEWER

Are you surprised to find yourself nearing the age of ninety?

AMRAM

You bet! I never thought I’d make it to thirty. We came up in the “live fast, die young” era. But contrary to the old saw, turning eighty-nine didn’t happen quickly. Anyway, I don’t have time for old age to catch up with me. The title of Charlie Parker’s great 1945 anthem “Now’s The Time” remains my mantra. People are already planning celebrations for my ninetieth birthday in different cities around the world. So I am eating extra vitamins and trying to get at least one good night of sleep a week to be ready.

INTERVIEWER

Where have you traveled recently?

AMRAM

I visited, twice, Silicon Valley’s high-tech, high-rent, high-IQ, high-ranked, center-of-high-expectations marquee city of San Jose. When I first went there in the summer of 1948, San Jose was a small, sleepy agricultural town. Having just graduated high school, I used to drive my truck through those streets as a carpenter’s helper and plumber’s helper, never dreaming that seventy decades later, I’d be back for the West Coast premiere of my latest orchestral work. And this time, I didn’t have to worry about finding a place to park my truck.

INTERVIEWER

Are there any overarching lessons you try to impart when you find yourself teaching?

AMRAM

The work ethic and high standards I learned from those master carpenters and plumbers way back in 1948, their dedication to their chosen path, and their creativity and constant problem-solving on the job. Above all, I want students to do what they feel that they were put here to do and never give up trying to do it. If they are ever told by their career counselors that they are too old for their art and should give up, perhaps they’ll remember an older cat like me, someone who is grateful for being able to spend his life doing what he loves to do, and say quietly to themselves, Maybe I’ll give it another two years, anyway.

INTERVIEWER

You must be a fun father.

AMRAM

I did the same thing with my three children that my parents did for me—keep stuff simple, teach them to not to judge others based on gender, pigmentation, education, or location, and leave enough space so that the kids could discover things on their own. In this way, without knowing it, I was following what a musician friend of mine, Charlie Chin, said is an Asian-American metaphor for child-rearing. It’s what they call “the thousand-year-old egg.” You put this egg in the ground and, through osmosis, the egg becomes nourished by all the nutrients there. So, expose a child to anything of beauty—a concert, an art museum, good friends, a good meal—and don’t worry if it looks like they’re not paying attention, because they’re there. Like that thousand-year egg, they’ll absorb all that beauty, all those nutrients.

INTERVIEWER

Does this apply to adults as well?

AMRAM

Oh, sure. Especially when you’re a composer. If you’re around all kinds of beautiful music, it will nitrify and enrich your DNA. Sonny Rollins, who’s two months younger than I am, told me recently, “David, I can’t walk around so well anymore, I can’t play the saxophone, I can’t do many things that I love to do, but I’ve never been happier, because I’m just spending all my time understanding and following the golden rule.” Sonny is someone who’s really arrived spiritually, and he did not get to that level by buying a course, or subscribing to an installment plan in order to be spiritual.

INTERVIEWER

Your great mentor Dimitri Mitropoulos, who was the conductor of the New York Philharmonic when you were a young man, told you to “love the music more than you love yourself.” What did he mean?

AMRAM

Mitropoulos had known people who’d become celebrated but then had a downfall and forgot what we’re all supposed to be doing while we’re here on this earth. He always said that if you’re not responsible for the artistic gift bestowed on you, or if because of pain or denial or any bad state of mind you don’t use it, then that gift might be taken away from you. Mitropoulos believed that we were lucky to be able to make art, and our responsibility was to get better at it and to pass it on and encourage others to do the same.

INTERVIEWER

Mitropoulos seems to have been a very encouraging sort.

AMRAM

One time we were riding an elevator together and the elevator operator said to Mitropoulos, “Maestro, I’m a songwriter!” Instead of saying, “I’m not interested, just be quiet and take me to my floor,” Mitropoulos said, “Oh, really? What kind of songs do you write? Do you like Cole Porter? Do you have any songs with you? You do? Then stop the elevator!” And the maestro looked through the guy’s song sheet, saying, “This is interesting. This chord here, I think it’s a C-sharp minor—you left the sharp out … and I like this harmony here… ” Mitropoulos gave the elevator man a whole crash-course Juilliard Ph.D. in music theory—and in a nice way. He always went out of his way for anybody and everybody.

INTERVIEWER

So he didn’t let his ego get in the way of his humanity.

AMRAM

Right. He made me see that, for artists, the only thing worse than obscurity can be too much recognition, because then you are told that now it is time to move to a “higher level”—get rid of all those in your life who love you but are not in a position to help you to “advance.” You may also be advised to cease celebrating your cultural roots, whatever they may be. But follow that advice and you’ll soon be feasting at the trough of swine! While it might seem tempting, the policy of “full greed ahead” won’t lead to growth.

INTERVIEWER

So being a somebody can make you a nobody.

AMRAM

But actually there are no “nobodies.” If someone says to me, “I’m a nobody,” I refer them to my friend Hondo Crouch. When Hondo bought Luckenbach, Texas, this ghost town that was just two blocks long, he made a fun toy city out of it, declaring himself mayor, creating the Luckenbach Air Force, and putting up a sign that said, “POPULATION: 7—EVERYBODY IS SOMEBODY IN LUCHENBACH.” The point is, everybody is somebody, everywhere.

INTERVIEWER

In one of your memoirs, you write, “If you get bitter, you’ve had it. If you get envious of others … you’re already ordering your own coffin.” Despite all your brio, have you ever gone on any bummer trips?

AMRAM

[Laughter] For years and years! I experienced everything—bitterness, jealousy, rage, pettiness, competitiveness, all those things. But I found older people to emulate and study, people who’d been through their own feelings of disgust, rage, and discomfort but had somehow managed to make a living in the arts while behaving with positivity. Whatever the situation was, they would turn it around to make others and themselves feel good. I found older people like Mitropoulos to emulate and study, people who’d somehow managed to make a living in the arts while remaining human. Before long, I could understand my own negativity and cancel it out. As the ancient Greeks said, Physician, heal thyself!

INTERVIEWER

So you don’t allow yourself to indulge those feelings anymore?

AMRAM

When I was playing with Oscar Pettiford’s big band in 1957, at the New York nightclub Birdland, I got talking with Jimmy Cleveland, a great trombone player. After rehearsal I started whining about my landlord, and my then-girlfriend leaving me and my lack of work—whine, whine, whine—and Jimmy just sat there going, Mm-hmm. Finally he said, “Let me pull your coat to something.” (That’s the vernacular, meaning “Let me give you some advice.”) He said, “Don’t put your business in the street.” Bam! Jimmy made me understand that no one wants to hear David singing the blues—unless it’s a psychiatrist, and they now get three hundred dollars an hour for that.

INTERVIEWER

How can you stay positive in the face of negativity, though?

AMRAM

When that friend of mine Charlie Chin was performing with me in 1976 in Toronto, hypnotizing everyone with his songs about the Chinese-American experience, a heckler with a braying voice kept shouting, “Charlie, you suck!” The audience was horrified. Finally Charlie just flicked his moustache and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, as a Buddhist and a Maoist, I’m always in conflict with myself, but I have learned that we are all basically one person. We’re the same person. And sometimes, ladies and gentlemen, I can’t believe I’m such a drag.” The audience screamed with therapeutic laughter, the heckler slunk off—and later, when I complimented Charles on how he turned around the situation, he said, “Well, what I said was true. With that heckler, the Great Spirit was showing us how disgusting that dark part of ourselves is, so that when we know that, we can quell it from within.”

INTERVIEWER

Sort of a higher-level “golden rule.”

AMRAM

Which reminds me of Sonny Rollins again. I complained to him once, “Sonny, there’s this musician who just keeps playing one note on his tenor saxophone, honking away like that for four minutes!” This was back in the fifties, when Sonny himself would play magnificent improvisations, thousands of notes, like a Beethoven symphony. But Sonny told me, “Don’t put that one-note guy down. That’s the best he can do. That’s his thing, that’s how he supports his family. If you don’t care for it, do something else.”

INTERVIEWER

The great photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank once thanked you for a compliment by saying, “I don’t need your approval but I appreciate your enthusiasm.” Do you similarly not crave, or even need, approval?

AMRAM

My main concern in composing or conducting or performing is to feel that I’ve done what I hoped to. And if the musicians involved feel moved, or rise to a certain level and discover or celebrate their own creativity, then I’m on the right path. When you’re conducting, you try to make everybody listen—to pay attention!—and to feel something and dare to put themselves into that moment and to celebrate that mix of formality and spontaneity, the magic that happens … It’s like a summer night when you go outside and feel that thing in the air. You don’t understand it but it’s present. The great unknown.

INTERVIEWER

For all your belief in tolerance and respect, did you ever just want to lash out at someone who was being a scoundrel?

AMRAM

Sure. At the funeral for my friend, the singer Dave Lambert, I was serving as a pallbearer, and some guy walks up to me—right while I’m helping to carry the coffin—and he says, “Hey, listen, I left some stuff up in Lambert’s apartment, do you have a key?” I knew what he meant—he wanted to steal from my friend’s home. And I was glad, being a pallbearer at the moment, that my hands were occupied, because even though I’m a pacifist, I wanted to clock that guy. Instead, I just said no and tuned him out. But that was a lesson. If you see bad behavior like that, then you learn how to act differently. He showed me how not to be.

INTERVIEWER

So you’re not revenge-minded.

AMRAM

Feeling vengeful is like getting cancer. That messes you up and diminishes you and hurts you more than you could ever hurt someone else.

INTERVIEWER

Another lesson you learned in New York was when Mingus told you, “Just find one person and play for that person all night long. All you need is one person in your life to really be listening.”

AMRAM

Right. If you can make even one person feel more creative or foster something good in them, then you’ve done a hell of a good thing in your life.

INTERVIEWER

But connecting with listeners also requires patience, of course.

AMRAM

Moses was in the desert for forty years, so if it takes awhile to get recognition for your work, you’re right on schedule.

INTERVIEWER

Since you mention forty years, I love your remark that “longevity is the artist’s best revenge.”

AMRAM

I have an addendum to that. “Premature expiration is highly overrated.”

INTERVIEWER

Do you have a sense of what happens to us when we die?

AMRAM

At one of my big school reunions, an old classmate said, “Now let’s talk about how we’ll deal with the afterlife.” I thought, Oh, man, I didn’t realize this was going to be an undertakers convention. I thought we were here to see old friends and celebrate being alive! Some people said, My guru says this, some other people said, My psychic says that, and I joked that, because I believe in reincarnation, I’m trying to be a vegetarian so that I can come back in the next life as an artichoke or an eggplant.

I think that leaving the planet is like when the front-desk clerk at a hotel calls you in your room and says, Time’s up. Please make room for the next guest. Time to move out and move on. It’s all a big mystery, of course. I have a vague sense that there’s a spirit world beyond us, and I’m in touch with it, but I haven’t developed that aspect of thought too much—or made any advance bookings! [Laughter] The singer/actor/humanitarian Theo Bikel summed it up. At his eighty-fifth birthday party at Carnegie Hall, people asked him, “Theo, are you okay?” and he said, “Not to worry. In the theater, we never die, we just go on tour.” So whenever I think about everyone I’ve lost, which I do a lot, I just figure that they’re “on tour.”

INTERVIEWER

Kerouac wrote to you not long before he died at a young age, “Someday when we’re old men, we’ll lie in our hammocks with toothpicks and rejoice in all the work we’ve done, and smile like Buddha, and pray for all our friends yet to be discovered.” Do you ever feel sad that he wasn’t able to grow old alongside you?

AMRAM

Mmm. It’s almost like I’ve been doing my work for Jack, too, and for all the other people I loved who didn’t live long enough to see all their dreams come true. I know that Jack would feel the same way if he had been the one who got to live a full lifetime. Charlie Parker, too.

INTERVIEWER

Parker’s death was another big early blow for you, but it prompted you to get more serious about your work. As you wrote about that experience, “I felt a real determination and force inside myself that had to get the music out at any cost and at any price.”

