Erin O’Keefe, Circle Circle, 2020, from New and Recent Photographs, a portfolio in issue no. 235 (Winter 2020) of The Paris Review.
I did not have a good time reading Vigdis Hjorth’s novel If Only. I felt, in fact, kind of abject—but something about the novel compelled me forward, in a way that sometimes actually confused me. I found myself reading fifty pages, putting it down, picking it up a week later and once again being unable to stop reading, then abandoning it for another week. It was a discomfiting instance where in returning to the bleak narrative world of the novel I felt almost like I was mirroring the behavior of its main character, Ida, who returns again and again to a love affair that seems to offer her nothing but pain. Why was I reading this book that made me so angry, uncomfortable, irritated? Because it was, maybe, the kind of discomfort that can reconfigure certain aspects of the way you see the world, whose insights or the shadows of them seem to recur long after you’ve closed the book—and so they have, as I thought last night of an image from it, Ida and her lover at a restaurant in Istanbul, gorging on champagne, telling the waiter they were just married even though they weren’t.
If Only—published in Norwegian in 2001, but published in English translation by Charlotte Barslund for the first time this month—is a novel about obsessive love. It is one of a spate of recent novels that take all-consuming desire as a theme: Miranda July’s All Fours and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos both deal with a passion that veers into misery at times, the kind of passion that is transformative only because it shatters lives. But If Only is by far the bleakest of these; in fact, it is one of the bleakest depictions of a relationship I have ever encountered. The affair obliterates Ida; it cuts her off from the people around her, including her young children; it makes her act erratically and occasionally dangerously. The relationship has many of the same qualities as prolonged substance abuse—and it is no coincidence that Ida and her lover constantly binge on alcohol, too. The novel offers neither redemption nor transcendence as its resolution. And yet Hjorth makes this relationship and its aftermath legible to us as a part of the human experience—one that we can’t extract from the type of love we do consider desirable or healthy. At the end of the book, we might find ourselves wondering, as Ida does: “If only there was a cure, a cure for love.” And we might realize, even as we wish this, that we don’t actually mean it at all.
—Sophie Haigney, web editor
I want to recommend the final, fourth volume of Michel Leiris’s autobiographical project, The Rules of the Game: Frail Riffs, recently published by Yale’s Margellos series. Lydia Davis—whose fiction, essays, and translations of Proust and Flaubert amaze me—rendered the first three volumes; volume four is excellently translated by Richard Sieburth. Alice Kaplan has written an incisive essay on Leiris, and Frail Riffs, for the current issue of The New York Review of Books. Alice K. is another international treasure whose books will be known by anyone who reads The Paris Review, I would guess. Especially, but not only, The Collaborator, which summons so much about the political winds of the twenties and thirties blowing through the Parisian literary world, and about the postwar epuration in France, which Céline eluded by fleeing to Denmark, and which Robert Brasillach didn’t. Elude, I mean. (Whether this “fine literary writer” should have been executed for treason or not is, for me, a question one could settle one way at breakfast and the other way at dinner. Sartre or Camus, take your pick.) Anyway: Leiris, who writes the most pellucid and persuasive sentences. Whose abjection I welcome more than anybody’s egotism. His writings a bonanza of formidable insights conveyed with the unrushed elegance of a Saint-Simon. Leiris is incomparable, a Vermeer in a world of Han van Meegerens. Frail Riffs is pure pleasure, in the way Proust is pure pleasure—you can open to any page and just surrender yourself to the music of time that saturates it. The early entry in Frail Riffs, describing the prologues of Goethe’s Faust and their effect upon him as a teenager, is enough to turn any reader into a Leiris devotee.
—Gary Indiana
Emily Witt’s Health and Safety begins in Gowanus in 2016, where the Future Sex author is set to give a lecture called “How I Think About Drugs.” She speaks from a Google slide about Wellbutrin, which she used to take, and the distinction between “sort-of drugs” (pharmaceutical) and “drugs” (illegal). After quitting Wellbutrin, at thirty-one, Witt broke a yearslong illicit-substance fast by smoking DMT at Christmastime. This was the beginning of a drug journey of sorts, one involving ayahuasca retreats in the Catskills with her then boyfriend, a sensory-deprivation-tank attendant, and a large dose of mushrooms taken in a Brooklyn apartment. After her speech she meets Andrew, a Bushwick DJ. He soon introduces her to another context for and type of drug-doing: raving. She falls in love. They soon move in together at Myrtle-Broadway.
