The Paris Review's Blog, page 82

Diary, 2019: Berkeley/Summit Hospital, Oakland

Photograph courtesy of Joyce Carol Oates.

March 29, 2019
Berkeley/Summit Hospital (Oakland)

It is not true that for all persons the essential question is: Shall I commit suicide? But it is true for the widow.

The placating fantasy, that makes possible those countless hours of bedside vigil. The beloved husband is asleep, or, if awake, not so very aware of you as you would wish. You are forced to see, as in an ingenious torture, how, moment by moment, diminishing second by second, you are being erased from the beloved’s consciousness.

When he looks at you without looking at you. 

For the widow there is one looming question: Should you outlive your husband?

For Widows Who Have Considered Suicide When Surviving is Not Enough

“Hospice.”

Like a thread through the eye of a needle, swiftly in and swiftly out.

At once the landscape alters.

It is my hope: I will make of our hospice a honeymoon.
My vow is to make my husband as comfortable as he can be. to make him happy. to fulfill whatever wishes we can for him, that are within the range of possibility.

It is another possibility, that I might die with my husband. Or rather, short after my husband. In principle I would like to do this but in reality, surely I will not.

The yearning to die with the husband is very strong. Perhaps it is more a yearning not to outlive the husband.
Sitting beside him in his hospital bed. He has had a dosage of Dilaudid to control pain. He is partially asleep, partially awake. He speaks to me, with an air of urgency though his voice is soft. He asks me to locate a book. He asks me to order a book. On his lap is the morning’s New York Times.
Through his adult life, he has read the New York Times each morning. Thoroughly. He’d begun reading the New York Times as an undergraduate at Harvard in the fifties when he’d told himself that, after he graduated, he would reads the Times the first thing in the morning, not later, as he’d had to do as a student.
Now, he doesn’t do much more than glance at the Times. But he likes to feel the weight of the paper on his lap. He likes the proximity of the paper. It is one of the constants of his life.

Many times in Jan & Feb I encouraged him to call his doctor. Each time he would reply that he had an appointment with Dr. B         on         and that would be soon enough to see him.
No, I told him. Please, no.         is a week away. I think you are very sick right now.

he ignores me. Laughs at me. The wife is the repository of weakness, and of emotion. The wife expresses fears that are groundless. Or, perhaps it’s the case that, since the wife expresses such fears, they must be groundless.

Still I encourage him to call his doctor. He refuses. Days pass, I am anxious, hearing him breathing painfully, audibly, knowing that he is in pain.

“I may be entering my Final Days.”
Gravely, matter-of-factly he begins to speak in this way.

He begins to speak of “my final days.”

Final Days. The words strike terror into my heart. In a way I cannot believe that I am hearing such words. Matter-of-fact words. No.
Yet there is something dignified, noble about such words. “I may be entering my Final Days.”

Does he say these words in the hope that one of us will refute them?

 

PRESENT: blood drawn. (but why?) (to what purpose, bruising the already—bruised arm another time?)

“Do you know what our plans are?” we ask him.
“To do vigorous exercises then … have lunch, … ”

“a backup, swimming at the Y.  instead of doing both.”

“take me home. Where’s the car? Give me the keys to the car.”
He speaks urgently, worriedly. His manner is not apparently delusional or “delirious”—he is speaking as one might, with concern, mild anxiety, but not unreasonably.

It’s only that there is no car, there is no key, the “home” he is referring to is 3,000 miles away in Princeton.

Suddenly I am fearful that he hasn’t really agreed to a hospice. Or, if he has agreed, he has forgotten. I say: “Do you know what a ‘hospice’ is?”
“Yes of course.”
“You have agreed to a hospice, to suspend treatment at the hospital.”
“Yes.”
But does he really mean yes? He is likely to agree to anything. It is not always clear that he hears what I am asking him.

My voice is breaking. The wife’s voice breaks, it is difficult for her to comprehend these words she is speaking. As if someone else is writing these lines. Preposterous, that I am speaking.

 

Joyce Carol Oates, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, is the author of a number of novels, story collections, and books of poetry. Her most recent book is Extenuating Circumstances: Stories.

On Watery Artworks and Writing-Retreat Novels

Jim Campbell, Topographic Wave II. Photograph by April Gornik, courtesy of Sag Harbor Church.

“Empire of Water,” on view until May 30 at The Church in Sag Harbor, New York, is well worth a wander out east. The exhibition, cocurated by the Church cofounder and artist Eric Fischl and the chief curator, Sara Cochran, features watery works from forty-two artists including Warhol, Ofili, Lichtenstein, Longo, and Kiefer, and an Aitken that delights. But the cake stealer is hiding in the back corner of the first floor: Topographic Wave II, by Jim Campbell. Tucked behind a partial gallery wall are 2,400 custom-built LEDs of various lengths mounted on a roughly four-by-six-foot black panel and arranged neatly in a tight grid, like a Lite-Brite for grown-ups or a work of Pointillism by robots with OCD. From a small distance, images appear as shimmering figures swimming through Pixelvision water. Walk closer and the picture dissolves into fragmented dots blinking some unrecognizable pattern. For a short time I paced in front of it, goofily leaning in close then stepping back. Distantly, I recalled an instruction to squint when viewing Seurat, so I did that, too. 

—Joshua Liberson, advisory editor

Caren Beilin’s Revenge of the Scapegoat is a weird book, in the best possible way. The novel follows Iris, a Philadelphia-based adjunct, as she flees for the countryside after she receives a series of letters from her past, penned by her father, who blames her for a familial crisis that occurred in her teenage years. There’s a sense of gleeful rampage. “Bonkers” is probably the best way to describe Beilin’s writing, which is full of madcap, often darkly funny digressions about publishing, the art world, chronic illness, complicated family dynamics, and the traumatic legacy of the Holocaust. “A book should be like a lot of spit,” Iris declares early on. “You can get an artist to live at a concentration camp easy,” another character says later in the book, about artist residencies, “if there’s a super streamlined application process.”

—Rhian Sasseen, engagement editor 

This past week I’ve been reading Shola von Reinhold’s debut, Lote, a heady novel that explores, in multiple genres and forms—comedy of errors, writing-retreat novel, book within a book—the erasure of Black art from gallery walls, history books, and archives. The novel’s narrator, Mathilda Adamarola, is fascinated by the London-based artists and socialites of the twenties known as the Bright Young Things. She’s itinerant, in thrall to decadence, possessed of multiple names, a researcher dilettante. With a little deception and luck, she is admitted to a writing residency honoring the work of John Garreaux, a fictional theorist whose work emphasizes a kind of aesthetic rigidity and blankness our hero despises. She revolts against the residency’s conspicuous rules, but falls prey to some of its subtler machinations, and Von Reinhold’s sensual sentences unfurl like ethereal greenery as you read.