AMRAM

You never believe that people like Jack and Parker, glowing examples of graciousness and appreciation, are going to die. That doesn’t seem possible. At least it’s terrific that with Youtube you can still see and hear an artist’s work and hear the artist speak about their work.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think a lot about your own mortality, about “going on tour?”

AMRAM

I’m mainly reminded of death because people mention it to me all the time, saying, “Have you prepared for this or that?” My oldest daughter now is forty and I’ve thought, How can I possibly be so old as to have a daughter of forty? Then I remembered that I was already forty-eight when she was born! Pete Seeger told me on his sixtieth birthday, “David, when you turn sixty you’ll be amazed by how many friends’ funerals you’ll have to go to.” I thought, This must just be Pete in a down mood. But of course it’s true.

INTERVIEWER

Are there any previous projects you look back on with special pleasure?

AMRAM

My piano sonata from 1960 is starting to be played again and I listen to that now and think, Wow, this young cat has some nice stuff here! But I try not to rest on my laurels. One of the things I always liked about New York was, you could finish the most colossal project and people would just say, What are you doing next? I understood that workaholic ethos when I was composer-in-residence with Leonard Bernstein at the Philharmonic. The morning after the glorious opening night of their 1966–67 season, Bernstein and the whole orchestra were back at work, sawing away, preparing a whole new hard program for the following week’s schedule. They didn’t even have the chance to take a day off. They had to get up and grind on and then go back every night to repeat their concert from the night before and make it even better. I thought, Man, they’re doing this all year long! And I vowed that I would never complain about being overworked or dare to say, I’m not in the mood to work today.

INTERVIEWER

You sound as focused on making art as ever.

AMRAM

I am. I’m excited about my new compositions, my new memoir, and my upcoming concerts. And, as usual, I’m trying to do better than is expected, be grateful, be happy, and behave in an excellent way. There are no shortcuts. You just have to keep on trucking.

 

NOTE: This year’s Amram Jam will happen at 8PM on December 19 at the Theater For A New City, while Carnegie Hall will host the New York premiere of Amram’s latest chamber music composition, Bulgarian Wedding for Violin and Horn, on December 23.

Gary Lippman is a lapsed lawyer. His novel Set The Controls For The Heart Of Sharon Tate was published recently and his heart is in the Highlands.

A Figure Model’s (Brief) Guide to Poses through Art History

Larissa Pham’s column, Devil in the Details , takes a tight lens on single elements of a work, tracing them throughout art history.

It paid $12.50 an hour with clothes on, $25 with clothes off. The choice, I figured, was obvious.

My friend Gabriel had turned me on to the gig in college. We were always on the lookout for work that required minimal effort for maximal reward. And the job was easy, Gabriel assured me. All I needed was a robe, some slippers, and to shave, but only if I wanted to.

The first class, I was nervous. I had scraped off all my body hair with a razor, praying that my period wouldn’t arrive in the middle of Introductory Drawing, surrounded by Yale freshmen—I imagined that seeing a naked woman in a curricular context would be traumatizing enough. I timed my shower for a few hours before class, enough time for my hair to dry but not enough, I hoped, for me to accumulate any malodorous sweat. My worst fear was of being too bodily, of grossing out my classmates. But after a week or two on the job, I realized, none of that mattered. All the students were focused on their drawing skills, not my errant pubes or pits or back-of-knee sweat.

Some of the professors I worked with gave instruction, to varying degrees of specificity. There was the hot professor, for example, who asked for elbows akimbo, figure-four knees, poses with lots of negative space. There was the class that took place right before Halloween, so they dressed me up in a trash bag and put Gabriel in a plague-doctor mask. And then there was the professor who, long after costume party season had ended, handed me two wooden dowels and asked me to act like a dominatrix. For the most part, though, they all let me do I wanted, and I came to see myself—if I may be so bold—as a coteacher of sorts, guiding the class with each pose. I’d attended drawing classes myself, and knew how much more fun it was to work from a model who had a grasp of dynamic poses, how it isn’t the look of the model that matters but how the model moves.

Conveniently, my education—what little of it I hadn’t squandered by frying my brain with party drugs—provided a repository for dynamic poses: the sculptures and statues of art history. Here, from a former figure model and art history major, is a brief guide to figurative sculpture through the ages, should you ever find yourself naked but for a robe, slippers, and in need of a shave—but only if you want to.

*

A figure drawing session frequently starts with gesture drawings—quick, thirty-second poses, which allow the artists to warm up with looser, broader marks, filling up the page. For quick poses, emphasizing vertical and horizontal lines, one might draw on some early examples of figurative sculpture: Egyptian funerary statues, in standing and seated poses, like this one of Hatshepsut at the Met. The ancient Egyptians believed in life after death; the statues were intended to be images of the body that the immortal soul could return to. As such, they’re made to last forever: sturdy, straight-spined, shoulders and hips in perfect alignment. The funerary and religious statuary of the ancient Egyptians wasn’t dissimilar to that of the Archaic Greeks, whose kouros sculptures depicted beautiful male youths, their backs straight, weight evenly distributed, one foot extended aristocratically as if midstride.

 

Left, Seated Statue of Hatshepsut, ca. 1479–1458 BCE; Right, Marble kouros, ca. 590–580 BCE

 

Sometimes the warm-up is a slow, uninterrupted stretch of movement, lasting a few minutes. For those, I liked to think of myself as one of Matisse’s dancers, painted in 1909, more than three thousand years after King Hatshepsut’s statue was sculpted. The movement of the dance was the point: the curvilinear body twisting in air, the gestures blending into one another. In a drawing, daisy-chained on the page, the five dancers could be modeled by just one figure.

Following the gesture drawings, a typical class moves into poses of about one to five minutes each. These short poses provide freedom for the model to experiment—because they’re so quick, more complicated postures can be taken, like extending one’s arms overhead or stretching them out. If you’ve ever taken a yoga class, you know stillness can be deceptive. Before long, the body quakes: it craves support and balance. Sooner than expected, what seems like an easy gesture can become intolerable. At work on the model stand, I never knew exactly how long I could hold a pose; it was always a bit of a gamble. But I always looked forward to the short poses for that reason—relief was just around the corner.

After the Archaic period, the Greeks happily took to perfecting the proportions of human form, perfecting its depiction with their love of geometry and mathematics. During the Classical period, from the rigidity of the kouros sculptures sprang a more subtle, relaxed posture, the weight of the body unevenly distributed along the hips, which the Italians, during the Renaissance, would describe as contrapposto. The Kritios Boy sculpture, from about 480 BCE, is thought to be the earliest sculpture demonstrating this new stance, which the Greeks continued to hone into the Hellenic period. This slight curvature of the body made the figure look alluringly naturalistic, even sensual, the way a relaxed model might actually stand. Paradoxically, in practice, taking a contrapposto stance feels mannered; though it looks realistic, it feels performative.

 

Left: Marble Statue Group of the Three Graces, Roman copy from second century CE; Right: Aphrodite crouching and arranging her hair, Roman copy from first or second century CE

 

On the model stand, I could take a graceful dancer’s stance, like one of the Three Graces in this Roman replica of a Hellenistic statue, perhaps draping my arm over a prop, like an unattended easel. Or maybe crouch low to the ground, my body twisted, like Aphrodite coyly adjusting her hair, in a typical depiction of the goddess.

Following the Classical period’s introduction of a more naturalistic understanding of the human body, the Hellenistic Greeks developed means of sculpting even more complex poses—the discobolus, or discus thrower, is a famed example that gave way to multiple copies in antiquity. A sculpture like the  Townley Discobolus wasn’t intended to be wholly realistic as much as it was meant to convey strength and movement—a perfect posture for a short, dynamic pose. This emotive posturing—the twists and gestures of the body conveying pain, strength, or both—found a climax in Laocoön and His Sons, a monumental piece by the sculptors of Rhodes that was unearthed in 1506 and is now on display in the Vatican.

 

Left: The Townley Discobolus, Roman copy after Myron, from second century; CE Right: Laocoön and His Sons, copy after a Greek original from ca. 200 BCE

Here, the body is maximally expressive: the torso twists, one arm is pulled back in struggle while the other grasps at a snake. The piece is a narrative one, depicting the story of Laocoön, a Trojan priest who was punished—according to Sophocles, for breaking his celibacy; according to Virgil, for trying to warn the city of Troy about the Trojan Horse—by being killed with venomous, strangling snakes. On either side of Laocoön are his two sons, their postures emphasizing the family’s plight.

After the short poses, a figure drawing class might move into medium-length sittings, with poses held for anywhere from five to fifteen minutes. Something incredible happens when you’re still for that length of time: the mind goes peacefully, utterly blank. After two minutes, the body settles. If something twinges, it will continue to twinge, but become bearable. After five, the brain stops racing. After ten, all that’s left is a buzzy, euphoric stillness. On those afternoons in the basement where drawing classes were held, I’d settle into a fifteen-minute pose and, when the timer rang, feel like I’d blacked out onstage under bright lights. I’d come back to consciousness just enough to put on my robe and stretch.

 

Left: David, by Donatello, 1440s CE Right: David, by Michelangelo, 1501–1504 CE

 

Following the fall of the Roman Empire and the deeply Christian medieval era, which shunned “graven images” in favor of geometric abstractions and symbolic illustration, European artists rediscovered, and consequently romanticized, the art of Greco-Roman antiquity. During the Renaissance, Western Europe was experiencing a newfound period of humanism (that humanity’s potential for genius might be appreciated at the center of all things), and the arts were flourishing as a result, especially in Florence, Italy, thanks in part to the patronage of the wealthy Medici family. Artists and scholars returned to classical Greek and Roman texts, now made widely available through translation, studying them as much for their allegorical potential as for their mathematical, scientific, and philosophical uses. Of particular importance to visual artists were the works of Greek mythology, epics, and tragedies, as well as more traditional biblical fables, like the story of David and Goliath.

Donatello, an Italian artist living in Florence, crafted David out of bronze in the 1440s, making it the first freestanding male nude made since antiquity. Some decades later, Michelangelo, perhaps the period’s most famous artist, sculpted his own interpretation of David in marble. Both display the naturalistic contrapposto stance first introduced in Archaic Greece, but Michelangelo’s interpretation is more anatomically correct and exaggeratedly handsome, an idealized male figure rippling with muscle. Though the marble sculpture of ancient Greece was a clear influence on Renaissance style—the Laocoön sculpture would be unearthed in 1506—Michelangelo’s sculpture speaks to his interest in the beauty and musculature of the human figure, mighty not through transference of the holy but through his devotion to it.

 

Pietà, by Michelangelo, 1498–1499 CE

 

Sometimes, Gabriel and I modeled for classes together (it was especially fun, if challenging, to work when we were both hungover). When posing with a friend, there was a whole host of religious imagery to draw on. David and Goliath, of course, but also the pietà: the crucified Jesus lying across the lap of his mother, Mary. Another instantly evocative pose was the Annunciation, the moment in which the angel Gabriel first appears to Mary, depicted in Renaissance paintings throughout Europe.

Like sculpture, whether additive or subtractive, much of figure modeling is about weight and balance. A standing pose, weight relatively centered, can be held perfectly still for longer than one expects, especially if the arms are hanging at one’s sides, positioned on the hips, or better yet, balanced on a prop. A seated pose, too, can be held nearly indefinitely—don’t cross the legs for long, or a foot will go numb; ditto a foot tucked under the seat, which will fill your calf with pins and needles. Bare-bottomed, you’ll want a cushion for anything longer than thirty minutes, and probably sooner if the weight is shifted onto one side. Any standing pose with the knees bent—a lunge, for example—will become taxing for the muscles, unless the foot is supported on a box or pedestal.

Michelangelo’s strong, rippling bodies and crisp, visceral style continued to be influential within the baroque style, which dominated European art into the seventeenth century. Of the baroque sculptors, perhaps the one who best exemplifies the over-the-top style of the era is Bernini, known for his skill with marble—the fingers of his figures, gripping a carved arm or thigh, appear to make dents in the flesh. His sculpture Apollo and Daphne, from 1625, depicts the moment from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which the beautiful nymph, fleeing the sexual advances of the young god, prays to her father for her beauty to be taken away. Daphne’s prayer is granted, with Apollo in hot pursuit, and her hands, outstretched, sprout leaves and turn into branches as she becomes a laurel tree.

