The Paris Review's Blog, page 93

Daniel Galera on “The God of Ferns,” the Review’s Holiday Reading

Author photo of Daniel Galera © Suhrkamp Verlag.

Daniel Galera was born in São Paulo, and spent a year and a half in Garopaba, the Brazilian seaside town that became the setting for his tense, violent, and funny 2012 novel Blood-Drenched Beard, which was published in the U.S. by Penguin Press in 2015. His other novels include The Shape of Bones (2017) and Twenty After Midnight (2020). He has translated works by John Cheever, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith into Portuguese, and his latest book, The God of Ferns, published in the Portuguese by Companhia das Letras, is a collection of three novellas. Earlier this year, we read the title story, translated by Julia Sanches, and were instantly hooked by its almost uncanny state of suspense, so we decided to share an adapted excerpt with you, to get you through these rather strange holidays we’re having.

Galera answered some questions about the story and about his writing from his home in Porto Alegre, where he lives with his wife, his young daughter, and his Australian cattle dog.

 

INTERVIEWER

The apartment in “The God of Ferns” is a complete, and very detailed, universe—the piles of clothes, the coffee cups, the hair in the bathroom. Is it where you live?

GALERA

It is made up of a few places I’ve lived—plus quite a lot of invention. The observation of my own private life is just a seed from which made-up details can flourish. Some of the stuff in the apartment has a significance, like the faded spines of Lucas’s books or the way Manuela organizes the pans on the stove; other things are random. For this story, I needed details to create a tension between the couple’s intimacy and the looming threat beyond their refuge. Their clothes, the contents of the fridge, their bodily detritus—I wanted all of it to add to a feeling that we are intruding a little, at a time when they’re not welcoming visitors.

INTERVIEWER

Are you a smoker, like Lucas?

GALERA

I smoke, but no more than three cigarettes a day, usually at night, when work and daily chores are behind me. More than that will make me literally sick. Lucas smokes heavily, and the interesting thing to me is that he’s proud of it at a time when smoking is widely censured. I liked imagining him feeling good about himself doing pull-ups and smoking at the same time. His behavior is a little childish and vain, and smoking is clearly a self-conscious part of his identity, the way he likes to be seen. Manuela gladly tolerates his smoking, and this is also meaningful. As the story progresses, it becomes more and more of an indication of his anxiety. Chain-smokers make people around them nervous, and readers can experience that, too.

INTERVIEWER

Did writing the story begin with the birth, or with the election, or something else?

GALERA

The story came out of my recollections of how I felt in the days before the election of Jair Bolsonaro, when a feeling of unreality started to sink in. It was like the future was dissolving. Most people I knew felt desperate. It was not a matter of liberals versus socialists, of private capital versus the social state. This was about basic human decency, the defense of democracy, the survival of the most vulnerable, the loss of even the few advances in social justice that Brazil had seen in the previous decade. There was so much fake news and hate speech. I have clear memories of those final days of the campaign. Our daughter was born a year before the elections, in 2017, and I combined both experiences to come up with this idea of a baby that refuses to come out, a mother enduring a long labor while trying to silence all that fear and hate. I started writing the story at the end of 2019, right before the first coronavirus reports came out of China, and so the social isolation we had to endure because of the virus became a sort of parallel narrative that the reader would bring into the story. While I was writing, I kept in mind that the reader would already know the outcome of the election and of Bolsonaro’s government, and this tension between what the characters know and what the reader knows felt essential.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think the act of writing is a bit like childbirth?

GALERA

Maybe it’s more like the opposite. The gestation of a story can be quite painful in a psychological sense. Giving birth, actually writing the thing, is mostly a pleasure. And once it’s born, very much unlike having a child, you have to move on from it.

INTERVIEWER

Did you set out, with “The God of Ferns,” to write a short story, a novel, or a novella?

GALERA

Initially I set out to write a story collection, thinking that “The God of Ferns” would be one among many stories. At some point I realized that I only had three stories, and that they should all be rather long. It felt possible that one of them might even grow into a novel. But I ended up with three novellas, or at least that’s what I decided to call them. They differ in style, plot, and setting. “The God of Ferns” is a short step backward into recent history, while the other two take long jumps into the future. They go from traditional realism to wide speculation. I like how they work together.

INTERVIEWER

Does the form of the novella lend itself particularly well to science fiction or fantasy?

GALERA

No, but science fiction and fantasy provide a useful freedom and a perspective from which to write about the present day. This has always been the case, of course, but I suspect that recently the realist tradition has been particularly challenged by the flood of big data, by widespread surveillance, digital images, and social networks. When people’s lives and daily affairs are so mediated by that kind of technology and by relentless digital reproduction, how do you write about it without sounding redundant? I think my ventures into science fiction and apocalyptic fantasy were probably experiments to try to answer that question. “The God of Ferns” is a realistic tale, but there’s this suspicion that something is wrong and unfinished, that the baby might never come, that history might be stuck in some sort of high-speed vortex that won’t deliver a satisfying outcome. In that sense, it is of a piece with the two other speculative tales.

INTERVIEWER

Are there works of science fiction that you especially love?

GALERA

I enjoy what they call “hard” science fiction—stories that are committed to scientific accuracy but that usually extract the most fabulous and mind-bending conclusions from it: books like Peter Watts’s Blindsight and Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem trilogy. I also love the “weird sci-fi” of Jeff VanderMeer, which blurs the boundaries between biology and technology, the human and the nonhuman. Recently, I had a great time reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, a rather realistic vision of the consequences of our climate emergency, and Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland, which I can’t really describe—go read it! Ursula K. Le Guin is terrific, too.

INTERVIEWER

What have you been reading recently?

GALERA

I often read even more than usual while working on a new book. Other writers are the best partners and allies, and I try to be open to their influence. I’d recommend The Employees by Olga Ravn, and Nuestra parte de noche by Mariana Enríquez (not available in English, I’m afraid), which is one of the most impressive and terrifying novels I’ve read. I enjoyed Visão noturna, a collection of stories about dreams, by the young Brazilian author Tobias Carvalho, and I just finished In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin, a thought-provoking memoir about her violent encounter with a bear in the Russian wilderness. Right now I’m reading a very unique book, The Man who Spoke Snakish, by the Estonian author Andrus Kivirähk. It’s a fantasy novel about people who live in the woods and talk to animals.

INTERVIEWER

This story is set in a particular kind of lockdown. How did the pandemic affect your writing, if at all?

GALERA

Even though the pandemic deeply affected my life, I don’t think it affected my writing very much. Writing “The God of Ferns,” I had in my imagination ideas and feelings that were gathered before the onset of the pandemic: coping with a country ruled by the far-right, with the often misguided ideology of technological progress, with the need to find new and better alliances with nature in order to survive in a damaged planet. During lockdowns I was struggling to find work, to not go crazy or get depressed, to protect myself and my family. Our habits and routines were constantly jeopardized and modified. Brazil suffered the additional tragedy of a president that was and remains anti-vaccines and scoffs daily in the media at masks and isolation measures. A lot of energy was spent just on hoping we would not be left to die by those who were supposed to take care of the people, on hate, on hoping they’d pay for their crimes sooner than later. Writing required me to find isolation inside isolation. I managed to do it, with support from family. Having to write this book helped keep my spirits up.

Illustration by Oliver Munday.

The God of Ferns

Illustrations by Oliver Munday.

An adapted excerpt of the novella by Daniel Galera, translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sanches.

Manuela hates that it’s taking so long. For the past two weeks, she’s hauled her belly up and down the stairs of their building, and along sidewalks where dirty water from the last October rainfall still splashes against her swollen ankles—and she’s sick of it. She wants to sleep belly-down, without pillows to support her. She wants to get up from the toilet without needing to hold on to the sink, to stop being kicked on the inside of her ribs, to have normal sex again. And Lucas, who’s always thought of himself as the kind of guy who can fight off exhaustion, confident in the perpetuum mobile of stamina that’s stored in his guts and keeps him in action no matter how badly he’s being pounded—lately, Lucas has been feeling paralyzed by a fear that he can’t fully understand. He’s scared he won’t make enough money to cover the basics, that Manuela will get hurt, that he’ll have a stroke or a heart attack, that come Monday morning the country will be at war with itself. The autobiography he’d spent six months ghostwriting was published in June, and the book’s subject, a young businessman who competed in ultramarathons all over the world and had a near-death experience in the Atacama Desert, finally wired him the last installment of his advance just a week ago. Now Lucas, who in the past few years has found himself having to settle for more and more freelance assignments, each less inspired than the last, is barely working. He often wonders whether he should finally give up journalism and take a job doing public relations for a construction company, just so they won’t have to move out of the city to the countryside. Maybe, he now realizes, it was a matter of inertia. It’s as if he had wanted to take things slowly for a couple of years to savor the last dregs of inactivity, to ease into this unplanned fatherhood. Some days, he feels sure that he’s done everything he could have, but the truth of the matter is that he’s been in a state of denial. He should have said yes to every depressing, low-paid gig that came his way. He should have harassed his contacts and past clients until he had more work than he knew what to do with. He’s been attending boxing classes religiously at a cheap, dungeon-like gym near Avenida Goethe, where bald, middle-aged bodybuilders give him lip because when they look at him, all they see is a communist hippie who probably took a wrong turn somewhere. In the past few months, he’s exercised even more than usual, as though in response to the fact that his body, unlike Manuela’s, refuses to change. But he knows he’s too old for all of this hard work to make a real difference. Ever since they decided their apartment would be mostly a cigarette-free zone, he’s been going out to smoke at a small square two blocks from the house, where he does pull-ups on the steel bar of the swing set, making everyone around him feel awkward. Not long ago, he’d caught himself smoking and doing pull-ups at the same time, taking a drag of his Camel on the way down and blowing out smoke on the way up, all while his mind fabricated soothing, hyperrealistic scenes in which he died by illness, accident, or suicide.

But they’re happy. They’ve come home at almost the same time—he from the dentist, where they fixed a chipped molar, the last on a list of items he wanted to cross off his to-do list before his son was born, and she from the beauty salon, where she got a wax and a mani-pedi. The late-afternoon traffic was heavier than usual, and Manuela ended up stuck for twenty minutes in the car she’d summoned with an app before finally deciding to get out and walk the six blocks to their front door, relishing the cool breeze and the five o’clock sun, which still shone brightly as pedestrians made way for her belly, as though she were a prophet parting the waters. Lucas, on the other hand, had stood on a packed bus, chewing his lips and keeping his eyes averted from the incessant ads on the bus’s small TV. In the narrow entrance to their apartment, Manuela takes off her sandals and Lucas praises her dark, porcelain-smooth toenails, the skin around them still pink from their recent encounter with the clippers.

The house is untidy in a way both of them find comforting. A mound of just-washed towels waits on the sofa to be folded and put away. A frying pan caked with scrambled-egg leftovers sits on the stovetop. Mugs are balanced precariously on the plush ottoman, from which they give off the smell of dried coffee. Manuela’s white socks and Lucas’s aquamarine bathrobe lie forgotten on the bathroom floor among tangles of hair. Stacks of books and magazines clamor for attention on every available surface. Electronics and their chargers wait doglike for their owners wherever they’ve been left. Manuela is responsible for the pieces by young local artists hanging in every room, for the bulky ceiling fixtures that dim the light, for the pyrites and the quartzes adorning the shelves, including the amethyst cluster whose provenance and emotional import she insists on keeping secret. When Lucas moved into the apartment that she’d been living in for half a decade, he had no trouble filling the shelves vacated by her previous boyfriend with hundreds of his own books and their faded spines, and he found it easy to clutter the kitchen with spirits and processed foods. But he couldn’t care less whether he had a say in the decor. His being there left a different kind of impression on the space. There was the stench of tobacco, the pungent seasoning and artificial scents. There was his bodily detritus, the electricity of his constant unrest and of his obsession with alignment, which meant that you could often find him rearranging the kitchen towels on the oven door and the bottles in the bathroom in an unceasing quest for parallel lines, straight angles, and level surfaces.

