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Unmastered: A Book on Desire Most Difficult to Tell

June 9, 2013 by parulsehgal

9780374280406By Parul Sehgal, Slate, June 7, 2013

We have no dominion over desire. It’s our ancient, aristocratic master, like hunger or sleep. It sings in our bones and stains our clothes and conspires to make us look ridiculous. Perhaps that is why every new book on desire—and there is always a new book on desire—seems so brave. Every one, an attempt to put into language what is essentially hostile to language and resists interpretation. 

Unmastered is the first book from Katherine Angel, a British academic who brings a supple intelligence and a slithery style to her personal account of a love affair. She’s a sexual intellectual with the hauteur of a Hitchcock blonde. The lady doesn’t come, she arrives.

Angel asks the same questions we always ask about desire: Why do I like what I like? Am I wrong to like what I like? and Why is it so hard to ask these questions anyway? But she poses them stylishly. The book edges forward in fragments—aphorisms, accusations, snatches of pillow talk. On every page, a riddle or two. On every page, an eel of text.

What’s shocking isn’t the sex, which is (too?) tastefully presented; it’s the extravagant happiness. She’s gone hungry in relationships, Angel tells us. She’d turn “restless, like the cat when we put her on soft food for a week … gnawing at the furniture, pressing her teeth into hard surfaces.” But she’s found her match in a new man. “His hunger feeds me. We meet, and live that hunger—his, mine, ours—and afterwards, we are ashes. We are the good Zen bonfire: we have left no traces. We have burnt ourselves completely.” Locked together, they become a new species, something out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, “a monster thrashing out of a lake, an arc of splash in its tail’s wake.”

What do we make of this, we who have been trained by life and literature to know desire through lack? We who know eros by its edges, who cut our teeth on “desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade” and “light of my life, fire of my loins” and “She keeps on passin’ me by”?

But Angel packs the story with just enough salt. The more violent the emotion, the icier her tone. The rhythm of the fragment helps too; it cuts the swoon, allows her to stage arguments with herself. She treats the silences between sentences like enjambments; she uses them to bait us. “I travel in a loop of gender,” she writes. “I was weaned on this—the hypostasized, brutal man; the yielding, deferring woman.” Poor dear, we think, turning the page, landing snap in the trap. “So, by the way, were you.”

Thinking women, Adrienne Rich told us, sleep with monsters. Clever women, I’d add, wake to slay them. And indeed, between the moaning and philosophizing, the zipping and unzipping, that’s exactly what Angel is up to—that these monsters are chiefly of her own making keeps things that much more interesting. She takes on sexual entitlement, the pornographic gaze, to spank or not to spank—and her targets are first her own pieties, then your pieties, and then the narrow discourse around desire. “If we are liberated, we cannot critique,” she writes. “If we are critical, we cannot enjoy.” This is, it should be noted, the argument at the heart of Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes’ study of photography, memory, and desire. He writes of “the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical.” He cannot choose just one. “By ultimate dissatisfaction with all of them, I was bearing witness to the only sure thing that was in me (however naïve it might be): a desperate resistance to any reductive system.” Angel comes to a similar conclusion—although she admits she’s arrived at this independence of mind rather late in the day.

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A Conversation with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

June 9, 2013 by parulsehgal

Photo: (from left) Tim Hout; © Frantzesco Kangaris/Eyevine/Redux

Photo: (from left) Tim Hout; © Frantzesco Kangaris/Eyevine/Redux

By Parul Sehgal, Tin House Summer Issue, 2013

Sinclair Lewis wrote that “every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.” Few writers have so flagrantly flouted these pressures as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the celebrated Nigerian author of Half of a Yellow Sun and The Thing Around Your Neck. Her new book, Americanah, will be published in May by Knopf and, like its predecessors, it’s a thrilling and risky piece of writing that takes on taboos, shatters pieties, and combines forthright prose, subversive humor, and a ripping good story.