Bernini captures this moment of transformation, the pivotal turning point in Daphne’s myth. The two figures appear as if in motion, their bodies following the same arc in space. The dramatic style of the baroque era appears in Apollo’s trailing robes and Daphne’s hair, in the leaves sprouting from her body in extravagant flourishes. The invocation of Greek mythology (by this point a well-trodden subject in visual art) adds heft and substance to the sculpture, providing a scaffolding of story and visual language on which Bernini could show off his craft.

On the model stand, I tried to emulate this idea that the old might be revisited and made new again, used and repurposed to provide material that felt both familiar and refreshed. By drawing on these classical poses and compositions, a lineage of visual language was offered to artists working in the present. It was up to the students in drawing class to make of the material what they wished, but by returning to the gestures and forms of history, that base material could become something fertile and robust.

 

Adonis, by Antonio Corradini, ca. 1723–1725 CE

 

Sometimes, particularly near the end of the semester, the drawing classes would focus on long poses, held for an hour or sometimes the duration of an entire class. For these extended poses, which demanded absolute stillness—even a change in hand placement or the angle of one’s head could throw off a student drawing from observation—the best options were to stay seated or recline. A pillow or cushion under the elbow helped, as did a blanket or drape of some kind. Other than that, there was little to do except to let the mind go blank. Over the course of an hour or two, sitting on the model stand under the hot lights, my mind would traipse through all kinds of territory, but I remembered none of it once I got up and put on my robe.

Two hundred years after the baroque period, which gave way to the delicate, playful miniatures of the rococo period, the themes of Greek mythology returned in neoclassical sculpture, which was characterized by its smooth, nearly mannerist, cold finish. The sleeping Adonis by Antonio Corradini, on view in the Met’s sculpture court, is an example of the decorative, appealing style; the youth’s reclining posture is also reminiscent of the tradition of depicting odalisques—reclining female nudes, their sensuality on display for the viewer. Cupid and Psyche, an oft-imitated sculpture that also draws from myth, similarly exemplifies the sleek neoclassical finish.

 

The Walking Man, Auguste Rodin, 1877

 

In the late 1880s, Auguste Rodin broke with the neoclassical tradition in his deeply gestural, expressive bronze sculptures cast from clay models he sculpted by hand. Rodin’s figurative sculptures are marked by their heavily worked, craggy surfaces, which allowed for a complex play of light and shadow across their subject. His sculpture fragments, The Walking Man most famous among them, feel like brushstrokes—almost painterly expressions of powerful, sometimes clumsy, earnestly human gestures.

After the twentieth century, the figure model becomes, in some ways, obsolete, or certainly transformed, as in the works of Alberto Giacometti, Constantin Brancusi, or Isamu Noguchi, who all offered ways to further experiment with the limits of human form. No longer did the body need to be represented so completely; like Rodin’s striding man, removed so far now from the ancient Greek kouroi, elements of the figure were reduced to a gesture, a mark, a move. In Brancusi’s Bird in Space series, it wasn’t the bird that was depicted, but the feeling of a bird: sleek, elongated, and gravity-defying.

*

So much of art is about making things look like other things, drawing on thousands of years of history to find the way something’s already been said. It’s not quite copying, as the Romans did with the statues they adored, but about learning the language so you can use it to say something new. Through the ages, figurative sculptors have returned again and again to history, and to antiquity in particular, each bringing their contemporary interpretations, their anxieties and concerns.

 

Left: Marble kouros, ca. 590–580 BCE Right: Kouros, Isamu Noguchi, 1945

 

In the Met, there is more than one kouros. There is the kouros boy of the Archaic Greeks, and then there is Noguchi’s Kouros, sculpted in 1945. Both are made of marble, but there the similarities end. Noguchi’s figure isn’t figurative at all: the sculpture’s vertical stance gestures at standing; the right angles of the flattened marble pieces recall limbs and bones. Yet in the precise right angles of Noguchi’s sculpture one recognizes the straight-backed kouros boy, the elegant shoulders, the striving toward perfect form. Perhaps, in the rounded shape atop the sculpture, one even sees a face, abstracted and sublime. Noguchi’s Kouros exists because of the Greek kouros boy, though it is not shaped by it; the sculptor has taken from history freely, using its material to make anew.

Notched and slotted, the pieces of Noguchi’s Kouros are held together without glue or adhesive: the stone, fitting against stone, holds itself upright. Is this not the same question of balance and weight, made more complex, that possessed the earliest sculptors of freestanding figures?

In this text, I’ve traced only one path. It’s a well-trodden one, one that might guide you through the Met or the Louvre. There are many other trajectories through art history, and so many connections to draw between: the deep influence of African sculpture on Western art; the ongoing relationship between religion and cultural production; the gulfs in this history I’ve outlined, where so many women artists are missing. Between any two points in art history one might draw a line, and so much will arise in conversation. But that’s it. That’s what all this has been about all along: a stroll through time. Looking at the way the meanings of things change and how the representation alters the feeling.

 

Read earlier installments of Devil in the Details here

Larissa Pham is a writer in Brooklyn. 

Moon Mothering

Albert Aublet, Selene, 1850

In most stories, the moon is a woman. Often, the sun is a man. Greek mythology has Apollo and Artemis, Roman mythology has Luna and Sol, Slavic mythology has Dazhbog and Jutrobog. In Bali, there’s Dewi Ratih, whose sexual rejection of the giant Kala Rau led to him becoming an immortal floating head that chases the moon across the sky, swallows her whole, and spits her out again. The Mayas thought the phases of the moon were associated with phases of a woman’s life. Chinese mythology includes tales of a lunar deity named Changxi, who gave birth to twelve beautiful daughters who became the twelve months.

Although I’ve come across moon gods as well as moon goddesses, it’s clear to me that the moon is a woman. Her her-ness is right there in the word, full of round letters, soft as breasts and wombs. It sounds like a mother cooing to her baby.

I do not believe womanhood is located in the body. I believe womanhood is a state that one can opt into and out of, that it is culturally coded and culturally enforced. And yet, my own experience of womanhood is tied to my breasts, my womb, my menstrual blood, my mother, and my motherhood. As my body changed from a girl’s to a woman’s, it softened and opened. For a long time, I resisted this—I wanted to be angular and sharp with elbows like arrows and collarbones that cut. I didn’t like the idea of being reduced. That’s what I believed my body was trying to do: reduce me to a biological statement about fertility and purpose. I didn’t know, until I experienced pregnancy myself, how much you can gain from your body, how much beauty and joy it can give. I didn’t know that I could be like the moon. I didn’t realize I could wax and wane.

Hiroshige, Autumn flowers in front of full moon, 1853

 

In ancient verse, women are often alone. One of the most famous fragments of ancient poetry, sometimes attributed to Sappho, is called the “Midnight Poem.” It consists of just a few short lines and has been translated dozens of times, but the bones of the poem are always the same—a woman, alone, with the moon above. This is Henry Thornton Wharton’s 1887 translation from the original Aeolic Greek:

The moon has set

And the Pleiades;

It is midnight,

The time is going by,

And I sleep alone.

It’s a small poem, a sketch made from a few curved lines. But those strong lines sweep without hesitation. They gesture toward an experience that feels, in my marrow, familiar. I, too, have been alone with the moon. Like Elizabeth Bishop, who based her poem “Insomnia” on this tiny verse, we have had so many sleepless nights, the moon and I, both of us “by the Universe deserted,” as Bishop writes. Insomnia is a lonely condition, particularly if you’re sharing a bed with someone. But I learned that it is less lonely if you’re sharing a body with someone, if there’s a pair of small, long feet that sometimes kick your lungs until they ache. It is less lonely if you swell with expectation.

 

Karl Schweninger, Luna, 1903

I was twenty-four and drinking too much. I lived in a city that was brick red and too expensive and I slept in an apartment with three other women, none of whom liked each other. I had a job that kept me up late, staring at the pale blue light of a laptop screen, swaddled in my bed, which was also my desk and my kitchen table and my couch.

A man would come visit me after his shift at the bar. He would run the six miles from his part of the city to mine, and throw pebbles at my window. He called me his moon. “Because I only see you at night, and you outshine everything else in my life,” he wrote once on a scrap of notebook paper, wedged under my doorway. It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to me.

Months later, he would break up with me. Years later, we would get married. We would make a child. He would never stop calling me his moon. The name was a gift. I had never had a nickname before, at least not one I liked. I had always wanted to be seen that way: nocturnal, luminous, singular.

Oscar Florianus Bluemner, Moon Radiance, 1927.

 

We see ourselves in the moon. We read its shadows as faces, and with our hubris, we turn the orb into a mirror. “The moon is my mother,” Sylvia Plath once wrote. “She is not sweet like Mary … She is bald and wild.” Some cultures see animals in the moon (in Japanese folklore, it’s a rabbit) but even those animals are personified. The moon-rabbit wound up in the sky because he offered himself as a sacrifice to a hungry beggar. The rabbit gave itself to sustain another, and as a reward, was set upon a pedestal. I can’t think of a more apt metaphor for the things we ask of mothers.

For centuries, people have viewed women’s bodies as contiguous with the moon. It was common belief (still is, in some places) that our menses follow the lunar cycle. The moon waxes and wanes for twenty-eight days. The average cycle of human ovulation follows the same basic structure. Yet the two things do not happen in tandem.

Once, I tried to match my cycle with the moon. I read about how to do this online, and while most sources said it wasn’t really possible, some Wiccan forums advised using a light to trick my inner clock. They suggested using a nightlight on days when the moon is full, and sleeping in absolute, complete darkness (with help from a silk sleep mask) when the moon was gone. The thought was that, by mimicking the experience of sleeping out under the moon, I could nudge my hormones into cycling up with her. We could match, she and I, like coyotes sharing a den. I wanted to feel wild like those strange yellow matriarchal dogs. I was already nocturnal and predatory, like them. I already lived tucked away in the woods. But still, I wanted more wilderness. I wanted more wildness. I wanted to shrug off my own domestication.

I have skylights in my bedroom, and thus I do sleep under the light of the moon. For almost a year, I let her keep me awake at night. In the winter, the light was shockingly bright. It streamed through the bare branches of the trees outside and into my bedroom. I watched the moon move across the sky. I felt the cold blue light filtering through my eyelids, through the neurons of my soft, gray brain, all the way into my pineal gland. I could almost feel the light changing me, shaping my insides, rearranging me on a cellular level. I imagined the moonlight reprogramming my very DNA. Perhaps turning me back into an animal, soft and hairy and moved by instincts. Primal.

Of course, that’s not how it works. Moonlight is romantic. It has mythological power. But its power is a placebo. It’s real only because we want it to be. Faith can sometimes birth a goddess, if it’s strong enough. Even the much-publicized belief that women living in close proximity will sync their cycles through pheromones is overblown. Studies done in the past two decades have shown no evidence for it. Scientists who study these things have cast doubt upon the entire idea of human pheromones. We secrete hormonal messages, maybe, but no one knows if we have receptors for these complex molecules. These theories, exciting as they may sound, may not lead anywhere solid.

When it comes to our bodies, it’s hard to know what’s real. Belief can change the body. Trauma can change our DNA. We know so much about how the human body works, and yet we still know so little. Bodies are murky lakes, especially women’s bodies, understudied as they’ve been.

I didn’t sync with the moon. Maybe someday I’ll try again, once my hormones have resettled and gone back to normal. I haven’t had a proper period in over a year. I don’t know when it will come again. I’ve been disrupted. My moon has gone dark. I used to hate having my period. Now, I miss it. I’ve been eclipsed.

Evelyn De Morgan, Luna, 1885

 

Twelve people have walked on the moon. All of them were men. There have been women in space, but I don’t know any of their names. I only know the name of Laika, the female dog who was sent to space. She died within hours of takeoff. They chose to send a female dog to space because “they were smaller and apparently more docile.”

