Sundress: What a Beautiful Shiny Word

Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

 

From The Old Man by the Sea by Domenico Starnone (Europa Editions), translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky:

Sundress: what a beautiful shiny word; my mother used to wear a light blue one that she sewed for herself. She made everything she wore with her own two hands, she was a dressmaker. For a few months in 1954, she even had a shop, which she called her butík. But she made more clothes for herself than for her clients, and she knew how to make herself look far more beautiful than any of the women who paid her to make them look good. Even when she had to go out to buy bread or fruit, she’d walk out of our low-income building looking like a rich movie actress, like a different mother entirely, whether she had on her winter coat with its astrakhan collar, or a pencil skirt, or a bell skirt, or her sundress. And maybe she actually was a different woman, that’s how I see her now anyway, my eyeglasses briny with the sea air, my nerves shot, cataracts clouding my sight. When she went in the water, she’d never go in deep and she always swam the breast stroke: her long neck extended, her chin held high, her mouth closed so as not to swallow the salt water, her small ears with their delicate lobes. She often lost things on the beach she considered precious, and when she started digging desperately in the sand, we children would always try and help.

From Roger Shattuck’s The Forbidden Experiment (NYRB Classics), originally published in 1980, a reconstruction of the nineteenth-century case of a “wild boy”:

This is a true story, as true as I can tell it. The story recounts an extraordinary life that was neither good nor evil nor conventionally heroic. The Wild Boy of Aveyron survived on the outer edges of humanity in a state of something like moral weightlessness. We have no need to pass judgment on him, only to take account of so remarkable a case. The appeal of the story lies in a rare combination of uncertainty and hope lodged in the events themselves, and in the way those events seem to touch our own lives.

 

From Kate Riley’s Ruth (Riverhead), a portion of which was previously adapted for The Paris Review:

Ruth knew she could not be entirely defective, because she loved Christmas. To have the trust of babies and animals; to delight in a God who made lady slippers and spotted toadstools; and to know with mind, body, and soul that God hung lower during the Christmas season: these were the qualifications required for humanity, and at least she managed one. 

 

From Mr. Ch’ing-Chih, one of three novellas collected in Kaori Lai’s Portraits in White (Columbia University Press), translated from the Chinese by Sylvia Li-chun Lin and Howard Goldblatt:

If cooked rice could be as abundant as the words he was learning, he would eat three big bowlfuls without a second thought, eat until he was full, full and contented. When his grandma, who couldn’t read, saw him writing on a sheet of paper, she reverently admonished him to never burn any paper with writing on it.

“Cherish Writing Pavilion, ever hear of it?” She picked up his exercise book and looked it over carefully, as if it included written incantations. “Don’t throw this away. When the junk collector comes, we’ll ask him to send it to Cherish Writing Pavilion.”

“What do we send it there for?” he asked.

“To be burned like gilded spirit paper.”

“Can even writing be offered to deities?”

She responded with a self-assured nod. “Grandma will go with Kiyoshi to worship the Patriarch of Literary Study when he has an exam.”

 

From “Pride,” in Anne Waldman’s new book of poetry, Mesopotopia (Penguin):

          Where to run?

                     Practice of dolls and their cosmos 

For dark love of self

Goddesses, I the courtyard

How much more than I, the courtyard

Carry a voice and will not move …