The fifth of sixth children, Adichie grew up in Nsukka, a university town in Nigeria, in a house once occupied by the celebrated Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, who became a great influence on her.

“It was Achebe’s fiction that made me realize my own story could be in a book,” she said in an interview with the New York Times. “When I started to write, I was writing Enid Blyton stories, even though I had never been to England. I didn’t think it was possible for people like me to be in books.”

Adichie studied medicine briefly and moved to the United States at nineteen, eventually receiving an MFA from Johns Hopkins. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), was well received; her second, Half of a Yellow Sun, was a sensation. An unflinching look at the horrors of the Biafran War of the 1960s, it earned her an Orange Prize and comparisons to Achebe. In 2008, she was awarded a MacArthur “genius grant.”

“Here is a new writer endowed with the gift of the ancient storytellers,” Achebe praised her. “She is fearless.”

In Americanah, Adichie fearlessly takes on what is so euphemistically called “American race relations.” Our heroine, Ifemelu, a Nigerian transplant to the United States, writes a blog, the tartly titled “Raceteenth or Various Observations about American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black,” in which she scrutinizes Obamamania, white privilege, the politics of black hair care, interracial relationships, and the allure and savagery of America.

Adichie and I chatted over e-mail.

Parul Sehgal: I just finished the book and find myself moping and missing Ifemulu beyond all reason. She feels terribly real to me. Where did she come from? More broadly, how do your characters announce themselves? As a gesture? A voice? An argument?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: All of those, and more. Sometimes a character just forms in my head; other times a character is based on somebody real (although the character often ends up being quite different from the “real” person). Ifemelu is a more interesting version of me. Both Ifemelu and Obinze are me, really.

PS: How so?

CNA: I think I have Ifemelu’s questioning nature, Obinze’s longing. Like them, I’m always looking to learn. A bit of a romantic, but I hide it well.

PS: Ifemelu is the “Americanah” of the title, yes? Can you unpack this term a bit?

CNA: It’s a Nigerian (actually, perhaps more regional than national, it’s more often used in the southeast, where I am from) way of referring to a person who affects Americanness in speech or manner, or a person who is (genuinely) Americanized, or a person who insists on her Americanness. It’s not exactly a polite word, but it isn’t derogatory either. It’s playful.

PS: Obinze and Ifemelu are that real literary rara avis: a happy couple. With romantic happiness so difficult to render on the page, I very much admired how you made them come to life. Did you have models, literary or otherwise, for their relationship?

CNA: Well, I had the old and grand tradition of the Mills and Boon romance novels that I read as a teenager! More seriously, my vision as a writer is dark. I am more drawn to the melancholy, the sad, the nostalgic. And so I wanted to do something a little different. I wanted to write a love story, a love story that would be both unapologetic and believable.

PS: Let’s stay on love a moment more. Ifemelu writes on her blog that the solution to the problem of race in America is romantic love: “real deep romantic love, the kind that twists you and wrings you out and makes you breathe through the nostrils of your beloved. And because that real deep romantic love is so rare, and because American society is set up to make it even rarer between American Black and American White, the problem of race in America will never be solved.” Now, I find Ifemelu utterly persuasive and charming and—sometimes, I must confess—a bit of a bully. For all these reasons, I’m inclined to agree with her. Do you?

CNA: I have been told that I am a benevolent bully, so I suppose Ifemelu gets that from me. I do agree with her, very much. I completely believe in the power of love. I think that race, as it has been constructed in America, makes it almost impossible for people of different races to have a real conversation about race, let alone understand how the other person feels. Storytelling helps. Storytelling can be an entry point.

PS: But why are we at such an impasse?

CNA: Race is, I think, the subject that Americans are most uncomfortable with. (Gender, class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion are not as uncomfortable.) This is an American generation raised with the mantra: DO NOT OFFEND. And often honesty about race becomes synonymous with offending someone.

