A Different Stripe

2010 Staff Favorites

In which we recommend our favorite NYRB Classics read over the past year and take a moment to plug something entirely unrelated to the series (an idea shamelessly lifted from the "endorsement" segment of Slate's Culture Gabfest).

Stephen Twilley
Pick: Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity. I was halfway through Bolaño's admirably sprawling 2666 when I chanced to fall into the hands of the Austrian master Zweig, a writer of almost inhuman delicacy and control who nonetheless has so much to show us about errant passions and self-deception. 350-odd feverish pages later, I stumbled back, equal parts devastated and exhilarated, into "The Part about the Crimes."

Sing it: I would like to recommend an old song that some friends recently put on a mix CD: "Don't Touch That Thing" by Sylvia Hall, from the compilation Cult Cargo: Grand Bahama Goombay. It may be a strange comparison, but something in the languidness of her voice reminds me of Neutral Milk Hotel, along with a kind of we're-celebrating-as-we-drive-over-the-cliff-vibe (the respective horn sections certainly help here). And given that the NMH song that's perhaps most exemplary in this regard is "Song Against Sex," there's a thematic connection as well. Hall's refrain, based apparently on an indigenous children’s rhyme and intoned over the fuzzy blare of raucous mid-seventies funk, is

Don’t touch that thing, your momma gonna know.
Don’t touch that thing, your momma gonna know.

If you touch that thing, your momma gonna know, girl.
How's she gonna know? Your belly gonna show.

 

Yongsun Bark
Has been on a prison-novel kick this year. Her picks, listed in order of preference are:

On the Yard by Malcolm Braly

Dirty Snow by Georges Simenone

Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter

Next up:  Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (or, may we suggest, The Enchanted April?)

 

Evan Johnston
Picks: Nightmare Alley by William Gresham. Thoroughly guilty pleasure, from its tarot-themed chapters to the carnival slang laden dialogue. The novel's best summation could be "Booze and mentalism don't mix" spoken by Zeena the fortune teller (p. 29). 

    The Tenants of Moonbloom by Edward Lewis Wallant. In so many ways, the protagonist reminds me of the landlord I had for eight years, who passed away six months ago—decades too soon. I consider this book a friend.

Contents may be hot: Counter Culture Coffee's Espresso Apollo. Sometimes, I just want to inhale the beans, and forgo this whole boiling water business. So good.

 

Patrick Hederman

Pick: It’s good to have hobbies. One of mine is skimming important works of literature and overstating my understanding of them.  If you share this hobby, do not pick up J.G. Farrell’s Troubles. Winner of the 2010 Lost Man Booker Prize, at least a few people consider it an important work of literature. But littered with dark and satirical anecdotes that one can’t help but read and re-read and tweet and re-tweet, it does not lend itself well to skimming.

    As far as he could make out she was older than he had expected and wore a fatigued air. Though apparently too exhausted to rise she held out a thin hand to be squeezed . . .”
     ‘Have you been well, Angela?’
      ‘Ah, I’ve been dying’—a fit of weary coughing interrupted her—‘of boredom,’ she added peevishly.

Before they were famous: Also recommended: Freaks and Geeks complete series marathons on IFC.

 

Eve Bowen

Picks: My favorite NYRB Classic of 2010: Jules Renard's Nature Stories. Also, an advanced copy of Tove Jansson's Fair Play (2011) has led me back to Jansson's earlier NYRB Classics, especially The Summer Book (2008), which has an introduction by one of my favorite contemporary novelists, Kathryn Davis.

Twinkle twinkle: A story by Davis appears in the second issue of my favorite new literary journal, Little Star (edited by The New York Review's own Ann Kjellberg), along with poems and translations by the brilliant Eugene Ostashevsky (among others) and excellent stories by writers including April Bernard, Jamaica Kincaid, and Ingrid Winterbach—whose latest novel, To Hell with Cronjé (Open Letter, 2010), is next on my reading list. 
    Another story by Davis appears in My Mother She Killed Me, My Father She Ate Me (Penguin, 2010), Kate Bernheimer's fabulous collection of fairy tales by contemporary writers—including the playwright Neil LaBute, who collaborated with the photographer Gerald Slota on one of my favorite gallery exhibitions of 2010: Home.Sweet.Home. 