If you want to see a place where women outnumber men, you’ll have to fly to Jupiter. Jupiter has seventy-nine known moons. They are named for his lovers and his daughters (and a few of his sons and male lovers, but the majority are female). These space stones orbit the king of kings, the god of gods. They are all lesser than him. Lesser still is his wife, the jealous Juno. Juno is the name of a spacecraft that NASA sent to Jupiter to “check up on him.” Juno is also the name of my daughter. Her full name is Juniper, after a witch I once worshipped.

Edward Munch, moon light, 1895

 

The nurse kept telling me to hold on, just wait, just a little longer. She told me the anesthesiologist was coming soon, my epidural was coming, she said, I just had to wait. The hospital was overwhelmed—too many births at once, too many women in pain. That is why I had been shuttered into a tiny triage room with no bathtub, shower packed full of medical equipment. That was why I was laboring for hours without any medication. That was why there was no one there, yet, to help me. “It’s a full moon,” the nurse told me later, when I was able to hear her again. “Ask any medical professional. Hospitals are always insane on the night of a full moon.”

For the first eight hours of labor, I gasped and choked and vomited all over the medical equipment. I spit water on myself. It was more like an exorcism than I had anticipated. I wasn’t a goddess bringing new life into the world. I was a body possessed by fire, spitting acid. I didn’t scream curses, I just moaned. I mostly asked for help, my husband told me later. “Why won’t anyone help me?” I kept saying.

Finally, someone did. I loved my epidural. After that, everything was quiet. I took a break from labor and lay in the hospital bed for a few hours, unmoving. Then, it was time to push. Forty minutes later, I had a baby on my chest. She was small and red and covered in fine blonde hair. She had long fingernails. Fur and claws.

My doctor was a no-nonsense woman, with blonde hair dyed all one shade and silver glasses. She smiled in a perfunctory way, like she knew that she should smile at patients. She moved quickly. If she wore heels, she would clack brusquely from place to place, but she didn’t wear heels. I found her businesslike manner reassuring. When it comes to doctors, I like a little abruptness. I like them to be blunt and maybe a little rude. It calms me.

But even she attributed some power to the moon. After I had my epidural, there was a lull, waiting for the child to come out. The anesthesiologist, the nurse, my doctor—they all talked about the full moon.

We have no evidence that the full moon brings more babies. We have no evidence that it causes brains to go mad or bodies to go haywire. Yet these ideas persist, and they hold their own logic. Maybe people go outside more when the night sky is lighter, and in the midnight hours, they do wild animal things, like fuck and kill and love. Maybe when the moon is dark, we stay home. Maybe the moon gives us license to be our lunatic selves more fully.

I like thinking the moon ushered in my child. That for a little while, we were alone with the moon. Me and Juno and the planetary body above.

 

Katy Kelleher is a writer who lives in the woods of rural New England. She is the author of Handcrafted Maine.

Redux: A Smile Like Collapsed Piano Keys

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.

Lydia Davis in Paris, 1973.

This week, we’re reading pieces all about the art of the piano. Read on for Lydia Davis’s Art of Fiction interview, Julio Cortázar’s “Feuilletons from A Certain Lucas,” Hanif Abdurraqib’s poem “Off–White,” and Sarah Manguso’s essay “Oceans.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast!

 

Lydia Davis, Art of Fiction No. 227

Issue no. 212 (Spring 2015)

INTERVIEWER

I think of the narrator of your story “Glenn Gould,” who wonders whether there is a way of being selfish without hurting anyone.

DAVIS

By never marrying, and living alone and having long conversations in the middle of the night with a friend. And by never seeing that person.

 

Feuilletons from A Certain Lucas

By Julio Cortázar

Issue no. 82 (Winter 1981)

A cat had been taught to play the piano and this animal, sitting on a stool, played and played the whole existent piano repertory, and in addition five compositions of its own dedicated to several dogs.

Otherwise, the cat was possessed of a perfect stupidity, and during concert intermissions he would compose new pieces with a drive that left everyone flabbergasted. In that way he reached opus eighty-nine, during which he was the victim of a brick thrown by someone with a tenacious rage. He sleeps his final sleep in the lobby of the Great Rex Theater, 640 Corrientes.

 

 

Off–White

By Hanif Abdurraqib

Issue no. 227 (Winter 2018)

it is a hot summer & I sweat through sheets I don’t change & people haven’t started filming black folks dying yet & so I believe only what the casket tells me to & even then I watch for the dirt to jump & as a boy I lost a whole tooth trying to lean forward like Mike in the “Smooth Criminal” video & it skipped across the kitchen tile & my still-living mother gathered it in a white towel like a new child & here I learned to honor every hero with absence an empty stomach or a smile like collapsed piano keys …

 

 

Oceans

By Sarah Manguso

Issue no. 228 (Spring 2019)

This fact pleased me as it had pleased me to perform Mozart, whose music my piano teacher constantly reminded me sounded deceptively simple but was so difficult that, per the old saying, only the very young and the very old could do it. The urge is to overuse the damper pedal so that the end of one phrase blurs into the beginning of the next. And there I was, in the twentieth century, playing Mozart and proudly showing off my moderately decent ability to perform this simple, difficult work.

 

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God’s Wife: An Interview with Amanda Michalopoulou

The Greek writer Amanda Michalopoulou is the author of eight novels, three collections of short stories, and more than a dozen children’s books. She studied French literature at the University of Athens, worked for many years as a columnist for Kathimerini, and now teaches creative writing at various Greek institutions. Her work has been translated into twenty languages; the first of her two novels to appear in English, I’d Like, won the National Endowment for the Arts International Literature Prize in 2008, and the second, Why I Killed My Best Friend, was short-listed for the 2015 National Translation Award. (Both books were translated by Karen Emmerich.) Her new novel God’s Wife, translated by Patricia Felisa Barbeito, has just been published by Dalkey Archive Press.

Michalopoulou spent this fall in residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, where I had the good luck to continue a conversation with her begun long ago in Athens. But it was only after she departed for Greece that we embarked on this interview via email.

INTERVIEWER

The premise of God’s Wife is at once audacious and unsettling. Can you talk about the origin of your novel and the kinds of research you undertook to tell such an unlikely story?

MICHALOPOULOU

Certain books start with a disturbing question. My question here was, What if God had a wife? How would she be, what would she expect from him, and what would he expect from her in return? The Bible is full of submissive women who wished to have many children and either followed their husbands or became prostitutes. I read somewhere that these women speak 1.1% of the words in the Bible. In this patriarchal view, God’s wife would be an introverted human being, an acolyte. But what if she didn’t comply with this model of thought because of her education? I played around with this idea for some time and in 2012 I started reading philosophical and theological texts in a more focused way. What would a girl married to God have access to? What would she want to read, especially if her husband was mysterious and reserved? I wanted to write a bildungsroman about a female protagonist who changed her views on life and love because of the books she read. This is my romantic view about education.

INTERVIEWER

On the first page of God’s Wife, an epistolary novel written to an unnamed reader, the narrator declares, “Having lived for so long by the side of Him who created All from Nothing, I am finally creating something of my own. I am creating you.” How do you imagine your reader(s)?

MICHALOPOULOU

I imagine every meeting with the reader as a miraculous one. The novel that shaped my view on this when I was very young was If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino. In this postmodern tale the reader is addressed directly. “You, the reader,” wrote Calvino playfully, and I felt like he was talking to me. It was a moment of perfect osmosis and I decided there and then that if I ever wrote books, I would also make the readers part of the plot.

And I have this idea when I rewrite that there is a sexless, ageless reader behind my right shoulder, reading and editing with me. I hear this voice saying, “Don’t repeat this, we know it. Don’t be so sentimental, don’t be so cerebral.”

INTERVIEWER

The beguiling voice of the narrator makes me wonder whether you heard her like this from the beginning, or whether her voice deepened as you went along.

MICHALOPOULOU

It deepened as she grew older. Writing about her young days and how she indulged in her love with God was nice and uncomplicated, but when she started to claim time and space and freedom for herself, she became more passionate and interesting. She wasn’t a nice girl anymore. Nice girls are decorative in novels. I prefer fiery, exasperating women like Madame Bovary or Pope Joan.

INTERVIEWER

God’s Wife is divided into three parts, echoing Dante’s Divine Comedy—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—and so I wonder whether this structure was in your mind from the outset, or did it occur to you during the writing of the novel? In what way are you in conversation with Dante? With other writers?

MICHALOPOULOU

God’s wife keeps having passionate arguments in her mind with Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil, mystics and philosophers dedicated to God, but also with atheists like Lucretius and Empedocles. As for the Divine Comedy, it is an inverted metaphor all throughout; what would be conceived as paradise—the beginning of the wedding, the infatuation—is named Inferno in the novel. As the girl grows older and keeps asking questions and revisits the world with her husband, she finds herself in a kind of limbo. And when she accepts that freedom and solitude come at a cost, she finds her paradise. It’s quite the opposite of what society would consider a successful life.

INTERVIEWER

The narrator’s relationship to time is complicated, as it is for every writer. Two examples from the early pages of the novel, when the narrator begins to come to terms with the consequences of having agreed to marry God: “I live without time—this state of atemporality soothes my husband.” And: “When I write to you, time exists once more. It shakes me, makes my skin crawl, because if time exists, then what am I doing here?” How do you think about time in relationship to this novel?

MICHALOPOULOU

God’s Wife knows both worlds; the alarm clock and the twenty-four hours, but also the universe of all things godly. This is a strange state, it stirs up comparison. Is it better to wait passively for winter or to live in oblivion and forget the names of the weekdays? I guess there is a lot of my own anxiety about time and mortality here. But it was fun to invent the rules of atemporality, the way God feels about time and space. To imagine this felt like the longest, strangest meditation.

INTERVIEWER

God’s Wife is your third novel to appear in English translation. What should American readers know about your earlier books? And how do you see this one fitting into your body of work?

MICHALOPOULOU

In most of them the protagonists are women. They cook, they raise families, they study and write books, they are pregnant with children, pregnant with ideas, they travel a lot, they fall in love and out of love, they settle or refuse to settle. I know women’s worlds. I was raised by a grandmother who hung sheets and towels to dry between two olive trees, the most poetic early image of my life. I am interested in how women fit into their environment, what is expected of them. In this sense God’s Wife is a repetition of the pattern. How we become who we are because of, and despite, our genetics.

INTERVIEWER

This novel includes, among other things, fascinating meditations on the nature of faith—in God, in the efficacy of the willing suspension of disbelief that certain forms of literature demand, and in the possibility of the narrator creating her future readers. What is the relationship in your mind between spiritual matters and the reality of the narrator’s daily life? How would you describe your own faith, if indeed your fictional meditations have led you in that direction?

MICHALOPOULOU

A writer is a monk. I always had this enormous, naive faith in literature. When I first read the scene with the madeleine in Remembrance of Things Past, I thought that what happened to Marcel Proust’s narrator would happen to anyone with a madeleine and a cup of tea. I was sixteen and I bought a madeleine to dip in my tea, expecting a thrust of involuntary memory, like the one in the novel. What was I thinking? I didn’t have an aunt named Leonie and I didn’t live in Combray. It took me some time to realize that this awkward incident was meant to be a spiritual awakening. I was the narrator, his aunt, her village. I was the text. Isn’t this a willing, miraculous suspension of disbelief? Tasting the madeleine was my kind of Holy Communion after losing myself in the text. This is probably what Julia Kristeva defined as phenomenology of an immediate pure faith.

Religion per se is a wonderful theatrical act, and I don’t mean this derogatorily. I light candles in churches and incense in Buddhist temples, I am hypnotized by the repetition of prayers and the feeling of spontaneously created community. I can’t think of writers without metaphysics. Last month, in the Congregational church in Iowa City, I met Marilynne Robinson. This is my kind of miracle. On a more serious note, “there are no atheists on a turbulent aircraft,” as Erica Jong put it.