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Writers and the Women They Worship

April 28, 2013 by parulsehgal

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By Parul Sehgal, The New York Times April 17, 2013

These three delightfully deranging books offer alternatives to your staid biographies. They’re a bit dangerous, a bit rude — free from the tyranny of good taste. The authors, first-rate obsessives, riff on the women who’ve consumed them — bearing out Frank Bidart’s line, “What you love is your fate,” with mischief, feeling and a rare frankness. That’s the thing about obsession. It can’t be faked.

Wayne Koestenbaum has written frequently and fondly about his favorite heroines, but there’s a Wildean clip and glimmer that distinguishes “Jackie Under My Skin” (1995), his take on Jackie Kennedy. “Writing about Jackie, I enter a terrain of embarrassment, error, excess. When I speak about Jackie, who do I become? A weirdo? A stalker? A fan?” He concedes that “the quest for self-realization via Jackie contemplation isn’t a standard male route,” but when he thinks about her, he’s at his “most collective and communal.”

Mr. Koestenbaum zeroes in on his subject with an unhinged intensity, Humbert Humbert fresh from a course on semiotics. “I am so hermetically contained by the perimeters of Jackie contemplation that I can only point to Jackie, and interpret her, from within the circle of terms that originate with her,” he writes.

Everything she touched becomes swollen with significance. Her laddered stockings. Her pink maternity shift. He practically swoons when he notices “the faint blond hair along her arm” in a photo. He mines the many meanings of her unpolished fingernails, her eyebrows that never looked “effortfully plucked,” her slimness. We feel his shiver of pleasure at Jackie’s memo to her staff requesting the curtain braid in the Blue Room be turned lest it be further sunburned.

And who else could shake out such a wealth of interpretations from Jackie’s shellacked bouffant? “From the hairdo we learn that she is composed and contained; like an armadillo or a turtle, she carries built-in protection,” he writes. “Her hairdos remind me of the bubbletop over the presidential convertible — the bubbletop that should have been lowered in Dallas.”

As a young man in the 1970s, the novelist David Plante had a talent for ingratiating himself with famous older women. “Difficult Women” (1983), his account of squiring around Sonia Orwell (wife of George), Jean Rhys and Germaine Greer, makes for fascinating if squeamish reading. Scenes of an elderly Rhys falling drunkenly into a toilet and getting stuck, or Ms. Greer accidentally flashing the author, are so uncharitable they make Truman Capote’s “Answered Prayers” look like hagiography. But there’s tenderness here, too. Mr. Plante is frank about what drew him to these women — their fame excited him, yes — but it was their misery that he fed on. “I was in love with the unhappiness in her, and yet reassured that, no matter what I did, what I felt it my duty to do, to lessen that unhappiness, I couldn’t,” he writes of Orwell. “I had been drawn to her darkness because she, who commanded a place in the world, was justified in her darkness, and justified mine.”

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How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

April 6, 2013 by parulsehgal

15815364By Mohsin Hamid

Parul Sehgal, New York Times Book Review, March 29, 2014

“How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” begins under a bed. With you — yes, you — under a bed. Once you quit cowering, you’ll be the hero of this novel written in the second person, although there’s nothing remotely heroic about you at the moment; you’re so sick you can scarcely speak. The only remedy at hand is a large white radish, which your mother cooks up in a foul brew.

Courage. You’ll live and what’s more, you’re only seven steps from getting Filthy Rich, according to the narrator. (You’re also nine steps from ruin, but we’ll address that in a minute.) The marriage of these two curiously compatible genres — self-help and the old-fashioned bildungs­roman — is just one of the pleasures of Mohsin Hamid’s shrewd and slippery new novel, a rags-to-riches story that works on a head-splitting number of levels. It’s a love story and a study of seismic social change. It parodies a get-rich-quick book and gestures to a new direction for the novel, all in prose so pure and purposeful it passes straight into the bloodstream. It intoxicates.

