The Paris Review's Blog, page 763

Amateur Night

Image via Pod Collective

Instead of attending my ten-year high school reunion I went to a psychic healer. This was the Boston suburbs, on the eve of Thanksgiving. Annually, on the night in question, prodigal Massholes in the eighteen-to-thirty-five demographic flock to the bars in Allston, Brighton, and downtown Boston for both informal and official reunions. Said reunions are marked by blackout binge drinking, vomit-flooded gutters, vomit-mouthed makeout sessions, and less-than-sober car rides back to the suburbs in mom-borrowed minivans. Boston radio DJ’s have euphemistically dubbed it “Amateur Night.”

If this sounds appealing, then we may have been friends in high school—at least in a superficial, pass the blunt kind of way—but no longer have much, if anything, in common. I don’t mean that to sound snobbishly pejorative. I grew up just outside of Boston, in Newton, Massachusetts, a wealthy white enclave famous for Fig Newtons, a high concentration of psychiatrists, and its recent reign as CQ Press’s safest city in America. It is a place filled with driven parents and overachieving children; of the roughly 350 students in my graduating class, nearly a dozen went to Harvard, not to mention all those who attended safety schools like Princeton, Brown, and Cornell. Many of my former classmates have gone on to great success. But high achievement and Frat Boy idiocy are not mutually exclusive. Like Clark Kent, my former classmates slip easily from business attire to superhero casual, removing stiff shirts at happy hour to reveal Red Sox logos. By day they are lawyers, doctors, and titans of industry. By night they drop their ‘r’s and instigate fisticuffs with tough-talking townies. In part, this performance reeks of rich kid guilt—it’s a certain kind of slumming—but more so, I think it speaks to something particularly Bostonian, a product of drinking too much dirty water, or years spent sitting in obscured view seats at Fenway, or a Kennedy-inherited Irish McLiberalism, in which money is disconnected from decorum.

I know all of this—the styles and habits of my former classmates—through Facebook, of course. I have followed these classmates for years online, sharing in their triumphs and tragedies, comparing my sex partners to theirs. In a sense, social media has rendered reunions obsolete; it has killed our curiosity. No longer does one attend a reunion wondering whatever happened to so-and-so, or shocked that the band geek has blossomed into a beauty. And though romantic comedies have emphasized the important role reunions can play in the healing of one’s high-school psychic wounds, the truth, these days, is that life’s winners have already etched their humble brags into our collective conscience online.

But maybe I was just bitter and embarrassed. It’s not that I was in such bad shape ten years on—I’d managed to kick a drug habit (Tylenol PM), move out of my parents’ basement, and trick a wonderful woman into dating me—but that in a group of high achievers, I was definitively unimpressive. After a long period of unemployment, I had moved to New York and become the cliché of a struggling writer, working part-time in a bookstore, publishing occasional TV recaps online, and squeezing into the skinniest jeans I could manage. I’d received a number of rejections on my autobiographical novel about a twenty-something stoner who can’t get over high school.

In high school, I had been one of those supposedly smart kids who wastes his potential by taking ecstasy in basements and trance-dancing to the techno remix of Rusted Root’s “Send Me On My Way.” I was liked but unloved, laughed with and at in equal measure, a sexual Switzerland. For years I had entertained fantasies of one day returning to my hometown in triumph, arriving at the reunion as a famous author or rocker or magically horse-hung porn star. As this was not the case, and as I had also gone bald, and as my girlfriend wouldn’t even be in town to help me prove that I was no longer a virgin, I decided to skip the reunion. I had already managed to experience all the attendant shame without leaving the comfort of my Snuggie.

The Healer was my mother’s idea. Mom had been seeing The Healer on the recommendation of a friend ever since the death of her father—my grandfather—one year prior. My mother is an artist, and eccentric, at least by suburban standards. For as long as I can remember, she has reddened her hair with henna and worn red clog shoes. She is a spiritual person, not in a wonky, new agey way, but in an artsy Jewish way, the kind of person who might find value in a psychic healing session despite her inherent disbelief in the very concept. She told me that The Healer gave the best massage she’d ever had, a rough ride from toes to dome. The Healer had informed my mother that her body was still grieving, that grief had manifested in her muscles and bones. She had contacted my grandfather from beyond the grave. She had laid hot stones atop my mother’s back and shoulders. My mother agreed that the body, too, must heal.

I’m not sure what about this appealed to me. There was the promise of a free massage, sure. But beyond this, there was my own sense of mourning, for my grandfather, yes, but also—like Masha’s from The Seagull—for my own life. Perhaps it was the moment in time; the economic downturn and my generation’s particular brand of Internet-exacerbated human disconnect. Or maybe it was burnout from blunt smoking, or melancholy about my career prospects, or jadedness, or Prozac numbification, or reading too much David Foster Wallace. Either way, I’d begun to feel the way I once had while smoking opium in the back seat of a friend’s Saab. Instead of the common drug experience of hovering above one’s body, I had felt almost the opposite, as if my conscience was so deeply embedded in my own corporeality, that the outside world was somehow walled off; I could feel the presence of other people, but they were on a separate plane, deeply unknowable, interacting in the ether. It was sort of like having terrible head cold, when your ears are insulated with mucus and everything sounds far away. And though I didn’t plan to use the healer to contact my grandfather, or even believe this was possible, I did allow myself a vague optimism that maybe this woman could help pull me out of my death-like trance and reconnect me to my old self.

It’s possible that a high school reunion was what I actually needed. It would have given me the chance to reconvene with those, like me, who had grown up in the same privileged environment, unprepared for life’s obstacles. But my former classmates weren’t people to me. They were avatars. I knew them only by the shallow signifiers of social media—curated photos of them looking their best, posing at weddings in rented tuxedoes, or tanned and smiling on foreign beaches alongside half-naked spouses, who, via tricks of the light, looked impossibly luminescent, inhumanly happy. The bite and grind of their actual lives was unknown to me; all I saw was un-relatable elation.

The den of healing was the top floor of a duplex in the bad part of town. Newton—at least South Newton, where I grew up—is the kind of town where the bad part of town is still a pretty good part of town. The thing that makes it bad is the duplexes. No one likes a neighbor. I sat in the waiting room with my heart beating fast. I’m not sure why I was so nervous. I’d had many massages, mostly the cheapo kind that are ubiquitous in New York City, and often leave one in worse pain than when you entered. But this was different. I felt a strange charge, like I was on a blind date. The room smelled like potpourri, which reminded me of my grandmother, who hid stashes of the stuff throughout her house. When my grandmother was  twenty-three, her father, sister, and mother were killed in a tornado. My grandmother, too, spent the rest of her life permanent mourning, for her family, but also for something more general: innocence perhaps, spring’s optimistic blossom. Open a drawer, and there were wilted flowers.

The Healer appeared, draped in silk and gauze, her curly hair untamed. She gave ethnic vibes, but I knew she was Jewish like me: eye-glassed, autumn-hearted, blooming with Eros. Giant breasts ballooned through her lacy blouse. She looked like one of those gentle, older porn stars who now teach tantra workshops on late night HBO. “I’ll just be a sec,” she said, and scampered off into another room.

The walls were thin, and from my chair I could hear The Healer arguing with someone in the next room. The Healer had the throaty harsh of a Boston accent. It’s an ugly accent—uglier on a woman—the kind of voice I associate with sports radio and rough hand jobs. The other voice was younger, and in comparison sounded almost adorably shrill: the age-old timbre of teenage rage. They were talking about homework, about staying out too late, the usual stuff.

I imagined the daughter imagining me out there in the waiting room. Another body to writhe under her mother’s fingers. I imagined the daughter hating her mother, and hating it here in this partitioned office-parlor-home, and again I thought of the reunion, and the misery of high school, a misery I couldn’t even articulate as misery at the time because I knew nothing else. As far as I was concerned that was simply the state of human existence: awful longing, anger at everyone, unquenched sexual urges.

The Healer returned to the waiting room with the fakest smile I’d ever seen. She apologized for the delay, said something about the perils of parenting. I followed her into the healing area, where I was left to strip naked and lie facedown beneath a blanket.

The healing area reminded me of a Victorian boudoir, like the ones I’d seen in period films as an adolescent, suffering the stilted dialogue to scan for visible nipples. There were antique lamps, mirrors whose styles didn’t quite match, and a four-poster bed instead of a massage table. The room was decorated in trinkets from all variety of religions, including various Buddha statues and a Native American dream catcher.

In the mirror, I searched my body for signs that I was dying—unexplained bruises, discolorations, pre-cancerous moles. I’d had many of these moles as a child and teen, and my body was pocked with small scars from the removal surgeries. In a couple days I would be attending the thirtieth birthday party of a close friend who wouldn’t live to see another year. He’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer out of the blue, six months earlier. This would be his final fete, a time for friends to send him love and make their peace. I was not prepared for the event—in fact I was terrified. I’d known people my age who’d died before, but none so close to me, and none by such an unexpected bodily betrayal. They’d died in car accidents and drug overdoses, or by their own hands. To die from disease seemed like something that was supposed to happen when you were older, and this instance, I thought, maybe meant that now I was older, that I had somehow slipped toward middle age without my knowing, that it was all grief and fear from here on out.

I was under the covers when The Healer returned.

“Sorry about that,” she said. “She lives with her father during the week, but now she’s here for the holiday. Things get a little cramped. Close quarters, you know?” She lubed up her hands.

My mother had been right about the massage. She started off slow and soft, gradually getting rougher. She told me I was very tense, totally knotted. I tried to relax. I pretended the bed was a coffin and that death was like this: serene, sleepy, sweet smelling. She tugged on my arms, kneaded my thighs, twisted my toes. It all felt good, but did nothing for my disconnect. I was far away, embedded in my body, while The Healer thought about her daughter or  mortgage, or something or other. My body was nothing but an object, some ugly silly putty. She stretched it in her hands.

After a while, The Healer told me to turn over. She laid the hot stones on the bed beneath my back. She rubbed something on my chest and said that she was hitting my heart chakra. It smelled like Vicks VapoRub. She asked about my astrological sign, how old I was, other questions. I told her I was an Aries. She told me that I was entering Saturn Return and that my life was about to change. I wanted desperately to believe her, to believe in astrology, anything. She asked if I wanted to contact anyone from beyond the grave and I said that I did not, and we both kind of laughed like we were embarrassed the subject had even come up.

When I said I was from New York, she asked if it was like the show Gossip Girl. I told her I didn’t know. I’d only been the Upper East Side once, and that was to visit the Whitney Museum. She said that Chuck Bass was her favorite character and I agreed, and for a moment I forgot I was her client and felt like her friend. From there we moved onto the differences between Brooklyn and Manhattan, and what other shows we watched, and whether I had trouble digesting dairy (how on earth did she figure that out?).

All the while, she rubbed lotion on my inner thigh. I thought about not getting an erection, a thought process that, inevitably, always leads to getting an erection. The Healer acted like she didn’t notice.

Apparently it’s considered a professional courtesy for members of the massage industry to ignore erections. I always thought this was somehow more awkward, until one time a non-English speaking masseuse stopped what she was doing, pointed at my penis, and said the word “bad.” Since then I’ve come to appreciate the professional courtesy.

The Healer continued to run her hands up, down, around my thighs, almost, but never actually grazing my groin. At some point, she lifted one of my legs and pushed my foot toward my face. There was a deep pain on the underside of my thigh, hamstring stretched like taught rope, on the verge of snapping. I almost yelped. The sheet slipped off, and my balls were exposed, hanging droopy in front of The Healer. The pain was supposed to be the good kind of pain, but I don’t know what that means—the good kind of pain—and suddenly all I could feel was the badness of it all: the soreness and tenderness and vulnerability, my crushable testicles cold and exposed. This was what I feared about the reunion too—nakedness, the sad truth behind my own online avatar, humanity on ugly display.

Just as the pain was becoming too much to bear The Healer let loose my leg and lowered it. She knew my threshold. I was safe in her hands.

I’m not sure if the healing session, or Saturn’s Return had anything to do with it, but things began to improve for me. I sold my novel, moved with my girlfriend and cat into a lovely apartment, and got a famous porn actress to star in my book trailer. Even my lactose intolerance seemed to abate.

 

Recapping Dante: Canto 7, or Hell by the Numbers

Gustave Doré, "Virgil rebukes Plutus at the entrance to the fourth circle," 1885.

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

Canto 7 opens with Plutus, the god of wealth, babbling unintelligibly at Dante and Virgil. Pape Satàn, pape Satàn, aleppe!, he shouts, a phrase that has left readers and scholars baffled ever since it was written. Many offer their own interpretations, but there is never enough evidence for any critic to settle definitively on a single meaning. Virgil, however, responds to Plutus as though the cry is somehow intelligible to him; Plutus doesn’t want to let the pair pass because he has been tasked with keeping the living out. Again, Virgil works some Roman magic and is able to pass by.

This canto is one of the first instances in which the sinner’s condition in the afterlife begins to correspond almost unambiguously to the sin committed. Here, Dante and Virgil come across avarice and prodigality. The Hollanders note that the reason the avaricious are shown with their hands closed is as a reminder of their greed. The prodigal have their hair cropped to show inattention to property. Virgil gives Dante a discourse on fortune, and, in brief, explains to Dante that fortune is impartial, and that the unlucky are quick to revile fortune, which Virgil suggests is a misguided aggression since in fact fortune couldn’t care less what people have to say. The two carry on and stop at the Styx.

But let’s see what happens of we break this canto down.

Dante by the numbers:

Lines: 130

Number of times Virgil disarms a worker of Hell: 1 (line 8). Charon, Cerberus—and now Plutus. Feels farfetched, and even a bit confusing because theological universes aren’t particularly amenable to any sort of overlap.

Number of similes: 2 (starting on lines 13, and 22). These similes are both nautical, one involving sails, and the other waves. Each simile is three lines long. By now, Dante has it down to a science.

Number of times Dante is afraid: 1 (line 4).

Number of times Dante feels sympathy: 1 (line 36).

Number of times Virgil comforts Dante: 1 (line 4). This number feels low.

Number of times Dante is confused and Virgil explains: 3 (stating on lines 37, 67, and 115)

Number of times Dante admits to being confused: 2 (lines 37 and 67)

Number of times Virgil calls Dante “Son”: 2 (lines 61 and 115)

Number of sinner groups encountered: 3 (2, if you count the avaricious and the prodigal as the same, and then the wrathful)

Number of major Greek mythological elements: 2 (Plutus, River Styx)

Number of times Dante recognizes a sinner: 0. Seems unlikely, but in this canto, Dante may be trying to break away from this model for a bit by having Virgil announce that the sinners are probably too deformed in this circle to recognize.

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.

 

Doris Lessing, 1919–2013

Photo: Warner.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any things you would have done differently, or any advice to give?

LESSING

Advice I don’t go in for. The thing is, you do not believe I know everything in this field is a cliché, everything’s already been said, but you just do not believe that you’re going to be old. People don’t realize how quickly they’re going to be old, either. Time goes very fast.

—Doris Lessing, the Art of Fiction No. 102

 

RIP Doris Lessing, and Other News

Doris Lessing has died at ninety-four.
“The adamant child became the adamant adult. She truly had ice in her veins. She believed that her insight and her talent were unique, and she may well have been right.” Justin Cartwright pays tribute.
Library copies of Fifty Shades of Grey have been found to carry traces of herpes and cocaine.
How Philip Roth gets geriatric sex wrong.

 

William Weaver, 1923–2013

“Some of the first books I read or that my father read to me were translations, although I didn’t know they were translations because in those days the translator often wouldn’t even have his name on the book. I remember a French book, Sans famille, called in English Nobody’s Boy, which my father read to me when I was four or five. It was about a little orphan boy who runs away from the orphanage and goes off with an Italian organ-grinder who has a pet monkey and a lot of stray dogs, all of them with names. Since I came from a large family with all these older brothers and sisters, the dream of my life was to be an orphan, so I thought, Oh, this lucky kid. He’s an orphan, and he gets to wander the roads with all these animals and this nice Italian. I thought it a great happy book, but you were supposed to be dissolved in tears from beginning to end. My father understood perfectly.” —William Weaver, the Art of Translation No. 3

 

William Weaver, 1923-2013

“Some of the first books I read or that my father read to me were translations, although I didn’t know they were translations because in those days the translator often wouldn’t even have his name on the book. I remember a French book, Sans famille, called in English Nobody’s Boy, which my father read to me when I was four or five. It was about a little orphan boy who runs away from the orphanage and goes off with an Italian organ-grinder who has a pet monkey and a lot of stray dogs, all of them with names. Since I came from a large family with all these older brothers and sisters, the dream of my life was to be an orphan, so I thought, Oh, this lucky kid. He’s an orphan, and he gets to wander the roads with all these animals and this nice Italian. I thought it a great happy book, but you were supposed to be dissolved in tears from beginning to end. My father understood perfectly.” —William Weaver, the Art of Translation No. 3

 

What We’re Loving: Great Teachers, Great Books, Giant Wigs

1778 fashion plate of French court dress with wide panniers and artificially enhanced “big hair.” Plate 43 in Galerie des Modes for 1778.

Some years ago, when I was trying to learn Spanish, I bought Borges’s lectures on English literature. As it turned out, these were largely concerned with Old English, so actual Spanish was required to read them and I had to throw in the towel. Now, New Directions has translated the talks as Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature. Recorded in 1966 at the University of Buenos Aires, this introductory class oozes charm. Quoting from memory, because he’d already lost his sight, and relying on his own translations, Borges ranges from Caedmon’s Hymn to the Victorians. It’s been a long time since I went back to the poems of Rossetti—and longer since I had any urge to reread Beowulf—but Borges is no ordinary teacher, and his old-fashioned taste, for Germanic heroes and doomed love and G. K. Chesterton, is sincere, untroubled, and contagious. —Lorin Stein

It suddenly feels like winter here in New York: we saw the first snowflakes of the season on Tuesday morning. I don’t have a fireplace, but it’s hard to resist the urge to curl up by the heating pipe with a fat, favorite classic. Enter the new Penguin Clothbound Classics edition of Vanity Fair, beautifully rendered in pale blue, and scattered with stylized gems in honor of the ambitious Becky Thatcher. I am generally fairly indifferent to what my books look like, but I love this series, which manages to feel both modern and heirloom. As to the novel, it’s just the best; you don’t need to hear that from me. From the opening lines of Trollope’s preface, “Before the Curtain,” you know you’re in for a treat, whether reading it for the first time or the twentieth. The author subtitled Vanity Fair “A Novel without a Hero,” but though it’s peopled with some of literature’s most memorable characters, it’s true that the real star is a sweeping story that manages to be both tragic and fun. —Sadie O. Stein

On Saturday afternoon, I took the Southeast line from Grand Central Station to Mount Kisco and read a fitting book: the 116-page Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. A mélange of sharp realism and muted surrealism, this novella was first published in the 2002 summer issue of The Paris Review; it was released in book form to great acclaim in 2011. Johnson takes us from the turn of the twentieth century through the late 1960s; Robert Grainer is the stoic loner who guides us through both the Idaho Panhandle and industrialization. “Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by.” —Caitlin Youngquist

Among the many wondrous artifacts left by the late poet John Hollander is Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse , a 2001 volume of slim dimension and  great poetic wisdom that has traveled with me for the past few days. I have been thinking about poetry’s relation to music, and early on Hollander writes, “It should be remembered that all poetry was originally oral. It was sung or chanted … poetic form as we know it is an abstraction from, or residue of, musical form, from which it became divorced when writing replaced memory as a way of preserving poetic utterance.” The book does not linger in sermon though, hastily moving into witty explorations of wide-ranging forms, schemes, and meters. —Adam Winters

The eighteenth-century French court’s rococo hairstyles—if such a word can even be applied to the elaborate confections—are the stuff of legend. Will Bashor’s Marie Antoinette’s Head: The Royal Hairdresser, the Queen, and the Revolution certainly gives you plenty of bang for your buck in that regard: thirty-pound wigs, mouse-infested coiffures, and the occasional miniature naval battle all make appearances. But it is also a scholarly history not merely of the vagaries and politics of Versailles court fashion, but the rise and fall of Léonard Autié, a man of modest background who rose to become hairdresser to the queen, and whose fortunes were inexplicably tied to that of the doomed monarchy. —S.O.S.

 

The Known Unknown: On Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky on holiday in Italy in 1912.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky was born in Kiev to a Polish-speaking family on February 11, 1887. At university, he studied law. In 1912, age twenty-five, he traveled through Europe, visiting Paris, Heidelberg, and Milan—for the young Krzhizhanovsky was the pure apprentice intellectual. After the First World War, and the 1917 Russian Revolution, he returned to Kiev, where he taught at the Musical Institute and the Theatrical Conservatory. In 1922, age thirty-five, he left Kiev for Moscow, where he lived for the rest of his life. In Moscow, Krzhizhanovsky wrote articles and gave lectures, in particular at Alexander Tairov’s Drama Studio. He also worked as a consultant to Tairov’s Chamber Theater. Meanwhile, he wrote novellas and stories, which were never published—either due to economic problems (bankrupt publishers) or political problems (Soviet censors). Twenty years passed in this way until, in 1941, with Krzhizhanovsky now fifty-four, a collection of stories was finally scheduled for publication—but then the Second World War intervened, preventing even that collection from appearing. In May 1950 he suffered a stroke and lost the use of speech. He died at the end of the year. (His works—almost all of them unpublished—were stored by his lifelong companion, Anna Bovshek, in her apartment: in her clothes chest, under some brocade.)

Almost no one knew that Krzhizhanovsky was writing fiction, since the state never allowed its publication. They knew him in other guises—as a lecturer on theater, or essayist, or occasional playwright. In 1939, Krzhizhanovsky, despite his restricted publication history, was nevertheless elected to the Writers’ Union—which meant that posthumously he was eligible for the process of “immortalization.” In 1953, Stalin died, and three years later Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” to the Twentieth Party Congress instituted a revisionist anti-Stalinist thaw. In 1957—the same year as Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago—a commission was set up to examine Krzhizhanovsky’s literary legacy. It lasted two years and was then disbanded, having drafted a publishing plan that was never implemented. Then, in 1976, Vadim Perelmuter, a poet, literary historian, and essayist, discovered Krzhizhanovsky’s archive. He had to wait until 1989 and the full thaw of perestroika before he could publish one of Krzhizhanovsky’s stories. Between 2001 and 2008, Perelmuter finally edited a handsome five-volume edition of Krzhizhanovsky’s works.

Alone in the cube of his room, Krzhizhanovsky wrote stories where people invent time machines or drift onto a branch line to a republic of dreams. In other words, the fantastic is the genre in which Krzhizhanovsky worked. (In a story written in 1927, he mentions in passing his general scheme—a “projected cycle of “fantastic” stories.”) This was not, perhaps, so eccentric. Like the Soviet state, he liked to play with the nature of the real. For although his library could not contain the high-tech innovations of his contemporaries, like Borges or Platonov or Kafka, it could still contain the fictions of Poe and Pushkin and Stevenson and Gogol—these stories where noses could detach themselves from faces, or authors could run after their own characters. And if this term fantastic seems to imply a B-movie, lurid kind of aura, a downmarket mode with ghouls and ghosts, I think the reader should reconsider. Really, the fantastic was the most useful vehicle available for the most intricate philosophy…

For the anxiously prospective reader, it’s maybe useful to propose a miniature classification to the stories Krzhizhanovsky wrote. Roughly they can be divided into two modes. The first kind fit happily, like Lego, into the old fantastic tradition—like the early story “The Runaway Fingers,” where a pianist’s fingers detach themselves and make their escape. But in Krzhizhanovsky’s second mode the subject becomes more abstract: it is no longer a description of the fantastic, but a description of how the fantastic could be described at all. And his method for this investigation is to treat language very seriously and very flatly. Perhaps, for instance, you think you can distinguish between abstract nouns and proper nouns? Krzhizhanovsky democratically erases such a distinction, so that whereas in the old tradition things were personified that could not be really personified, like noses or fingers, in these extraordinary stories much smaller elements can now take on uncanny life—like “solitudes,” or literary terms … Or, in his great novella The Letter Killers Club, it is a role in a play that somehow acquires its own existence, separate both from a character and from its actor.

Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction is based on the fact that language makes things possible that are not possible in reality. If there is a word for “role” and a word for “character,” then naturally, it follows, according to this method, that the two could possess separate existences. Or, to put this maybe more precisely, he investigated whether the distinction between what is possible in language and reality is even tenable at all. And so the central mechanism of this writing is metaphor (“a three-by-four-inch slip of paper torn out of the notebook had miraculously turned into lodgings measuring one hundred square feet”)—the hinge between animate and inanimate objects, which allows figures of speech to acquire a strange kind of life.

While this attention to the act of writing could, I suppose, be defined as metafiction, Krzhizhanovsky’s real subject is not the gap between fiction and reality so much as the gaps inside the real itself. The metafiction is really metaphysical. So that it should be no surprise if a corpse, in “Autobiography of a Corpse,” reasons in this manner, arguing that space “is absurdly vast and has expanded—with its orbits, stars and yawning parabolas—to infinity. But if one tucks it inside numbers and meanings, it will easily fit on two or three bookshelves.” It is just one more example of Krzhizhanovsky’s exploration of language’s tricks.

In this way, he maps one of the strangest and yet most logical topographies in literature: “I am neither ‘here’ nor ‘there,’ but in a between—in a seam.” And it’s in the story called “Seams” where Krzhizhanovsky gives the most complete account of his new domain.

People whom Moscow has tried in its courts and banished from the city are said to have been: sentenced to “minus 1.” No one has passed sentence on me: 0—1. I am still here, in the hotchpotch and hubbub of the capital. Yet I am fully and firmly aware: I have been banished forever and irrevocably from all things, from all joys, from all truths: though I walk, look and listen beside others settled in this city, I know: they are in Moscow and I am in minus-Moscow. I am permitted only the shadows of things.

In this inverted world, everything that seemed marginal is in fact revealed as central—the crack, the seam, the dream, the reflection, the shadow:

It will do me no good, you see, no good at all to repeat after others: things cast shadows. No, in my minus-city, in my ghostly, minusy little world, only minus-truths make sense—only facts that have fallen on their heads. Therefore: shadows cast things.