Concurrently, I’ve been reading some plays Harold Pinter wrote in the seventies that are also very British and concerned with nostalgia. The one that really had me in its teeth was No Man’s Land, which opens with a conversation between a wealthy British writer named Hirst and a much younger and less established poet named Spooner. The two have returned from the pub together, and act as if they just met. But the play’s second act embarks on a new premise: that Hirst and Spooner have known each other for years, and that their lives are deeply entwined … or maybe not so deeply. Like Lote, the text veers from intimate to alienated in an instant. Everyone talks at cross-purposes; some of what they say is nearly nonsense. The characters’ misapprehensions of one another’s language are so large that a drama of word association ensues, unbeknownst to the speakers. The humor could not be drier, as when Hirst bemoans, “I do not understand … how the most sensitive and cultivated of men can so easily change, almost overnight, into the bully, the cutpurse, the brigand. In my day nobody changed. A man was.”

—Hannah Gold
Read Hannah Gold’s interview with Will Arbery on the Daily here. 

Diary, 2022

From the afternoon of March 13 into the early hours of March 15, 2022—

Journals are more a nervous habit for me than anything else. I tend to copy out passages of whatever I’m reading, less because that passage is particularly important and more as a way of taking a photograph of a time and place and line of thought.

Starts with a quote from Jung’s The Undiscovered Self, which I was borrowing from my dear friend and (at the time) traveling companion in Mexico, Sara, a.k.a SR.

This pair of thoughts is funny to me:

// Is the point of company in partnership to escape the self or to deepen it // I think I’m disturbed by how happy I am //

Then some analysis of a few lines from Shirley Jackson’s memoir.

Much of the opposite page was written while I was awake in the bed I was sharing with SR. I didn’t want to wake her up so I was writing in the dark. I was going over a conversation we’d had at dinner about self-deception.

Also, later, still awake after a failed attempt to sleep in the hammock in the yard, but I think I had moved to the bathroom floor so I could turn on a light.

Thinking of Sean’s encroaching blindness.

My other best friend, Sean, is slowly going blind, and I was thinking of it that night for a variety of reasons. I apparently didn’t have any language for this beyond the observation that it was on my mind. It’s funny how love can sometimes energize language and sometimes numb it, but lately I’ve been centering my life around my friends and the question of how to best take care of them and be taken care of by them. This has been rewarding and has produced a happiness I apparently find, at times, disturbing.

 

Catherine Lacey is the author of four books, including, most recently, Pew. She lives in New York and Mexico.

Two in the Afternoon

Illustration by Na Kim.

Saki’s Moment

Saki once had sex with Jin the Actor, and she couldn’t be any prouder. She hasn’t told anybody yet, so maybe pride isn’t the right word for it. Still, wherever she is, whenever she starts thinking about that intimate moment and everything it means, she slips into ecstasy. She’s in ecstasy when she thinks about how it’s going to feel to share her moment, when she thinks about the day the rest of the world will finally know what happened—when her moment will become a full-fledged point of pride. She imagines standing in front of all the women burning for Jin, the women who fantasize about him. She clears her throat and comes out with it as if delivering the best news they’ve ever heard: I had sex with Jin, Jin the Actor. In bed, in the middle of the afternoon, fair and square.

On Saki’s side table is a magazine with Jin’s face on the cover. Last weekend, at the drugstore, there were some young women—younger than Saki—who picked up that magazine and sighed audibly at Jin’s image. “Hey, maybe you don’t know this,” she imagines saying, “but I’ve slept with him.” Saki pictures herself smiling, resting a hand on one of their shoulders as she sets the record straight. But why bother? If you really think about it (or even if you don’t) these random girls don’t have what it takes to process what I’m saying. They don’t deserve my moment. Drugstore girls caught up in fantasy could never in a million years comprehend why the only man who could make all their boredom and talentlessness and emptiness go away would sleep with some other woman and not them. There’s no way they could accept that a woman who’s actually been with Jin were standing right in front of them in some drugstore, of all the places in the world, because it had always been distance that made them jealous, that made things unbearable. The confusion swirling in their throats would soon turn to hate, and they’d direct those feelings at me, even though they’ve got nothing to do with me or my moment—so why should I go out of my way to let them in?

Saki’s in ecstasy. Who really deserves her moment? Lying in a bed warmed in places by the afternoon heat of her own body, she shuts her eyes and sinks deeper into her moment. That moment. The firm bulge of his bicep against her cheek. That moment. The smell of his armpit. That moment. The soft curls of dark brown hair on the back of his neck. That moment. The heft of his penis as he slept. But for some reason, Jin’s face—that wonderful face, the thing that makes Jin Jin—escapes her. Saki grabs the magazine from her side table and studies the cover. Right, that’s right. She lets out a sigh of relief. The moment continues to warm her as it radiates outward toward its intended targets. It enters them and starts to move, bringing them even more pleasure. Yes, it reaches those women, the women who have had sex with Jin. Saki imagines them coming together in a beautiful ring, with Jin’s penis taking the middle. The women stroke each other’s hair and kiss, they put their arms around each other’s hips and use their fingers. They moan as they look after Jin’s penis in the right way. Again and again, they bring their triumphant moments and watch them grow; they make each other wet with their tireless enthusiasm and the circle expands little by little. Saki’s ecstasy gains speed as she thinks about the women drowning in a swamp of their own hatred, the women who could never enter the circle. Yes, this is what she’ll do with her moment. And when she’s done, it’ll be out in the open for all to see. She’ll make sure that the rest of the world properly documents her moment. Then she’ll do it again. She’ll stand in front of the others, the women who think that burning for Jin can keep their hard, shriveled, useless desires alive. She’ll hold one hand high and clear her throat, then smile as she expresses her thanks. In bed, in the middle of the afternoon, all alone.

 

Who’s Eating Emma’s Grapes?

Emma had never gone grape picking. Even in her dreams, she thought it was odd to dream about picking grapes. Picking grapes? This wasn’t the first time, either. For whatever reason, she had this dream all the time. At some point, Emma always found herself in the dream. Was there some sort of pattern to it? Maybe, Emma thought, maybe not. She couldn’t be sure.

You can’t pick grapes without grapevines. So, whenever Emma had the dream, she was in the fields, where the trees were planted neatly in rows. Their leaves formed a thick canopy under which the grapes were hanging down in bunches. Sometimes, when Emma looked up from a certain angle, she could see patches of sky through the web of leaves. The clumps of grapes changed color, from light green to blue or purple. Lovingly, the overlapping leaves looked after their charges. Emma had a hard time finding the words to express what the leaves had given her and how. It was much more than shelter. More like home. On summer afternoons when the merciless sun burned brightest, the leaves shaded her; on winter nights when the wind and rain hit hardest, the leaves shielded her.