But back to the radish. It saves you — or was it perhaps something more numinous? Luck has already begun clearing your path. “There are forks in the road to wealth that have nothing to do with choice or desire or effort, forks that have to do with chance, and in your case, the order of your birth is one of these,” the narrator congratulates you. You’re a third-born son. Third born means you’re spared from going to work immediately (like your elder brother) or being married off (like your sister, who at puberty is “marked for entry”). Third born means you’re not “a tiny skeleton in a small grave at the base of a tree,” like your youngest sibling. Third born means you stay in school.

Even your illness is a blessing; it persuades your father to move the family to the city — Step 1 in getting Filthy Rich — and it’s the point where the story of the individual debouches into the narrative of the nation. “You embody one of the great changes of your time,” Hamid writes. “Where once your clan was innumerable, not infinite but of a large number not readily known, now there are five of you. Five. The fingers on one hand, the toes on one foot, a minuscule aggregation when compared with shoals of fish or flocks of birds or indeed tribes of humans. In the history of the evolution of the family, you and the millions of other migrants like you represent an ongoing proliferation of the nuclear. It is an explosive transformation.”

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Red Doc>

April 6, 2013 by parulsehgal

9780307960580_custom-689066379ad8cb7f9c4b62c3af2a1dec4dd50f8f-s6-c10By Anne Carson

Parul Sehgal, Bookforum, February 2013

When Anne Carson was a child, she read Lives of the Saints and adored it so much she tried to eat its pages. The Canadian classicist and poet has never lost this desire to merge with the text; if anything, she’s created forms that allow her to eat as many pages as she possibly can. In her translations and recastings of the classics, she enters the books she loves, tilts and deranges them and makes them her own. Nor has she lost her appetite for the physicality, the thingness, of a book. She eulogized her brother, Michael, in Nox (2010)—a translation (of sorts) of Catullus’s poem 101, his own elegy for a brother—illustrated with collages, photographs, and scraps of letters. The pages folded concertina-style into a gray box, its shape suggesting the self-enclosure of grief and the cold slab of a headstone. In 2012, Carson updated Sophocles’s Antigone, another story of a sister grieving the death of her brother, in Antigonick, a hand-lettered translation with playful drawings and enough creative license to include references to Virginia Woolf and Hegel. Even if one of her books looks conventional, trust that hidden architecture undergirds the story. In her novel in verse, Autobiography of Red (1998), Carson retold the myth of Herakles and his tenth labor: slaying the red, winged monster Geryon and stealing his oxen. She made the two men lovers and narrated their romance in a nonchronological hodgepodge of styles—the academic essay, the interview—the chapters formally different and discrete as rooms.

In her new book, Red Doc>, Carson picks up the story of Geryon again, fashioning from it yet another curious object. The sentences are squeezed into a tight column, about an inch and a half long. Scenes are sequential and cut occasionally to witchy pronouncements from a Greek chorus who call themselves the Wife of Brain. Surrounded by acres of white space, the text looks like tracks in snow.

When we left Geryon in Autobiography, he was in Buenos Aires, the unhappy party in a love triangle with Herakles and Herakles’s new lover. At the beginning of Red Doc>, he’s older, still unlucky, still tending his animals and losing his looks. “Am I / turning into one of those / old guys in a ponytail and / wings he thinks sadly.” He’s spent the last seven years reading À la recherche du temps perdu.(“Reading it every day,” he tells his mother, “was like having / an extra unconscious.”) Fortuitously, he’s shaken out of his stupor and self-pity by the reappearance of his old love, now a war veteran who calls himself Sad. They meet a delightfully deranged artist named Ida, and embark on a desultory journey over a glacier, into a body shop–cum–psychiatric clinic. They pick up Hermes—in Greek mythology the cunning messenger of the gods—as a hitchhiker. They sleep with each other and squabble and leave Geryon at his mother’s deathbed. It’s Alice in Wonderland without the philosophy, just the nonsense and surreal size play: “Ice bats . . . the size of toasters” and “crows as big as barns / rave overhead.”

