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The Daily

May 18, 2021
Arts & Culture

The Horror of Good Behaviour

By Amy Gentry

Molly Keane. Photo: © D. Donahue.

“All my life so far I have done everything for the best reasons and the most unselfish motives,” says Aroon St. Charles, the tall, bosomy antiheroine of Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour, minutes after killing her mother. “I have lived for the people dearest to me, and I am at a loss to know why their lives have been at times so perplexingly unhappy.”

As a narrator, Aroon is a monster of repression, revealing things she herself does not know on every page. Take this first scene, in which she—well, murder is such an ugly word. Let’s just say the book opens with Aroon speeding her invalid mother’s twilight years to their inevitable conclusion with the aid of an indigestible rabbit mousse. When, afterward, she orders the housekeeper to save the leftovers for lunch—mustn’t waste!—we know, even if she doesn’t, that this act of symbolic cannibalism is meant to perfect her revenge. But revenge for what? Read More
May 18, 2021
Redux

Redux: The Vagaries of Taste Might Swerve

By The Paris Review

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.

Ishamel Reed.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re in the library stacks. Read on for Ishmael Reed’s Art of Poetry interview, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s short story “Two Sisters,” and Tom Disch’s poem “The Library of America.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off.

Ishmael Reed, The Art of Poetry No. 100
Issue no. 218 (Fall 2016)

When I came back to Buffalo, I dropped out of school. I was seventeen. My plan was to stay home and read plays but my mother said, You’ve got to get a job, so I worked at a library and that’s where I first read James Baldwin. I think it was Notes of a Native Son. It stopped me cold. I had never seen a black guy that could do this. When I was a child, I thought literature was written by lords and knights and stuff. You know, these people living in these great estates wearing beautiful clothes. Baldwin showed me something different. Then I discovered Dante, man. That really turned me on. My parents thought I had lost my mind.

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May 17, 2021
First Person

America’s Dead Souls

By Molly McGhee

Engraving from Gustave Doré’s 1861 illustration of Dante’s Inferno. Scanned, postprocessed, and uploaded by Karl Hahn. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

There is money to be made off the dead. Nikolai Gogol knew this when he wrote his masterpiece, Dead Souls, the story of a middle-aged man named Chichikov who buys dead serfs with the intention of mortgaging their souls for a profit. I chose to read this novel at the start of quarantine, when everyone else was reading War and Peace. I had already read War and Peace. It ruined my life. I wasn’t keen to have my life ruined again. I wanted some other grand, sweeping Russian epic to fill my time.

I wish I would have been more cautious in picking a book. Every time I read one of the Russian greats my life transforms into an eerie mirror of the work. I had already experienced a year of obsessive relationship analysis (Anna Karenina), six months beneath the thumb of a powerful boss whose political maneuvers were far reaching and whose requests quickly spiraled into the hellish and fantastic (The Master and Margarita), a week on the run with a depressive whose obsessive psychosis ended in a prison sentence (Crime and Punishment), a much-too-long friendship with a man whose preoccupations with his father were borderline incestuous (Fathers and Sons), and, after I finished War and Peace, years stuck in sprawling disillusionment that, unlike many characters in the novel, I have yet to overcome. Had I not learned my lesson? I wasn’t keen to fall into the trap of Russian literature again.

But, I reasoned, what could possibly happen to me while I read about Chichikov? Good, bumbling Chichikov, who purchased dead serfs in order to turn a profit. A man whose harmless scheming and bribing promised quick prosperity. We were in the middle of a pandemic. What relevance could this bourgeois con artist possibly have to my life? Read More
May 14, 2021
This Week’s Reading

Staff Picks: Jungles, Journeys, and Jealousy

By The Paris Review

Rachel Cusk. Photo: Siemon Scamell-Katz.