It is a fiction, therefore, devoted to what is most miniature and evanescent. (A philosophy that comes with its own inverted poetics, where everything that seems peripheral to a literary work—details, titles, epigraphs, stage directions—is what Krzhizhanovsky most likes to examine.)

And so, to perform a trick of retrospective history for a moment, it’s perhaps not outlandish to notice how Krzhizhanovsky can sometimes recall the writings of Marcel Duchamp—and in particular Duchamp’s idea of the infra mince. Duchamp’s list of what he wanted to express by this idea of the infra thin—the way the smell of tobacco smoke combines with the smell of the mouth which exhales it; the sound corduroy trousers make as one walks; the distance between the front and back of a thin sheet of paper—seems strangely reminiscent of Krzhizhanovsky’s oblique obsessions, always trying to track the gaps in one’s field of vision, or one’s momentary self-reflections in other people’s pupils. His stories are explorations of infra thin edges that are usually ignored. “A thought thought either no further than ‘I,’ or no closer than the ‘cosmos.’” On reaching the “threshold of consciousness,” the line between “I” and “we,” it would stop and either turn back or take a monstrous leap into “the starry beyond”—the transcendent—“other worlds.”

Adam Thirlwell’s most recent novel is The Escape.

Excerpted from Adam Thirlwell’s introduction to The Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, a New York Review Books Classics Original that will be published December 3, 2013.

 

Full-Color Book Espresso Machines, and Other News

The first full-cover book espresso machine comes to Books-a-Million of Portland, Maine.
Bukowski in Hollywood.
Google wins its epic book-scanning battle.
Michiko Kakutani loves the phrase “deeply felt.”

 

The Price of the Ticket

Photography credit Carl Van Vechten

Back in 1985, on the morning of November 23 (a cold, wet, gray autumn Saturday) I woke up happy. At that time in my life, nothing could have been more unusual.

But I knew that before that day’s sun had set, I was going to meet James Baldwin, whose body of work (the novels and short stories, his plays and all those exquisite essays) had inspired my own burning desire to write.

Baldwin was on an interview-and-autograph tour which would be his last, crisscrossing America after the simultaneous publication of The Evidence of Things Not Seen (a book-length essay on the Atlanta child murders that were then still common knowledge) and The Price of the Ticket. On that Saturday afternoon, Mr. B. (as I privately referred to him) was scheduled to appear at a bookshop on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago. For the preceding month, each customer who made a purchase at Guild Books had received a Xeroxed postcard-sized printout of an invitation to the event. Baldwin’s appearance had also been touted in a news story printed that week in the Tribune.

I thought of how strange it must be—how truly bizarre—for a great writer who has spent thousands of hours alone in a room, grasping for words, struggling to sculpt just the right image on paper, to be confronted suddenly with hundreds of smiling, book-buying admirers; dozens of them invariably requesting special inscriptions for someone special; others craving a momentary brush with celebrity; still others bearing poems, plays or stories they’re praying to share, plus the others who want to say a few words. I belonged in the latter category. Or I told myself I did. And what I wanted to tell Mr. B., more than anything else, was something like this: Thank you—for your books, for all of your work, and for being such a formidable mentor. I knew he’d heard some variation of that a thousand times before, but I was determined to say it.

Baldwin’s appearance was set for three p.m., and when I arrived at Guild Books just after two o’clock, a crowd of some three hundred was already crammed inside. A line of people stretched out the door and snaked around the corner and down the block. It may have been the most successfully integrated aggregation ever to peacefully assemble in Chicago (food festivals and ChicagoFest notwithstanding). Blacks and whites, Hispanics and Asians, Sikhs with turbans and Jews with yarmulkes were all in line, drawn together by the power of the words.

Passersby inquired about the reason for such a gathering. When told that hundreds were ignoring the autumn chill in order to meet James Baldwin, some of them smiled. Others drew a blank: They wanted to know why he was famous.

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