INTERVIEWER

This novel is filled with comic bits. You note that “God’s wife wants to write her own version of the marriage and God is terrified by the idea of a testimony being written at all, as He is tremendously introspective and afraid of critique.” It is hilarious to contemplate a figure for divinity as a font of insecurity, which makes me wonder about the role of humor in your work and the range of registers you employ, from the philosophical to the fantastic, with plenty of slapstick comedy. How did you manage to synthesize so many different forms of storytelling?

MICHALOPOULOU

Sometimes I ask my students in creative writing to write down an anecdote as a short story. I admire people who can tell a joke. At school, I was an awful storyteller and didn’t know how to seduce people with my stories, how to re-create a funny dialogue. I had l’esprit de l’escalier, as the French call it. The right answer came to me when I left a room after a humiliating or embarrassing moment. In a text, you have all the time in the world to re-create humorous, sarcastic, brave, or crazy answers. My kind of revisionism.

One of the first things I did before starting God’s Wife was to collect expressions that she would use when addressing her husband, like “God bless you” or “God willing” or “for the love of God.” And paradoxes about God, like “Thank God, I’m an atheist,” by Luis Buñuel, or “I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of him,” by Márquez. The Lacanian “What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?” reads like an anecdote, too. And hopefully readers will laugh when my narrator admits she is jealous of her husband’s past.

As for synthesizing: in fiction, harmony comes from contrast of light and darkness, as in photography. Everything becomes more intimate and tangible when we recognize the rhythms of life, its discouragements and jubilations. The books that made me want to write managed this without necessarily succumbing to realism. Think of the power of metamorphosis in extravagant Greek myths, in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Of the cruel humor in Isaac Bashevis Singer and Borges and Lucia Berlin. Of Hans Castorp, who carries in his pocket an X-ray of his beloved Clavdia’s thoracic cavity in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. I am talking about writers who take everything in—cruelty, fear, and tenderness. They are not looking for justice, or moral lessons. They are just dismantling life.

INTERVIEWER

I understand that you read for two years before you began to write this novel. Can you tell us something about what you read and why, and how you knew when it was time to start writing?

MICHALOPOULOU

For realism I read Spinoza, for idealism Leibniz. I wasn’t methodical; one text led me to the next and they all eventually read as a palimpsest. Nietzsche brought me to Neoplatonism, Plato back to Nietzsche. Hegel and the idea of an unalterable self brought me to Heidegger’s fixation on constant change. But I preferred the idea of decreation, the undoing of the self, as Simone Weil described it and Anne Carson embodied it. Still, I wanted God’s wife to start her reading in order; first Plotinus and his ideas about beauty and kindness, then German Romantics. But, well, if her teacher is not God but his library, shouldn’t she read instinctively, chaotically, like I did? Wouldn’t she suffer more if she had access to knowledge and still couldn’t persuade God to tell her how it all began? I started writing the very moment I understood that drama.

INTERVIEWER

The third section, Paradiso, opens with a creation story, which is like nothing heretofore put down in words:

It all began when a yellow flame tore through the benighted chaos. What was it? Where did it come from? We will never know how that beginning came to be: whether it was God or chaos itself, for God and chaos are one. In the wake of that first flare, he invented a yellow flame and hung it in the darkness.

Among other things, we learn that “He created clouds to externalize His brooding,” that the Second Coming lies in the past, and that He colored the earth yellow at first, like the wings of his first butterfly, and then went for a more neutral color. “In those primordial times,” the Narrator explains, “my abstracted husband was drawn from invention to invention by a process of association. From butterfly to leaf, from leaf to tree, from tree to soil.” What inspired you to treat the origin of life on this planet as a kind of cosmic joke?

MICHALOPOULOU

Among other reasons, because creation is a cosmic joke, isn’t it? The biggest joke, actually. I just offer a creative interpretation. My idea was to present God as a frustrated creator, a feeling all writers share. You start with this big megalomaniac idea to create a world, to change the canon, and in the middle of it you feel that something went very wrong. Some of the good things in writing happen by accident, you do things casually, randomly, move from the leaf to the tree, from details to the whole, go back, revise. It is a crazy choreography. But how can you revise creation? I had an idea about this revision, and I wrote the chapter frantically, laughing alone in my room. Then I felt it was too much and I used a verse by Robert Frost as protection— “Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.”

INTERVIEWER

You note that the bulk of God’s Wife  was written during writing residencies, and now that you have returned home from a residency at the International Writing Program I wonder if you could speak to the different ways you work when you are at home and abroad.

MICHALOPOULOU

Well, years ago I left my job as a full-time journalist to write fiction. Two weeks into this, I received a grant to go write for six months in a castle in east Germany, called Wiepersdorf. I wrote my first novel, there and then, in rising tension, and it was one of those experiences that shape you for life. I made a strong Pavlovian connection, ever since I’ve been unable to write at home. The ceremony of creating a room of my own works at a deeper level: it erases fear and prepares my mind and heart to go wild. Strangely enough, in Iowa I only wrote poems. Not good poems, but still, what nerve!

INTERVIEWER

Can you talk about translation and its influence on your work, beginning, if you like, with your academic studies in French literature?

MICHALOPOULOU

I feel blessed, because my previous books were translated by Karen Emmerich, and God’s Wife by Patricia Barbeito, who are goddesses of translation. They are not only exquisite translators but also editors. The process of translation was like rewriting the book in English with them. I am sorry to say that I wasn’t a good student in my French translation class, in the sense that I always changed the French text. I guess I wanted to write so badly that I couldn’t be a disciplined translator.

Translation is of big importance for small linguistic communities. It was so nice to teach in the International Literature Today class at Iowa: I loved the students’ questions! But I kept thinking that the concept of international literature is more about identity politics, a way to include non-American literature in the U.S. simply for the purpose of political correctness. It is like we live in two separate words, two realities, the U.S. and the world. The biggest problem is that we are still being exoticized, foreign publishers expect us to speak as Greek priests, or Greek fishermen, they want to smell oregano and orange trees in our books.

INTERVIEWER

Barbeito, noting that God’s Wife was published during the Greek government-debt crisis, writes, “At a time of harsh austerity measures and related humanitarian crises [the thousands of refugees from the civil war in Syria and elsewhere who have found shelter on Greek islands], it is perhaps appropriate that the novel is both austere and turbulent, wry and angst-ridden.” But this is as far as the analogy goes, since you have chosen to focus “instead on crises of another, parallel order.” Can you talk about the relationship in your work between politics and literature?

MICHALOPOULOU

During the financial crisis, everybody was longing to read literature about the crisis, as if novelists had taken on the role of journalists. We were expected to write a report on what we saw before us. In that sense, it might seem like I am stubbornly out of context. Yet politics is so much more than our narrow definition of it, it refers to how we treat people, how we claim our rights. The ongoing crisis in Greece is much more than financial; it is existential. People are seriously depressed and suffering, students are constantly leaving the country, and while the Golden Dawn no longer has seats in Parliament, their slippery presence is constantly felt during demonstrations.

God’s Wife sprang out of a feeling of frustration. A frustration of the mockery that our political life in Greece had become. First with the financial disclosures, then with a pseudo-referendum from a leftist party that ridiculed our idea of the political Left, now with a conservative right-wing party that disguises itself as neoliberal.

While there might not be any allusions to the economic crisis in my novel, I hope that a Greek reader will recognize the tone of disbelief, the need for redemption. My way to fight preposterous politics is to go back to philosophy and use it as a prayer.

INTERVIEWER

If, as you have noted, “we write books to ask questions, not to answer them,” what questions remained unanswered when you finished writing God’s Wife? Which is another way of asking, What questions are you interested in articulating in your next book?

MICHALOPOULOU

My next book was autofiction, a novel called Baroque. It was published in Greece four years after God’s Wife, in 2018. I moved towards it keeping in mind the idea of decreation, the undoing of self. It is constructed in fifty chapters, fifty short stories, one for every year of my life. But they move backward in time, so the book finishes with the lovemaking of the parents and the baby narrator who can’t narrate without teeth. Another question that comes directly from God’s Wife is how the creator disappears into their creation, but this is valid for every work of art. A question that stayed with me and deepened was how God can be both far and near—longe propinquus, as Marguerite Porete finely put it. It’s a vertiginous spiritual question that is legitimate to ask every now and then, not only about God but about everything.

 

Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. He is the director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and an advisory editor for The Paris Review.

The Provocation of a Good Meal

© Jiri Hera / Adobe Stock.

As the year 2011 drew to a close, while I was still teaching in New York, Mary Ann Caws asked me for four recipes, two cocktails without alcohol, and two desserts. Mary Ann Caws, a professor of French literature and modern art at the City University’s Graduate Center, is one of the most extraordinary women I have met. She is a brilliant speaker and can talk engagingly on André Breton, Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Robert Desnos, and René Char. She uses the same talent to write about the novels of Virginia Woolf, literary manifestos, and Provençal cuisine. This time she was compiling a book of painters’ and writers’ recipes for an English publisher under the title Modern Art Cookbook. My first reaction was, Why me? She merely replied: “Because your cooking is one of the best I have ever tasted.” I was flattered to no end. But as days went by I felt sad that such a book was going to be published in America and England. Couldn’t we imagine a similar publication in France?

I became so obsessed with the idea that once back in Paris, I discussed it with Otis Lebert, the owner of the restaurant Le Taxi Jaune, which sits opposite my apartment in the Marais district. By dint of comparing recipes, we had become friends. On my initiative, we decided to write a book of recipes together. After a series of long and heated discussions, we invited Laurent Laffont, my editor, for lunch in order to inform him of our project. I was convinced I could easily win his approval since our friendship dated back to the time when I published my first novels with Robert Laffont, his father. He had welcomed me with open arms when I indicated I would like to be on the authors list of the publishing house he had just taken over with his sister. To my great surprise, Laurent gave a categorical refusal to the recipe book. Not only did he have no interest in the project but mainly, according to him, cookbooks belonged to a specialized field of publishing and distribution. He was so adamant that there was no point insisting. Although Otis accepted the decision somewhat indifferently, I myself was so disappointed that it forced me to think about the meaningful role cooking had played throughout my life. Together with literature it had been my dominant passion for years.

Of course both passions are not fully comparable. Cooking goes back to man’s animal origins, and there’s no use elaborating complicated recipes in order to mask this truth. Preparing food does not fall within the domain of the so-called noble occupations such as mixing colors for a painting or devising rhymes. But very quickly, however, I realized that despite their differences, both passions could not be radically dissociated. They discreetly share common ground. My taste for cooking therefore was mainly inspired by my desire not to conform to the picture of the perfect little girl, so dear to my parents, especially my mother. Instead of massacring “Für Elise” in front of an audience of friends as they feigned admiration, I preferred the realm of the kitchen. It was the same inclination to displease that accompanied my first attempts at writing. My book Victoire, My Mother’s Mother—which is intended to rehabilitate my grandmother, who was a cook for a family of white Creoles—includes a great deal of provocation, a dominant feature of my personality. As a rule, people are said to be proud to count as an ancestor a poet, a philosopher, a historian whose lost notes they found in a trunk in the attic, or else a brave soldier who died for their homeland. To claim as one’s own a dèyè chez, a servant who never knew how to speak French, smacks of heresy.

Let us delve deeper. I remember how surprised my guests looked as they licked their lips after having savored a capon stuffed with candied fruit or a butterflied sea bass garnished with a pea puree. To be considered an excellent cook also helped me change my image as the feminist, militant intellectual I was too often stuck with.

One summer I taught a course at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, the ultimate in scholarship, where professors of outstanding merit compete with one another for an invitation. While lunching in the dining room, a young African girl dressed in white overalls flung her arms around my neck and reminded me that I used to know her when she was a child. She was the daughter of two friends in Dakar. Her mother and father ranked among Senegal’s most prominent intellectuals, well-known opponents of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s government.

“What on earth are you doing here?” I asked her once the effusion had been vented.

“I’m a student at the school for hotel management,” she explained proudly. “It’s one of the best in the States, you know.”