There is a Joni Mitchell live album called Miles of Aisles, recorded while she was on tour in 1974. Caught on the recording is her response—in a slightly Dylan-esque posture—to the crowd’s wild chanting for a particular number. She complains that other artists don’t have to deal with this kind of crap: “Nobody ever said to Van Gogh, ‘Paint a Starry Night again, man!’ ” I think she’s wrong, though. The anticipation for Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Second Place, has been as close to feverish as we get in certain circles, and it is in part because Cusk answers the call to “paint a Starry Night again” so well. Much has been said in the past weeks about what we particularly want from Cusk and why. In fact, if you are a person who reads The Paris Review’s staff picks, you have likely read two or three meditations on the subject. Whatever it is we want from her, Second Place delivers in spades. And with the dynamism of a truly great writer, the novel seems written just for the spring of 2021 but was actually inspired by the memoir of Mabel Dodge Luhan, a patron who played host to D. H. Lawrence in Taos, New Mexico, in 1932. In Second Place, it is late spring on the English coast. Our narrator and her second husband invite a world-famous artist—now out of fashion—to use the second place on their property. He ends up arriving with a youngish woman of no defined role or position. If the opposition of these two relationships didn’t create enough refraction, our narrator’s daughter from a previous marriage and the daughter’s boyfriend come to stay as well. Cusk gives us three “stages of women,” leaving hints of female truths I’ll carry for the rest of my life, and no small amount of lush, threatening scenery. The Starry Night, I learned recently, was not universally loved at first. Only with the dedication of Van Gogh’s sister-in-law Jo van Gogh-Bonger, who peddled his troubled genius to the world, did we end up with refrigerator magnets and mouse pads. Although it’s in every job description, creativity is hard to see and harder to live with. We are taught to want it and fear it in equal measure. Among many other things, Cusk shows us this in Second Place, and I hope she never does it quite the same way again. —Julia Berick Read More
May 14, 2021
Eat Your Words

Cooking with Sigrid Undset

By Valerie Stivers

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for virtual Undset-themed drinks on Friday, June 4, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. For more details, visit our events page, or scroll down to the bottom of the article.

Photo: Erica MacLean.

The most common food in the medieval historical romance Kristin Lavransdatter, written by the Norwegian author Sigrid Undset (1882–1949), is oatmeal porridge, a dish I made elaborate perfection of during my children’s early years. The porridges in Undset’s book are good and nourishing but plain (though in one scene, a young Kristin eats hers with “thick cream” off her father’s spoon). Mine, on the other hand, were ridiculous. I blitzed half the oats in the baby-food blender before cooking. I tried different combinations of milk and water. I made fruit puree swirls. I had a two-year-old daughter, an infant son, and an office job, to which I fled every day in great relief to get a moment to myself and then struggled not to leak breast milk on my work clothes. My husband was unhelpful with the children. Childless people found my travails boring and embarrassing. I’d never thought being a woman mattered much, but suddenly it seemed to. I was miserable, and perfecting the oatmeal made me feel better.

Kristin Lavransdatter, which unfolds over the course of three volumes—The Wreath, The Wife, and The Cross—is a woman’s story. It’s also a gripping read and an impressive feat of historical re-creation, which helped Undset win the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature. The epic’s structural and textual allusions are so numerous that, as the professor Sherrill Harbison dryly remarks in her introduction to The Cross, they “show no signs of being exhausted by scholars.” (She also—correctly, I feel—thinks the book is overlooked.) When writing Kristin Lavransdatter, Undset drew from sagas, ballads, Scandinavian oral tradition, and medieval texts of all types, notably the allegory Le roman de la rose, to tell the tale of a woman in the early fourteenth century, a time when society was changing for women, who takes her newish right to consent to her own marriage a step further and demands her own choice of husband. Not accidentally, Undset was writing in the 1920s, another time of rapid social change. Read More
May 13, 2021
Arts & Culture

Know Thyself

By Meghan O’Gieblyn

Frank Markham Skipworth, The Mirror, 1911. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

When I was first beginning to teach, in graduate school, a friend of mine with more experience in the classroom told me about a study she’d come across. I can’t say whether this study actually exists. I’ve never looked for it, and it strikes me now as one of those well-traveled anecdotes that’s been passed from hand to hand, accumulating more baggage along the way, like blockchain. The study, she told me, found that students who were asked to evaluate their instructor five seconds into the first class of the semester gave more or less the same rating as they did at the end of the term. The instructor who was liked upon entering the room was still liked three months later. The instructor who appeared severe had not managed to change any minds.

Despite its implicit fatalism, my friend claimed that she found the study’s conclusion solacing. Once you accepted that your character was immediately transparent, there was no pressure to keep up appearances. If I felt nervous about how I was coming off throughout the semester, she advised, I should remember that the students’ minds were already made up. They’d had me figured out before I’d placed my supplies on the desk the first day, and nothing I could do would change it.

This is among the more deranged bits of advice I have received in my life. More than once, her words have popped into my head as I’ve approached a lectern or shaken someone’s hand for the first time. What is it that others discern so conclusively in those five seconds? It seemed to me a parable about the limits of self-knowledge. We spend our lives trying to figure out what kind of person we are, but others can understand us, in our entirety, at a glance. Read More