In Carson’s work, philosophy and literary criticism (or even their parodies) have functioned as a trellis around which scenes are strung. Formal structures and especially the fragment allow her to pose questions with and within her work, to insinuate and tease, and she’s at her best in the interrogative mood, as in her book The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001). Because Red Doc> lacks this scaffolding, her players skitter in constant and confused motion. This wouldn’t matter so much if the story were strong enough to hold them, if the characters were, on some level, enacting psychological or philosophical questions. But Red Doc> is only superficially interested in narrative. It’s a long, lovely line to nowhere, a beautiful surface. The language doesn’t exist to take us inside the characters; it’s just so many daubs of paint, utterly its own end.

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The Wayward Essay: ‘The Fun Stuff,’ by James Wood, and More

January 19, 2013 by parulsehgal

Essayists all (from left): Daniel Mendelsohn, James Wood, Katie Roiphe

By Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review, Dec. 28, 2012

In its quality of attention and faith in the salvific power of the right words in the right order, the essay resembles nothing so much as a secular prayer. That, at least, was the original point. The essay has proved wayward, which has been the great secret to its longevity.

Invented in France by Michel de Montaigne, the 16th century’s great oversharer; perfected in England by Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt; the essay found America very agreeable: “The United States itself — and even its name, according to some sources — is partly the outcome of the essayistic brilliance of the radical English artisan Thomas Paine,” Christopher Hitchens, one of its finest modern practitioners, wrote. Its health, however, has never been guaranteed.

Virginia Woolf had to reassure the public in 1922: “Oh, yes dear reader: the essay is alive. There is no reason to despair,” even as journalists crowed over the death of “that lavender-scented little old lady of literature.” “Everybody is forever saying that the essay is dead,” John Leonard observed in 1982. “This is always said in essays.”

The essay doesn’t die. It’s too protean. It only grows more indispensable as it learns to mimic, then amplify, our senses. The essay is a way of seeing through language, and in language. It grasps and sifts — recall its cognate “assay,” the distinguishing of base metals and gold. And if we like our art forms promiscuous and free, it obliges. Joan Didion turned it on to doubt in the 1970s, admitting in her collection “The White Album” that writing about her experience “has not yet helped me see what it means,” and an already supple form became even more elastic. The “lavender-scented little old lady of literature” has loosened her stays.

Only a certain breed of literary essay retains some starch. The book review, for example, with its formality and abstractions, its ego and aggression tamped down. Not for it the ecstasy of doubt; it trudges from certainty to certainty.

But in such strictures self announces itself in style. Think of Virginia Woolf’s unsigned reviews in The Times Literary Supplement. The “anonymity was ideal,” James Wood explains. “Surely Woolf knew that her prose had to sign itself. So her essays, both in texture and in content, were self-advertisements.” This is true too of Wood himself, a staff writer at The New Yorker, with his clearly delineated — and undeviating — theory of how fiction works and what it must do. Raised in the evangelical tradition, he possesses a faith in fiction that is absolutist, and teleological; “It was not just the ascent of science but perhaps the ascent of the novel that helped to kill off Jesus’s divinity,” he has written. He reads messianically, with a hunger for fiction to answer the questions religion once did.

Wood’s new book, THE FUN STUFF: And Other Essays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27), possesses many of the pleasures of his previous collections “The Broken Estate” (1999) and “The Irresponsible Self” (2004): the same tight weave, the laconic humor, the genius for metaphor (Flaubert, “the agonist of style, assassinated repetitions like insects.”). He keeps bringing us back to Chekhov, Tolstoy, Flaubert — about the old masters, Wood is never wrong — founts of psychological insight. No one is better at alerting us to influences with such gossipy familiarity: just as Orwell “almost certainly” got his “eye for didactic detail from Tolstoy,” Wood tells us, Ian McEwan in turn “learned quite a lot about narrative stealth and the control of disgust from Orwell.” And no critic gets closer to the text. Wood writes that Edmund Wilson “seems to rear panoptically above his subjects, like a statue overseeing a city square.” Wilson looms over the work; Wood seems to speak from within it. On Norman Rush’s “Mating”: “The novel has the air at times of a once fatter man whose thinner frame is now making his skin sag a bit: there are abrupt transitions and sudden deposits of information.” He is critic as coroner, reporting on the source of life or root of disease. He can be surprisingly squeamish, though; he shudders at how Wilson would “happily gut a living novelistic organism with the blunt blade of précis.”

But “The Fun Stuff” is notable for what it does not include. There is no introduction. Wood establishes no unifying thesis or theme. For a writer so fond of system building, the silence is puzzling. Our most consistent critic is changing. In his tightly pleached arguments, he’s making room for the reader, and a fresh inquiry. He’s moving past fiction’s possibilities to linger on its limitations, on the books that explore what happens when language becomes insufficient and storytelling breaks down. How the starved sentences of Lydia Davis’s later stories flirt with muteness and leak grief. How “Leaving the Atocha Station,” an American-abroad novel by the poet Ben Lerner, reaches “for what cannot be disclosed or confessed in narrative.” How “The Road,” Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic Grand Guignol, evades its own crucial question: “As long as language can be used to recount the worst, then the worst has not arrived. . . . When does narrative, language end?”

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Courage And Curiosity: The Best Heroines Of 2012

December 27, 2012 by parulsehgal

1.3by Parul Sehgal, NPR, December 27, 2012

The most dangerous trait a woman can possess is curiosity. That’s what myths and religion would have us believe, anyway. Inquisitive Pandora unleashed sorrow upon the world. Eve got us kicked out of paradise. Blight on civilization it may be, but female curiosity is a gift to narrative and the quality my five favorite heroines of the year possess in spades.

These women come to us from history, from a novel, from the pages of a diary and from an ancient poem. They’re women who want to know things, who want to devour the world. Refreshingly, they aren’t primarily defined by their desire to love or be loved — or even to be especially lovable — these are sublimely stubborn women, frequently at odds with themselves and always at odds with their times. They’re on quests. Which isn’t to say that these quests are necessarily successful (the heroines of one particular book were flamboyant failures). The outcome is immaterial; the wanting is all.

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Sophie Calle: The Address Book

By Sophie Calle • Hardcover, 104 pages

In 1983, the French artist Sophie Calle found a lost address book on a street in Paris. She rang up the people listed and asked about the owner of the book, whom she calls Pierre D. (“I will try to discover who he is without ever meeting him.”) She published her findings in a newspaper — to the outrage of the real Pierre, who threatened to sue. Calle agreed to hold off republishing the pieces until after his deathPierre died in 2005, and this book is now available in English. I’d foolishly worried that there would be something self-consciously whimsical, something Amelie about the project. But from the outset, Calle’s inquiry is too serious and strange and plain difficult. A few people refuse to speak to her. Others agree to meet Calle, but can’t recall Pierre. The testimonies add up; our quarry comes into focus then blurs again: He lives alone. His hair went white the week his mother died. He has conventional sexual fantasies. He wears ill-fitting clothes, like a clown. Assembling a personality from these shards is intoxicating, a bit like solving a mystery, a bit like falling in love. But whom are we falling in love with? Is it Pierre? Or is it our guide? The book includes photographs of the people, paintings and places dear to Pierre. The most arresting portrait is of a young woman — could it be Calle? — in profile, hiding her face behind long dark hair, inscrutable to the last.
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As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals & Notebooks, 1964-1980