I did know, in fact. My parents would certainly never have let me go in that direction. But what about me? Would I have let my daughters become chefs and not lawyers and economists? On a more personal level, Richard, my husband, is my translator. As a result he examines my books with a critical eye and assails me with questions to clarify his work. His finicky interrogations never stop. As for my talent as a cook, it’s a very different story. The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, goes the proverb. Although there is certainly more at stake between Richard and me than the mere matter of a stomach, it is nevertheless true that a meal together is a moment for relaxing and communicating. When he, educated in the English manner and sparing of compliments, tastes one of my dishes and congratulates me, I am filled with plenitude. I get the same feeling when my children seated around me at table do justice to my cooking.

“You know full well,” Sylvie, one of my daughters, said recently. “When we come for dinner, we eat everything in sight.”

“We gobble everything up,” Aïcha, another of my daughters, grins, harking back to her childhood vocabulary.

All things considered this feeling of satisfaction after having sated those we love is somewhat banal. After all, woman nurtures.

There is, however, one last consideration I must address with a certain caution as it is perhaps deeper than the others. Does cooking even the score with writing? For me who has such difficulty fitting into Guadeloupean, African, and finally African-American literature, I who have known so many refusals and exclusions, isn’t cooking an easier way to whet the appetite?

When I welcome my guests for the first time around the table laid with considerable effect with the Chinese Rose Spode dinner service inherited from Marjorie, my mother-in-law, I inevitably venture the same joke: “I know you’ll love it! I’m not sure I’m a good novelist, but I’m convinced I’m a great cook!” Nobody laughs. Not one. It’s because deep down my guests are shocked. What sacrilege! they think. How can she be so bold as to compare cooking with literature? It boils down to mixing sheep with goats, jute with silk.

My enduring crime of treason is the subject of this book.

—Translated from the French by Richard Philcox

 

Maryse Condé is one of the French Caribbean’s most beloved voices. Her many novels and plays published in English include Heremakhonon; Segu; I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem; Crossing the Mangrove; Windward Heights; and Victoire, My Mother’s Mother. She is professor emerita at Columbia University and divides her time between Paris and Gordes in the South of France.

Richard Philcox is Maryse Condé’s husband and translator. He has also published new translations of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks.

From Of Morsels and Marvels , by Maryse Condé, translated by Richard Philcox. Excerpted by permission of the publisher, Seagull Books. Distributed by University of Chicago Press. First published in English translation by Seagull Books, © 2019.

Our Contributors’ Favorite Books of 2019

Our contributors, from across our quarterly print issues and our website, read as widely and wildly as they write. Here, they tell us about the books that moved them most in the final year of this decade. 

2019 closes with the news that the President’s son killed an endangered sheep this summer. The dull son once again erased in the dark what was majestic and rare. The sheep was an argali sheep. His horns and gentle face resembled the shape of the female reproductive system. These sheep are killed for their horns. The dull son also killed a red deer. I don’t pray, but all year I’ve been carrying around Vi Khi Nao’s Sheep Machine in much the same way my great aunt Rosa carries around the Tehillim (the Book of Psalms). Sheep Machine is a two minute and fifty-two second frame by frame of sheep grazing on a mountainside, but really it’s a spell against apathy and greed. Almost each second is a page, and each page is a poem, and each poem is a story, and each story is a pasture, and each pasture is a hunger, and each hunger is a sheep. Vi Khi Nao has invented a new form that stills the tick before the tock flies like a bullet through the air.

This year my favorite books have been the ones that collect around rogue forms. Motherish forms with the belly of a story and the eyes of a poem. Hybrids that swell then go frail, grow wooly, and then grow smooth. Forms that leave the door open for dry leaves and ghosts and a sheep so lost she has forgotten what a sheep even looks like. Kate Zambreno’s Screen Tests, Brenda Shaughnessy’s The Octopus Museum, Tina Chang’s Hybrida, Anne Boyer’s The Undying, and Rachel Zucker’s Sound Machine all completely reimagine what it means to be a book with an earthly shape. Each one is a miracle. They are my fantasy coven. I have no doubt each could draw down the moon. —Sabrina Orah Mark

 

 

As I see it, the most important reading now and for the foreseeable (or unforeseeable) future falls into three categories. First would be books that continue to inform us with all the hard facts about how the earth is physically changing, year by year, under the effects of climate change, and for this, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming by David Wallace-Wells was important to me, alarming but also surprisingly engaging, a page-turner despite its hosts of statistics. The second category would be something philosophical or spiritual, with a longer view, to give us a little guidance as we reorient our thinking going forward. For this, I sometimes turn to one of the Zen books I have on hand, or sometimes a poem, perhaps one by William Bronk, who is able to embrace death in so many ways, or by the Norwegian imagist Olav Hauge. The third category would include some relief in the form of a good piece of fiction—for me, it is often something from earlier times, such as The Odd Women by the nineteenth-century feminist George Gissing or any of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels (somewhere in the neighborhood of Barbara Pym, she writes with a dependably high level of psychological insight and stylistic skill), but also more recent fiction, such as Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend. Yet one more category might be that of community relationships: how to work toward a harmonious coexistence with others, especially how, amicably, to cross the divide of political difference. Is this wishful thinking? Maybe, but it is also, I think, imminent necessity. One fascinating discussion that includes a meditation on forgiveness is Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past. —Lydia Davis

 

 

I recognize great storytelling any time I have to momentarily put aside what I’m reading to ask myself, How am I going to steal this? Or simply to say, Wow. It’s the feeling that signals I’ve come across an idea, or a mode of presentation for an idea, that I hadn’t seen before. Kimberly King Parsons’s Black Light brought wow after wow, along with eruptions of guilty laughter, as I encountered her startlingly fresh characters’ shockingly grim, yet palpably human thoughts and actions. That anything could surprise in 2019 is impressive, but Parsons’ surprises pay off doubly because she pulls from the dark recesses of our minds the ugliness we’d prefer not to see in ourselves. The joy is in the shared recognition, in the sense that you’re as fucked up as I am. By contrast, Dariel Suarez’s atmospheric debut collection A Kind of Solitude presents a cast of characters who must navigate impossibly grim conditions through ingenuity, resilience, and stoicism during Cuba’s “Special Period.” Here, it is often the source of the conflict—the system—that seems deranged, exemplified best, perhaps, in “The Inquest,” in which protagonist Elena might lose everything because her refrigerator houses a wheel of contraband cheese. Suarez masterfully collides the personal and the political, moving characters and circumstance toward each other like pieces on a chessboard. Finally, Dana Johnson’s collection Break Any Woman Down (2001, I know) is one I returned to again and again throughout 2019, especially for “Three Ladies Sipping Tea in a Persian Garden,” which baffles and delights me for its nearly conflict-free plenitude and its warm depiction of friendship. —Jonathan Escoffery

 

 

Part travel narrative, part lyric memoir, Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara was a huge best seller when it was first published in Chinese in 1976, and has retained an enthusiastic following in the Chinese-speaking world ever since. This year, the first mainstream English edition of the book was published, bringing it an even wider readership. Sanmao’s enduring popularity across Asia stems partially from the fascination with who she was: a dashing, instinctive, often quixotic figure who seemed far ahead of her time in the way she saw the world and her place in it. Arranged as a series of short essays, the book appears at first glance to be a straightforward record of her move from Taiwan to the Sahara, where she lived with her Spanish husband, José María Quero, but almost immediately, it opens up to reveal a hypnotic meditation on love and loneliness in a foreign place. Writing with frankness and vulnerability, Sanmao’s constant questioning of her insecurities and flaws is remarkably human, and nothing remains beyond the boundaries of her probing eye, not least her relationship with José. Mike Fu’s gorgeous translation brings to life Sanmao’s evocative descriptions of the Sahrawi communities in which she lived, along with her wit and her gift for capturing life’s absurdities. Stories of the Sahara is a record of one person’s fierce refusal to follow a path laid down for her by the rest of the world, but it is also a celebration of the complexities of being an outsider, and, ultimately, an ode to freedom. —Tash Aw

 

 

I read Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire, a light-handed and light-footed account of America’s accidentally acquired, undeclared, and mostly lovelessly maintained Empire (guano and naval bases). If you have ever experienced the puzzlement of American tourists passing through San Juan, Puerto Rico, twitching passports no one wants to see and wondering for once about the territorial identity of where they are, this is a book you need to read. And I enjoyed Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes’s The Light that Failed: A Reckoning, about the strange fate of the liberal world order during the past two ghastly decades since history “ended.” Krastev is always what the English call good value, and his perspective here on the differences between the parodic Russian response to our newly victorious West and the “imitation” of Eastern Europe is devious, plausible, and amusing. And now on to Life with a Capital L/ The Bad Side of Books, Geoff Dyer’s wonderful selection of D.H. Lawrence’s essays. Hail to the counterspirit. —Michael Hofmann

 

 

So, I had to look this up, but almost six years ago, which feels like a million years ago, I had just moved to New York. I was asked to do an event at a bookstore but realized at some later point that I was asked because it was Women’s History Month, a fact that somewhat depressed me, so I read some of my book about my dead mother and became belligerent about my love for Robert Walser. So it was March. I was sick with a cold—I had snot pouring down onto the pages I was reading. I looked up at some point and saw T. Clutch Fleischmann smiling at me in the very small, or let’s say “intimate” audience. I recognized them because of the author photo recently published on PEN’s website alongside their prose poem, “Spill Split,” chosen by Maggie Nelson. The piece focusing on queer community, infatuation, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and ice is a work that has over the years become as important to me as Anne Carson’s “Glass Essay,” so full of direct thought and feeling, of a crystalline dailiness, as the speaker wanders through a Brooklyn summer, having crushes, taking hormones, thinking about art and ice. Anyway, afterward I immediately went up to Fleischmann, or Clutch, and told them how much I loved their work, and asked if we could meet up when they were in Brooklyn. And for a while whenever they were in the neighborhood, we would meet, and drink whiskey and smoke, back when I did those things, and talk about what we were reading, love affairs, art we had seen, our in-progress books, and what for me was a desire at the time for a perfect book. But what’s so radical about their new book, Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, is how it overthrows the perfection found in their earlier prose poems, and creates a structure to house the doubt and failure of what it means to work on a book when one’s life is always transforming, what it means to be, as the title suggests, a body moving through time and space. It is a celebration of queer joy and love and activism in all of its manifestations—a book of “slutty prose,” as Fleischmann writes, one of self-mythologizing one’s friend groups and fluidity, in the mode of Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and Bruce Boone’s Century of Clouds. Somehow in this gorgeous collage there are also interludes about ice and Felix Gonzalez-Torres and the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago, where Fleischmann now lives, and a close reading of the beyond-gender eighteenth-century Quaker named Public Universal Friend. What a gorgeous, alive book of such total compassion and conviction. —Kate Zambreno

 

 

The best book I read this year was Women Talking by Miriam Toews, a stunning fictional account of a series of violent rapes that occurred in a Mennonite community in Bolivia in the early 2000s. In the novel, which takes place over several days, a group of women across three generations gather secretly to discuss what to do about the attacks: Should they stay and fight? Should they attempt to forgive the men, in accordance with their religion? Or should they leave? Because they are illiterate, they invite one man to record the minutes of their meetings. This man, August, is the first-person narrator of the novel—does that make him unreliable? He is kind and well-intentioned, but the text he creates is not strictly minutes; it’s full of commentary, long asides, interpretation; it is translated. At one point, he adds a “translator’s note”; at another, he claims a phrase cannot be translated. And he is a man—not a victim of the crimes they are discussing. Can he fully speak their language? He interjects with relevant and interesting “facts” in part to charm the pregnant Ona, whom he’s in love with. The women look for signs and symbols in these “facts,” though they may just be a distraction. He continues writing even when the women are silent. When they ask him what he thinks, he says, “I’m not here to think,” but clearly, he is thinking. I read this book slowly because I had to keep stopping to contemplate its moral questions. What is the value of forgiveness, and how can we forgive in ignorance? (The women were drugged with belladonna, so they cannot be sure who has raped them or their children.) Is violence ever justified, and is power always abused? What are facts, what is real, who decides? (“Heaven is real, says Mejal. Dreams are not real.”) What would it mean to leave the life you’ve known behind and start over without men or without “men,” the idea of men? The novel is amazingly rich, yet so light-handed it’s breathtaking. “They look ahead, towards something I can’t identify, not empty space.” the man writes. “And they are silent.” —Elisa Gabbert

 

 

In an odd coincidence, my two favorite novels of this year both consist of a single long sentence. With Ducks, Newburyport, the lilt and verve of Lucy Ellmann’s narrator’s unforgettable voice altered the literary landscape for good, and properly got under her readers’ skin. A Girl Called Eel, by the young francophone writer Ali Zamir, is another funny and angry conjuring of a woman’s inner life. The novel, Zamir’s debut, was originally published in France in 2016 to considerable critical acclaim, and in May the small London press Jacaranda released a lively and fluid English translation by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. Set on the author’s native island of Anjouan, in the Comoros archipelago between Mozambique and Madagascar, it tells the tragic, tangled story of seventeen-year-old Eel, who embarks on the narrative as she is about to die.