 

Sara Kramer

Picks: My  favorite NYRB Classics of 2010 are both new translations from the French—c'est bien normal. I think by now my love for Jules Renard's Nature Stories has been established (laughing, crying, pants charmed right off). So we can move right along to The Jokers by Albert Cossery, a hilarious novel about government corruption. Or, rather, about the best style of confronting institutionalized corruption. Which is more effective in the end? Levitating the Pentagon or lobbing a bomb at it? Passing out phony copies of The New York Times with the headlines you want to see on the front page or writing indignant letters to the paper's editor? After seeing the fun Cossery has with his band of misfit rebels, who start a campaign of mockery against the governor of their city, I'm pretty sure I know how he would answer.

Lyrics are weird, they're cryptic, they don't make sense: In keeping with the francophone theme of my picks, I thought I might tell everyone to take a listen to Amadou & Mariaam's "Je pense à toi"—a love song that even I, with my public-school level French can comprehend. But then I remembered a bit I heard on The Sound of Young America that made me laugh like nothing else did in 2010. In it, the men of Team Submarine attempt to write an advertising jingle for a pizza place, and utterly, absurdly, fail. 

Team Submarine, Summer Jobs (begin listening at the 10:47 mark)

Semi-retraction:  Todd McEwen's "Living in the Country"—a rant against Los Angeles and a warning about the dangers of reading too much Thoreau, published in issue 4 of The Paris Magazine—made me laugh as much as Team Submarine's baby-eating pizza. More McEwen in 2011, please!

Rebecca's West's Christmas

After the drear of the last post (horses starving, mothers starving, patriotic bears liquidating kulaks) we thought we might bring you something more befitting the holiday season. Herewith an excerpt from Rebecca West's novel The Fountain Overflows, as sweetly Christmasy a passage as you could read without rushing to the dentist immediately after. (If you like you Rebecca West more bracing, we highly recommend reading her Paris Review interview.)

We went upstairs to our room and collected the presents we had made for Papa and Mamma and waited there till we were called. Then we stood outside the dining room until Mamma began to play a piano arrangement of Bach’s “Shepherd’s Christmas Music,” and then we marched in in single file, followed by Kate, and stood round the Christmas tree with our backs to it and sang a carol. That year it was “Silent Night, Holy Night.” Then we handed over our presents to Papa and Mamma. I know what they were, for Mary and I wrote them down in a little book, which somehow never got lost. Cordelia had knitted Papa a silk necktie and had made Mamma a set of muslin collars and cuffs. She was the best needle-woman of the three of us. Mary had practised considerable deception over the money given her for milk and buns at eleven, and had gone to a junk shop we passed on our way to school and bought Papa a little eighteenth-century book about the sights of Paris with pretty coloured pictures and Mamma a watercolour of Capri, where she had spent a wonderful holiday when she was young. I had painted a wooden box to hold big matches for Papa to keep in his study and had made a shopping bag for Mamma out of plaited straw. Richard Quin had given the matches to put in my match-box and to Mamma a bright pink cake of scented soap which he had chosen himself. We were hampered because we had almost no pocket-money, but really these presents were not quite rubbish. All except the necktie and the soap were still in the house when, many years later, we left it, and I do not think they had been preserved simply because Mamma loved us, I believe they survived because of their usefulness and prettiness. We were not specially accomplished or sensible children, but, with Papa and Mamma and Kate in the house, we were propelled along the groove of a competent tradition.

When Papa and Mamma had had their presents we had ours. They were lovely. I really cannot think, looking back over a lifetime in which I have known many quite opulent Christmases, that any children have ever had much lovelier Christmas presents. We had known that Papa was making us new furniture and inhabitants for our dolls’ houses, but he had done better than that. He had given Cordelia’s Tudor palace a maze and a sunken garden and a pleached walk, like the one in Much Ado About Nothing; he had given Mary’s Queen Anne mansion a walled garden with espaliered trees all around it and a vinery outside built against the south wall; and he had given my Victorian Gothic abbey a small park with a looking-glass lake with a rocky island in it surmounted by a mock hermitage. Out of her old dresses Mother had made a pale green Mary Queen of Scots dress for Cordelia, an eighteenth-century white dress for Mary, a rose-coloured crinoline dress for me, and a Three Musketeers uniform with a cardboard sword for Richard Quin. Like everything else that Mamma did each was unique, we had never seen anything like them before, any one of them was something only she would have imagined. So enchanted were we with these big presents that we had hardly time to look at the presents Constance had sent us before we had to dress for church, except to see that for us girls she had pretty little pinafores, each with a hair-ribbon to match, and for Richard Quin a little shirt. There was an air of cool composure about the needlework which made these garments as distinctive as my mother’s wilder work.