After a couple of years, the flower parts dropped from Emma’s head. Then, one year, when the smell of autumn filled the fields, Emma’s body began to change, just like the others. In time she became a cluster, full of color. Emma didn’t know how many grapes she was or how big. She didn’t know what color she was or how sweet. But she saw other grapes dangling nearby and figured she probably looked something like them. Then, one day, the men showed up. In the distance, Emma could see their wives and children and babies. She saw old women, too. The men approached with tiny clippers in their hands, baskets on their shoulders and at their hips. The men pushed back the leaves and went right for the berries. Thick fingers held the grapes as they were snipped free and tossed into the baskets until there was no room left. The men hadn’t noticed Emma behind the leaves, but the other grapes were all taken away. Years of intertwining vines were ruthlessly undone in a matter of moments. The land was utterly spoiled and autumn’s abundance was gone. Emma was alone. Then a boy came. He looked up at her. Emma’s grapes were just out of his reach, but he stood on his toes and grabbed the lowest of her fruits. He tore the grape loose and popped it into his mouth. He peeled off the skin with his tongue, then spit it out onto the ground. He did it again, over and over, picking berries from Emma’s bunch until she was reduced to a single grape. Even on his tiptoes, the boy couldn’t reach the last one. In frustration, he leapt up with everything he had and managed to land holding Emma’s final grape. She was crushed in the boy’s hand. Juice dripped between his fingers, down his wrist. Men and women in the distance called to the boy. There was nothing left of Emma now but a flimsy stem, which the boy flicked into the dirt at his feet. He wiped Emma’s indigo stain on the back of his pants and ran off. The days went by and Emma dried up. She could feel herself becoming indistinguishable from the earth—when she woke up on the couch. It was two in the afternoon. She rubbed her eyes and turned over. She had no memory of having been a grape, but the vineyards still echoed quietly within her. I’ve never even gone grape picking, she told herself, back at the edge of sleep. The gentle shadow of a single leaf fell over her trembling eyelids. Emma was back at the beginning of the dream.

 

Translated by David Boyd.

Mieko Kawakami is the author of Breasts and Eggs. Her novel Heaven is on the short list for the 2022 International Booker Prize, and her most recently translated novel is All the Lovers in the Night. She lives in Tokyo. This week, she headlines two events in the 2022 PEN World Voices Festival in New York: “Writing in the Country of Women,” with Leïla Slimani, and “World Voices: An Evening of International Poetry.” For more information about the festival, please visit worldvoices.pen.org.David Boyd is an assistant professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. With Sam Bett, he is cotranslating the novels of Mieko Kawakami. 

Flight Paths

Francisco Anzola, Old Cairo Skyline, licensed under CC0 1.0.

1.

2010

The word for invoice is the same in Arabic and Italian: fattura. We learned this, my mother and I, on the outskirts of a cemetery in Naples, as we tried to navigate the final arrangements for the transfer of my father’s body. It was a beautiful day, sunny, the sky Riviera-blue, and somewhere in the periphery of my vision, focused on this undertaker in his ill-fitting suit, there was a family mourning their own newly dead. They were of this place. We were not. Helplessly, my mother struggled to make the man from the funeral home understand what she was asking for, until finally, exasperated, she blurted out the word in Arabic, and the man nodded. By chance, our languages overlapped; we were understood. The man disappeared into a nearby office and, a couple of minutes later, returned with the bill of sale. In a few days we would need to show this document to a military inspector at the Cairo airport, when we returned to bury my father in the city of his birth. For the last twenty-eight years of his life he had been a migrant and now, in death, he would go home.

I come from a long line of malfunctioning hearts. My grandfather died just before my father was born. My father made it to fifty-six before he died suddenly of a heart attack while on a cruise with my mother and her siblings off the coast of Italy. In the days that followed, as we trudged slowly through the bureaucratic mire trying to give him the burial he wanted, I found myself slipping in and out of communion with all the lives we could have lived, all those small coin-flip moments that make up an unanchored life.

 

2.

1986

In much of the Arab world, it is customary for a boy to take for his middle name the first name of his father. My middle name is Mohamed. My father’s middle name is Ahmed. It goes like this, as far back as there exists an accurate record.

In addition to being my father’s name, Mohamed Ahmed is one of the most common combinations of first and middle names in the world, and it just so happens that there’s someone on Egypt’s terrorism watch list with the same name. We found this out one morning at the Cairo airport as we awaited a flight to Libya.

Having grown sick of being poor, being hassled by the ubiquitous cops and soldiers that prowled Cairo in the years after the president’s assassination, my father did what so many Egyptians of his generation did, and tried to find work in another country. An accountant by training, he eventually got a job offer working in Tripoli, which he accepted. I was four at the time. We packed our bags, we readied to leave.

Not long after we got to the airport, my parents and I were escorted into the secondary screening area, where we waited for hours until finally the men detaining us became certain my father couldn’t be the man they were looking for. By then, our flight had already departed. The job offer in Libya was revoked; my father missed his chance to get out, only to be offered, a short while later, employment as a junior accountant in a hotel in Qatar. He knew almost nothing about the tiny peninsular state that juts out the eastern edge of Saudi Arabia, but he accepted, because what mattered was to leave. A short while later my mother and I followed him to a country that, over the next couple of decades, would become perhaps the richest nation on earth, flush with more oil and gas money than it could possibly use.

This is where I ended up spending my formative years—the Arabic accent scrubbed clean off my tongue by years of British and American schooling—instead of Libya. Nothing I have ever done, nothing I’ve achieved or struggled for or chased after, has had a more significant impact on the trajectory of my life than a random case of mistaken identity at the Cairo airport a few months before my fifth birthday.

 

3.

1994

It was a long form full of questions, but the only one I remember was about Nazis. It asked whether my parents or I had ever supported the Third Reich between the years of 1939 and 1945, or something to that effect. We had been vacationing in Florida for the summer and we wanted to extend our stay, which meant re-applying for a visa, which meant filling out one of these forms, an interrogatory listing of all the worst ventures in which a person could possibly engage—human trafficking, terrorism, genocide. Dutifully, we checked off No, No, No, always on the lookout for trick questions—“Have you ever not engaged in terrorism?”—always aware that we were the only party in this interaction for whom things could go wrong.

Westerners don’t tend to think this way, but in the part of the world I’m from, we talk about passports in terms of their power—a metric related to the number of countries any particular citizenship allows you to visit without a visa. The Japanese passport is probably the most powerful in the world; its holders can visit more than 190 nations without having to affirm they’ve never aided the Nazis. My old high school friends Naseem and Rami, who for a while had no formal statehood and were forced to rely on Palestinian Authority travel documentation, held one of the least powerful. Every border became a carnival of indignity.

To navigate the world this way, roughshod on the back of a weak passport, is to become malleable. One must contort themselves into the shape of the admissible. It’s a subtle, delicate art. The smallest hints of an accent, the slightest stuttered syllable or twitch of the eye in response to a question about the purpose of a visit might cause things to topple.

For years, when I worked full-time as a journalist but before I was granted American citizenship, I entered the United States wielding some of the most bizarre explanations any TSA agent had ever heard—on my way to Andrews Air Force Base to hop a flight to the Guantanamo Bay detention camps, or the time I went to war correspondent training in Virginia before heading off to Afghanistan. But the only time I was taken into secondary and interrogated was when I arrived in JFK and told them I was there to see my cousin. It turns out a lot of terrorists claim they’re here to visit cousins.

 

4.

1998

To live in Qatar as an expat—the word we use when a migrant is too well-off to be called a migrant—one must secure Kafala, a sponsorship of sorts, issued by a local citizen or company. In order to protect the country’s oil and gas wealth, the Qatari government makes it almost impossible for any foreigner to secure citizenship. Most people who live in Qatar are foreigners, and so are subject to this kind of precarious existence, the possibility of overnight deportation always present. Everyone knows the deal: you come here, you make some money, but you’re a guest, always. There’s no being of the place, only passing through it.

One year, after more than a decade of living in this place, it became clear our time in Qatar was coming to an end. On the last day of August, we boarded a plane to Canada.

I knew nothing about Canada. My first week in Montreal, I got on a bus and try to jam a twenty-dollar bill through the coin slot, expecting change. I had no idea how the bus system worked; there was no such thing as public transit in Qatar. I was sixteen and the prospect of starting from scratch—of acclimating to the way the air turns to needles in the lungs when it’s forty below zero—was unbearable. The world was an onslaught of beginnings.

 

5.

2001

For a long time my father couldn’t find work in Montreal. His French wasn’t good enough, his credentials insufficient. As we burned through our savings, he expanded his job search outward until he got an offer to work as an accountant in a hotel in Wisconsin, a state none of us could point out on a map. But it paid well enough and there was nothing else going, and so he accepted. There was some paperwork that needed to be completed, a work permit that, his prospective employer assured him, should be fairly straightforward, all wrapped up by the second week of September at the latest. Then the second week of September arrived.

The work permit process stalled; everyone knew why. Eventually, the hotel had no choice but to stop waiting and hire someone else. We never moved to Wisconsin. I imagine another iteration of my family moving into that strange, ghostly neighborhood of would-have-beens, alongside the us that lived our lives out in Tripoli and the us that remained in Cairo. All these aborted trajectories, all these vessels that never left shore.

 

6.

2010

On a Sunday in August my friend Anna tried to find an Italian translator in Toronto. In order to take my father’s body back to his home we needed to appease the bureaucratic whims of the Egyptian, Canadian, and Italian governments and this required, among many other pieces of paperwork, a certified translation of my father’s Italian death certificate. In Islamic tradition, the dead should be buried within twenty-four hours, but we spend days wrangling all the necessary permissions before we finally travel back to Cairo, our first flight together since the day we came to Canada twelve years earlier.

In Egypt, any arriving body falls under the purview of the military. We landed around three in the morning and my cousin and I accompanied the coffin to a nearly deserted corner of the airport, where a single administrator sat at a desk, bored and irritable.

She checked the paperwork, the documentation from the funeral home in Naples and the translator in Toronto and the Egyptian embassy in Rome. It turns out we had missed a form, without which we were technically engaged in a crime. It was illegal to have transported my father’s body this way, and it was too late to do anything about it.

We stood there for what felt like a long time. Finally, my cousin said, “We just want to give him a Muslim burial.”

She stamped the forms. She let us through.

At the mosque in El Hussein, they lined the coffin next to a half-dozen others, all there to receive the same final prayer from the congregation, and some of the men entering the grand hall mentioned what a privilege it was to have died in these last days of Ramadan, the most blessed month. They seemed genuinely jealous.

We prayed, then we took the body to the place where my grandfather and my aunts were buried. Cairo’s city of the dead housed the living, too, and one of its residents pointed us to the El Akkad mausoleum as though pointing out a neighbor. We carried the shrouded body underground, past the bones of ancestors, past the past. Home.

For years, whenever I thought back to that day, I thought of it as my father’s final migration. But it wasn’t a migration. It was something far more merciful: an ending. It is the most lightening thing, to be done starting over.

 

Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. His fiction and non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ and many other newspapers and magazines. He is the author of the novels American War, and What Strange Paradise.

Omar El Akkad headlines the 2022 PEN World Voices Festival event “In the Same Boat: Narratives of Borders and Migration,” Friday, May 13, 8:30pm, at Judson Memorial Church in New York City. For more information about the festival, please visit worldvoices.pen.org.

Tricks, Tension, Surface, Suspense

Topkapi (1964) by Jules Dassin.

Paris, 1954. Jules Dassin—blacklisted in Hollywood for his Communist affiliations—hadn’t worked on a film set in four years. He wandered the mist-shrouded city streets scouting locations for a film based on a crime novel titled Rififi. He hated the book, in part for its racism, but needed the job. The adaptation was to be shot on a $200,000 budget with an underpaid crew and no star power; in fact, Dassin himself would decide to play a central role. Dassin’s character, César, is eventually killed by Tony—a member of his own band of thieves—for naming names, in an allegorical comeuppance fantasy aimed at Dassin’s enemies in the entertainment industry: those former colleagues who, in his words, “put their careers before honor” by ratting out Communists. Tony is a recently released jewel thief who, as another figuration of the effects of Dassin’s blacklisting, looks unkempt, ill, and nearly unable to breathe until he’s recruited by his friend Jo to rob a highly secure jewelry shop. This seemingly impossible task is taken on by a multilingual team assembled from Paris’s criminal demimonde, self-consciously staging the international crew’s own predicament in making the film.

Rififi is most famous for its nearly silent half-hour heist sequence, a triumph of restrained suspense that not only influenced countless techno-thrillers to follow, but also served as a practical how-to that was copied by actual criminals internationally; the film was temporarily banned in Paris, Finland, and Mexico. The crime is carefully planned and rehearsed in detail, grounding the scheme within our physical universe, and the heist that follows unfolds procedurally. The thieves pervert the functions of everyday objects around them through extraordinary yet naturalistic methods: they access the jewelry store by boring through its ceiling, then slide an upturned umbrella through this pilot hole to keep debris from setting off the highly sensitive security alarm below—which, once downstairs, they immobilize with fire extinguisher foam. 

Rififi (1955) by Jules Dassin.

But Rififi also has a more classically dramatic narrative appeal; its elaborate, snaking plot and tragic arc earned it widespread acclaim upon its release. While the heist sequence is the centerpiece, the emotional climax comes when tough-guy gangster ethics are pushed to their limits through the criminals’ intimate relationships. Those heart-wrenching plot points include: Tony reuniting with his girlfriend (provoking the ire of a gang boss), the discovery of a stolen ring (that César had given to his lover), and Jo’s child being held ransom by the gang in exchange for the jewels. These intertwined human dynamics all have fatal consequences, situating the film, which Dassin insisted on shooting only on rainy days, in the legacy of post-neorealist film noir. 

Ten years later, though still living in Europe, Dassin, who by then had found renewed success among American audiences, was tapped by Filmways to direct a film—to be called Topkapi—based ​​on Eric Ambler’s jewel heist novel The Light of Day. This film, his first caper since he set the bar for the genre with Rififi, would be received with far less critical acclaim. While it’s true that Topkapi is no Rififi, it was never intended to be; in fact, much of Topkapi’s charm comes via Dassin’s cheeky, self-parodic inversions of the earlier film’s brutality. 

Around the same time, Italian fringe filmmaker Mario Bava, who specialized in low-budget horror movies, was approached by the producer Dino De Laurentiis (backed by Paramount) to make another heist adaptation, this one of the Italian comic Diabolik. Like Topkapi, Bava’s Danger: Diabolik, despite its predestination as a commercial caper of extravagant superficiality, is a masterpiece of Romantic irony—a kind of self-reflexivity or self-consciousness of the work’s fictions made manifest. It alludes, repeatedly, to the systems of artifice that produce its world.

Left: Topkapi (1964) by Jules Dassin. The introductory title sequence unfurls with a prismatic display of colors, as though our vision is situated within a jewel. Right: Danger: Diabolik (1968) by Mario Bava. Following Diabolik’s smoke-shrouded opening heist, the image begins to rotate rapidly, dissolving into spinning gem-like abstraction for the introductory credit sequence. 

In both films, emeralds motivate skin-deep characters, emotionally flattened caricatures of sixties excess. It’s clear they don’t need the gems, like so many of the thieves in noir films of the previous decade, so no “fence” is required to convert the fetish objects into capital. They aren’t down-on-their-luck crooks, so viewers aren’t positioned as political subjects, called upon to identify with the existential stakes of have-nots. The female protagonist of each film already has a lot, but wants more. The moment she lays eyes on the precious gemstones, she can’t seem to live without them. Neither woman’s gaze looks beyond the surfaces of the gems for their inherent value, as liquid assets geared towards circulation; they’re simply objects of desire to be acquired, cherished, fondled, and displayed.

Left: Diabolik sets the emeralds on Eva Kant’s bare skin. Right: Walter Harper grips Elizabeth Lipp’s flawless replica of the Topkapi Dagger.

In Topkapi’s fanciful introductory vignette, Elizabeth Lipp—a self-identifying thief—cases Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace and directly addresses us over a saccharine orchestral score, illuminating her boundless desire to possess the Topkapi Dagger, a diamond-encrusted relic embellished by “the four greatest emeralds the world has ever known.” Bathed in red light and already wearing the second of fourteen mod getups she’ll don throughout the film, she places her fingers, gloved in white leather, on the glass vitrine and savors the sight of the sparkling dagger with wide, dewy eyes. She breathes heavily and then starts to choke up, remarking, in a thick Greek accent: “Forgive me. A strange thing happens to me … difficult to explain.” 

Throughout both films, faced with the splendor of the surfaces presented to them, the viewer experiences a similar form of hypnosis. Here, the gritty neorealism that Dassin and Bava had favored during the forties and fifties gives way to Technicolor pizazz. Both filmmakers set out to stimulate desire in the viewer for the vibrant, shimmering emeralds. The bewildering forms of suspense they compose by illustrating the lengths to which thieves will go to obtain them are embellished by the artistry—of the filmmaker, and the criminals—exhibited in doing so. Neither Topkapi nor Diabolik strives towards verisimilitude or depicting the plight of the poor. Rather than inciting or reflecting political discourse, they revel in the display of their craft.

Walter slides the Topkapi dagger through his watchband and zip-lines off the roof of the palace.

Both set up technologically secure spaces—an embellished Ottoman palace in Topkapi, a fictional fortified castle in Diabolik—to be permeated by technologically aided criminal collaborators via farcically complex procedures. They’re ridiculous films. But when they’re at their best, constructing enigmatic networks of angles, action, bodies, architecture, and tools, with their plausibility hanging by a thread (or suction cup), they transcend their mechanics.

Left: Danger: Diabolik. Right: Topkapi.

The classical suspense deployed in Rififi is morally conventional in structure, in that it fosters audience allegiance with the sources of human morals: the love, for example, between parent and child or even symbiotic partners in crime. By deploying these relationships to dramatic effect, Rififi’s criminals maintain their humanity despite existing outside the social (or legal) moral order. Ultimately, they pay for their crimes with their own lives. In Danger: Diabolik and Topkapi, however, moral development and character psychology are largely avoided. In neglecting both subjective suspense—since the audience isn’t offered consistent identification with a particular character’s point of view—and objective suspense—in which the audience knows more information than characters in the story do—the focus shifts to the details of the protagonists’ physical struggles within complex technological systems. The audience becomes distracted from a larger moral framework and the consequences of the criminals’ actions. These flattened characters become components of extraordinary systems of action—and, as human actors, of representation—allowing kinetic suspense and material pleasures to flourish. This technique is neither moral or immoral; it is the amoral modus operandi of the aesthete. Its depths lie in the visual and aural surface of the work. 

***

After Topkapi’s opening sequence, she recruits her ex—and now possibly current? (both films waste little time on the niceties of character development)—lover, Walter Hill, to plan a theft of the dagger. She finds him “up to his old tricks,” in the midst of a theft. As he stops to tie his shoe, he uses the car door handle as a pistol holster. This sets the stage for a world ripe with the visual and physical potential of objects. 

The Mission is not as Impossible as it could be given that, during the heist, sweating onto Topkapi Palace’s weight-sensitive floor alarm doesn’t seem to be a concern, although, here, with a mockup of the floor, it is demonstrated that even a ping pong ball would set it off. It’s a slapstick rendition of musique concrète through a sight gag; each time the ball hits the floor, a blast of circus music plays. The mute acrobat Giulio, it follows, will have to break into Topkapi Palace without touching the floor.

Unlike in Rififi, which features a laborious heist rehearsal scene that carefully instructs the audience as to its own mechanics, elements of Walter’s plan are cryptically unveiled across a tangle of comedic episodes that aestheticize the tools of the trade. At some point before embarking on the mission (time is also mostly abstract), said tools are displayed on a table like the scattered puzzle pieces of an unknown image that will fit together in the heist scene that follows. As will the accomplices themselves: small-time hustler Arthur’s greasy rope will be tugged by Walter’s elegantly gloved hands as it suspends Giulio by his snug leather utility vest. Later, when the objects’ technical functions are precisely detailed within the larger system, the attention granted to each part registers as excessively fetishistic. 

Giulio is lowered out of a drain on the roof of Topkapi Palace, with Arthur attached to the other end of one of the ropes. He cuts open the window grate and swings in, with the drain serving as a smooth guide for the ropes.

Topkapi, like Rififi, contains a half-hour heist sequence that uses silence for dramatic effect. While Rififi details a more plausible procedure in service of a moral framework, Topkapi offers a breathtaking display of “suspense” and “tension” manifesting literally on screen, as a system of ropes, mechanisms, and bodies lower Giulio into Topkapi palace. As with Elizabeth’s unmediated desire for emeralds, in which an emerald is just an emerald as opposed to an asset, suspense is often just suspense in Topkapi.

The intertwined objects of the heist are connected through amplifying insert shots, becoming actors in collusion with the thieves as they execute Walter’s boldly choreographed scheme, in which neither party ever sees more than half of the total system. Suspension of disbelief is achieved by the fragmentation of the viewer’s attention, as they attempt to track the algorithmic operation of an enigmatic plan that is both too textured to register as procedural and too complex to be grasped. Giulio glistens with sweat as he moistens tiny suction cups with his tongue, while the stained-glass window through which he enters casts a blurred reproduction of its colorful forms onto the palace’s interior. The scene is a masterful composition of surface, causality, covert mental modeling, and just having a feel for it—both within the fiction and externally, in the filmmaking.

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Giulio (1) moistens a tiny suction cup and (2) uses it to prop open a stained-glass window, then (3) does the same for a suction-mounted device, which serves as an interior guide for the rope attached to the large glass display case that encloses the Topkapi Dagger. To indicate to Arthur that he’s ready to descend (4), he kicks the rope to send vibrations upward. Once lowered, he (5) uses the key that Walter fabricated to unlock the display case and then (6) attaches a suction clamp for it to be raised. Walter then (7) marks the rope to keep track of the position of the out-of-sight display case. With Giulio’s guidance, he (8) lifts the display case. Giulio then (9) replaces the authentic Topkapi dagger with the replica fabricated by Elizabeth, and (10) guides the display case back into position.

***

In a masterful transition, Diabolik uses a literal smokescreen to disorient police officers—disguised as high society individuals in a Rolls Royce—while transporting $10 million in cash from a bank.

In a film flush with countercultural posturing and anti-establishment sentiments (sex symbols dunking on cops, exploding tax offices, distorted guitar riffs) Danger: Diabolik (1968) is more commonly understood as a work of cinéma d’évasion—escapist cinema—that diverts viewers from social reality and moral questioning toward what is perhaps adequately suggested by the litany deployed in the film’s promotional campaigns: “police, sex, millions of dollars, supercars, diamonds, submarines, rivers of gold … drugs … white jaguar, black jaguar, Eva, Eva, Eva …”

Following the introductory sequence, Diabolik and Eva Kant watch a news bulletin on the luminous entertainment tower that rises out of the middle of their rotating bed. Suddenly, the famous Aksand emerald necklace, resting on voluptuous red velvet, appears on screen. “Those emeralds …” Eva, mouth agog, whispers sensuously, her moist eyes drifting suggestively towards Diabolik.

While Diabolik and Eva, partners in coitus and crime, destabilize political and economic power by bombing their unidentified European country’s tax offices and pulling three heists ($10 million, a world-renowned emerald necklace, and a twenty-ton bar of gold), their ends indicate a perversely carnal materialism. Distinct from the circulatory drive of anarcho-capitalists, their pleasure lies in acquiring, owning, and displaying their booty—including each other’s bodies—through literal physical contact with material excess. A product of commercial filmmaking, Danger: Diabolik is also a deceptive lesson in object acquisition: a hallucinatory model for luxury, a fraudulent diagram for bedroom arrangement, an impossible fashion spread.

Following the opening heist, Eva and Diabolik make love in their rotating circular bed amidst $10 million in cash.

Like Topkapi, the film glosses over narrative drive and characterization in favor of audio-visual design, to the point that its loose episodic structure unfolds like three issues of the comic it was adapted from—Diabolik—stapled together. While, in the words of director Mario Bava, “all cinema is made for infantile brains,” this comic book movie still manages to wink knowingly (and often literally) at the audience as it presents visionary clusters of practical effects. If, in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), the spiral motif unites camera movements, architecture, costumes, and special effects, in Diabolik, a more abstract logic of the trick unites style and content. Trick photography, trick lighting, trick attire, a hidden lair, ghost-ridden vehicles, trapdoors, and so on, are all presented so quickly so as to constantly deceive and surprise the viewer. 

Through matte painting, models, foreground miniatures, and forced perspective, a disorienting cinematic artifice is constructed. Their lair, for example, appears to be integrated into a grotto in a kind of virtual set design that is functionally analogous to more recent VFX technology. In both, the trick lies in masking the points at which the physical set gives way to the simulated depth, as in the illusionistic ceiling paintings of the Baroque era.

Diabolik and Eva Kant’s lair.

Screens, cameras, and mediatic representations of the object of desire abound. In fact, the trick-heist itself hinges on creating confusion between representation and reality. First, Lady Clark leaves her emerald necklace on the table, in full view of a security camera. Once she and Sir Harold Clark have retired to bed, Diabolik takes a photograph of the room from the perspective of the security camera, which is embedded in a portrait painting. He then uses a candle to mount the photograph in front of the surveillance camera. By the time security notices, Diabolik has made off with the emerald necklace.

At the conclusion of the film, in an ejaculatory spectacle of luxury, Diabolik melts the twenty-ton gold ingot he and Eva stole, spraying the liquid gold into smaller molds. But suddenly, the police infiltrate. Amidst a blaze of gunfire, Diabolik loses control, flooding the grotto with gold and encrusting his heat proof suit, leaving the police and Eva to believe that he is dead. Wealth for Eva and Diabolik remains tangible, a material adornment for their earthly bodies. This finale offers a kind of final moral position on Eva and Diabolik’s pathological form of materialism: unbound from value, their greed, as in the case of King Midas, leads to their corporeal undoing. 

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… Or, at least, it seems to. For this is soon revealed to be a trick ending: a beat before the credits roll, Diabolik winks and belts out his trademark laugh. There is seemingly no end to his exploits, and therefore no narrative—or moral—stakes.

***

Toward the beginning of Diabolik, in the first of many failed attempts by the powers-that-be to put an end to the lovers’ antics, the Minister of the Interior holds a press conference. He has reinstated the death penalty to dissuade criminals like Diabolik and Eva. But the couple disrupt the legitimacy of the conference by releasing “exhilarating gas” into the crowd, before taking “anti-exhilarating gas capsules” while the rest of the room erupts into laughter.

The structure of this trick unfolds with the kind of irony with which both Bava and Dassin approach their respective films. While they aim to elicit laughter from their audiences, the directors themselves are above the laughter. They make sure we’re aware that they’re aware of the films’ absurd pretenses and arbitrary worlds, deploying a protective self-mockery and puckish attitude towards the conventions of the heist genre.

Throughout Diabolik and Topkapi, characters compulsively reference the fact that they are performing roles: Diabolik winks at the camera and cycles through over ten costumes, Elizabeth Lipp addresses the audience and changes outfits thirteen times. While these distancing effects prevent emotional investment in the characters, they also make manifest the authorial presence and control of the director. Walter/Elizabeth and Eva/Diabolik are always a step ahead of not only their opponents but also the audience; like Bava and Dassin themselves, they know more about the work than anyone involved. In both films, the internal artfulness of the heist is intensified by the external artfulness of the filmmaking.

This artifice is linked to the pervasive presence of perversity, of those anarchic energies that are concealed beneath the often repressive veneer of human civilization and civility. The fictiveness of these story-worlds and the pandemonium they allow for—embodied and wholly motivated by the gem-crazy protagonists—give vitality to heists that rely on the vulnerabilities of institutional power and the unreliability of appearances: in Topkapi, the theft hinges on Elizabeth’s counterfeit dagger; in Diabolik, a misleading, set-dressed photograph is placed in front of the security camera.

If the post-neorealist Rififi seems to point through the veil of the screen to some other reality—blacklisted director’s biography, or the plight of the socially marginalized—Diabolik and Topkapi nestle into their representations. They affirm the play of appearances, albeit ironically, as their only reality. This strategy, rather than accepting the assumption of two levels—a representation and a reality independent of it—undermines our ability to make the distinction in the first place. Not, however, in order to lead us further astray from so-called reality itself, but rather to remind us that we are always involved with mediation.

Diabolik and Topkapi presented their directors with larger budgets than they had ever worked with. They made copious use of those funds, in constructed environments on studio sound stages, along with expressive lighting, extravagant wardrobes, and practical effects. The directors both self-consciously grappled with these systems of artifice beyond the frame by amplifying their effects within.

Each film seems to acknowledge that the production of narrative cinema entails ridiculous arrangements of collective behavior, through which casts and crews are subjected to an onslaught of gratuitous decisions—all in pursuit of a fantasy. At these stages in their careers, Bava and Dassin must have known the fantasy never turns out quite like one imagines: both films are imperfect gems. But, by then fully entrenched within their respective studio systems, they also probably assumed (correctly) that they would continue working. The thieves don’t end up paying for their crimes with their own lives; in fact, the protagonists are left at the outset of their next scheme. The films, therefore, don’t simulate the viewer’s social reality, they refer only to their own preposterous world-making: deceitful, obsessive, dopamine-induced, manic, technologically dependent, emotionally detached, perverse, shimmering, enchanted.

 

Andrew Norman Wilson is an artist based between Europe and North America. His work has screened at Sundance, New York, and Rotterdam, and sits in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Centre Pompidou. Though principled, he leads a fraudulent life and his heists are many. He sees the return policies offered by Bezos and the Waltons as loan agreements; he lends them $1500, and the interest they pay is his use of a new editing hard drive. While TurboTaxing he hallucinates a DJ software skin, transforming the expense estimate sliders into Fraud Modulator functions. Occasionally he takes meetings with horny, neglectful dads to become a contract conspirator in the various wealth management schemes that constitute the art market. Otherwise he accepts unpaid exhibition offers from salaried curators and gallerists in far-flung cities and tacks on lecture stops at €150 a pop, spending as much time as possible as a guest in circulation, on sofas, so as to avoid paying rent anywhere. For ten years, he has been on Medicaid and food stamps. He is also an aspiring film director, and, following the production of a proof of concept short in 2021, his feature-length heist film Impersonator is currently in development. 

Redux: Even a Fact Is Not a Fact

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.

Ned Rorem. Photograph from the Paris Review archives.

Other people’s diaries, observes our web editor, Sophie Haigney, offer “distinct and potent pleasures, the rare, delightful, occasionally shocking intimacies of reading someone else’s private thoughts.” She’s describing “Diary, 1988,” an excerpt from Annie Ernaux’s journals that appears in our Spring issue, but the same can be said for Ned Rorem’s Art of the Diary interview, Jane Bowles’s short story “Emmy Moore’s Journal,” pages—colorful in more senses than one—from Duncan Hannah’s high-school diaries, and Charles Wright’s cycle of poems, “Five Journals.” And few other forms can be so sharp, so economical in conveying the texture of life lived in times of atrocity, as shown by Liao Yiwu’s account of the Tiananmen Square massacre, “Nineteen Days.”

For more diaries, follow our new series featuring contributions from writers and artists: last week, Elisa Gonzalez shared pages from 2018 and Adam Levin looked back on a period of self-interrogation. And if you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and art portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

INTERVIEW
The Art of the Diary No. 1
Ned Rorem

INTERVIEWER

Auden defined the narcissist as the hunchback who gazes at his image in the water and says, On me it looks good. When I asked you about the diarist’s narcissism, I didn’t just mean the recurrence of I, but the self-absorption—whatever happens to the self is deemed of interest to others.

ROREM

Well, yes. Auden was right even when he was wrong. Cocteau said, “Je suis le mensonge qui dit la vérité.” All art is a lie, insofar as truth is defined by the Supreme Court. After all, Picasso’s goat isn’t a goat. Is the artist a liar, or simply one for whom even a fact is not a fact? There is no truth, not even an overall Truth.

From issue no. 150 (Spring 1999)

 

Courtesy of Duncan Hannah.

PROSE
Emmy Moore’s Journal
Jane Bowles

May

On certain days I forget why I’m here. Today once again wrote my husband all my reasons for coming. He encouraged me to come each time I was in doubt. He said that the worst danger for me was a state of vagueness, so I wrote telling him why I had come to the Hotel Henry—my eighth letter on this subject—but with each new letter I strengthen my position. I am reproducing the letter here. Let there be no mistake. My journal is intended for publication. I want to publish for glory, but also in order to aid other women.

From issue no. 56 (Spring 1973)

 

Courtesy of Duncan Hannah.

POETRY
Five Journals
Charles Wright

Inaudible consonant inaudible vowel
The word continues to fall
in splendor around us
Window half shadow window half moon
back yard like a book of snow
That holds nothing and that nothing holds
Immaculate text
not too prescient not too true

From issue no. 104 (Fall 1987)

 

Courtesy of Duncan Hannah.

PROSE
Nineteen Days
Liao Yiwu

June 4, 1989

A massacre took place in the capital city of the People’s Republic of China. The size of it shocked the world. Nobody knows precisely how many innocent people lost their lives. The government put the number of “collateral deaths” at two hundred or less. But many Chinese believe that it was more like three thousand innocent students and residents who were slain.

From issue no. 189 (Summer 2009)

 

Duncan Hannah at Bard College, 1973. Photograph from the Paris Review archives.

ART
Diaries, 1970–73
Duncan Hannah

Nov. 20th. Listening to the new Velvet Underground LP, Loaded. “One fine morning, she turned on that New York station, she don’t believe what she heard at all . . . not at all.” Also the Zombies’ Odyssey and Oracle is fantastic. Such a rich wealth of music coming out. It’s where we get our messages, our subversive directions. It’s the soundtrack to our lives. The centerpiece to all this action.

From issue no. 222 (Fall 2017)

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Diary, 2008

Annie-B Parson’s journal, March 7, 2008.

 

Annie-B Parson’s journal, March 21, 2008.