“Being in love made me happy,” begins chapter five, “and I lost interest in channeling all of my knowledge about nutrition, disease, and medicine into a life of perpetual risk management.” Witt began to see her former orientation toward health and wellness as narrow and individualistic, whereas raverly values were collectivist, abolitionist, and harm reductionist. To be one of techno’s real appreciators meant thinking through its lineage in Black American Detroit and how it morphed in Berlin clubs; it meant learning about Afrofuturism, Deleuzian metaphysics, and Narcan administration. It could all feel overly theoretical, because the real point of doing ketamine at Nowadays is having fun, but even the most pretentious scene fixtures were interesting in their own ways. Witt is intrigued by techno’s embrace of pessimism as praxis: a deep-house artist named DJ Sprinkles uses part of their set to drive home why they use the term transgendered instead of transgender, then tells their audience they’re all a bunch of normie losers. Sprinkles is compelling because their unapologetic manner gets at realer issues than does the tone-deaf #Resistance-era small talk that was unavoidable at the time in New York.
Witt’s partying coincides with Trump’s election, the beginning of the #MeToo movement, Parkland, Kenosha, the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, January 6. The Trump administration disturbed many Americans’ sense that we shared a definite political reality; our widened Overton window, at least, began to reveal the racial and socioeconomic injustices that white, middle-class liberals had claimed ignorance of. During this period, Witt joined The New Yorker as a staff writer while attending Black Lives Matter protests on the side with Andrew. Health and Safety poses sharp questions about what it means to watch history unfold versus to participate in its making, and about what it means to write about brutality when your friends are in harm’s way. These questions don’t resolve, as if to remind that discourse has little impact on the machinations of capital and state violence.
Witt’s reflections on the loop of reporting assignments—like being sent to watch Lizzo play a Shake Shack–sponsored set at a D.C. March for Our Lives rally—and sleepless nights at Bossa Nova Civic Club that comprised her pre-pandemic life are spectacular. So are her extremely specific notes on tripping: “I just saw some patterns that faintly buzzed in the marker colors of my childhood—the ‘bold’ jewel-toned spectrum that Crayola started selling in the early 1990s.” While reading Health and Safety, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the defamiliarizing effects of psychedelics are not unlike those of a well-constructed sentence, the kind that catches you off guard with its accuracy.
—Signe Swanson
The Kármán line, in astronomy, is the definition of the edge of space: the line at which Earth’s atmosphere ends and outer space begins. It’s a geopolitical rather than physical definition—it’s about fifty miles above sea level, though it is not sharp or well defined, and below the line, space belongs to the country below it, while above it, space is free. Daisy Atterbury’s new collection of poetry, The Kármán Line, to be published by Rescue Press next month, describes the line’s psychological import, characterizing it as a clearly defined yet impossible-to-name boundary between the known and the unknown. From the poem “Sound Bodily Condition”: “I want to learn how to get at the thing I don’t yet know, the blank space in memory, the experiences I should have language for and don’t.” Atterbury’s book is at once a math-inflected lyric essay; a rollicking road trip; a field guide to Spaceport America, the world’s first site for commercial space travel, located near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico; and a collection of intimate poems.
Atterbury spells out how you can, in a few steps, arrive at a relatively simple equation for calculating the latitude of the Kármán line for any planet, (2𝑚𝜌(𝑟)𝐴𝐶𝐿𝑟=1), but though the math might be legible in the abstract, things get more complicated in concrete terms: “To work out the Kármán line on an extraterrestrial planet I suspect you’d need to know the temperature.” The book’s energy comes from its application of the idea of the Kármán line to borders of all kinds. “We are thinking a lot about mindset,” says a man on the radio in the poem “Uranium Yellow”: the distinction between thought and the mind is a kind of Kármán line between reality and metareality. “I think he calls himself a neurobiologist,” recalls the speaker: the blood/brain barrier is the Kármán line of the body. The Kármán line might even be the signature line that the speaker deletes “when writing / personal emails,” tracing the edge between the public and private virtual versions of the self.
In the poem “What the Boundary,” I hear in the title an echo of William Blake’s “The Tyger” (“What the hammer? what the chain? / In what furnace was thy brain?”). The Kármán line divides space into a Blakean fearful symmetry that makes the known world seem safer—we can measure it, mark its delineations, perhaps even explore all of it—but also makes the unknown that much more vast and wild. As much as we crave the escape beyond the Kármán line into the infinite, Atterbury writes, we fear in exact parallel what lies beyond what we can measure. The formula for the Kármán line is simple—having the variables to plug into the equation to get an answer is the impossible part.
—Adrienne Raphel