It had been decided beforehand that Richard Quin was to go to church with us for the first time on Christmas morning. But he was bemused with his toys. He had not even begun to empty his stocking, but was dragging it about with him. If anybody tried to relieve him of it, he said, “Not yet, not yet in a minute,” but he could not bring himself to take his eyes off the fortress Papa had made for him, a proper fortress with casemates and redoubts and glacis and a garrison numbering twenty, all in silver-foil armour. He could not bear to touch it, he liked it so much. So Mamma took pity on him and said that he need not go, perhaps he was too little, it would wait till next Christmas. But he said that if Papa was going he would like to go too. So we started out through a crisp morning, Mamma going to the steps to see us off. “Gloves?” she said sternly to us three, for all over England little girls were starting a revolt against gloves, which was to succeed before very long, but was then discouraged by all adults. “I wish I could come with you.” She sighed. “I would enjoy the service.”

The illustrated Platonov, drawings by Kirill Sokolov

The Russian artist Kirill Sokolov (1930–2004) produced a number of illustrations to Andrey Platonov's novel The Foundation Pit.  Many of these—two 1991 drypoints and nine 2000 drawings lifted and printed from wax crayon orginals (artist's technique)—are now in the collection of the Andrey Bely Museum in Moscow.  They were donated by the artist's widow, Doctor Avril Pyman, who has kindly allowed us to reproduce four of the later drawings.

Captions in brackets are the artist's own.

"'And why are you dying, Mama? From being bourgeois—or from death?'
"'I got bored,” said the mother. 'I’m worn out.'"

[Chiklin, Prushevsky, Nastya and her late mother, pp. 47-50; pp. 55-56)

 

 

"Night was total at village level. it covered everything, and snow made the air cramped and impenetrable, such that chests were at a loss for breath, yet women were shrieking in every place, keeping up a constant howl as they got used to grief. The dogs, together with other petty and nervous animals, also maintained these sounds of anguish, and there was as much noise and alarm in the collective farm as in the changing room of a bathhouse."

["there was as much noise and alarm in the collective farm as in the changing room of a bathhouse," p.101]

 

 

"The horse was dozing in her stall, having lowered her sensitive head forever; one of her eyes was feebly closed, but she did not have enough strength for the other and so it was left looking into the dark. The shed had grown cold without equine breath and snow began to fall inside, settling on the mare’s head and not melting. Her master blew out his match, embraced the horse’s neck, and stood there in his orphanhood, smelling in memory the mare’s sweat, as when they were plowing."

[Parting with a horse that is starving to death, pp. 101-02]

 

 

"Walking beside some yards felt as cool as in the open fields, while beside others there was a sense of warmth. Cows and horses were lying in these yards, their carcasses gaping and rotting—and the heat of life accumulated during long years beneath the sun was still seeping out from them into the air, into the shared wintry space. Chiklin and the hammerer had already passed a number of yards, but somehow they had not yet liquidated any kulaks anywhere."

[Misha the blacksmith's hammerer sets off to dispossess kulaks, p. 109]

 

About Platonov's language:
If you aren't familiar with Andrey Platonov's dislocating way with langauge, the excerpts above might strike you as odd. In his afterword to The Foundation Pit, translator Robert Chandler begins to explain:

"One day, no doubt, someone will publish a commentary listing the abnormalities in each sentence of The Foundation Pit and the expressive power of each of them. Platonov used language more creatively than even the greatest of the great Russian poets who were his contemporaries, and there is no simple answer to the question of why he wrote as he did. Sometimes, as we have seen, he deviates from the norm in order to summon up a biblical, cultural, or political allusion. Sometimes he orders the most common of words in an uncommon way so as to bring out in full the meaning
of a word that we normally take for granted."