Her life flashing before her, Eel is compelled to explain how she fell into such dire straits. “Oh, the earth spat me out,” goes the opening, “the seas are devouring me, I’m expected in heaven but here I am coming to my senses again and I can’t see, can’t hear, can’t feel anything but so what…” Zamir is an audacious novelistic risk-taker, and it’s thrilling to see him get away with it. As Eel recounts her past in a continuous monologue, a timeless, fable-like atmosphere prevails, and we must accept that she’s talking (sometimes directly) to us while in her death throes. Her personality—wise, cutting, equally vulnerable and tough—feels wholly authentic, and her ordeals are all too resonant. Without spoiling Zamir’s suspenseful plot, it is Eel’s sexual awakening, and the ensuing male misdeeds, that determines her fate.

The same is true for the subjects of what was, for me, the standout nonfiction book of 2019: Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women. In an astonishing feat of immersive reporting, Taddeo investigates the contours and consequences of female desire, unvarnished and depoliticized. She confronts with mesmerizing candor many uncomfortable truths, not least the extent to which her three subjects’ destinies have been derailed and narrowed by their formative sexual experiences (coercive or otherwise) with men. Taddeo writes as beautifully as any novelist but never pulls her punches, and she has an unerring feel for the social nuances that shape our every encounter. The result is both a feminist classic and an essential work of American social history. —Emma Garman

 

 

Let me sing you a love song about Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier. As much as a book about two criminally minded old Irishmen sitting at port, shooting the shit, and looking for a daughter gone missing can be a love story, this is a grand one. Moss and Charlie’s friendship and nemesis-ship over the years is, as they say, “an arrayal of the stars.” The book is brutal and funny about sadness and pain and I dare you to find a more narratively or stylistically thrilling chapter than “The Judas Iscariot All-Night Drinking Club.”

The prose is a glory. In one dramatic scene, when Charlie’s expression is giving too much away, showing his emotional cards, Moss tells him, simply, “Arrange your face, Charlie.” I howled.

Night Boat has been compared to Waiting for Godot, and I was reminded of the magnificent production of that play with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen at the Cort Theater in 2013—of the way two men might establish a hilarious and heartbreaking rapport that feels like it’s been in rehearsal for a lifetime. Moss and Charlie get their hooks in each other for the familiar sport of it, and for the pleasure of daring to walk the minefield of their shared past.

The book is hilarious, and seedy, and thrilling, but it’s more than that, too, because in the end, the reader has to reckon with what it means to glamorize violence and Rumblefish-style machismo. If they could, Moss and Charlie would exit their own stories in an epic hail of bullets, Butch and Sundance style—but that’s not on offer. Instead they are forced to grow old, to wait, and to live. Forced to stare down the barrel of their own sadness and sins. Forced to live in the world in the small and everyday kind of way no one ever tells stories about.

I am young enough to risk inviting eye-rolls if I say I know a bit about what that’s like, the struggle to sit in the present and let the past exist amicably alongside it (to the eye-rolls I say: ARRANGE YOUR FACES). But I am old enough to recognize the glorious gallows humor of the men’s banter as my own shield, my own home. —CJ Hauser

 

Staff Picks: Bas, Beauvoir, and Britain

Damon Daunno as Curly and Mary Testa as Aunt Eller in Oklahoma! © Little Fang.

My junior year of high school, I was not asked to the prom. Bear in mind that my high school had 4,500 students and that although 2,250 of them were eligible to attend this dance, not a single person deigned to be my date. I went, instead, to see Oklahoma! A lovely time, to be sure, but boring as all get-out. While my peers enjoyed a disastrous evening of sex, drugs, and revelry, I watched that bland production from a blurry distance. At Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! last weekend, I found these two evenings had merged into a marvelous party, to which I had finally, belatedly been invited. Twitter chatter informed me this was “Sexy Oklahoma!,” and while it certainly is sexy, it’s also so delightful I beamed through much of the first act. It’s funny and warm. The house lights are almost always up, and they serve chili during intermission. First, we are primed with tenderness; then, tragedy unfolds, and its arrival is shocking, cold, and truthful. I loved it, and I’m pretty darn sure it loved me back—if only for one night. —Noor Qasim 

I still have my undergraduate copy of The Second Sex, nearly every page dog-eared and underlined enthusiastically. I consult it regularly. The margin notes reflect my mental state at each moment of rereading: there, a starry-eyed student just entering the world; here, an older self, writing the initials of a man who had broken my heart. So it was with great eagerness that I delved into Kate Kirkpatrick’s recent biography of Simone de Beauvoir, Becoming Beauvoir. Kirkpatrick is herself a philosopher, and she brings this background to her incisive portrayal of Beauvoir’s career, writing, and life. Beauvoir was far from simply a companion to Sartre; in fact, Kirkpatrick writes, many of Sartre’s most famous philosophical insights were heavily influenced by Beauvoir’s own work on the ideas of bad faith and freedom—ideas that she was exploring in her diary as early as age twenty. As a fan of Beauvoir’s novels, I found it thrilling to learn how she developed her unique mixtures of autobiography and fiction. It’s both inspiring and sobering to see how Beauvoir grappled throughout her life with the very real concerns of balancing the domestic, the private, and the passionate in her work and public life. In fact, Becoming Beauvoir has me turning to Beauvoir again—I started reading The Woman Destroyed earlier this week. —Rhian Sasseen

I suppose most of the people reading this have already experienced the gut-wrenching despair and confusion that accompanies the result of an election. I imagine most of you felt pretty shit the day the forty-fifth president of the United States was elected. I felt pretty shit that day, too. I also felt pretty shit the day the result of the Brexit vote was announced. But today is a new level of shit, it seems to me, because my compatriots in Britain have chosen to double down and return Boris Johnson to Number 10 with the largest majority since Thatcher. Sometimes, I find this stuff fucking inexplicable. It’s inexplicable to my pals, too, and to most of the writers and artists whose work I admire. Yesterday, the playwright and performer Daniel Kitson emailed his subscribers about the election and described his creative output as one that “emerge[s] entirely from the heart and the mind of a Labour Voter.” His characters are marginalized and, often, forgotten, and his work is profound and poetic and sad. He is a compassionate performer, and we could all do with a bit of that right now. His latest show, Keep, runs until December 19 at St. Ann’s Warehouse. You really, really should go. —Robin Jones

 

Still from Tales from the Golden Age. © Wild Bunch.

 

I saw Tales from the Golden Age some weeks ago at Film Forum. Those who didn’t can stream it, and mid-December, the anniversary of the Romanian Revolution, is the perfect time to do so. Here are all the absurdity and horror of late-stage communism in six short, bleakly comic glimpses. A village overextends itself to impress a passing motorcade, but before it arrives, an “inspector” gets everybody drunk and marooned on a carousel rented for the occasion. A family manages to get a pig for Christmas, but they have to kill it themselves—in their apartment. To keep it from their neighbors, the family quietly gasses the pig in their kitchen. A fine Eastern European sense of place winds through the Tales: all the apartment kitchens have doors, all the refrigerators are full of leftovers covered with upside-down plates. Each chapter closes with a legend: “Legend has it that they were all still trapped there when the motorcade did after all pass through.” “Legend has it that the family used what remained of the animal for the seasonal celebrations.” It’s supposed to be funny, and I laughed, but the jokes are pulled from hunger and despair. This year a Romanian friend sent me a picture from her polling station of a trash can with a slit cut in the taped-down lid. She found this hilarious. Made in 2009, twenty years after the revolution, Tales implies that carousel traps, pig gassings, and other horrors are mere legend now, left in the dust by present-day truth. The situation has arguably improved since then, but accusations of corruption are frequent. Legend has it that your vote ends up in the trash can. It is both metaphor and not-too-distant truth—to a certain new-world-order-weary sensibility, as absurdly comic as it is brutal. —Jane Breakell

A man walking his dog past the Lehmann Maupin on Twenty-Fourth Street last week did a double take and stopped by the gallery’s glass door. He had caught sight of a Hernan Bas painting, and after a moment, he (and his basset hound) joined me in front of one of the eight canvases exhibited in “Time Life” (on view through January 4, 2020). How could he not open the door? Bas’s subjects—handsome, effete young men with heavy-lidded eyes and fulsome lips—draw you in with their slight, sullen glance. These paintings are genre art in the sense that they give us a scene in the story of these men’s lives, but there’s nothing quotidian about them. The Occult Enthusiast captures a man nodding off amid a cluttered room of arcane curiosities, a Ouija board on his desk; The Glofish Enthusiast, whose neon accents must be appreciated in person, features a boy alone with his net in a basement aquarium. Neither subject looks enthused; Bas’s men are trapped in their own heads, where their selfhood rages quietly. My favorite painting of the show is The Sip In, which features the interior of Julius’, New York’s oldest gay bar, where three besuited men present unfocused stares as a disembodied hand covers the one beer in front of them (the history of this painting is a fascinating dive into a chapter of LGBT rights in New York). But I come to The Sip In for the fourth figure, a boy sitting alone in a red sweater, making direct eye contact with the viewer and raising his martini. There’s a smile at the corner of his lips. It’s not as bad as it all seems. Have a drink; stay a while. —Lauren Kane

This week, as Christmas trees began to light up street corners around my neighborhood, I recalled a scene from Garth Greenwell’s story “The Frog King,” which I must have reread half a dozen times when it appeared in The New Yorker last fall. In the opening scene, the narrator and his boyfriend, R, decorate a small tree together in their apartment in Sofia, Bulgaria. R—a somewhat sentimental and whimsical character—swaddles the tree in tinsel and gives it a name: Madeleine. “He liked to give things names,” the narrator reflects, “I think it was a way of laying claim to them.” The story, which follows the couple on a romantic trip to Italy, is an excerpt from Greenwell’s forthcoming book Cleanness, which follows the narrator’s love affairs with several different men over a number of years. A tale of tumultuous romances, the book is explicitly—almost incandescently—erotic. In scenes containing both tenderness and violence, Greenwell showcases his powers as a taxonomist of touch, revealing that there are as many ways to put your hands on someone as there are Christmas lights twinkling over Bologna. At one point, the narrator kisses every spot on R’s body, from the soles of his feet up to his scalp. At another, he lies awake in bed and feels R roll over, half-asleep, and curl against him, pressing his face against his shoulder. He thinks to himself, “They could make a whole life … these moments.” —Cornelia Channing

 

Garth Greenwell. © Bill Adams.

The Exceptional Dovey Johnson Roundtree

Dovey Johnson Roundtree.

We have all heard that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, but during dark and difficult times, it’s sometimes a challenge to see it curving in the right direction. History tells us the stories of the great men—charismatic, brave, and doomed—who gave their lives to the struggle for racial equality. While these men earned our praise, we know that they did not change the world alone. Mighty Justice is the story of a great woman, Dovey Johnson Roundtree, who dedicated her life to moving the United States closer to ideals outlined in the Constitution. Born in 1914 in Charlotte, North Carolina, Dovey Roundtree came into this world with her mind stayed on freedom, as the sixties protest song goes.