Today a bouquet of lilies arranged in a vase on the small, square dining room table exudes the sugary scent of fermentation. In the fridge is a festive stash of whole and sliced fruit, coconut water, a bowl of gazpacho, various jams, and goat cheese. The maidenhair ferns are still vibrant, even though they’ve been deprived of Manuela’s menstrual blood for nine months. On the Saturday of the hottest week of the previous summer, Manuela had fertilized her plants and left a small glass with the remainder of her nutrition-rich concoction on the kitchen counter. Even though Lucas knew all about this ritual, he’d been tipsy when he got home and assumed the glass before him held a finger of the Serra Gaúcha grape juice they’d recently purchased at the José Bonifácio farmers’ market. To this day, they remain unsettled by his accidental ingestion of her diluted menstrual blood, not because they were embarrassed or disgusted but because, in retrospect, it felt like an impromptu ceremony binding them together, an unpremeditated pact that sealed their fate. A few weeks later, she took a pregnancy test. Her foolproof cycle-tracker app was not, in fact, foolproof. Though they gazed at each other in shock, neither of them spoke about an abortion. They hugged and whispered that they loved each other and that everything would be okay, and they slept more peacefully that night than they had in a long time.

At seven o’clock on this Friday, as the summer sun peeks over the roofs of the neighboring buildings one last time, Manuela summons Lucas to the living room and tells him she’s just had a contraction. She is sitting on the Eames-style armchair she’d brought with her from her parents’ house in Caxias do Sul back when she moved to Porto Alegre for school, knees open and feet touching, one hand resting on her belly as the other hand grips her phone. Her lower jaw is projected forward and her bottom teeth are covering the tips of her upper teeth in a pose that she inadvertently slips into now and then when emotions are running high, much to the delight of Lucas, who finds it all terribly charming and never passes up an opportunity to compliment her pointed lower canines. He pictures her giving birth right then and there, in a matter of minutes, the way people say sometimes happens. He secretly wishes that he’ll be forced to deal with the expulsion, the placenta and the mucus: a dopey grown man awkwardly cradling a dripping-wet newborn who is still attached to his mother by the umbilical cord.

Manuela knows there are fake contractions, practice ones. For several minutes, nothing happens. She sets aside her phone and picks up a copy of J. G. Ballard’s Crash, which she’s been hooked on since yesterday. The final weeks of her pregnancy have whetted her appetite for extreme stories, complete with body horror. She’s calmly watched movies that make Lucas want to find an excuse to leave the living room. In the thirty-seventh week, they’d torrented all four Alien films for a two-night movie marathon. Neither of them had remembered the ending of the fourth movie, in which a monster queen—the daughter of a Ripley clone from one of the previous movies—gives birth to an alien with human traits. More than the carnage, more than the gushing slime and other secretions, it was the hybrid alien’s sharp, anxious distress that had struck them as a chilling augury of what was to come. Lucas had noticed Manuela seemed more frightened by her condition than before. So frightened that she hadn’t managed to sleep and they’d spent their first wakeful night together.

The next contraction arrives ten minutes later and catches Manuela engrossed in her book. She frowns, grits her teeth, sucks in air, and immediately exhales, looking down at her belly and then over at Lucas with an expression that contains fear, a question, and the shadow of a smile. It’s the same expression, he realizes, that she uses to give her consent in the heat of the moment whenever they want to try something new or play rough in bed. He faces her expectantly, waiting for her to describe things in a way that is useful, for her to say something that makes sense, so he can weigh in or jump into action. This time she knows it’s not a drill. The pain radiates through her torso, her belly hardens. Lucas walks up to the broadband modem—lights flashing diligently as though pleading for their lives—and closes his fingers around the plug. He glances at Manuela, who quickly nods her head. He unplugs the modem. They take their smartphones and switch off their cellular data. Cutting the internet seems to strip a layer of noise and commotion from the room, like when you turn off a burner underneath a pan. They’d decided on the blackout at the last ultrasound, when the baby had held his small, amphibian fingers over his face, as if wanting to protect himself from the high-frequency sound waves. They were going to create a shelter not only from the din of motors on the streets of Porto Alegre’s historical center, from the deluge of information and notifications, from the fake news and the toxic cloud of political polarization, but also from their friends and family, who would only be notified once they were at the hospital. Manuela’s obstetrician, a short-haired woman in her forties who looked like she could have been a weightlifter, one of the few people in Porto Alegre with experience in natural births, had told them to call her on the phone when the contractions started.

Manuela rings the obstetrician, who doesn’t pick up. She and Lucas look at each other. Had it been a good idea to rely exclusively on phone calls? It hasn’t been five minutes and already they’re itching to get online again. Manuela starts wandering around the apartment picking up clothes, crumpled napkins, and alfajor wrappers. Lucas follows her around, and runs his hands through her hair and along her hips. He feels a dumb sort of affection toward her, like they’re about to say goodbye. She smooths the duvet with her hands and raises the possibility that she could be out of the hospital in time to vote on Sunday. He does the math and says it doesn’t seem likely, but she insists it’s within the realm of possibility. If they do have a natural birth and everything goes well, she could be discharged from the hospital as early as tomorrow. Lots of European countries let you out on the same day. They might have to take turns; he could stay with the baby while she takes a quick trip to the polling place. Lucas wants to know if she thinks they’ll let her into the priority line if she takes the baby with her. Does giving birth a day and a half ago constitute a priority? Would they believe her? As they contemplate these scenarios, Manuela’s cell phone rings.

The wedge of sky between the two nearest buildings has turned salmon with streaks of red, and evidence of renewed activity can be seen through the windows. Grown-ups and children have come home from work or from school, and they walk from room to room wrapped in towels, talking to each other in loud voices that seem muted from afar, televisions aglow with bluish news programs and neon cartoons. Lucas shuts the soundproof windows they had installed in the living room and in both bedrooms to ensure their future baby’s slumber, courtesy of Manuela’s parents, who’d also bought a good chunk of the clothes, the baby bottles, and the other trimmings that were simply indispensable, or so claimed a life coach for new parents who happened to be an acquaintance of Manuela’s mother—the daughter of her best friend from school in Caxias, that kind of thing. They’d made a point of buying most of the baby furniture themselves, in four installments, and had also managed to stay on top of their healthcare premiums, thanks in part to Manuela’s salary at PUCRS, where she teaches literature at the graduate level, and to Lucas’s savings, which he’d padded with what was left of his ghostwriting money and the various payments he’d received for a few dozen pieces he’d written mostly for news agencies that were founded in the past couple of years by a younger generation of journalists, many of them the most recent victims of the mass layoffs that had swept through traditional media companies, young men and women who’d struck out on their own, either out of conviction or a lack of alternatives, hoping to make their comeback by providing content to the same companies that had laid them off, except this time for less money and less security. Lucas shuts the windows in the baby’s room, which used to be his old office, and listens to Manuela on the phone with the obstetrician. Midconversation, she has a contraction and tries to describe it. She falls quiet for a few minutes and simply listens, then responds in monosyllables. Lucas grabs the pack of cigarettes from the living room table and tries to catch Manuela’s eye, but she ignores him with an intent expression, so he goes to the laundry room to smoke. He misses being able to smoke wherever he wanted to in the apartment—back when he lived on his own, he even had the occasional cigarette in the bathroom. Then again, a close friend of his recently kicked the habit after hearing his three-year-old say that his daddy smelled bad. Lucas checks his phone out of reflex, then remembers they’ve gone offline. His fingers chew on the phone as if touch could somehow satisfy his mental hunger. He thinks of Manuela in the living room. They have everything they need right there, everything, he tells himself, the taste of the singed filter in his mouth. He has always done his best to make the right decisions and to plan for the future, and yet he doesn’t feel he’s ready to have a family all of a sudden. Because it did happen all of a sudden, even though they’d been gradually paving the way for this version of their life, at the expense of other versions, and with varying degrees of intentionality and awareness. The fear that hits him every now and then—does it have something to do with the fact that he has been making the wrong decisions all this time? Or is it about his failure to recognize the pivotal moments in his life, the consequences of his choices in the past few years? Or does it have more to do with the instability of the country, the threats to his material well-being, to the values he believes are central to a dignified life? He and Manuela are the kind of couple who like to entertain fantasies of mandatory isolation. He, at least, often catches himself daydreaming about scenarios involving social upheaval, climate apocalypse, and a clean break with an urban lifestyle that would force them into a heroic, hedonistic confinement. Only people who love each other beyond a doubt crave this kind of isolation, he thought.

Before he’d gotten to know her, Manuela had struck Lucas as imperious, maybe even a bit cruel—a daughter of the aporophobic Serra Gaúcha elite. Around the time they met, there were only a handful of decent clubs left in Porto Alegre, and every so often they’d bump into each other and exchange a cautious greeting, curious but unwilling to make an approach. Plus, she was seeing someone, the scion of a winery who always seemed to be off somewhere on his motorcycle. When a mutual friend died in a car accident, Manuela and Lucas met at the wake and shared their favorite memories of him, weaving together partial accounts of a life interrupted. It was the only thing brought Lucas any consolation. A while later, he ran into her at a billiard room where some of his friends from college regularly played in a grunge cover band. That night, their conversation flowed more easily, and he discovered that beneath Manuela’s aristocratic facade was a revolutionary who translated ecofeminist texts pro bono for a collective that published them both online and in cheap physical editions. Generally tacit, Manuela kept her cards close to her chest, but the right question could unlock doors like the ones to hidden rooms in a small-town museum that allows in only a handful of visitors. He’d taken a chance when he’d said to look him up once she and the biker broke things off. She navigated the situation gracefully and even stood up for the guy. About two months later, Manuela texted Lucas to ask for his address. That same day, a motorcycle courier rang the doorbell and handed him a key card to a room at Hotel Everest, with a note attached that said there was no need to knock. He went to the hotel, took the elevator up to the tenth floor, and swiped the card in the door. Halfway through his next cigarette, Manuela is still on the phone with the obstetrician. Lucas glances at the kitchen and thinks back to the moment he finally caught on to Manuela’s habit of moving the kettle and the pots around whenever he was about to boil some water or cook on the stovetop. When he asked her about it, she told him that each burner had to be used equally, that you shouldn’t neglect any of them or play favorites. Manuela, he realized, had a special kind of empathy for objects. She felt strongly that they needed to be cleaned and stored in a way that honored their every function, that they had to be treated with the same consideration and respect normally reserved for the animate beings in their lives.

Lucas heads back to the living room, where Manuela sits in the half-dark, looking irritated and fidgeting with her phone. The obstetrician had said her contractions were still mild, that it could be hours before they reached the level of intensity that indicated sufficient dilation. She’s trying to use the app she downloaded a few days ago to keep track of her contractions, but there are limitations to the free version and since the ads won’t load, she can’t get it to work. Manuela has another contraction, which lasts forty-five seconds. Fuck, she says, her face tensed up. Lucas fetches his laptop from the bedroom while Manuela lowers the temperature on the AC unit to twenty-one degrees Celsius, turns on the two table lamps, puts on a playlist she had made and downloaded to her phone, and goes to the freezer for a small pot of açaí. They sit on the sofa and Lucas opens up Excel as he chats with the baby, saying he should bring a swimsuit and a towel because it’s going to be hot out. Manuela is wearing a pair of white sweatpants and a silk blue-violet robe she bought at a thrift store in São Francisco de Paula on a trip they took to the Serra. Her belly and breasts jut out from her gaunt body like fleshy, rubbery mutations. Her face is red, her feet are bloated. A CocoRosie song ends and one by Tom Zé begins. Manuela is bringing a spoonful of açaí to her mouth when she freezes, groans, and clutches the armrest. Lucas times it. The contraction lasts fifty seconds and comes six minutes after the last one. They look at each other and smile. Everything seems to be going according to plan. Their hospital bag has been packed for days. In it are the baby’s first clothes, bonnet, and socks, a change of clothes for them, whole-wheat crackers, chargers, documents, and e-readers. Lucas turns his laptop screen to Manuela. He has created a spreadsheet to monitor her contractions, with separate fields for the start and end times. There are formulas that automatically update the duration of each contraction, the thirty-minute average, and the interval between one contraction and the next. He says they could use colors to illustrate the contractions’ intensities. Another document translates this information into charts that for the moment are just geometric shapes, anomalies that convey nothing. The sunlight has waned. What is left is the glow of the public streetlights and of the lamps in neighboring apartments, which tinge the walls of the city a sulfurous shade of yellow. The high beams of the cars that drive up the street cast the occasional orange strip across the ceiling, and it’s as if the light were traveling through the shutter of an old camera, burning unknowable images onto the plaster.

Manuela stares at the wedge of unstarred sky. She still gets a chill when she thinks about the night she almost died from a rare reaction to an antidepressant she was prescribed. These days she doubts she even needed the medication at all. Following the eight-day stint at the ICU, during which her kidney function was compromised by rhabdomyolysis, she’s never had another depressive episode. But a different kind of gloom settled in, one that was seasonal and less debilitating, one that seemed to want to ask questions more than it wanted to suffocate her. She feels like she’s being watched by the eyes of a nocturnal darkness. The apartment is her cocoon, and Lucas a kind of doorman or caretaker. He had won her over because, from the onset, he hadn’t seemed to expect more from their relationship than companionship and physical intimacy. With time she learned to see the insecurity behind his crude cishet male aesthetic, the rebelliousness behind his admirable aptitude for work, the pleasure he got from making people happy in the simplest ways. His appetites could be brutal, but she enjoys submitting to them. She holds out her hand and moves it down to Lucas’s cock. Now half-asleep on the sofa, he clears his throat and tilts his pelvis in response. They tease each other about how great it would be to have sex right then and there, playfully describing the hypothetical scenario until Manuela starts moaning in pain and pants for almost a minute straight. Lucas adds it all to the spreadsheet.

Three hours later, Manuela tries the obstetrician on the phone again while Lucas studies the spreadsheet with the fury of an investigative journalist. According to all of the guidance they’d received, her contractions would grow more intense and more frequent. There was the promise of order. But Manuela’s contractions are all over the place. They range from mild to excruciating, with intervals that range between two and ten minutes, with no discernible pattern. She’s already taken two hot showers on the Pilates ball. Her water hasn’t broken; there’s no blood or mucus. Right now, her phone is pressed to her ear as she sits on the sofa with her eyes shut and the look of someone being forced to wade through the quagmire of a large corporation’s support line in search of a human voice—in this case, her obstetrician’s. Cut off from the world, the apartment now occupies a dimension isolated in time and space. If they haven’t cracked open the window or turned on the TV, it’s because they’ve put their faith in an algorithm that should have delivered results by now, and it feels imprudent to interfere. Little by little, they are becoming aware of how naive their expectations had been.

The obstetrician picks up a couple of minutes later. She is in the hospital cafeteria, eating a sandwich after completing a caesarean. Manuela says the contractions are now five minutes apart. She listens to the woman and then, a few minutes later, says goodbye, puts her phone down on the sofa, and bursts into tears. Lucas strokes her neck, which is a little sticky, and asks what’s the matter. The obstetrician had insisted it would still be a while before she was ready to go to the hospital. The sound of Manuela’s voice had been too normal, too lucid. The obstetrician suggested having a friend, a parent, a doula come over to keep her company. She’d said to call only if things changed or they were on their way to the hospital. She was heading home to see her children and get some sleep.

Manuela is interrupted by a contraction. It’s a strong one. She tries to breathe normally. She hugs her knees, and Lucas rubs her back. They don’t know if all massages help or if he should be giving her a special kind of massage. It begins to dawn on them just how unprepared they are, even though they’d planned out every last detail, but Manuela doesn’t want her relatives around. She doesn’t hate her parents. There has been no unpleasant Sunday-lunch argument. But a consequence of avoiding conflict at all costs is that they spend less and less time together. A heated altercation might do their relationship some good, maybe even bring them closer, but at the moment they are in something of a cold war. It’s as if she and her parents each have a secret cache of weapons from which they can draw to obliterate the parties involved. Manuela recognizes her parents’ right to vote for a right-wing bigot, as she and Lucas believe they will two days from now. At the same time, she recognizes her right to affirm her own understanding of order and decency by excluding them from this personal milestone. If her mother had any say in the matter, Manuela would be in the hospital right this minute, under the scalpel of some renowned doctor and friend of the family. As far as her friends are concerned, she just doesn’t think she needs them right now. And though Manuela had seen a doula at some point during the pregnancy, she’d been put off by the woman’s mystical take on motherhood and idealistic views on femininity. Lucas and Manuela know of couples who have weathered the initial stages of childbirth independently, on their own, in the privacy of their homes. They’d thought they were part of the same clan. Now they’re beginning to suspect that these couples hadn’t shared the whole story.

Manuela remembers hearing a pregnant woman say laughter is the best way to induce labor. Lucas is excited for this new project. He makes popcorn in a frying pan while Manuela scrolls through the movies and TV series they have downloaded onto their external hard drive over the past few years, respecting their moratorium on internet and streaming services. When Lucas returns to the living room, he’s thrilled to see that Manuela has put on the episode of Louie in which the antihero’s sister goes into labor and screams bloody murder all the way to the hospital. He kisses Manuela and squeezes her face, his greasy fingers dusted with salt. His love for her and her off-brand sense of humor immediately loosens the tension stiffening his joints. Manuela’s angular traits, faintly padded by the weight she has put on during the pregnancy, light up when she breaks into a childish smile. They laugh for all twenty minutes of the episode, even though they already know the punchline—that all the mayhem and all the woman’s hollering will be interrupted by a huge fart in the hospital bed. Manuela has a long contraction and cries tears of laughter and pain as she clutches her colossal belly as though it could come loose from her body and roll along the shaggy rug. Lucas doesn’t neglect to update the spreadsheet, a reflex they both find so ridiculous that it doubles their laughter until finally they’re sent into a fit of hysterics when Lucas, as though wanting to punctuate the situation, lets out a brief yet perfectly audible toot. They try to control themselves—all that laughing is starting to feel at odds with the circumstances, and dangerous in some unidentifiable way—but can’t help giggling a bit longer. The torpor that follows is almost postcoital. Manuela says she could really use a drink right now and for a few minutes they seriously consider making a whiskey sour, but then reality sinks in and they decide to watch a couple more episodes. After that, they put on a movie about a group of young pothead celebrities who get stuck at a party in James Franco’s Hollywood mansion as the world comes to an end. Though they’ve seen the movie half a dozen times, it always hits the spot. They sit holding hands under the glow of the television and the lamplight, their heads drooping slightly and their eyes glazed as they laugh and yawn. Manuela gives Lucas’s hand a hard squeeze, and even though he knows it’s a cliché, he tells her to breathe, to take deep, relaxed breaths, that’s right, just like that. The rest of the night passes this way.

They still can’t tell whether the contractions are getting stronger. Apprehension slowly settles back in. In the air hang whispers that things happen. Bodies break down, babies die. Life is resilient until it isn’t. Manuela tells herself again and again, like a mantra, that the opposite of death is not life but birth. No one knows what the opposite of life is. It’s unclear to her whether she’s doing this to self-soothe or to embrace the despair; either way, the sentence gets stuck in her head. Now they’re just trying to stay distracted, to kill time. After watching a few early episodes of Seinfeld, Manuela gets up and starts pacing around the apartment. Not long after, she stops and climbs into bed. Lucas sits on the edge of the mattress and squeezes her thigh through another wave of pain, then lies down, a touch hesitant. Manuela tells Lucas to go watch a movie, read a book, smoke, but he isn’t in the right headspace for any of that. He feels a mix of guilt and helplessness, he says. This annoys Manuela. The kid hasn’t even been born yet, man up.

Time has broken away from its usual circadian rhythm. The orbits of the sun and the moon have given way to a series of contractions. Sometimes Manuela drifts off between contractions; other times she mumbles and begs for help, for an opinion, for relief. Lucas tries to imagine what it would feel like for your cervix to be dilating. Manuela has lost her appetite but concedes to small sips of water. Around one in the morning, the pain has become excruciating. She is incoherent, secluded from the world around her. The end of one ordeal is just the terrifying prelude to the next. At two in the morning, seven hours after Manuela’s first contraction, Lucas calls the obstetrician and tells her they’re on their way to the hospital. The obstetrician’s voice is thick and drowsy, and when she says she will meet them there in an hour Lucas isn’t convinced.

All of their doubts as to whether they should be going to the hospital vanish the moment they slide into the back of the taxi. There’s something comfortingly filmic about the whole thing. Their car glides steadily down the asphalted road, flanked every now and then by other cars taking people who aren’t pregnant to late Friday-night parties—people who aren’t having children but are instead going out to dance, get drunk, pick fights, stuff themselves with cheese and fried foods, make out, fuck, eyeball each other’s outfits and bodies, have loud conversations about the latest TV, and celebrate or mourn the latest polling data in the streets and the bars. Lucas and Manuela have nothing to do with that right now, they’re just asking to be let through. The driver, a large, clean-shaven man who sounds like he might be from one of the state’s German settlements, remains calm and slows down when Manuela begins whimpering with pain. He tells them that one of his sons was born in the hospital they are going to now, and that even though they’d gotten stuck in rush-hour traffic, they’d made it there in time and everything had turned out all right. Now all he can remember of that day is an immense feeling of joy. The hospital abuts a semirural area in the urban heart of Porto Alegre, an enclave of small country houses and villas, old mansions and leper colonies that over the decades has been engulfed by venerable gardens, groves, and fields of grass which most residents know nothing about, even though it’s only a fifteen-minute drive from the center. The taxi crawls up a windy hill between precarious housing and large native trees littered with plastic and garbage. There are more stars here.

They are let out at the emergency entrance. A triage nurse spots them and immediately ascertains what is going on. As she wheels Manuela through a heavy tinted-glass door, Lucas is told to fill out forms at the maternity ward registration desk on the second floor. The hospital building looks as if it’s asleep. Motion-sensitive lights click on as he crosses an empty lobby and walks upstairs. He passes walls pinned with informative posters about measles and how to donate blood. The woman at the counter asks for his health insurance card and the name of the baby. The waiting room is empty. In it are three rows of narrow chairs, a water fountain, and a small, wall-mounted television, which is thankfully off. He finally feels calm. He takes out his phone, scrolls through the last few photographs he’s taken, and resists the temptation to go online. He and Manuela had agreed to leave the bubble only once they had given the baby his first bath. He thinks of his parents, who live an hour and a half from Porto Alegre in Imbé, with four dogs that are so anatomically asymmetrical that each looks like the product of a demented geneticist. Their house is three blocks from a chocolate-hued ocean and faces a lawn that smells faintly of sewage. Manuela once described his parents as two hypertrophied children. They are loud, apolitical, kind—but only in the sense that we attribute kindness to people who don’t know any better—and addicted to pizza and low-budget TV. The main advantage to them being this way is that they seem to be almost oblivious to the fact that there is an election on, and they always vote for whomever Lucas tells them to. At least, that’s what they say. Their happiness is immune to crises, and though most self-serious people find this quality to be offensive, it is also contagious for a brief period, after which Lucas always feels the intense urge to never see them again. He is going to have to call them in an hour or so and brace himself for their furious joy and unsuitable gifts. He pictures his mother’s slobbery euphoria and his dad’s doll-like face punctuated by a pair of misty eyes, and thinks that part of the fun in having a child is paying back the emotional debt we owe to our forebears. It’s just that when he thinks of their happiness, he can’t help also thinking of the spiritual exhaustion that he will feel thirty minutes later.

A large-bodied woman in scrubs makes her way to the entrance of the maternity ward. For a minute he thinks it’s their obstetrician, but the moment their eyes meet he realizes his mistake. He is beginning to wonder whether there’s any point to all this privacy, self-preservation, and autonomy. He has the strange feeling that he’s doing something secretive—like breaking out of prison or administering an abortion. He grabs his phone, opens the settings, and fixes his eyes on the toggle that could activate his cellular data. His body bristles in anticipation of what could come next. Then the door to the maternity ward swings open a second time and a slender blond nurse comes toward him. His finger pulls back from the glowing screen. Manuela is on her way out. Lucas slides the phone back into his pocket and takes out his lighter. He fiddles with it, head pounding for a cigarette. Manuela shows up one minute later in the company of a nurse, arms hanging at her sides and a deathly look on her face. The obstetrician on shift said she was only one centimeter dilated. One centimeter, Lucas, she repeats, stunned. The doctor offered to break her water and administer oxytocin, but she refused, so they told her to wait at home. As they stand by for the taxi, Manuela dials the obstetrician, who says that she told them so, that they should go home and relax and only call again if her water breaks or if the contractions grow more intense and more frequent; she needs to get a couple more hours of sleep before visiting a patient in recovery. Things are crazy this week, she says, it’s like all the babies are in cahoots. They shouldn’t worry if she’s not there when they return to the hospital, one of her colleagues will assist them until she arrives. They stare at the callous darkness around the hospital and can’t find anything to say. Silently, they come to terms with the end to the delusion that they ever had any control over what comes next.

When they enter their apartment, they have the feeling that it has been housing a secret occupant who has spent months on end hiding in the closet or under the bed. The windows and the blinds are still closed, while the AC unit and TV have been left on, which makes the air feel electric. They don’t remember using any of the dirty bowls, silverware, or glasses that are scattered around the apartment. The bathroom is hot and humid.

She sits on the nursing chair they bought for the baby’s room and swings back and forth. Lucas looks through the doorway at her drawn face, which is set in an almost-silent rictus. He can’t find any words to comfort her with. He smokes at the small window of the laundry room and between cigarettes, he checks to see if Manuela is still on the chair. After the fourth cigarette, he hears the sound of the shower and the murmur of a song on the speaker. The open bathroom door exhales a glowing mist that reminds him of a laboratory. He draws closer and sees Manuela sitting naked on the Pilates ball beneath a sheet of water, eyes closed and lips pinched, hands on her belly as she faintly moves her hips and hums a song that sounds like an incantation. The sight of her hits him full-on. Tears well in his eyes and he steps furtively into the half-dark of the master bedroom, which at the moment looks more like a storage unit for all the suitcases, books, mounds of shoes, and boxes full of stuff that they haven’t yet figured out where to put since reordering the space for the baby’s arrival. He lies on the bed and cries for a few minutes as he listens to Manuela quietly sing, moan, and take steady breaths, blanketed in a cloud of steam. He can’t get the image out of his head. He feels like he has witnessed a devastating miracle—mind and body perfectly aligned in the act of living, like one of those rare flowers in the heart of the jungle that only blooms for a few hours a year. What she is experiencing, Lucas concludes, is something he cannot; it is connected to things she experienced a long time before he came into her life, even though their lives are now inseparable, overlapping almost perfectly. This almost, though, is yawning; it’s the immeasurable width of a single strand of hair, the universe compressed to the tip of a pinhead, a slew of things that don’t concern him and never will. The rubber ball stops squeaking against the tile. Manuela takes another deep breath of air and then, in a pained cadence, exhales. This can’t go on much longer, he mumbles, it’s got to end soon, please let it end soon.

Lucas opens his eyes. He’d drifted off. Groggily he pulls himself out of bed and finds Manuela in the living room, lying down next to the sofa with her eyes open. Nothing’s changed, she says. She isn’t sure how long he was out for. An hour, maybe two. He cracks open the window, pulls the cord that draws the blinds. A glaring sliver of light pierces the darkness of the living room, drawing a golden rectangle on the wall. She shields her eyes. A gust of hot air braces against the cold of the air conditioner. She reaches for her phone on the sofa and activates the screen. It’s nine a.m., Saturday, she says. Outside there are the sounds of a helicopter hovering over the neighborhood and of street sweepers chatting loudly about their relationship problems. Lucas pulls the blind open a bit wider and sees them scattered along both sidewalks, black men and women in sunglasses and orange uniforms sweeping up cigarette butts, colorful plastic containers, stacks of election leaflets.

Daniel Galera was born in São Paulo. His novels include Blood-Drenched Beard (2012), The Shape of Bones (2017), and Twenty After Midnight (2020). He has translated works by John Cheever, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith into Portuguese, and his latest book, The God of Ferns, is a collection of three novellas.

Julia Sanches has translated more than a dozen works from Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan into English. Her translations and writing have appeared in Granta, LitHub, Poets & Writers, and The Common. She has received support for her work from the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, PEN Translates, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Redux: Furry Faces

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.

When we at the Review first read Sterling HolyWhiteMountain’s story “This Then Is a Song, We Are Singing,” which is published in our new Winter issue, we found ourselves in thrall to the story’s narrator—who, for all of his rage and confusion, self-justification and delusion, is undeniably charismatic. Inspired by the pleasure we took in spending time in his company (at least on the page), we hunted through the archives for some of the most memorable—which is to say, memorably off-kilter—voices the Review has published over the years. Inevitably, this led us to our Art of Fiction interview with Marguerite Young, whose hallucinatory novel Miss Macintosh, My Darling is, in her words, “an inquest into the illusions individuals suffer from.” From the same issue, no. 71 (Fall 1977), there are two poems by Erica Jong in which a lonely narrator putters around, talking to her cat. We’ve also been sucked into John Edgar Wideman’s stream of consciousness in “Sightings,” and fascinated by the inscrutable portraits of Llyn Foulkes.

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

Interview
Marguerite Young, The Art of Fiction No. 66
Issue no. 71 (Fall 1977)

It was the unconscious that interested me. I say that I am not interested in people, but I am interested in the bizarre and in people at an edge. I am interested in extreme statements about people because that is where drama is most apparent.

Fiction
Sightings
By John Edgar Wideman
Issue no. 171 (Fall 2004)

You can’t inch closer to what’s unreachable even when it’s pissing in your face. No pilgrim has returned and reported how it feels to die. That’s the dirty joke hunters go to the mountains to laugh at. Werewolf with other werewolves, furry clothes, furry faces, stomachs bloated with jelly doughnuts and beer.

Poetry
Two Poems
By Erica Jong
Issue no. 71 (Fall 1977)

I am a corpse who moves a pen that writes.
I am a vessel for a voice that echoes.
I write a novel & annihilate whole forests.
I rearrange the cosmos by an inch.

Art
Portraits
By Llyn Foulkes
Issue no. 100 (Summer-Fall 1986)

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives.

Fairy Fatale

An illustration by the painter Natalie Frank for The Island of Happiness. One of Frank’s favorite tales is ‘The Green Serpent,” in which the prince is a snake, though only literally. “I love the image where you have to get into bed with this creature but you can’t look at him, and of course you look at him.”

Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville was born into a rich family in the fall of 1652. At thirteen, she was wed by her mother to the middle-aged Baron d’Aulnoy, who had purchased his title. Three months pregnant that same year, in the summer of 1666, she inked a jinx in the margins of a fifteenth-century religious play from their library:

It has been almost 200 years since this book was made, and whoever will have this Book should know that it was mine and that it belongs to our house. Written in Normandie near Honfleur. Adieu, Reader, if you have my book and I don’t know you and you don’t appreciate what’s inside, I wish you ringworm, scabies, fever, the plague, measles, and a broken neck. May God assist you against my maledictions.

Madame d’Aulnoy would bear six children. (The first two died young.) But she’d also become the mother of a best-selling genre in early modern France: the literary fairy tale, in which her curses would be very much at home.

In d’Aulnoy’s stories, heroines cream dragons and enemy armies. They run away from home, crossdress, shape-shift; they outwit, slay, rescue, lead. Occasionally, they faint or sob or splash their sisters’ ball gowns with mud. According to Jack Zipes, the doyen of folktale scholarship who recently translated a new collection of d’Aulnoy’s tales under the name of The Island of Happiness, at least two-thirds of seventeenth-century fairy tales were written by women. And though d’Aulnoy has historically taken a backseat to Charles Perrault, the author of “Sleeping Beauty” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” she published her first fairy tale in 1690, some seven years before he did. (The two writers had no contact, and ran in very different circles: he a well-connected Parisian bourgeois, she an outrageous aristocrat from the sticks.)

“The Tale of Mira” is exemplary of d’Aulnoy’s refreshing style. Tucked into a novel, as many of her fairy tales were, it’s presented as a lady’s letter or diary entry, relating a story she has heard while traveling. Once upon a time, a king and queen produced a daughter so beautiful that people couldn’t help but stare—they called this princess Mira, the Spanish for “Look.” “Anyone who saw her fell desperately in love with her. However, her pride and indifference made all of her lovers die,” d’Aulnoy writes. “Consequently, she depopulated her father’s kingdom.” She adds: “Moreover, the surrounding countries were full of dead or dying lovers.” An oracle said that Mira would have to go—the fates would teach her to be more considered with other people’s hearts. So Mira roamed the globe dressed as a shepherdess, leaving expired men in her wake, until one day she met a shy, young, and possibly gay count, whom she adored. Finding him immune to her charms, Mira died of grief at his castle, where locals afterward claimed to hear the “deep sighs” of the man-eater’s ghost.

These seventeenth-century fairy tales, Zipes told me, “had to do with women’s real lives, and I don’t believe d’Aulnoy’s life was so different from a lot of the women in her time.” That’s hard to prove in great detail. D’Aulnoy’s biography is, as Volker Schröder, a scholar of Louis XIV’s France at Princeton, told me on a phone call, full of gaps, gray areas, and gossip. Schröder, who discovered the teen bride’s threatening marginalia a few years ago, has puzzled together some of her life story from archival documents, and he blogs about his findings.

D’Aulnoy’s marriage was no success. “I have it from her that he was a terrible husband—a violent husband,” Schröder said. In 1669, d’Aulnoy and her mother framed the baron for bad-mouthing the king, a crime punishable by death, but their plot came apart in court, and d’Aulnoy is said to have gone to jail with a babe in tow. Over the next fifteen years, the d’Aulnoys didn’t make peace but didn’t divorce, either. Then, in December 1685, the baron, unable to put up the dowry for their eldest daughter’s marriage, forced his wife to give the fief she had inherited to her prospective son-in-law. “And this”—Schröder inhaled sharply—“she didn’t like.” Though the baron, who worked a day job and did stints in debtor’s prison, promised to compensate the baroness with an annuity of 1,000 livres (about $35,000), the money either came irregularly or not at all. Lawsuits ensued, as did some unspecified mauvaise conduite (“bad behavior”) on the part of Madame d’Aulnoy. In 1686, she was arrested by order of the king (presumably at her husband’s urging) and pushed first into a convent in the Loire Valley, then another in Paris—not as a nun, but as a detainee. She stayed there until at least February 1695, and we don’t know what her decade of lockup looked like, only that she retained access to her daughters, her lawyer, and her publisher. (Not bad.) In fact, it was during this period of imprisonment that her first fairy tale appeared in print.

Her first book of stories, Les contes des fées, coined the new genre’s name. The earliest of her tales, “The Island of Happiness”—in which a dude voluntarily leaves his darling to go and make war, then dies in battle—has no happy ending, only the poetic justice she favored above all else. D’Aulnoy’s fairy tales run long and are not addressed to children. She marbles fantasy with realism, and burnishes it with vim and wit. Often, the narration is scathing: one stepsister is “less noble than an oyster in its shell.” D’Aulnoy’s most reliable crowdpleaser is “Belle-Belle, or the Chevalier Fortuné,” in which three sisters, one “brave amazon” after the other, attempt to pass themselves off as knights. Only the youngest is made of the right stuff. It’s a Shakespearean romp in which Belle-Belle becomes the king’s squire and then his wife, but not before (s)he has taken the reins and saved the day. In this way, D’Aulnoy dethroned the reigning image of female nature. Her heroines are three-dimensional portraits of women trapped between rocks and hard places, doing pretty much their best to hold on to their virtues. As the feminist painter Natalie Frank, who illustrated the new collection, told me: “Every female character feels real and burdened and formed by what they have been through.” In “The Ram,” the heroine’s nonhuman boyfriend dies of heartbreak. “D’Aulnoy here says maybe that’s the better ending for the woman: to control the kingdom and not care about husbands,” Schröder suggested. “The explicit moral doesn’t say that, but the implicit message does. She has these tales where things are a bit more complicated.”

Frank’s jewel-bright drawings suggest Mary Cassatt if Cassatt had allied not with Degas but Goya. They fit d’Aulnoy’s cast-like couture.

In “The White Cat,” a princess has been turned into a tiny, sweet, and extremely resourceful mouser. The story is full of precious miniatures that defy belittlement, including a ruby-encrusted box that opens upon a walnut, inside of which is a hazelnut, then a cherrystone, a kernel, a grain of wheat, a millet seed, and, finally, a four-hundred-yard-long cloth, resplendently embroidered. “That’s a conscious choice when the prevailing discourse—especially around Louis XIV—is one of total grandeur,” Rori Bloom, a scholar at the University of Florida, told me. “It’s an upset about what you value.” “The White Cat” itself impearls a larger novel whose hero, Dandinardière, a concussed wannabe knight based on Don Quixote, betroths himself to a dreamy girl who has no dowry but whose storytelling talent rivals Scheherazade’s. D’Aulnoy often points to a strong alliance being the most important thing. From the poem that ends her tale “The Blue Bird”:

Better to be a bird of any hue
A raven, crow, an owl, I do protest,
Than stick for life to a partner like glue
Who scorns you, or whom you detest.

D’Aulnoy managed to write herself a happier ending. By January 1698, she was legally separated from her husband and had a place on rue Saint-Benoît in Paris. There she hosted one of the era’s more interesting literary salons, sometimes appearing in costume as characters from her fairy tales. Schröder believes that she had already composed her catalog at the convent, and not in the midst of these raucous parties. “She still saw herself as a noblewoman,” he said, “and nobles aren’t supposed to be serious professionals. It all has to look so effortless.”

Even so, today it’s tempting to frame the mother of fairy tales as some sort of radical. Bloom, who is at work on a book about d’Aulnoy and another conteuse, has an allergy to reading too much into their lives, yet she still hears a protofeminist tone in the tales of Madame d’Aulnoy. In “The Little Good Mouse,” for example, after Queen Joliette’s husband and jailer dies, a fairy urges her, “Let us not waste any time, we must organize a coup d’état; let us go to the castle’s big assembly too and address a harangue to the people!” Fairies—typically fairy godmothers—are always stirring the pot, altering fate, dishing out help and harm. (How else did all those people become birds and rams and cats?) The world of d’Aulnoy’s fiction is governed by powerful women.

According to some of the bavardage, d’Aulnoy helped her friend Angélique Tiquet hire a hitman to kill Tiquet’s abusive husband, a member of parliament who had wooed her with bouquets peppered with real diamonds but whose fortune turned out to be fake. Things went sideways: the husband survived the hit and Tiquet was executed. There’s no reliable source for d’Aulnoy’s involvement, yet it’s easy to believe in—because Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy often comes off as just the kind of fairy fatale she liked to make up. Woe to the fool who forgets that a woman invented the literary fairy tale, and that fairies are not to be fucked with.

Illustration by Natalie Frank for The Island of Happiness.

Chantel Tattoli is a Paris-based culture journalist. She has contributed to Wired, the New York Times Style section, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Harper’s, The Believer, and the Porsche journal 000.

Our Staff’s Favorite Books of 2021

In which we tell you some of the things we most enjoyed reading this year. 

Rhian Sasseen’s reading log.

Maybe this is unsurprising for an audio producer, but I like listening to people talk: about their job, their bad childhood, their love life, the bigots living next door. People are funny, especially when discussing things that aren’t. Here are some of the books I read this year that felt like listening.

In Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Belarusian oral historian Svetlana Alexievich sits at kitchen tables across the former USSR and records people’s stories. Not for the faint of heart. Or if you are, I recommend taking frequent breaks to watch dogs at the dog park. 

In the seventies, right before computers would change almost everything, Chicago radio interviewer Studs Terkel walked the streets and asked people “what they do all day and how they feel about what they do.” Every single one-and-a-half-page testimony in Working feels like a novel.

For The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson picked just three people to tell the story of the Great Migration: a sharecropper from Mississippi, a labor organizer in Florida’s orange groves, and a doctor from Louisiana. It’s filled with such great details, it makes me weepy with gratitude that someone saved them from the dustbin.

A set of ocher silk sheets, her mother’s death, her electric bike, the time her father was imprisoned in South Africa—Deborah Levy treats every morsel of her living autobiography (Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living, Real Estate) with equal aplomb. It’s like listening to someone’s mind. Minus the repetition. —Helena de Groot

***

I read three books this year that I’ll never forget. The first is The Dry Heart, by Natalia Ginzburg, a short book that has all the force of a mountainous novel. On the first page, the protagonist kills her husband; the remaining hundred or so are given to showing why this was an inevitable conclusion to their relationship. You probably won’t like any of the people in this book, but you won’t be able to look away from them. The second is Olga Tokarczuk’s Primeval and Other Times, one of the few books by the recent Nobel winner that we’ve got in English, about a mythical, timeless town; it turns out to be the story of just about everything, all leading up to and away from the horrors of World War II. The last is In Memory of Memory, an indescribable novel/critical work/essay collection thingie by Russian poet Maria Stepanova. It’s a long and luxurious meditation on how the past is ever present. It has a beautiful purple cover and nothing that resembles a plot. I’ll be reading it well into 2022. —Craig Morgan Teicher

***

Nothing I read this year had anything to do with anything, except for my perennial desire to read all about love, including bell hooks’s All about Love, which I took up in a tender bid to understand love’s most vexed manifestation, the couple. I read, at a clip, a trio of Natalia Ginzburg books: The Dry Heart, Happiness, as Such, and Family Lexicon. The latter begins with one of the best author’s prefaces in the history of apathetic mic drops: “In the writing of this book, I couldn’t bring myself to change the real names which seemed to me indissoluble from the real people. Perhaps someone will be unhappy to find themselves so, with his or her first and last name in a book. To this I have nothing to say.” Domenico Starnone’s 2017 novel Ties is, to me, couple canon, which is why I was so happy when Jhumpa Lahiri’s translation of his 2019 novel, Trust, about a couple haunted by a third, came out this fall. 

Conspicuously absent from too many books about couples are digressions on sex; I read The Right to Sex, by Amia Srinivasan, whose arguments about the shape-shifting capacities of desire I frenetically paraphrased to everyone I encountered, and then Sara Ahmed’s Complaint!, which is less concerned with the act itself, and more with the way institutional complaints about sexual abuse get stalled and deferred, or else taken up and reflected back onto the complainer, who thus risks being tainted by the negative qualities of the event complained about. Not everything I read was so thematically fixated, or even so continental. I picked up a novel about a white, very online American woman trying to differentiate herself from other white, very online American women, but I didn’t finish that. —Maya Binyam

***

D.A. Miller’s  Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style is a dazzling close reading of Austen’s prose style that is also an obsessive mirroring of it. I love fan fiction; this is fan criticism. Miller quotes Barthes: “Whatever its sophistication, style has always something crude about it.” Indeed, the whole book, which is also about Miller being gay and Austen being unmarried, is “a bit much,” just like the clothes I most covet—that’s why it’s so good. Analyzing a jewelry-shopping scene in Sense and Sensibility:

As the figurative manufactory of the brilliant, the sparkling, the precious, the lapidary, the engraved … the jewelry shop must be the natural mise-en-abîme of Austen Style… Simultaneously determined by narrative thematics and the course of stylistic reflection, the shop situates a collision between the claims of the literal gem, a properly functional item … and those of the figurative gem, an eminently aesthetic thing whose social destination is vague, mysterious, trifling, troublesome.

Miller’s argument is too intricate to intimate here, but this book is really for anyone who loves language (especially the thesaurus-addicted, adjective-infested, alliterative, “bad” kind you’re not supposed to like); or mean girls; or sparkling, precious, perfect diamonds.

Three more well-styled books:

Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: Cavell writes with a grace and care appropriate to the subject of his chosen genre (the subtitular Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage), which is romantic love: a special kind of love that is crafted, most of all, through conversation. So he speaks with us about how he loves the films he does, i.e., how best to write and think about and with them. Like a good boyfriend, he steers us through his argument with a steady hand. I most liked his descriptions of these movies’ mythic personalities—Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Hepburn—and how the aura of each changes the way the camera sees a scene.

Guys like Yukio Mishima because of the politics-and-violence demons they struggle with, but the pathologies that take center stage in Star, a lesser-known novella of his translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett, are more for girls. This book is preoccupied with describing the physiognomies and facial expressions of more or less beautiful men and women, and how being more or less beautiful mars their personalities forever. There are also good descriptions of wearing clothes, and lines of sight.

Eyes, countless as the gravel at a shrine, pressed in all around me. They found their center—my image coalesced. In that moment, dressed as a yakuza, I became a sparkling apparition, like a scepter thrust against the sky.

Mishima’s simplicity and precision are admirable; his writing is less “cinematic” than like a detailed script (as befits his sociopathic movie star protagonist). But what makes the book fun are the bouts of bad figurative language to which our narcissistic narrator is given, especially in his most main-character moments: 

I like to have a mint before a kissing scene… I assumed a stoic air, knotted my tie, rolled up my sleeves, and shook a few mints into my palm. Against my skin, these prosaic pellets felt like currency, little symbols of the kisses I relied on for my livelihood.

Jane Unrue’s Life of a Star, conversely, features a hyperfeminine hysteric suffering/enjoying delusions of grandeur. The story is structured like a creepy hedge maze and proceeds in a strange, vacillating fashion: some pages are nearly blank, some are painstakingly covered.

When I am not engaged in matching gazes with the gentleman on horseback posing proudly at the foot of his estate, or with the praying servant boy illuminated by a painted glow of holy-looking light, or with the tiny waxen likenesses in boxy gilt-edged frames, I often find that I am exiting the Gallery of Art and veering toward the little bridge that signals that the northern pathway through the Public Garden is about to take me in the direction of that fountain on so many seemingly ordinary afternoons.

The protagonist herself, what’s happening to her—the plot—vanishes into this baroque, perversely disordered prose, which is like a schizophrenic daydream of what language could be. The effect is astonishing; no one writes like Unrue! (I also like The House and Love Hotel.)  —Olivia Kan-Sperling

***

“He understood the word transitional to refer to more than the seasons: for a year he’d live in a transitional time,” writes Wolfgang Hilbig of his directionless East German narrator in The Interim, newly translated into English by Isabel Fargo Cole. Like Hilbig’s C., with his propensity for loitering in train stations, I found myself drawn in 2021 to the idea of the transitional, the fractured, the in-between. The books I liked best this year shared a similar sensibility, like Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day (translated by Deborah Smith), with its overlapping timelines set in a Seoul plagued by frequent blackouts, or Nona Fernández’s The Twilight Zone (translated by Natasha Wimmer), which blurs fact, fiction, and references to pop culture phenomena in order to portray post-Pinochet Chile and the liminal space that is life lived under a dictator.

I loved books in which forms collided, like Cheswayo Mphanza’s poetry of ekphrasis in The Rinehart Frames, or Ann Quin’s sinister, experimental 1966 novel of a love triangle, Three. The essays in Rachel Kushner’s The Hard Crowd, on subjects as varied as motorcycles, postwar German poets, and prison abolition, fascinated me, as did Lauren Elkin’s No. 91 / 92: A Diary of a Year on the Bus, a book literally written in the in-between space of a Parisian bus commute. The strange, off-kilter humor and surreal sensibility of Moon Bo Young’s poetry collection Pillar of Books (translated by Hedgie Choi) thrilled me, as did Anne Serre’s novel of a love affair, The Beginners (translated by Mark Hutchinson), with its sly observations on both writing and the heart. And Teju Cole’s Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time offered new insights into what a photograph can accomplish that a paragraph can’t—and vice versa. —Rhian Sasseen

***

This year I’ve been reading a lot of Annie Ernaux, on whom no scrap of experience seems ever to have been wasted, and Gayl Jones, who speaks in many voices yet whose singular virtuosity marks them all. I could (and perhaps should) reread Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights every year that remains to me. The book I found most useful was Patricia Highsmith’s Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. The boldest and most unsettling was Percival Everett’s comic novel about lynching, The Trees (though my current favorite of his is Glyph). Then there were the books that moved me in ways I absolutely didn’t anticipate, like historian Joanna Bourke’s Loving Animals: On Bestiality, Zoophilia, and Post-Human Love (full of odd insights about language, autonomy, damage, pleasure), or French anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s weirdly delightful account of being mauled by a bear (translated by Sophie R. Lewis as In the Eye of the Wild), or Niki de Saint Phalle’s small, handwritten Mon Secret, written in her sixties about her abuse as a child and its aftermath. Or The Devil’s Treasure, a zine-like concoction in which Mary Gaitskill intersperses pieces of her older and current fiction and nonfiction and, through and alongside these texts, grapples with the more profound and harrowing questions writers encounter. “It was not about words,” she writes at one point, “it was too big for words and did not care about words. But because I am a person I needed words; I needed form.” —Lidija Haas

***

Early in the year, I treated myself to Bette Howland’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, a collection of stories I’d been meaning to read since I first encountered her writing in the magazine A Public Space. Like the Chicago sky, as Howland describes it, her stories are “full of gloom, but here and there [is] a splinter, a gleam.” The gleam is often Howland’s sense of humor, and the way the narrator addresses the reader like another member of her comfortingly messy extended family. New to me was the novella that closes the book and gives it its title, a tale that brings mythic gravitas to all the stories that precede it. More recently, I started reading my mother’s copy of Pachinko—a full-on Sweeping Family Saga of a Korean immigrant family in Japan—and finished a library copy, marveling all along at Min Jin Lee’s uncompromisingly democratic approach to fiction, the beauty and precision of her prose, and my own ignorance of history. I balanced this epic with Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett’s slim collection of prose about a woman living alone in an ancient cottage. Pond is funny, meditative and tender yet sharp as ice, and utterly delightful. I will never again take a kitchen appliance for granted thanks to Bennett. All of these books, I think, recognize a kind of unfulfilled human homing instinct, a desire for a specific place where we can feel right. That may not exist, but in the new year, may we all find books that bring us closer. —Jane Breakell

 

Craig Morgan-Teicher’s reading log.

Long Night Moon

In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon.

Harald Sohlberg. Månesskinn (Moonlight), 1907. Photo © O. Vaering, Norway

The birds have gone. Off to pull worms from softer earth, drawn by the magnetic force alerting them each year to leave. Their shadows slid across the fields, reflections shivered over the dark surfaces of rivers and ponds. Each month has flown away, leaving a year’s worth of shadows and reflections on the surface of the mind. We’ve landed in December. Night is at its longest now.

During one of these cold, endless nights not long ago, I woke up in the threes. What had roused me from sleep, I don’t know. A car alarm, a thud from the apartment above, whatever nameless summoner draws us on certain nights from dreams into the waking dark. The edges of the bureau dissolved into the wall, the mirror angled back the streetlamp’s light entering through the window, a serpent-tongue plant on the desk looked like an octopus diving in the deep. A hunchback appeared where there’d been a jacket on the chair; the spines of all the books were blank. Then the monsters arrived. In Japanese folklore, a menacing creature called umibōzu rises suddenly from calm, fair-weather seas, smashing ships and drowning sailors. No high wind precedes it, no foreboding churn or thunder in the distance. It erupts, this deadly spirit made of shadow, tentacled, smooth-headed, saucer-eyed.

Is that vague pain on my right side an organ rotting? Will I never be good at the one thing I want to be good at? Are we teetering toward our own extinction? On and deeper, darker, worse. You’ve had nights like this, too, when in the still and shadowed room the clawed parts stir, rise, give reminders of your every flaw and fear. Cringing in the dim, with hours left till sunrise. The scalding flash of tasks undone, the punch of regret, the swallowing void of opportunities missed, the yellow sour-tongued lick of guilt, the quarrels unresolved despite so many one-sided rehearsals. On certain licoricey nights, a signal is ignited that begins the parade of our malignancies. They torment us, bash their pots and pans, blow their mournful horns, stomp and thrash, or worse, in silence, drag us down into their pits. Lurking even lower, feeding these smaller nighttime demons, lives dense-shadowed shame. “Night is their kingdom,” Novica Tadić writes in a poem called “Dark Parts.” “They stay where they are / in our chests, / murmuring in our hearts.” There’s a night inside us, in the heart’s synchronized pulses, and now and then we’re offered entry to the pooling place where it lives.

Then the morning came, as mornings do. The dark saturated into a deep blue that right-side-outed to a gray the moon retreated into. Out the window, leaves still clung to branches of the sycamore, a ragged few. Inside, the desk regained its edges. Forms reformed. Red jacket on the chair. Titles on spines. The dark clawed creatures slunk back in their holes, as I looked around, scrape-eyed, relieved to be delivered into day.

I have felt, on mornings after sleepless hours aggressed by failures, fears, perversities, depravities, that my perspective had been skewed in the night. The sun rises, the world reassembles, and I curse the twisting dark. But it’s the sun’s light, insistent, interrogatory, that tricks us into believing in the knowable and solid. In those long nights, perspective is not skewed, but opened wider. The moon’s silver quiet light allows for these encounters with the parts of ourselves that hide in caves, the banished parts. The moon knows: we need to see.

“Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty,” Jun’ichirō Tanizaki writes in his essay “In Praise of Shadows.” What cannot be fully seen offers “a moment of mystery … of trance,” stepping out of the world of jackets and chairs and dropping into a duskier range of possibility. Frightening, sure, and uncomfortable—as most worthwhile things are—to be reawakened to shame. It’s seeded in us when we’re small, before language, and nestles in the same deep snarl as fear. Near shame’s tangled root lies the fear that our true monstrosity will be found out, and we’ll be flung from the human scene into some iced and all-dark realm without love or comfort. “Shame on you” goes the phrase, the fecal smearing, stinking and repugnant. More: shame in you, in me, in all of us, and the moon can coax it out with its magnetic light, gentle and enveloping. Otherwise that shadow eats you from the inside out.

In one telling of the umibōzu story, the spirit rises from the waves, towers over a sailor and asks, “Am I terrifying?” The sailor replies, “I find nothing as terrifying as trying to make my way in this world.” The umibōzu vanishes. It’s a savvy answer. The sailor acknowledges the creature, does not deny its horror, and states that there are greater fears. Know the frightening thing, look it in the eye. It’s not gone but reabsorbed, less inclined to swallow you whole. Your shadows are as much a part of you as your jawbone or your laugh. Like the moon itself, we’re half lit, the other side in darkness. As the poet Alejandra Pizarnik writes, “It’s night inside of you. Soon you’ll witness the rearing up of the brave animal that you are. Heart of night: I ask you to speak.”

What does the heart of night have to say? It dares you to enter its perilous uncertainty. I used to fear that below the shadows were more shadows, a dark so dense its gravity, at some point, would grow inescapable. (It was for Pizarnik, who swallowed a handful of Seconal, a pill to treat insomnia, and went to sleep forever.) But the moon opens the night jar of the heart and inside, beneath the layers of fear and shame, lives another form of light. It does not glow like moonlight and it does not shine like sunlight. It is like no light any of us have seen with our eyes, a light like bells. When the moon draws out the shadows it can guide us to this light in the darkest center, in every heart pulse and in every pause that breaks the eternity of a sleepless night. There it is, this light, and it is—can I say it? Why this shame? This light, brave animal, can I say it? It’s love.

 

Nina MacLaughlin is a writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her most recent book is Summer Solstice. Her previous columns for the Daily are Winter Solstice, Sky Gazing, Summer Solstice, Senses of Dawn, and Novemberance.

Two Poems

Illustration by Anna Bak-Kvapil

 

Henry Hudson

Wood is a masculine substance.
Witness the Arts and Crafts movement,
the men at the helm of it.
Witness, for that matter, this room:
Oak floor, oak walls, oaken ceiling.
The air-conditioning grate ersatz oak.
The slats of the ceiling fan oak veneer.
The table I write on, particleboard
with no pretense to oak, oak’s sad cousin.
And the craftsman-style light fixtures, triangles,
right angles, dreamed up in the minds of geometers.
What does geometry illuminate?
I’m the sad cousin of a mind.

The Arts and Crafts men were reacting
against Victorian furbelows, the ornaments of empire,
or, as they might have said, civilization.
Still, this room is only the sad cousin of nature.
It has its smoke alarm, its watercooler,
its green exit sign (a threat, not an invitation),
its lectern, its monumental fireplace of unpolished granite,
its coffeemaker. Out the west-facing window
I see, flat and small as a playing card,
the platinum slice of river, and beyond,
the wiry cliffs of the Palisades. The sun is setting,
pronounces Henry Hudson, eternally facing west,
bobbling on the deck of the Halve Maen.

 

A Collection

A scarlet tin star bursts its compartment
in the display case.

One Buddha coexists
with a brass Egyptian cat.

Another is dwarfed by a brass-capped test tube
which might be a soul-body metaphor.

No collection can keep honest
without a pocket watch.

How flexibly the several thick white hairs
lean in their compartment.

From the collector’s head
or a cat’s face? An ivory skull,

an ivory skull, an ivory skull, an ivory skull—
they’d make nice earrings.

A tanned rose, once fresh.
Oh, there are two pocket watches.

A possible third bends its sheen
away from the curious and backs into the gloom.

 

Kathleen Ossip is the author of July, The Do-Over, and The Cold War.

By Your Name

In her monthly column Notes from Paris, Madeleine Schwartz records some unexpected aspects of everyday life in France.

Photo: Madeleine Schwartz

Not long after I moved to Paris from the United States, in 2020, I began to hear reports of women disappearing. It happened at the bank, at the doctor’s office, when they were picking their children up from school. They were there and, suddenly, they’d been erased.

In France, women who marry do not legally relinquish their maiden names, as many do in the United States, but they may choose to add a husband’s surname as a second nom d’usage. The trouble is that even someone with no intention of taking her husband’s name can have it imposed on her. She might be living her life normally one day, and then, after registering a marriage, find herself cut off from her previous civic persona.

I heard these stories from friends and acquaintances, women in tense divorce negotiations unable to travel with their children, or access their medical records, all because of seemingly minor problems with their paperwork. To me, a half-American, half-French person who has spent most of my life in New York City, something about these incidents sounded alien. They reinforced a feeling I have often had since arriving in Paris, where much of my family lives: as if I’ve opened the door to a long-abandoned room, where everything looks jumbled, and looks all the stranger for my expectation that I’ll find it familiar. I couldn’t be sure whether the fact that so many women were confiding such stories was a sign of their ubiquity, or reflected something about me. Perhaps people chose to tell me in particular, considering me just fluent enough to understand and just foreign enough to be sympathetic. Curious and alarmed, I decided to start collecting these accounts, in the hope that approaching them as a reporter might help me understand them, and France, a little better.

Sure enough, I found that these seemingly bizarre experiences were rather common. One woman wrote to me about what happened when she notified the national health service, the Sécurité sociale, that she was married: “A few days later, they sent me a new card, even though I didn’t ask for one, with my husband’s name on it. I refused, I explained that I had kept my name, but they didn’t want to know. They told me that I would have to take my husband’s name.” The woman who handled her complaint said, “If we could choose, it would be too easy.”

When Anne Pruvost, who lives just south of Paris, arrived at the hospital to give birth, her water had broken and the fetus appeared to be in distress. The staff couldn’t find her medical records, which her doctors needed to ensure that Pruvost, who is epileptic, would not have a seizure. The records turned out to have been filed under her husband’s name, which she does not use. Pruvost, who is trained as an attorney, told the hospital that her right not to have her husband’s name forced on her had been enshrined in law since the seventies. “Madame, this is a serious establishment!” a member of the staff responded. “We don’t just joke around here.”

These restrictive and outdated practices can cause a host of problems, according to the lawyers I’ve spoken with. While some women have a name that’s not theirs foisted on them without their consent, the lawyer Sophie Soubiran told me, others may be stripped of their married name after divorce, if an ex-husband decides to revoke their right to use “his” name. The problems are especially acute for women with children. Pruvost told me that she had given her children both her own and her husband’s last names, yet often found them listed in official documents with only the latter, which led to complications with the administrative system that runs family welfare. People sometimes accuse her of having the wrong ID herself because she doesn’t share a name with her husband. She is now accustomed to carrying additional paperwork with her at all times, in case she needs to prove that her children are in fact hers.

Some of the consequences of all this are simply bureaucratic nuisances. Life in France often feels like one long bureaucratic nuisance. Others, however, entail grave threats to the personal safety of women and their children. Charlotte (here I’ll mention that many of the women I spoke to for this column did not want me to use their last names if I quoted them, citing the possible reaction of an ex) had an order of protection against the father of her twin daughters. When the girls were eleven months old, he beat her so badly that she ended up in the hospital. After their separation, the court ordered that Charlotte and her ex (who had visitation rights) hand off the children in the presence of a police officer. Their father used these occasions to exert whatever power he could. He withheld the girls’ passports for months, acting warmly toward the police all the while. When Charlotte finally retrieved the passports and tried to take her daughters on a holiday abroad, an airport official, seeing their names, said he would have to call the father for permission to travel. He relented only when the girls began to cry.

The issue of her children’s last names plagues Charlotte. Just recently, she was called into her daughters’ school. She had enrolled them under her ex’s last name and her own, but her ex had systematically crossed hers off their papers. What angers Charlotte the most is that her ex will soon marry, and his new wife may take his name, in which case she would be able to take the children anywhere, no questions asked—even though he does not have custody.

Photo: Madeleine Schwartz

Living here, I’m constantly reminded of how much France provides for women that the United States does not: a functional, if creaky, welfare system; guaranteed childcare and maternity leave. The buildings themselves call for “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”—you can’t walk more than a few blocks in Paris without seeing the slogan emblazoned on some government institution or other. Close-up, however, the picture looks very different. Though statistics only say so much, I’ll note that in this year’s Global Gender Gap Report put out by the World Economic Forum, France is tied for first place with twenty-five other countries with regard to women’s educational achievement. Yet you have to scan to number 58 to find the country listed in the category “Economic Participation and Opportunity,” and to number 115 when it comes to the wage gap.

Ophélie Latil, whose feminist advocacy organization Georgette Sand fights for the visibility of women in the public sphere, recently launched a petition against the erasure of women’s identities in financial and administrative documents. She notes that women have only been able to give their last name to their children since 2005. In 2013, Christiane Taubira, then François Hollande’s minister of justice, tried to pass a law that would give a newborn child the last names of both parents, as is done in Spain and Portugal. When the bill failed to pass, the government said that a double last name would automatically be put in place for the child of any couple in a disagreement. This workaround is an acknowledgement of the problem, as Marine Gatineau Dupré, a founder of the organization Porte Mon Nom (Bear My Name), points out. But it is not a solution. In order for this supposedly automatic process to begin, a parent must file a declaration of disagreement at the mayor’s office. How many pregnant women in difficult relationships, Gatineau Dupré asks, would have the time and wherewithal to do so?

To change a child’s name in France, you need to prove “legitimate interest”—a designation so restrictive that it has been brought to a UN Committee on Gender Equality and condemned by the European Court of Human Rights. (The court also recently found in favor of a Spanish woman who alleged discrimination in being forced to give her child the father’s name ahead of her own.) The process is cumbersome and can take years. Both parents must consent to the change, even if only one has custody of and cares for the child.

Mere bureaucratic side effects? Cultural difference? I don’t know if there’s really a distinction—or whether arcane laws always create their own customs. Gatineau Dupré sent me a poem by Catherine Pilade, a member of her group, that attempts an explanation. I have translated two of the stanzas loosely, in an effort to preserve the rhyme as far as possible:

Am I wrong to feel so revolted
By the words of one once beloved?
That I should have to ask a man, in 2021,
That my name be given to my sons?

I am learning about feminism at my expense
I walk the path of those who did not accept this difference
Just as, in French, the masculine prevails over the feminine
Your father overruled the decision of your naming.

 

Madeleine Schwartz, an advisory editor at The Paris Review, is a writer based in Paris, where she teaches journalism at Sciences Po.

Redux: Naked Lightbulb

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.

In the seventies, Gary Indiana found himself swept up in the experimental film and theater scenes of West Germany and New York City. “When I performed I had—and this maybe had something to do with how much I drank—a quality of demonic abandon,” he recalls in his Art of Fiction interview in our Winter issue, in which he describes the influence of directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Schroeter on his novels. Of course, the page, the stage, and the screen have always been bedfellows. To celebrate these intimate relationships, we’re unlocking August Wilson’s Art of Theater interview, James Salter’s short story “The Cinema,” Charles Simic’s poem “Mystery Theater,” an excerpt from Claudia Rankine’s play Help, and a portfolio of work by Ken Lum inspired by TV.

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

Interview
August Wilson, The Art of Theater No. 14
Issue no. 153 (Winter 1999)

I don’t write for a production. I write for the page, just as I would with a poem. A play exists on the page even if no one ever reads it aloud. I don’t mean to underestimate a good production with actors embodying the characters, but depending on the readers’ imagination they may get more by reading the play than by seeing a weak production.

Fiction
The Cinema
By James Salter
Issue no. 49 (Summer 1970)

A performance was built up in layers, like a painting, that was his method, to start with this, add this, then this, and so forth. It expanded, became rich, developed depths and undercurrents. Then in the end they would cut it back, reduce it to half its size. That was what he meant by good acting.

Poetry
Mystery Theater
By Charles Simic
Issue no. 212 (Spring 2015)

Bald man smoking in bed,
Naked lightbulb over his head,

The shadow of his cigar
Next to him on the wall,

Its long ash about to fall
Into a pitch-dark fishbowl.

Play
An Excerpt from Help
By Claudia Rankine
Issue no. 235 (Winter 2020)

You’ve joined us here in our liminal space, a space neither here nor there,
a space full of imaginative possibilities,
a space we move through on our way to other places,

and I want to tell you how I came to have
brief conversations
with white men.

Art
Portraits
By Ken Lum
Issue no. 133 (Winter 1994)

The catalyst for this work happened to have been a moment in Germany in 1993 when I was watching a program on TV which was the American equivalent of Current Affair. The program was dubbed, so the voices didn’t always fit. A young boy was seen riding a bicycle but pointing frantically to somewhere outside the camera frame. He was mouthing words but nothing was audible. There was a sense of drama and anxiety which I found really interesting. I’m interested in how the viewer identifies with the problems presented in the picture.

 

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives.

Our Contributors’ Favorite Books of 2021

Bud Smith’s “To Read and Reread” fridge list.

Some Paris Review contributors—from across our print issues, our website, and our podcast—give us a peek into their reading habits.

I still got that list of books on my fridge that I’m working through (one of the first pictures on my Twitter). Made it a few years ago. Classics and famous books I hadn’t read yet. When I finish one I circle it on the list and whenever I wonder what to read next and feel stumped, I just walk over to the fridge. This year I read The Brothers Karamazov, which amazed me. It was hairy and funny and, as always with the books I love, not what I expected. Easily one of the best pieces of art added to the little thing called my life. I’d read other Dostoyevsky novels and didn’t connect with them on that same crazy level I felt connected to Brothers Karamazov. The copy I had was 776 pages and I couldn’t imagine cutting it down at all.

Right now I’m reading Malone Dies, the second novel in Beckett’s trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable). I’m halfway through and just astounded. Molloy was amazing, too, a very funny book, laugh so hard you cry… It reminded me a bit of The Sound and the Fury, when Jason Compson is chasing his niece around. In Part II of Molloy, it becomes a metafictional Smokey and the Bandit. I don’t want to give anything away, spoil anything for new readers of it. There’s a big payoff. All the things I’ve heard about Beckett, nobody ever told me how funny he is.

I also recently read Martha Grover’s new memoir, Sorry I Was Gone. Her work is killer. She’s got a part in there she wrote called “The Math Class,” and I’ve picked up the phone on more than a few occasions just to read that to people because I thought it would blow their mind. I taught it in some prose workshops I teach out of this apartment of mine. Martha Grover writes about her life in a conversational way that slips into these wild lucid-dream stretches of prose—she’s an artist like Tove Jansson or Lucia Berlin. I’d read anything she wrote about because the voice is so great. People should also check out her first two books, One More for the People and The End of My Career, both out from Perfect Day (a really great small press in Portland, Oregon).

I also just read Atticus Lish’s new novel, The War for Gloria, and thought it was great, so tough and smart and true, very personal. His first novel, Preparation for the Next Life, introduced me to a whole world of underground writing through presses like Tyrant Books, Two Dollar Radio, and many others that are gone now. But whenever I don’t feel like carrying around War and Peace, for fuck’s sake, I just go on the internet and look to see what the underground writers and presses are doing, that stuff always feels so immediate and powerful and raw, straight to the vein.

I was talking to an author the other day who was trying to find a publisher for their book of poems. They didn’t feel like they had any idea where they could send anymore—didn’t want to enter another university poetry contest after already spending an endless waterfall of submission fees. I told the poet what they should do is call around to bookstores and see if any of their local ones have a really great small press section, well curated and cared for. Just ask the person who runs the section, what are the small presses that are really moving the hearts of the people? Or even better than a phone call or email, go in to the store, talk face-to-face with the bookseller. They’ll pull their favorite book that nobody is reviewing yet right off the shelf. Buy that book from the store. I’m telling you. Somebody looks you in the eye and says, This right here is incredible (and they’re probably shaking it at you), this will move you, it’s from this artist who is important to me, from this publisher that is important to me. That’s worth so much more than what the New York Times Book Review says or doesn’t say. You’ll find the best books of your life that way.

Took me a while to learn what I even liked in contemporary writing. Like most people, I just had that stuff we were assigned in high school English, and that was all right, but if it did speak to me, it didn’t feel like there was a chance I could ever speak back to it. I got a little bit away from school and started reading classics that were just classics because people, centuries later, still couldn’t shut up about how incredible The Brothers Karamazov is. And then on top of that, a steady diet of photocopied zines and handmade chapbooks, and small press novels I had recommended to me, face to face, because I went looking and asking. I’m thankful anybody takes the time to suggest anything to me. I can’t get to it all, but if a couple people shake it at me, I have no choice but to add it to my fridge list and eventually let my life be changed by it.

These days I read a lot of great work online, of course. I’m looking forward to December 31, when Brian Alan Ellis begins serializing his new novel, Hobbies You Enjoy, on his Instagram (@hobbiesyouenjoy). Every day, a new post from the novel. I’ve already read Hobbies You Enjoy; it’s hilarious, and deep, and moving—a special thing. Keep an eye out. —Bud Smith

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I found myself pushing Eyal Press’s book Dirty Work on people this year, because it gets at something broken about our political culture. Unfortunately this something is broken in a way that is all too convenient for America’s elite, on the left as well as the right, so it will be hard to fix. With in-depth interviews, Press tells the stories of people who do America’s dirty work and bear the scars on their bodies and souls: prison guards, drone operators, border patrol agents, slaughterhouse workers, oil rig roustabouts. Some of these jobs come with a risk of maiming and death; others, such as drone operation, do not. But all come with a risk of what sociologists call moral injury: the people who hold the jobs often have to compromise the values of their core self. In doing so, they take on stigma. They become seen, and sometimes come to see themselves, as morally reprehensible, undeserving of sympathy—which lets the rest of us off the hook. In other words, part of the job description is to bear the shame of doing what the rest of us, as a society, have decided that we want but that we don’t want to be stained with. To imprison large numbers of people while spending as little as possible. To keep the price of meat low. To project American power abroad without much concern for the deaths of innocent bystanders. The people who do the dirty work are paid—not very well, usually—to be broken. To have the nightmares. To be the ones who have to try to numb themselves by drinking and using. You might ask: But what kind of person would take a job as a prison guard, anyway? Press’s answer: someone who doesn’t have a better economic option. In our society, economic need is a kind of force. Shaming, Press suggests, is a way of covering our tracks. Dirty Work is heartbreaking, and I hope it triggers a reconception of personalized guilt as the result of a political and economic system.

I’m a member of the pandemic class of new birders, which means now I read bird books, and this year the best one I found was Jonathan Meiburg’s A Most Remarkable Creature. It’s about striated caracaras, which Charles Darwin observed stealing hats and compasses when he visited the Falkland Islands, where some of the birds still live today. As a rule, birds of prey are solitary and single-minded, interested in little but hunting. The striated caracara, however, is playful, curious, trusting, and open to new experiences. If you offer your keys, it will grab at them excitedly; from a collection of stuffed animals, it can learn to fetch Nemo and Piglet by name. Worldwide, only a few thousand survive, including fifty or sixty in Great Britain, descendants of a handful imported in the middle of the twentieth century by an eccentric millionaire enthusiast known as the Penguin King. The birds sound personable, and Meiburg’s digressive account of being smitten with them, and of traveling to Argentina, Chile, and Great Britain to meet them, and up the Rewa River and into the jungles of Guyana in search of the red-throated caracara, one of its relatives, impresses on the reader that the world is still, even now, full of marvels. —Caleb Crain

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Perhaps it’s because I have a tendency to read passively and allow myself simply to be immersed in the action of a story that George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain felt to me like a revelation. Saunders presents seven great Russian stories alongside essays exploring why they’re great and why, when reading them, we might feel what we feel. With the first story, Chekhov’s “In the Cart,” Saunders gives us a page of the text, then interrupts himself to discuss how the reader may react to what they’ve just read. He does this in simple terms: What do we know, having read the page, that we didn’t know before? What are we curious about? What are we expecting to happen next? Then he gives us the next page. And so on. It’s a risky, brilliant move. The idea is that close, intense attention to a story will inform our own writing, that some craft or instinct will be assimilated. Do I believe this? Maybe. Probably.

In any case, there was something thrilling about encountering Chekhov’s story in the company of another reader—and one as attentive as George Saunders—a page at a time. Saunders’s approach to thinking about all of the stories is usefully workmanlike, but he doesn’t forget the forces of strangeness, of mystery, of not knowing what things mean (see the astonishing fifth essay on Gogol).

The subtitle of the book is In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. A blurb notes: “the process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is as much a craft as it is a quality of openness and a willingness to see the world through new eyes.” In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shows us that the same can be said of reading.

Maybe it was finishing A Swim in a Pond in the Rain early in the year that led me to spend much of 2021 going back to books I have loved: The Ice Palace, by Tarjei Vesaas (translated by Elizabeth Rokkan); They Came Like Swallows, by William Maxwell; Where Reasons End, by Yiyun Li. Maybe I thought I would come away from these books with a new understanding of them and maybe I did, a little, I’m not sure. But I know that I felt more deeply how beautiful these books are and, in the end, how mysterious. —Chetna Maroo

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Recently I’ve been hopping among books of nonfiction, having trouble sticking with a novel. I reread Kafka’s diaries: “I don’t read him to read him, but rather to lie on his breast,” he wrote of Strindberg on May 4, 1915. “He holds me on his left arm like a child. I sit there like a man on a statue. Ten times I almost slip off, but at the eleventh attempt I sit there firmly, feel secure, and have a wide view.” Around the same time I was chomping through Michael Zantovsky’s biography of Václav Havel, in which I learned that Kafka’s un-banning by the Communists in 1963 might have precipitated the Prague Spring. The language of two new books of poems, Wendy Xu’s The Past and Geoffrey Nutter’s Giant Moth Perishes, really gripped me (not exactly nonfiction, perhaps?). Having just introduced my five-year-old to movie musicals, I was charmed and often amazed by Earl Hess and Pratibha Dabholkar’s Singin’ in the Rain: The Making of an American Masterpiece. And the other night I read the reissue of Lucille Clifton’s memoir, Generations. The book belongs to Clifton’s charismatic father, Samuel—he’s quoted so much he becomes a kind of second narrator. As a child he was cared for by his great-grandmother, Mammy Ca’line, who was captured in Africa as a child in 1822. Much of what she remembered she never told him, and a painful refrain is Ca’line’s refusal to put certain parts of her experience into words: “And I would ask her what it was like on the boat and she would just shake her head.” She shakes her head a number of times in Generations, and it’s the sense of facts withheld, gaps in the record, memories unspoken that made me feel this short book’s awful intensity. —Jana Prikryl

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This year, due to ongoing insomnia, I listened to a lot of books while trying to fall asleep. Some of them so many times I’d be embarrassed to know the actual number. Primarily these were old favorites, Samantha Irby’s We Are Never Meeting in Real Life and Wow, No Thank You, and R. Eric Thomas’s Here For It. What I have noticed, listening to these essay collections multiple times, is that with both authors, the humor is so delicious it almost distracts from how brilliant they are. I also loved listening to Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch and Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers. Beyond audiobooks encountered in the middle of the night, I thought Claire Vaye Watkins’s I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness was a masterpiece. So chaotic and feral and good. And based on early manuscripts I’ve had the pleasure of reading, I’m eagerly anticipating Gabrielle Civil’s the deja vu and Raquel Gutierrez’s Brown Neon. —Aisha Sabatini Sloan

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I always learn something new about black people from white people. No matter how much I observe myself and the other black people I know, I always find, reading a book like Pete Dexter’s Train, these intriguing dimensions of experience and language that I had not noticed, revealed from another dimension. It disturbs me. It delights me. Fan of Chester Himes that I am, I was fascinated by Dexter’s portrait of a malevolent caddy dispatcher, and by that character’s counsel to the black golf caddy, Train, that an inquisitive life is better with “something on his person.”

I read Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads and was shocked to find him dealing with the same themes I am trawling through in my latest book: liturgy and the Christian seasons and the problem of Christian moral duty, sinful guilt and redemption. I noticed on the cover that his name is in bigger type than the title, so it is kind of as if he is the marquee. The characters are almost types and the situations staged and the idealized debates and conversations perfunctorily academic. And yet I think that is a problem we are having in the country today: not enough Americans have been to a good college—a damn elitist thing to say, but it still seems right.

In the summer, my son who is sixteen turned me on to a song by Chicago rapper G Herbo called “Some Nights.” We were driving to Greensboro and I was trying to stay awake and I asked him why had he put on soporific cartoon music, my general critique of post-1996 hip-hop. But on the road from old Confederate Route 29 between Danville and Leesburg, I listened to Herbo’s two minutes on Swervo and was energized and transported to my youth. In his 128 bars, he echoed our attitudes of confrontation with police and the structural force they represented, and my prayer that my own sons won’t seek out the same confrontation. “What about the Opp?” The theme of dynamic maroon-like survival is enjambed in every single overstuffed line of his. “He’n een get thu process n this nigga’s snitchin.” Not much alliteration tops that. There are the plaintive, affective dimensions of the humble lyricist who bangs the introduction “Straight up out the trenches,” and the minimalist existentialism of these twenty words squished into eight bars: “While I’m out in public I think about leaving in a blink I throw all my shit in a hoodie.” I sent a text message to my youngest son connecting “Seen you in there wit you bop you know I gotta top for uh” to the history of the blues and bebop. —Lawrence Jackson