By Susan Sontag and David Rieff • Hardcover, 523 pages

The second volume of Susan Sontag’s posthumously published journals picks up in New York in the ’60s with the writer’s reputation established and romantic life in shambles. It’s a book in fragments: the “hot exhalations of the mind,” images that gave her pleasure (the “pale pinkish brown color of stone houses” in Corsica), and some scabrous self-criticism. We see Sontag lie to herself (“I’ve constructed a life in which I can’t be profoundly distressed or upset by anyone”) and arrive at painful personal realizationsMost of all, these journals are a portrait of a woman who was the custodian of her intellect. “I’ve got this thing — my mind. It gets bigger, its appetite is insatiable,” she writes, and these pages — rife with lists of books to read, films she’s seen, and words to learn — record how she fed it. The critic Daniel Mendelsohn wrote that Sontag burst on to the literary scene, “a cultural-critical Athena, armored with a vast erudition, bristling with epigrams”. This book reminds us of the daily diligence this display required. “Buy a dictionary the size of an elephant,” she ordered herself. “A writer, like an athlete, must ‘train’ every day. What did I do today to keep in ‘form’?”
9780374176495_custom-1a638ea575f1256cd72ae2515032d9f00a6dd1b5-s2
All We Know

By Lisa Cohen • Hardcover, 429 pages

Lisa Cohen gives us three stylish, independent heroines for the price of one in her triptych of women, once famous, now forgotten: Esther Murphy, a spellbinding conversationalist who never managed to produce the books her public so eagerly awaited; Madge Garland, a gifted editor at British Vogue; and Mercedes de Acosta, the “first celebrity stalker” who became the lover of the most glamorous women of her time, including Marlene Dietrich, Isadora Duncan and Greta Garbo. The three women, who were intimates, moved in the lively and quarrelsome lesbian circles of early 20th-century New York, Paris and London, and Cohen vividly brings this world to life. She also makes an original and persuasive case for her subjects’ métiers, the fleeting, trivialized forms of cultural production: conversation, collecting and fashionIt’s a gossipy, gorgeous, near-perfect biography that turns the form inside out. “I have wanted to make these three women visible again,” Cohen writes. “But none of them thought herself in need of rescue. Each memorialized herself and colluded in her own invisibility.”
9781451636888_custom-48ced0946ba0110fc9691346516f589eb8c17fbf-s2
Carry the One
By Carol Anshaw • Hardcover, 523 pages
Carol Anshaw’s taut novel of how a horrific accident propels three siblings on very different courses has many qualities to recommend it. It’s sharp and wise and manages the impossible: to write about sex in a genuinely sexy way. But most of all, it has AliceAlice is the rumpled, heroic soul of the book — and possibly the year’s most purely sympathetic character. An artist desperately in love with her elusive model girlfriend, jittering with need and trauma, she and her sister Carmen are struggling to save their brother from tumbling further into addiction. (Anshaw, whose own brother struggled with addiction, unsparingly depicts what it means to lose a family member to drug dependency.) Hers is a journey of learning to live productively with great guilt, of the solace of work and art and sisterhood (Alice “pitied everyone who didn’t have a sister.”) Our siblings do much more than merely support us, they hone us, like steel sharpening steel.
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Antigonick
By Anne Carson • Hardcover, 180 pages
In her new book, the poet and classicist Anne Carson remixes Sophocles’ great tragedy, Antigone, with Hegel, Virginia Woolf and strains from her own life. The book is hand lettered, and Bianca Stone’s surreal illustrations tell a story of their own: beautiful girls with cinderblock heads, tottering furniture, a shovel, a ladder, red thread pinioning a horse’s hooves, red thread twining around spoons, red thread unspooling over the pages like a long trail of blood.

Antigone, our heroine, is “a person in love with the impossible.” She is the daughter of Oidipus and sister to Eteokles and Polyneikes (Carson’s own spellings) who have slain each other in battle. She defies her uncle Kreon’s order to leave Polyneikes’ body unburied, risking death by being buried alive. The book speaks to us in our own language — and cheekily references other interpretations of the play: (“Remember how Brecht had you do the whole play with a door strapped to your back” the chorus asks Antigone) — while matching the horror and heartbreak of the original. Realizing death is near, Antigone says:

“You ask would I have done it for a husband or a child my answer is no I would not. A husband or a child can be replaced but who can grow me a new brother. Is this a weird argument, Kreon thought so but I don’t know. The words go wrong they call my piety impiety, I’m alone on my insides I died long ago.”

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