Mighty Justice is a love story. Dovey Johnson Roundtree was a patriot, in love with a flawed, unfair, and often cruel nation. One of her earliest memories was the sight of her grandmother’s feet, misshapen and gnarled as a result of violence at the hands of an angry white man. But along with her memory of the damage done to her grandmother’s body, she recalls herself on bended knee, kneading and massaging the same feet, providing comfort to the woman who had been brave enough to say no in the face of power and paid the price. Even as a small child, Dovey Johnson Roundtree understood that the ultimate act of love is service.

I wonder how Dovey Johnson Roundtree would want this work to be discussed. I am sure many will read her story, as I did, and marvel that her name and contributions are not better known. Still, I resist the impulse to call her a “hidden figure,” the term coined to honor the black women whose unsung contributions to NASA helped put a man on the moon. But I can’t imagine that Ms. Roundtree would cotton to such a description. While she was no doubt aware that hers was not a household name, I am not convinced she would consider that a tragedy. There is a hymn well-loved in the African Methodist Episcopal Church that proclaims, “Let the work I’ve done speak for me.”

Hers was a life of constant contribution. In the forties, she heeded the call of the great Mary McLeod Bethune and joined the first class of African American women to be trained as officers in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, lending her skills to support the war effort. These difficult years capture the paradox of her experience as a black woman in the United States. She was a proud American, eager to represent her country in World War II. The term “the Greatest Generation” conjures images of handsome young soldiers storming European beaches before returning home triumphant in uniform, and then another image of these same men, old and wizened, festooned with medals, entering the White House in wheelchairs. But a generation is a vast and diverse marker. Also part of this generation were the women who worked as switchboard operators, mechanics, bakers, whose labors supported the men on the battlefield. And among them were the black women who challenged segregation—and sometimes won, but other times were excluded, penalized, and humiliated for their efforts.

Ms. Roundtree herself faced the pain of being shunned by the country she had so well served. As a young servicewoman, she insisted upon her right to a seat in the white section on a segregated bus. She was thrown off the bus and forced to remain for several hours in a deserted bus depot. This would be a dangerous situation for any woman, but for a black woman the threat was infinitely more grave. This incident stayed with her long after she was safe at home. In the struggle for freedom, Ms. Roundtree was deeply invested not just from an abstract respect for the ideals of the nation, but from her own yearning to live free.

She found her calling as a lawyer. In her own words, “The promise of the law lifted me, when so much else weighed me down.” Careful parsing of Plessy v. Ferguson, the most destructive decision in the history of the Supreme Court, demonstrated “how thoroughly Jim Crow rested on sand.” Law school was demanding: Ms. Roundtree worked two part-time jobs to support her studies and struggled with her health. Still, as someone would say decades later, nevertheless she persisted. As with her experience in the military, she had to fight discrimination in law school. Howard University is a historically black university, but she was one of the few women in her class. Still, she studied alongside the men, winning their respect and in some cases lifelong friendship through a shared sense of mission, a deep faith in the promise of the law.

Ms. Roundtree believed that the route to justice was through the courts. Along with her colleagues she argued cases on behalf of scores of African American citizens who opposed segregation. Most Americans will understand the import of Brown v. Board, argued by the great Thurgood Marshall, toppling Plessy v. Ferguson and ending segregation in public schools. But few people know of the countless other cases tried by lawyers like Ms. Roundtree who were barely paid. They lost more cases than they won. But when they were triumphant, their cases made small cracks in the barrier that separated African Americans from their civil rights. This is not the story of well-dressed, fast-talking lawyers seated in rich leather chairs. This is a story about lawyers as laborers, serving the people.

Ms. Roundtree was exceptional, but she was not an exception. All her life she was surrounded by those who shared her commitment and values—from her grandmother, who insisted that she go to college, to Mae Neptune, the professor at Spelman College who helped Dovey pay for her education. Even as a young woman, she forged relationships with Mary McLeod Bethune and A. Philip Randolph, titans of American history. She saw herself as a member of a mighty army, understanding that she was a participant in a steady movement of dissent that spanned generations.

In addition to its historical significance, Mighty Justice is a pleasure to read. When speaking of one of her clients, Ms. Roundtree invokes the “surety I believe that God gives to persons who are telling the truth.” I will assert here that she expresses herself with the music God gives to the same. Whether she is remembering the Southern lilt of her grandmother’s voice or the ruin of a man wrongfully imprisoned, or even her own longing for love and family, Ms. Roundtree speaks with conviction and eloquence. But more than that, she approaches the story of her own life with the passion of one who is called to witness.

Like its author, Mighty Justice is many things at once. It is a call to arms for those who refuse to allow the nation to be dragged back into the dark days of segregation and blatant injustice. It is a how-to guide for those already performing freedom work. For those who are tired and discouraged, it is a rousing reminder that change will come for those who are persistent. For those who know little about the route from the hard-won battles to end American apartheid, Mighty Justice is an education. But for us all, it is, as Dovey Johnson Roundtree spells out in the final chapter of her remarkable life story: Healing the Brokenness.

 

Tayari Jones is the author of the New York Times best-selling novel An American Marriage and three previous novels, including Silver Sparrow. A winner of numerous literary awards, she is a professor of creative writing at Emory University. Like Dovey Johnson Roundtree, she is an alumna of Spelman College.

Published courtesy of Algonquin Books. From Tayari Jones’s foreword to Mighty Justice: My Life in Civil Rights , by Dovey Johnson Roundtree and Katie McCabe.

The Many Lives of Hou Hsiao-Hsien

In Tash Aw’s column Freeze Frame, he explores his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema. In this installment, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Three Times.

Still from Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Three Times (2005)

Not long after the turn of the millennium, there were a few years where it seemed I was saying goodbye to people all the time. People I loved, who had been part of my life for a very long time, but also people I’d only recently met and formed close friendships with strangely and swiftly, the way you sometimes do when you find yourself in a city far from home. My first book had recently been published and suddenly I was offered opportunities to travel in ways that I had only dreamed of as a child. I went to places I’d always wanted to visit, and occasionally I would stay on once the book tour was over, forming attachments to cities that seemed magical and full of promise, like Vancouver or Mumbai. Friends would put me in touch with friends of theirs, in some cases people they barely knew, who would show me around, and talk to me about what it meant to live there. They opened their lives to me and in doing so, changed the way I saw the world. Each time I had to say goodbye I felt unexpectedly sad, as if I was losing something that I had come to regard as my own—as if after only a few days, a week, a month, I had carved out a space for myself in that new country, in those new friends’ lives, only to leave it all behind.

Shanghai, where I lived on and off over the space of two years, proved especially difficult to leave. I had initially gone there to research a novel, but friends in Malaysia thought that I was going to rediscover my Chinese roots. I laughed because the idea seemed ridiculous. Growing up in Malaysia, I couldn’t not be aware of my origins—of what it meant to have the language, culture, and physical features of southern China embedded in my identity, whether I liked it or not. I didn’t need to go searching for a heritage that was already mine. And yet. Several times in Shanghai, I met locals who weren’t interested in the multiplicity of my identity (Chinese Malaysian, Chinese- and English-speaking at home, Malay-speaking at school, et cetera). For them, I was Chinese, and only Chinese, a simplicity that should have upset me, would have upset me if I had been in New York or Paris. But in Shanghai, it felt as though the city were absorbing me, claiming me as its own, even though we both knew that this sense of belonging was just an illusion.

Back in Kuala Lumpur, I spoke with my parents about this odd sensation of wanting to be part of somewhere that isn’t your home. I asked them about the three years they spent working in Taipei in the early seventies, a time when—as the few remaining stories and photographs would suggest—they seemed happy and settled. (There had been race riots in Malaysia in 1969, hundreds of ethnic Chinese had been murdered on the streets of Kuala Lumpur; Taipei must have been a relief). Had they been tempted to stay in Taipei? Were they sad to leave? They shrugged. “Don’t remember,” they said. “Anyway, that’s life, isn’t it? It was time to go home.”

Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Three Times is about how it feels to say goodbye—about the long, drawn-out feeling of knowing that you are about to separate from a person, a place, a time, and once you have parted ways you will never quite be the same again. The film is made up of three distinct segments, each about forty-five minutes in length and each with its own texture, rhythm, and atmosphere. All three sections revolve around the same two actors, Shu Qi and Chang Chen, who inhabit different characters in different eras, spanning nearly a hundred years. Each time, they have to part.

The first movie-in-a-movie, titled “A Time for Love,” is set in Kaohsiung in 1966, in a pool hall in a sleepy neighborhood where Shu Qi’s character, May, works as an attendant, keeping the customers company during their games. One of them is a young army conscript called Chen, played by Chang Chen, and very soon the two form an attachment expressed in timid glances, the odd anxious look, a shy smile. The camera lingers on the lamp that hangs over the pool table, or the dust suspended in the air, caught by the light so clearly that every particle seems crucial. Even though there are numerous breaks, the camera stays with the characters so intimately, so lovingly, that we feel as if we are there with them in one long scene, in an extended present. 1966 could be now; it could be any year at all. The choice of The Platters’ Smoke Gets in Your Eyes as the theme song confuses my sense of time even further, for this was one of my parents’ favorite songs, redolent of a time when Asia was opening its cultural boundaries and exploring its fascination with America. I heard the song all the time during my childhood in Kuala Lumpur in the seventies, and when I recently watched the film again, I was struck by how similar the quiet lanes of Kaohsiung in the sixties resembled those of Kuala Lumpur a decade later. The language the characters speak is Taiwanese Hokkien, almost identical to the dialect my parents use to speak to each other. I felt as though I was watching a scene from my parents’ life, a time before they became the people I knew, who were never able to enjoy life’s simple pleasures. A time when they could contemplate staying in one place without having to move to find work or live without violence.

But the inevitable happens, as we are half-expecting it to. May decides to move away, and when Chen returns on leave, he finds that another young woman has taken her place. Finally, he tracks May down to another pool hall in a new town, but by the time he finds her, they have only a few hours together before he has to return to the army barracks later that evening. She accompanies him to the station, but they find that the last train has just left. It starts to rain, so they wait, sheltering under an umbrella, unable to articulate their final goodbye.

The second segment, “A Time for Freedom,” is set in Japanese-occupied Taiwan in 1911, and this time the two actors play a courtesan working in a brothel and her most faithful client, an intellectual engaged in the fight for political freedom. When the two are finally parted—by the threat of war, by his principals, by her social entrapment—the courtesan must bid goodbye not just to the man she has come to love, but to her dreams of being a free, independent woman. Conversely, in the final section, “A Time for Youth,” Shu Qi’s 2005 incarnation, a singer in Taipei, holds the power of choice and decides to leave her girlfriend after an affair with Zhen, a photographer played by Chang Chen. We are supposed to feel the messiness and confusion of youth, the intense, heady nature of life in the underground Taipei club scene, but all I could see was how choice had left the characters in a state of permanent flux. Even with an abundance of freedom, relationships start and end all the time, and the characters are diminished in ways they can’t really understand.

Over the course of a hundred years, we see the same two faces struggling to achieve intimacy. They travel across time to find that sense of belonging, yet it eludes them. Always, they have to accept a situation they would rather not. Watching the film for the first time, I remembered what my grandfather once told my sister, not long after she had left home at fifteen to attend high school on a scholarship in Singapore. She was homesick, she said, also physically sick, she had the flu, she didn’t belong there, she wanted to come home. “You’re an immigrant,” my grandfather said, “just put up with it and fit in.” I remember being outraged: he was an immigrant, my sisters and I were not, we didn’t have to put up with being perpetual outsiders.

But watching Three Times again during that period of intense and seemingly never-ending travel, I realized that I had absorbed more of his advice than I’d thought, and that I was in fact more anchored than adrift. I attached myself to those countries I’d visited, transforming my rootlessness into a place of temporary shelter. In those in-between spaces, I found others who straddled cultures and languages, at once insiders and outsiders. We formed friendships so quickly and intimately we sometimes felt as though we’d known each other in previous lives, always having to say goodbye before finding each other again in some other time and place.

 

Read earlier installments of Freeze Frame here

Tash Aw’s most recent novel is We The Survivors.