 

For more on this matter
Listen to Bill Marx discuss The Foundation Pit with Robert Chandler
David Bourzmogis interviews Robert Chandler about The Foundation PIt

Bonus link! Daniel Kalder in conversation with Robert Chandler about Platonov, in The Guardian. 

Jules Renard's Bestiary

If you follow us on Twitter, you might notice that we couldn't help posting bits from Jules Renard's charming and inventive collection of observations of the natural world, Histoires Naturelles or Nature Stories. They were just too delightful not to share. Where writers often seek to make the world strange in order to enable us to experience it afresh, Renard's gift is to domesticate the by-definition inhuman. His patently false imaginings of animals' inner lives paradoxically grant them their own realities—realities that Renard's writings help us to understand that we can never understand. And beyond that, they will make you gasp with the wonder of this gifted and too-little-known writer's wholely fresh way of putting into words everything he observes.

To celebrate the book's official on-sale date, we can finally let you in on some longer excerpts, accompanied by the illustrations that Pierre Bonnard drew for the 1904 edition of the book.

And if, like us, you aren't satisfied with just one book by Jules Renard, then you must run out and buy the selection of his Journals translated by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget and published by Tin House Books.

 

From "Frogs"

    They’re suddenly relaxing their springs. That’s how they take exercise.
    They’re leaping out of the grass like heavy drops of frying oil.
    They pose, like bronze paperweights, on large water lilies.
    One of them is soaking in air. Through his mouth, you could drop a coin into the money box of his stomach.
    They rise like sighs, out of the mud.
    Motionless, with their large eyes level with the water, they seem like growths on the flat pond.
    Squatting like tailors, they’re yawning, stupefied at the setting sun.
    Then, like street vendors deafening people as they yell, they croak the latest news items of the day.
    They’re giving a party this evening, at home. Can’t you hear them polishing the glasses?
    Sometimes, they snap up an insect.
    Others are only interested in love.

"The Stag"

      I went into the wood at one end of the avenue as he was coming in at the other.
    At first I thought a stranger had just come in, wearing a plant on top of his head.
    Then I could see the little dwarf tree spreading out its leafless branches.
    Finally the stag came plainly into sight, and we both came to a halt.
    “Don’t be afraid, come closer,” I said. “I’m carrying a gun, but it’s just pretense, I’m only imitating people who take themselves too seriously. I never use it, and I’ve left the cartridges in a drawer at home.
    The stag was listening to me and sniffing.
    When I stopped talking, he didn’t hesitate: his legs moved like twirling twigs blown by a gust of wind. He fled.
    “What a shame!” I shouted after him. “I was already dreaming that we’d go off together. I was going to pick all sorts of grass that you particularly like and offer them to you. And you’d be walking along beside me, carrying my gun on your antlers.”

Barbara Comyns at The Rumpus

Barbara Comyns (author of The Vet's Daughter) is the inaugural author published by Dorothy, a brand-new press "dedicated to works of fiction or near fiction or about fiction, mostly by women." Brian Evenson writes about reading this remarkable novelist at The Rumpus:

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead was the first book I read by British novelist Barbara Comyns. I knew nothing about Comyns at the time: I picked up the novel exclusively because of the title, which struck me as promising and intriguing.

In fact, the book turned out to be a great deal more than that: it was downright astonishing. Beginning mid-flood, with ducks swimming through Grandma Willoweed’s drawing room windows “quacking their approval,” Comyns’ narrator quickly moves on to “[a] passing pig squealing, its short legs madly beating the water and tearing at its throat, which was red and bleeding,” and then the sun comes “out bright and strong and everywhere became silver.” That last fact is a good thing if you side with one of the book’s several astonished children, but bad if you’re Old Ives the handyman, superstitiously convinced that the sun will draw the moisture back into the sky. Inside the house, maids pin up their skirts and try to make breakfast while wading red-legged through the water, laughing and screeching. Meanwhile, the bodies of drowned peacocks eddy round the garden, the hens in one shed commit suicide by falling from their perches into the water, and the hens in the other shed fatalistically sit “on their eggs in a black broody dream until they were covered in water. They squarked a little; but that was all. For a few moments just their red combs were visible above the water, and then they disappeared.”

All of that happens in the first two paragraphs of the book. [continue reading]

See what else Dorothy is publishing
Read about The Vet's Daughter at Bookslut
Listen to the John Wesley Harding album named after Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead