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We All Have Our Magical Thinking: An Interview with Nicola Griffith

James Clark, St. Hilda at Hartlepool (detail), 1925, oil on canvas.

Late in Nicola Griffith’s 1998 novel The Blue Place, her protagonist, Aud Torvingen, speaks rapturously about a spot on the coast of England. “Have I told you about Whitby Abbey, on the Yorkshire coast? There’s a ruin there that dates from the twelfth century, very haunting, very gothic, but the first abbey there was founded in the seventh century by Hilda. There’s a power there.” Fifteen years later, Griffith’s latest novel, Hild, explores the early life of the woman who would go on to become Hilda of Whitby.

Hild is an intricately plotted historical epic, set in a landscape that seems familiar and a culture that is anything but. Hild, the young protagonist, acts as an adviser to the king, Edwin, and the novel abounds with plotting, misdirection, and the use of mysticism toward decidedly realpolitik ends. Griffith’s ability to evoke a different time and place has manifested itself in very different ways over the years; her first two novels, Ammonite and Slow River, were both science fiction, though of very different types. Ammonite begins as anthropological science fiction and gradually becomes more epic in scale; Slow River involves conspiracies, industry, and a marvelously intricate plot. The series of three novels featuring Aud Torvingen—The Blue Place, Stay, and Always—are set in the modern world, with a fiercely analytical (and sometimes critically violent) protagonist. And in 2007, her memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life, was released.

Reached via phone at her Seattle home, Griffith’s spoken language is as precise as it is on the page.

How long have you known that Hilda of Whitby was a figure you wanted to write about?

Since my early twenties. Actually, I didn’t even know that I was going to write about her—I discovered the abbey in my early twenties, and I was very struck by it. Hilda grew on me. She grew in the back of my mind. At first, I thought I was going to write an alternate history novel, one in which the Synod of Whitby didn’t go the way that it actually went. But the more I discovered about the world itself, about the seventh century, the more I wanted to write how it actually was. Not make it fantastical, just really go there, really live there for a while. And Hild herself became more and more interesting to me.

I kept putting off writing about her, because I really didn’t want to write a book about women as chattels, and women as baby-making machines. But as I discovered more about the seventh century, I realized that my preconceptions were wrong, and in fact, Hild could have been a really powerful woman in her own right. A really powerful person—not just a powerful woman. And then, one day, I just thought, This is enough. I have to really go there. It’s time to step up. The day before my forty-seventh birthday, I sat down and wrote the first paragraph. So it took more than twenty years.

Reading the book, I was impressed with how deeply it immersed me in seventh-century Britain. It gives you this wealth of information, and there isn’t a lot of hand-holding.

My worry is that readers are going to find the first few pages quite difficult, especially as they’re told from the perspective of a three-year-old. That was the most difficult part, beginning, just trying to figure out how on earth to enter this world. And then I hit on the fact that one should enter it as a child, and discover it as children do. Some things just are and make no sense, and some things we have to figure out.

One of the things that really struck me about Hild was the way that literacy is treated as a technology throughout. It’s something that certain characters are able to use to give themselves an advantage.

Language is one of our primary tools, and as Wittgenstein says, it is the iron cage of consciousness. If you have the language gift, you can use it as a tool. That’s one of the assets I gave Hild. Trying to figure out what kind of style to use for the book nearly took the top of my head off. I didn’t want to start the book until I thought I had a notion.

I was reading bilingual versions of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and old Welsh poetry. I read a bit of Middle English, but that just wasn’t the same. It’s not where I wanted to go. I wanted to go earlier. Even words like hythe—I stuck the word hythe in there, it means a sort of sandy harbor. But that’s a Middle English word. I was cheating. I felt very wicked. But I thought, It sounds suitable. It sounds Anglo-Saxon. I ended up thinking of language as a kind of chisel. The sentences are what you might call almost Celtic. They come back along, they’re winding. The words are very short and sharp and blunt. They’re not transparent. These are very solid little words, and I think that’s a very Anglo-Saxon thing.

