More books completed!
Beowulf: A New Translation; translated by Maria Dahvana Headley, read by JD Jackson.
I thought this book was pretty cool. Recommended to me by a reader for its (prolific) use of the word bro, Headley’s translation (and JD Jackson’s reading) is brash and yet somehow hospitable. It brought me in; it kept me interested; it energized me. I didn’t know the story beforehand: At a high level, it is about a Swedish (Geat) hero who kills a monster, is almost killed by its mother, and [spoiler alert] later dies in an epic fight with a dragon. Transcribed from oral tradition in around 1000 AD, the poem exists today in a single (partially burned) manuscript. Headley’s translation made it accessible in ways I would not have expected, and I blasted through the four-ish-hour reading in a couple of days.
In Praise of Shadows; by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker.
I believe I have read this book twice before, and at one point I owned two copies of it; I have since given one away. Its content is somewhere in between The Unknown Craftsman and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, but I found its approach more honest, in the sense that Tanizaki seems to be communicating his opinions on aesthetics (and women, and jade, and pooping) rather than attempting to define and argue for a unified objective theory of them. His narrative wanders; I found his thoughts on architecture the most compelling and least problematic, though his descriptions of persimmon leaf sushi and black lacquerware soup bowls are also appealing. But perhaps my favorite line in the book came from the afterward, in which the Tanizaki’s wife recounted an anecdote about him after his death. He had decided to build a new house; the architect arrived for a meeting and proudly announced that he knew In Praise of Shadows and was prepared to build a house that fit Tanizaki’s desires perfectly. “But no, I could never live in a house like that,” Tanizaki replied. In Praise of Shadows is a rant, muttered by a self-described old man who is mourning the traditions of an earlier Japanese culture. There is truth in it, but it shouldn’t be taken as a guide to live one’s life by.
The Paris Review No. 246; various authors.
I purchased this issue of The Paris Review after much deliberation at a surprisingly charming book store in Miami, Florida. Ada and I had walked, then biked, then taken a car to get there, partly to buy books (between the flight down and a little time on the beach, I had finished both Eastbound and Need for the Bike that weekend) and partly to get the fuck out of South Beach, with its charmingly old-fashioned architecture and its not-quite-NYC-cool restaurants. When we arrived at the book store — Books & Books, in Coral Gables — we were both hungry and got a snack at their restaurant. We successfully ordered the hummus we wanted, but they were out of both the curried chicken salad and then the baba ghanoush, so we got some rather unsatisfying labneh instead. It was a warm afternoon in January, and we were sitting in the courtyard, and Ada ordered a white wine. I ordered a kombucha but received the same white wine, which I drank obediently and without displeasure.
After our snack we paid, then went inside to look for books. Ada decided promptly; she was nearing the end of a loaned copy of a “fiercely romantic, irresistibly sexy” fantasy novel, and wanted the next book in the series for when she was done. I undertook a more intense search. I thought about getting a copy of Dante’s Inferno, and was egged on by a college-aged kid who overheard my deliberations, but decided I would fare better with a different translation. I poked around the nonfiction section but was uninspired; I thumbed through almost their entire literary fiction collection but couldn’t commit. Finally I returned to the cafe (by this time Ada had paid for her book) and peered past a customer working on their laptop to scan the periodicals. A glossy magazine wouldn’t do, and we already had copies of The New Yorker and The Atlantic at home, but the blood-red cover of The Paris Review — a publication that I was vaguely aware of but wouldn’t have been able to describe in any detail — stared passively out from the shelves, indifferent to my interests but presumably capable of teaching me something.
And, I enjoyed reading it. It felt a little more focused on the writing than The New Yorker, whose house style is distinctive and literary but which also puts a lot of effort into being informative, entertaining, and stylish. To be clear, these traits make The New Yorker singularly great to me, but The Paris Review felt a little more angular, challenging, and focused — in a way that I liked. The first piece in this issue, by Sean Thor Conroe, excerpts journal entries he made during a failed attempt to walk across the country after having dropped out of college. Both ecstatic and deeply anxious, Conroe’s piece left me on a hopeful note, but also gave me the sense of looking over someone’s shoulder as they made a series of dubious life choices. A few pages later, an interviewer (who is named in the introduction, but who is listed only as “INTERVIEWER” above question after probing question) talks with Yu Hua, who Wikipedia claims is “one of the greatest living authors in China,” about life experiences spanning from the Cultural Revolution to today. The questions are almost painfully short (“Do you often cry when you write?”), a pattern that seems like it might be The Paris Review’s house style (it repeats in a later interview with the poet Louise Glück). At one point Hua’s interviewer (who had worked as a translator for the English version of Hua’s most successful novel) mentions, almost in monosyllables, that they had yet to receive a single royalty payment for their work.
I felt distinctly sophisticated reading The Paris Review in public. Around the middle of the 200-ish-page paperbound text, whose back cover advertises a list of upcoming book titles from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the writing became almost shockingly edgy in Tony Tulathimutte’s Ahegao, which deals with its protagonist’s sexual repression and ultimate humiliation with humor, empathy, and little apparent concern for its readers’ potentially puritanical proclivities. Which is to say that it’s graphic as fuck. But somehow fun to read! The next story is a tender and heartbreakingly remembered pseudo-romance between a pair of retired flight attendants; then comes the aforementioned interview with Glück; finally comes (I’m skipping the poetry and full-color visual art, though I enjoyed them as palette cleansers) another sexually graphic, then achingly romantic, then touching and meditative story called Two Men, Mary by Jamie Quatro.
It would be a little presumptuous of me to say that I’ll pick up the next issue of The Paris Review, and while I did poke at the subscription page (the quarterly costs $59 per year) I eventually closed the tab. But I do find The Paris Review’s founding editorial statement to be compelling:
The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines and putting it pretty much where it belongs, i.e., somewhere near the back of the book. I think The Paris Review should welcome these people into its pages: the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders. So long as they're good.