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on Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions by Alberto Manguel
Alberto Manguel lived in Toronto for 18 years until 2000 when he shipped himself, his partner Craig Stephenson, and more than 30,000 books to a medieval stone presbytery in the southwest of France. They resided there happily for 15 years until problems “I don’t wish to recall because they belong to the realm of sordid…
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on Heretics of Language, essays and reviews by Barry Schwabsky
“One of the characteristic symptoms of the spiritual condition of our age,” Charles Baudelaire wrote about Eugène Delacroix, is that “the arts aspire, if not to take one another’s place, at least reciprocally to lend one another new powers.” Barry Schwabsky, a poet who evolved into an incisive art critic (like Baudelaire and Peter Schjeldahl),…
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on History Titles: The Modoc War, Berlin 1936, and The Case of John Demjanjuk
The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age by Robert Aquinas McNally (Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press) Berlin 1936: Sixteen Days in August by Oliver Hilmes (Other Press) The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial by Lawrence Douglas (Princeton University Press) *…
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on Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats & Drugs by Martin Torgoff
Jack Kerouac was a junior at Columbia when he met Lester Young in 1943. Kerouac had started listening to jazz in Harlem clubs. “They shared a cab from the Village up to Minton’s Playhouse, the nightclub in the Hotel Cecil on 118th Street where the bebop revolution was percolating,” writes Martin Torgoff in Bop Apocalypse.…
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on The Stone Building and Other Places, stories by Aslı Erdoğan, translated by Sevinç Türkkan
On August 20, 2016, as Sevinç Türkkan worked on her English translation of The Stone Building and Other Places, its 49-year old author, Aslı Erdoğan, was arrested by the Turkish state police and charged with supporting a terrorist organization. She had been serving as an editorial advisor to a pro-Kurdish newspaper advocating for the rights…
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on Love, a novel by Hanne Ørstavik, translated by Martin Aitken
While reading Hanne Ørstavik’s cerebrally lissome novel Love, I was reminded of a question posed by Roland Barthes: “Why do our famous psychologists waste their time on contrived topics like Will, Attention, etc., instead of studying the only important thing in modern psychology: Mood?” A single inquisitive mood – not quite melancholy, not quite buoyant,…
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La Lumière Blanche
With CPR and drugs, the emergency room team revived my cousin Serge. Once a pulse was established, they applied shock paddles to restore an even rhythm. That morning Serge had thought he was coming down with the flu, his chest was congested. Finally around noon, he decided to leave his art gallery in the hands…
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on In Full Flight: A Story of Africa and Atonement by John Heminway
In 2010, John Heminway wrote a feature for the Financial Times entitled “A Legendary Flying Doctor’s Dark Secret.” The doctor was Anne Spoerry, renowned and respected for providing emergency medical care in Africa for more than 30 years until her death in Nairobi in 1999. Richard Leakey had praised her for saving “more lives than…
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on The Perfect Nanny, a novel by Leila Slimani, translated. by Sam Taylor
The following headline was recently aired on Boston TV news: “Police in Salinas, California said a 47-year old nanny was arrested after she allegedly was drunk while attempting to pick up a six-year old child from an elementary school.” It was reported that she drove there with a one-year old infant. Suspicious school employees stalled…
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on Improvement, a novel by Joan Silber (Counterpoint)
“I’m still more of a short story writer," Joan Silber remarked in a 2016 interview. “I move around somewhat quickly. I cover a lot of time in a short space. That gives a different sense of event.” Time sprints by in Improvement, her new novel, and events over time interlink with a click-shut finality. In…
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on Old Rendering Plant, a novel by Wolfgang Hilbig, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole
We like to say that the making of poetry and lyric prose is not dependent on a prior narrative and that no particular kind of experience is required for creativity. We see what occurs and then create new forms in order to newly present the world to ourselves. Nevertheless, prior narratives won’t die without a…
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on Being Here Is Everything: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker, by Marie Darrieussecq
In the years 1906 and 1907, Picasso painted “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” Matisse his “Blue Nude,” Klimt the “The Kiss,” and Kandinsky “Riding Couple.” Braque exhibited his “Viaduc à l’Estaque” at the Salon d’Autumne. Meanwhile in Worpswede in northern Germany, a 30-year old painter named Paula Modersohn-Becker fled to Paris on a February night without giving…
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on Orexia, poems by Lisa Russ Spaar
Lisa Russ Spaar’s seventh collection Orexia creates the aura of a world bound up in unrelieved tension so exquisitely balanced that it is beautiful. If the poem can be made, it may embody the balance as a sort of proof. Balance isn’t resolution. Uncertainty has a certain weight, so does a vision; the blunt or…
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on As Lie Is To Grin, a novel by Simeon Marsalis
Simeon Marsalis’ debut novel, As Lie Is To Grin, is told in the voice and writings of David, an African-American freshman at the University of Vermont in the fall of 2010. He makes an appointment to see a psychologist at school: “I felt like a boy in a man’s body. ‘I need help’ … I…