The novel treats religion somewhat similarly. Religion is pragmatic here. Characters convert not because they’re dedicated to a particular faith, but more because it will be advantageous to them.

Everyone has this notion of the Middle Ages—certainly the early Middle Ages—as being this very superstitious era. I think that all eras are superstitious. We all have our magical thinking. But I wanted to show that the people fourteen hundred years ago had minds just like ours. They thought the same way about things. The pragmatic, political people would have pragmatic, political thoughts about religion. They would have used priests as tools.

You made reference to a sequel to Hild on your Web site recently, and at the end of the book, there are parts of her life that remain unexplained. Is her life something that you’re planning to return to?

Oh, yes. I had originally intended to write one big fat novel. I got to about a hundred thousand words and the character of Hild was only twelve, and I thought, You know, this just isn’t going to work. The way I’m seeing it right now is that there are going to be three books. The second book will take us to the point where she rejoins the historical record, when she’s thirty-three. And the third book will be the second half of her life. I know where the second book begins, and I know where it ends. And I know some of the points in the middle. I just don’t have the whole thing yet.

I find Hild to be a very likable character, and a very admirable character. At the same time, her society is one where people can be bought and sold, and you don’t shy away from that aspect of it.

Hild has to be sympathetic in the sense that the reader has to understand what she thinks and how she feels. They don’t necessarily have to like her in the sense of, I wish she was my friend, or my daughter, or my mum. They just have to understand her. Honestly, I wrestled with the whole slavery issue. The way, obviously, we’re all brought up is that it’s just anathema to own a human being in that way. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it’s just a question of degree. We are all beholden, on some level, to some institution, some more than others.

If you were a slave in Hild’s time, some of them had better lives than some of the free people. That’s a low bar, I know. This is just how it was, and I had to deal with it. Hild had to. I think, in book two, we’re going to see more slavery, and see how that really unfolds. I couldn’t afford to spend too much time on the notion too early, I don’t think. There’s a lot about the seventh century that’s going to be difficult for twenty-first-century readers, without throwing too much at them at once.

There are parts of Hild’s life that are well documented and parts that aren’t. Where did you draw the line for yourself, as far as which things you could write speculatively about and which you couldn’t?

For me, the rule was very simple—if it could have happened, it was fair game. If it was actually written down, I was not going to contravene it. But there was so very little that’s known to be known. I can give you her entire life in one short paragraph.

Most of what we hear from Bede about Hild is, pretty much, hagiography. If you strip that out—the fantastical dreams about her ascending to heaven, and all that stuff—there’s very little left. We know roughly when she was born, but not exactly. We know she was probably born in Britain. We can guess that she was born in what’s now Yorkshire. I was guided greatly by reading all the secondary scholarship around this time. The material goods and so forth. All the archaeology, the ethnology. How the jewelry looked. And I could extrapolate from that. I started off as a science-fiction writer, so that’s my meat and drink—take three facts and build a world from it. It’s a joy to me.

Do you have a sense of what your next project might be after the third volume of Hild is done?

I’d love to write the next phase of my memoir—I wrote that multimedia memoir in 2007. And there are lots of novels I’d write. I would love to write about this country in pre-Columbian times. I would also love to write about the UK and Iceland a little later, like the ninth century. There’s another Aud book bubbling in the back of my head. I sometimes think about Ammonite, and what that might be like now. Ideas are cheap. They circle like planes running out of fuel. Whichever looks most important, I will bring that in to land when it’s time.

 

Author of Tender Is the Bite

This week, we’re presenting Timothy Leo Taranto’s illustrated author puns. Today:

F. Scott Spitzgerald

 

Critics with Sharp Objects, and Other News

Preparing to take down an author. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

It’s that time again: the annual Hatchet Job of the Year is coming, and critics have honed their wits all year in anticipation. On the shortlist you’ll find eviscerations of John le Carré, Donna Tartt, and Morrissey, among others.
While we’re doing things we do every year, let’s mourn the slow disappearance of successful midlist authors.
When did it become popular to call people losers? Google knows.
At the MLA conference—regularly touted, no doubt, as the sexiest gathering in academe—a titillating ad for a “mock-interview make-out session” has everyone buzzing and, with luck, making out.
“I sometimes think of social media as being like the terrible apparatus at the center of Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony.’”

 

Congratulations to Jonathan Franzen

Oskar Kokoschka’s 1925 portrait of Karl Kraus. Oil on canvas, 65 x 100 cm, Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna.

The Kraus Project, Jonathan Franzen’s translation of three essays by the late Austrian writer Karl Kraus, has been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award in criticism. An excerpt from the book, “Against Heine,” appeared in our Fall 2013 issue, and several excerpts of that excerpt—meta-excerpts, if you will—made their way here to the Daily. Winners will be announced on March 13; until then, to prevent the suspense from killing, maiming, or even laying a finger on you, breathe deeply and read Franzen’s expansive notes on “the anal-retentive preciousness” of John Updike’s prose; the externalities of Salinger’s appeal to young readers; the difficulties of translating German travel humor; and the proper way to inflect harsh. And keep your fingers crossed!

 

Love in a Cold Climate

Photo: Sebastian Dooris

I moved to Greenpoint, in North Brooklyn, on the heels of a breakup, and although I lived there for years, in my memories it is always somehow winter. While I was hardly a pioneer in the neighborhood—a recognizable mumblecore actor lived one fire escape away—ten years ago it was still a far cry from today’s full-on Girls-level gentrification; friends still griped about taking the unreliable G train to come visit, and more than one said that the rent had better be pretty cheap to justify the schlep. It was.

To those who know the area, this was just off of Monsignor McGolrick Park, a twelve-minute walk from the Nassau Avenue station. At first glance the apartment was unprepossessing, but after I had pulled up the stained carpet, painted the walls a vivid blue, found a copper leaf sculpture at a thrift store, and sewn a gaily-patterned bark-cloth curtain to separate the bedroom, I fancied it was cheerful, in a vaguely retro-modern way. There was also a fire escape large enough for a table and chairs, not to mention a few pots of nasturtiums and some basil in the summer, even though, again, my primary memories involve snow.

I had chosen the neighborhood because it was one of the few where I could both afford to live alone on my shopgirl salary and also feel safe walking alone at night. But I had not been living there long when I met M., and he kind of just moved in by osmosis. It was never a formal arrangement, but I didn’t like going to his roommate-filled bachelor pad three trains away, and we were young enough that this sort of thing seemed normal.

We would walk hand in hand down Nassau Avenue in the mornings, crossing the street when necessary to catch any weak rays of sun, and stop at the local doughnut shop, where the waitresses, all young Polish girls in teal uniforms, served us our sour-cream glazed and coffees. In the evenings we would go to a nearby cafeteria and get pork cutlets with potatoes and red cabbage. Then we would sit in the park, if it was warm enough, or play the metal-heavy jukebox at the Palace Café, if it wasn’t.

One of the clerks at the doughnut shop—a plain, shy girl who seemed to keep to herself—had an obvious crush on my boyfriend. The other girls all teased her about it and would push her forward to wait on him while she blushed scarlet and refused to meet his eyes. She clearly did not enjoy any of it; I found it painful and didn’t mind that she hated me. He was always very kind to her.

There are a few hardy drunks who to this day hold court at that particular subway stop (in the coldest weather they often go into the station), but there were other regulars. When I commuted to the shop, I invariably found myself on the train with an elderly woman who, every day, was met at the top of the stairs by her husband. And every day, he would dip her back and greet her with a passionate kiss.

On my days off, I spent my mornings at the doughnut shop. Nowadays it’s considered destination-worthy. Maybe it always was; it’s been there since the 1960s. I liked it because it was so comfortable (even with the hostility emanating from that one girl), with its horseshoe counters and regulars. There I would read the Post and listen to the teenagers bantering. If one stayed late enough, the twins would come in: a pair of identical elderly women who would enter in silence and, also in silence, be handed a single split, toasted, and buttered English muffin and two cups of Lipton tea. I was tolerated, after several months, sometimes even treated with cordiality. And there were moments when I sat there that I was achingly conscious of being happy.

Around this time, I learned that M. had been seeing a second girl, a beautiful young Englishwoman doing an internship at a well-known fashion house. I was heartbroken. He seemed genuinely bewildered by my reaction. As he explained, we had never formalized our relationship nor declared it exclusive. Following a tearful scene, he left. But when I got home the next day it was to find that he had made a number of repairs around the apartment and gone to IKEA to replace a faulty set of blinds. He had left his set of keys on the table.

Several days later, I returned to the doughnut shop and ordered a bowtie and a coffee with half-and-half. When I tendered my two dollars, however, the young girl behind the counter turned away, consulted in a whisper with her colleagues, then returned to me and decisively shook her head. “It’s free,” she said. “You don’t have to pay anymore.” No one seemed able to provide an adequate explanation for this sudden stroke of good fortune, so the owner was summoned from the basement, where I was told she had been taking a nap. It was then I learned that M. had arranged a system whereby I was to have free doughnuts for life. He had put down $100; when the balance ran low, he would re-up it, in perpetuity. “I hope you appreciate him,” said the owner. “He really loves you.” The uniformed girls nodded earnestly, clearly considering the whole situation highly romantic, and me somewhat elderly and bespectacled to have rated such gallantry. I saw the girl who loved him, standing back, and I held my tongue, and smiled, and agreed that yes, I was very lucky.

I took M. back, and ate doughnuts every day. And every day the girls looked at me with a combination of reproach and envy and, in the case of that one, hatred. Sometimes I would get two doughnuts: a bowtie in the morning and, just to live large, a sour-cream glazed for later.

It was harder to get to the doughnut shop from my new apartment, but I still made the schlep with some regularity. As more and more of my friends moved to Greenpoint, I had increasing reason to be there. But I would have gone anyway; it was, after all, money in the bank. But then I moved even farther away, to Manhattan, and it has been over a year since I spent a morning at the horseshoe counter, waiting for the twins. Last time I went, it was pretty jammed, anyway. I did not recognize the new crop of girls behind the counter, but my erstwhile rival was still there.

This weekend, I was packing up some of M.’s things to send to him in California, always a melancholy task. He has said I can give away most of his cold-weather clothes, so a few coats will go to the local precinct for the coat drive, and I’ll try to sell what I can and send him the proceeds. I am wearing one of his sweaters as I write this; it’s the kind of cold that gets into your bones.

Going through a large Tupperware box filled with papers, I came across one scrap on which was written, “Good for Free Doughnuts for Life.” I don’t know how to cancel the arrangement, or even whether I should. I like to think that maybe sometimes the girls there see the envelope and the note, now eight years old, and find it romantic. In any case, it’s always nice to have the option.

 

Our New Year’s Resolution: Spend More Time with the Kids

Film still from Back to School, 1986.

As truisms go, “They grow up so fast” is a doozy. Take it from us. A mere fifteen years ago, when The Paris Review was a sprightly forty-five, we looked on in wonder as McSweeney’s took its first steps in this world, a mock eighteenth-century gazette from the outskirts of Silicon Valley. At moments we glimpsed a younger, friendlier version of ourselves, if we’d been born in a small nonsmoking city where people did graphic design. We laughed at their jokes. We admired the typesetting. We even paid a couple of visits to their pirate store.

What can we say? Time did its thing. We remained on the East Coast, McSweeney’s on the West. As the years passed, we begged off various ballet recitals, countless soccer games, and at least one fiction reading that had an acoustic guitar component. We were an absentee elder sister. No more! With a new year upon us and McSweeney’s entering its headstrong teenage phase, we want a second chance: at the ripe old age of sixty, we’re spending more time with the kid.

All month long, we’re offering a subscription deal in conjunction with McSweeney’s: you can get both magazines for just $75, a 20 percent savings. Because it’s 2014, and you don’t have to make the same mistakes we did. You can have it all: the interviews, fiction, poetry, art, essays, humor, and translations that make us proud to be in the same business.

 

Recapping Dante: Canto 12, or A Concerned Parent Contacts the FCC

Gustave Doré, Canto XII, lines 73, 74.

This winter, we’re recapping the Inferno. Read along!

To whom it may concern:

For the last several months my child has been watching the program The Inferno. I’ve had concerns about the moral integrity of this show since the beginning, but a recent episode, “Canto 12: Dante with a Vengeance” is perhaps the worst of it. The episode, which I heard about from my son and then felt concerned enough to watch myself, begins as the two main characters meet a Minotaur. I’m not trying to have my son indoctrinated with pagan dogma. I mean, what is this? I’ll let my son watch a show about talking vegetables so long as they’re telling the stories of Christ, but there’s something so frighteningly glib about the mythological image of a Minotaur being placed in front of children. Is no one worried about the future of American youth? And while we’re on it, let’s talk about these Virgil and Dante fellows. There’s something going on there, and I can tell you exactly what: sin.

But it gets worse. As the two sodomites (let’s call them what they are) travel past the creature, they’re surrounded by a series of centaurs. And I’ll tell you the exact same thing I told the executives at Warner Brothers when the fifth Harry Potter film had a scene with centaurs. The centaur is obviously a product of sin. And animal cruelty.

Allow me to set my faith aside for a minute, because the worst of The Inferno is not in its hunger for blasphemy. This is the work of a very, very sick mind. “Canto 12” prominently features a river of boiling blood in which the sinners are confined. Should they pop their heads too high, the centaurs pelt them with arrows. The whole scene is very graphic, and the blood looks very real. How do you even come up with that?

I can’t even begin to tell you all the questions my son asked after seeing this episode. Whose blood is it? What does boiling blood feel like? Can we boil blood when we get home? Of course the blood river is for violent sinners, but even I have a limit for punishing evil. Doesn’t Satan have a sense of moderation? I’d like a show that teaches my kid moderation. Alexander and Dionysius are present (and I’m certain those two are having a blast hanging out in a bath of frothing blood together for all of eternity). Attila was there as well. And so I can’t help but feel that this show is very anticolonialist, and I don’t know what they do in the USSR, or wherever you liberal pinko bureaucrats are from, but I’ll have you know that here in America we owe everything to colonial sympathizers.

My son also pointed out that the punishment fit the crime very well. Violence, blood, whatever. I was hoping to wait a few more years before sitting him down and explaining what irony is, but that moment has passed and this show has derailed my parental agenda. Let’s just hope Dante never finds Beatrice, because I’m definitely not ready to have that talk yet.

Let’s get back to the river of blood. There is literally an entire river of blood and people burning in it. How on earth (or how the hell, if you will) did that slip past you guys? What kind of operation are you running here?

If you want to be the ones to comfort my child when he wakes up in the middle of the night crying because had a dream that a centaur was going to lead him into a bath of scalding blood, and then abandon him in hell, leaving him to the device of a dead Roman poet, then by all means, keep this show on the air. Until then, please consider investigating the entire writing and production team of The Inferno. If you do, I’m sure you’ll find them all very deserving of a nice trip to Guantanamo.

Cordially,

An American mother

Alexander Aciman is the author of Twitterature. He has written for the New York Times, Tablet, the Wall Street Journal, and TIME. Follow him on Twitter at @acimania.

 

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

 

Dear friends,

There are going to be some exciting things happening here at the Daily! For starters, after nearly two years of editing the site, I’m going to be shifting my focus to writing: as a contributing editor and sort of house writer, I’ll now be appearing here on a daily (no pun intended) basis!

As to the editorial side, I’m delighted to hand things over to Dan Piepenbring, who has graciously made the westward trek to lend TPR his talents, smarts, and musical acumen. (One of these days I’ll actually get all my perfume bottles, matchbooks, and ink bottles out of his desk.) Watch this space to see the wonders he works.

As ever,

Sadie

 

Martin Amis Owes Everything to His “Wicked Stepmother,” and Other News

Photography: Maximilian Schönherr, via Wikimedia Commons.

Martin Amis pays elegant tribute to his deceased stepmother, who saved him from an early life as “a semi-literate truant.”
Chang-rae Lee’s forthcoming On Such a Full Sea boasts the world’s first 3D-printed book cover.
How to modernize literary classics (even when cell phones and the Internet bring an infestation of plot holes).
Can great literature really change your life? (Quick answer: probably not, but maybe.)

 

What We’re Loving: Adventures in Silhouette; Red Sauce, Whiskey, and Snow; the Narcissistic Hypocrisy at the Center of Human Nature

I’m embarrassed to admit that I barely touched a book over the holidays (besides 84, Charing Cross Road, which I’m in the habit of rereading most years around Christmastime), but I did see a spectacular movie whose imagery I can’t get out of my head. In 1923, a talented artist named Lotte Reiniger was approached by a banker looking to make an investment. He suggested that Reiniger parlay her particular skill—cutting delicate silhouette art—into making a feature-length animated film. Three years and over 250,000 hand-cut images later, The Adventures of Prince Achmed premiered in Berlin. The story is a mélange of tales from the Thousand and One Nights, but good luck paying attention to the plot; the visuals are so arresting that they’ll keep you from focusing on more than one character or bit of pattern during any given scene. The original print of Prince Achmed is lost—a casualty of the Battle of Berlin, in 1945—but thanks to a restoration project completed a little over ten years ago, a fully colorized (and scored!) version is available on DVD from Milestone Films. —Clare Fentress

I’m a sucker for culinary memoirs by authors who aren’t primarily considered “food writers”—a genre that includes work by such varied names as A. J. Liebling, Laurie Colwin, and Jim Harrison. (The Pat Conroy Cookbook and The Roald Dahl Cookbook, respectively, also deserve honorable mentions.) Jason Epstein is best known as a publisher and cofounder of The New York Review of Books, but he’s also an accomplished cook and gourmet. Eating, the 2009 collection of Epstein’s food essays, covers family recipes, his days working as a professional cook, and, of course, the memorable meals he has shared with various literary luminaries. Although Eating is by no means gossipy or indiscreet (the only one who comes under the knife is Roy Cohn, with whom Epstein once lunched at 21), it’s filled with terrific vignettes; one could do worse than lunch, on a ship, with Edmund Wilson and Buster Keaton—“lobster over linguine with a bottle of Chablis beneath a perfect sky.” —Sadie O. Stein

Not long ago—but long enough that I’ve forgotten how it happened—I asked you to explain why exactly the rediscovery of Aristotle, from Arabic sources, mattered so much to medieval theologians. You recommended Étienne Gilson’s 1938 classic primer Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages. Over the vacation a copy arrived at my house from a used bookstore, without any note. I’ve read Gilson’s lectures with great pleasure, and a keen sense of intellectual relief, but I can’t think who you are. Who are you? —Lorin Stein

Having thrilled to a certain louche Scorsese film (starts with W, ends with olf of Wall Street), I decided to watch After Hours, his 1985 comedy, set in a Soho lousy with neon and ne’er-do-wells. Griffin Dunne stars as Paul Hackett, a word processor (!) whose eccentric first date crumbles into a delirious picaresque. As Paul encounters more denizens of the old downtown—no Dean & DeLuca here—the dream logic turns nightmarish; a plaster of Paris bagel and cream cheese is employed to chilling effect. Of the film’s unanimously strong ensemble, pay special attention to Rosanna Arquette, as a tragic naïf whose husband has a Wizard of Oz fetish. “When he came, he would scream out, ‘Surrender Dorothy!’ That’s all. Just ‘Surrender Dorothy!’” —Dan Piepenbring