For six months I was given an office, my first and only, at a center for ballet research. I think you act and move differently in new architectures, and I spent those months constructing what an office meant to my day, to my body, to my work. It seemed to me that if I had my own office with a closed door and a desk, I should do solo time-based seated activities in silence. So, in the morning I would write a to-do list, distilling the day into a structural event in three parts. Then, I would do daily drawings inspired by a fragment from a tenth-century list of clothing and objects that I had found in an old bookstore near my office. This list inspired me to make lists of other things. In the afternoon, I would sometimes invite young choreographers into my office for tea. We would sit, the desk determining our proximity, the chairs determining that we faced each other essentially in stillness. At the end of the day, I would draw this reiterative dailyness into the form of a diary. When I had studio space, I would bring these diary pages into rehearsal and use them as dance scores. On March 21, the diary generated ideas about verbs, erasure, the structure of lists, the placement of bodies in architecture, and the odd shapes of fruit, boots, and aprons. On March 7, I just sat at my desk unable to do anything at all. It seems it was a day of sadness, confusion, and a giant snowstorm, and the formal ideas I generated from this diary entry were about retrograde, breakage, stillness, and error. Dancing is living.

 

Annie-B Parson is a choreographer and co-founder of the OBIE and Bessie Award–winning Big Dance Theater. Ms. Parson has created choreography for opera, pop stars, marching bands, television, theater, ballet, symphonies, objects, museums, augmented reality, and a thousand amateur singers. Among others, she has choreographed for David Byrne, St. Vincent, David Bowie, Lorde, Laurie Anderson, Esperanza Spalding, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Her book, The Choreography of Everyday Life, will be published by Verso in October.

On Liberated Women Looking for Love

The first paperback edition of Advancing Paul Newman, signed and dedicated by the author to Pauline Kael. Courtesy of Ken Lopez Books and Fine Manuscripts.

I became aware of Advancing Paul Newman, Eleanor Bergstein’s 1973 debut novel, through Anatole Broyard’s dismissive review, which I came across in some undirected archival wandering. His grating condescension spurred me to read the novel—one of the best minor rebellions I’ve ever undertaken. (Bergstein is best known for writing the movie Dirty Dancing.) “This is the story of two girls, each of whom suspected the other of a more passionate connection with life,” she writes of the protagonists, best friends Kitsy and Ila. The romance of their friendship holds together everything else: trips to Europe to collect experiences (which, of course, often disappoint), becoming or failing to become writers, love affairs and marriages and divorces, their idealistic campaigning for the anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy in 1968. But Advancing Paul Newman is not simply a story of friendship, albeit one between two complicated women. The book is also gorgeously deranged and witty, told in fragments and leaps. “Don’t find me poignant, you ass,” Kitsy snaps at her ex when he happens upon her eating alone in a restaurant. After bad sex in Italy, she says matter-of-factly, “This was a good experience because now I know what it feels like to have my flesh crawl.” Ila is “glorious when in love, undistinguished when not in love,” and sleeps with two men on the day of Kitsy’s wedding. “There were reasons.” When she has a story accepted by The New Yorker, the proofs are returned with only one sentence intact: “Madam, the gentleman across the aisle is staring at my upper thighs.” The novel’s title comes from one of Kitsy and Ila’s duties in the McCarthy campaign: to arrive in advance at Paul Newman’s public appearances on behalf of McCarthy. They act as political fluffers, exciting the crowd and leaving for the next event just as Newman’s car pulls up. (Spoiler: they never meet him.) “Why in the world are you doing that, Miss Bergstein?” Broyard asked, frustrated, in his review. I think I know: the search for a passionate connection with life is chaotic; the lives of young women encompass more than a man thinks they should.  

—Elisa Gonzalez
Read Elisa Gonzalez’s entry in our annotated diary series on the Daily here. 

The Swedish novelist Lena Andersson is a genius at conveying characters whose minds have been so thoroughly consumed by idiosyncratic, self-serving logic that they just barely manage to keep up their attachments to other people. I read her newest novel, Son of Svea, late last year, and her 2013 novel, Willful Disregard, last week. The latter’s protagonist, Ester Nilsson, is a icon of limerence: after giving a lecture on a prominent artist, Hugo Rask, and sleeping with him during a week-long tryst, she allows their flickering relationship—which she insists is budding, full of anticipation—to become the predominant organizing principle of her life. Hugo is cold, flinty, and brusque, but to Ester, his unyielding communications are fodder for endless interpretation. I was reminded, while reading, of a quote from Adam Phillips that runs through my brain like an earworm: “Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.”

—Maya Binyam, contributing editor

About a month ago, I watched David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) for the first time. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I am still taken aback by its urgency and delicacy, the juxtaposition of its withholding and indulgence. Celia Johnson plays Laura Jesson, a middle-class housewife who reads Kate O’Brien, knits, and fantasizes while her lovely husband (Cyril Raymond) does the crossword. She begins an affair with Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), a handsome and affable doctor who works in the same suburb she travels to for her shopping. Every Thursday they see each other, at the train station or in town, and they strike up a friendship that begins innocently enough and then, as the film’s title suggests, turns very quickly into something rapturous.

The contrast between Johnson’s open, open doe eyes and her character’s recalcitrance, what her eyes allow her to envision and what her mouth won’t let her say, still stuns me, many days away from my first encounter with it. I suppose that’s the lasting legacy of an affair, or of a great viewing experience—an impression you can’t let go of, a flicker of a memory, the sustained effect of a magic trick. I’ve fallen in love with many films, rewatching them for weeks at a time. I think Brief Encounter will hold up, will turn from my latest dalliance into a lifelong romance, because I’ve never seen anything else like it: the intricate Rachmaninoff score; the film criticism ensconced in scenes of Laura and Alec watching B movies and laughing at Donald Duck shorts; the transitions and fades that frame Laura’s clandestine outings with Alec against her home life in the most heartbreaking ways. There’s an absolutely gutting sequence in which Laura gazes out of a train window, imagining far-off possibilities with Alec. That window becomes a viewfinder. The key shots of those gorgeous locomotives underscore the film’s thematic focus on parallel lives and missed opportunities. Trains don’t look like they used to—beautiful, gleaming, majestic machines issuing steam that mimics the fog of dreams—and neither do movies. 

—Niela Orr, contributing editor

Watch the Staples Jr. Singers Perform Live at The Paris Review Offices

A.R.C. Brown, Annie Brown Caldwell, and Edward Brown. Photograph by Eliza Grace Martin.

On the evening of Friday, April 22, the staff of the Review tidied our desks, tucked away our notebooks and computers, ordered pizza, and welcomed the nine members of the band known as the Staples Jr. Singers to our Chelsea office for a very special performance. The band’s music was introduced to us by our friends at Luaka Bop, who are today rereleasing the Staples Jr. Singers’ 1975 record, When Do We Get Paid. The Staples Jr. Singers (who named themselves after Mavis Staples) formed in 1969, when the original band members—A.R.C. Brown, Annie Brown Caldwell, and Edward Brown—were still teenagers; they sold that first, glorious record on the front lawn of their home in Aberdeen, Mississippi. Almost fifty years later, to celebrate the rerelease, the original members drove the seventeen hours from Aberdeen to New York City, children and grandchildren in tow, for a weekend of gigs in New York City. We at the Review were thrilled to host the band’s first-ever concert in the city, and we are delighted to share a clip from that performance with you.