Just before the holidays I went to see the terrific Twelfth Night now on Broadway. The production comes from the Globe in London, and they’re doing things the old-fashioned way: period costumes, live music, and males playing all the parts (which means, in the case of Viola, that you have a boy playing a girl playing a boy and saying “I swear, I am not that I play”). To mimic conditions at the Globe, they also have some seating on stage. The night I went, during the first scene between Viola and Olivia, an elderly gentlemen in one of these seats fell off his chair in an apparent faint. It was a scary moment. Several members of the audience clambered on stage and the man was taken to an ambulance (we later learned that all was well). Mark Rylance, who played the funniest Olivia I’ve ever seen, was motionless during the entire emergency. When it was over he turned to the house and observed, still in female falsetto, how lucky we were to have so many fine doctors in Illyria; then he proposed a short break. The rest of the performance was wonderful, but I’ll chiefly remember that moment of grace and professionalism under pressure. —Robyn Creswell

“Human nature is such that when we are suddenly taken up by someone whom we consider superior and admirable, we accept his attentions calmly, whereas when we are dropped we cannot rest until we feel we have got to the bottom of the person’s profound irrationality.” In the Freud Archives, Janet Malcolm’s 1983 account of historians at war over the origins of psychoanalysis, finds everyone blinded and betrayed by his own wounded self-love. The Freudian scholar Kurt Eissler overlooks the obvious sleaziness of his disciple Jeffrey Masson; Masson blabs so egregiously to Malcolm that he’d eventually sue her for misquoting him (he lost); even Freud seems to expose a love affair by “hiding” the evidence in a case study. As usual in Malcolm’s work, everyone fights to supply a master narrative, but—again, as usual—Malcolm alone achieves mastery. Her character judgments ring out like ultimate truths. What makes In the Freud Archives so addictive is the thrilling suspicion that Malcolm may have blind spots of her own: her skepticism is contagious, and in her stylish quest for truth she plants the seeds of doubt. —L.S.

When I was in film school, one of the first classes I took was an introduction to sound. I fondly remember making a run to the nearby Morton Williams to pick up a watermelon that my production group quickly destroyed with a chopping knife and mallet to invoke a murder scene in our radio play. Our inspiration was the giallo cinema of the seventies and eighties, gory masterpieces made on the cheap by such directors as Dario Argento and Mario Bava, stockpiled with sex, Satanism, and human sacrifice. Peter Strickland’s fever dream of a film Berberian Sound Studio is a beautiful tribute to this genre as well as to the old-school sound mixers and Foley artists from cinema’s post—dub-craze era. While the film within the film being produced, The Equestrian Vortex, is a gory mess, there is no actual violence or sex in Strickland’s claustrophobic Foley studio, and, like the best work of Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch, the film chooses atmosphere over action while exploring the limits of identity and sanity. —Justin Alvarez

I’m reminded this morning of August Kleinzahler’s poem “Red Sauce, Whiskey, and Snow.” There’s the snug feeling of being home on a snowy day, tucked inside one’s warm kitchen, as Kleinzahler is—the toasty tones of “cinnabar and gold,” the amber light, and the titular sauce’s hearty heat. His nip of whiskey unfastens “a tap of the base of the skull.” That activity—in the warmth of the house, in the back of the brain—contrasts so crisply with the quiet rush of blowing white outside Kleinzahler’s window, and outside mine as well. Snow’s blankness, the nothingness that covers everything, makes indoors feel particularly interior. —Nicole Rudick

Out with the old? That transition is rarely elegant. In my own nebbishy attempt to catch up with an LRB subscription, I ended the year on Joshua Cohen’s November diatribe against Franzen, popularity, and HBO (“No one hates him more”). The piece refers to a panoply of Oedipus complexes (we have Kraus, Heine, Franzen, Wallace … and Cohen). For a less genealogically worrisome Teutonic-themed character assassination, I went to Sebald’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, printed by Notting Hill Editions. It’s about Alfred Andersch, an ex–Mouson Lavendel advertising man cum racial hygienist cum writer, who composed his own blurbs and rebranded his politics to get ahead. In one mesmerizing portrait, Aldersch looks cross, and stuck, and desperate for a cry. —Lucie Elven