Indholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2022 i The Paris Review

I met Jane Gardam when she was ninety, at her home in the Kentish village of Sandwich, England. Haven House, where Gardam has lived since 1987, was originally a pilgrims’ hostel and is made up of several medieval structures, but has been modernized over the years and today is graciously proportioned, orderly, and comfortable. The drawing room where we conducted most of our conversations is filled with upholstered furniture, vases of flowers, silver-framed photographs of family, and mementos from the overseas law practice of Gardam’s late husband, David. A fire crackled brightly; the room looked over the large and well-maintained back garden. Once a keen cook, Gardam apologized repeatedly for being unable to make meals for me herself due to a leg injury; instead, a housekeeper brought us tea and…

Frida Orupabo was born in 1986 in Sarpsborg, Norway, and lives in Oslo. She studied sociology, with a focus on Black feminism, at the University of Oslo, Blindern, and then spent several years providing social services at a center for sex workers. She started to make digital collages as a student, using old photos of her mother, who is from Norway, and her father, who had returned to his home country, Nigeria, when Orupabo was three. Later, she began to incorporate images from eBay, Tumblr, and colonial archives. She also posted series of found and manipulated images under the handle @Nemiepeba on Instagram, where Arthur Jafa encountered her work. He included Orupabo in his 2017 show A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions at the Serpentine Galleries in London.…

I Am Traveling a Great Distance I remember when the lights cut out in Prek Engthe women kept cooking Three whole tomatoes fried in the dark But it was not so dark from where I lay in the hammock The trees helped me to discern shadow from night Knowing how to move without lightthe women set the table Did they live in the same way as they survived? Did they stop to wonder? I am too far from the women to ask them now Long Life Often I have knelt beside her as she lay on the white leather sofa,repeating to herself, Maybe one day I die soon. All my life,I’ve heard this and watched her continue living. She is here now, with a cleaver,tenderizing meat. She squats on the…

His mind kept the airspace but sold the sun.At night, he ordered his own sun, which wasSupposedly arriving soon, they said,In entourages of azures and clouds. A state had been charged with charging him,Then a state was charged for charging him.The absence of exposition hit homeAnd so, like a chord that needs resolving After yeahyeahyeahyeah, he was sent home.Now things are clear now and so less clear now:The scent of summer in all autumn sound;The shore and chatoyance of the sea stones; And a hayness in the wavelength a blackHorse inhales en route back to the barn. TuneMe in then tune me out again with your yeahYeahyeahyeah and your big hole in the sky.…

Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson on Antigua in 1949. When she was sixteen, her family interrupted her education, sending her to work as a nanny in New York. In time, she put herself on another path. She went from the New School in Manhattan to Franconia College in New Hampshire, and worked at Magnum Photos and at the teen magazine Ingenue. In the mid-’70s, she began to write for The Village Voice, but it was at The New Yorker, where she became a regular columnist for the Talk of the Town section, that everything changed for her. Her early fiction, much of which also appeared in that magazine, was collected in At the Bottom of the River (1983), a book that, like her Talk stories, announced her themes,…

for “the maiden in her dark, pale meadow” Twilight through the roof of a rain forestshatters like a chandelier of green glass,the shrillness strafed by keening cicadasand unseen flocks of cockatoos that cawtheir catcalls at the meltdown of the sun. Dimming of the day bronzes a pathwaythat we follow under vaults of booyongdown a terraced stairway to this canyonof warm mist, where a waterfall loiters,draped in a grotto, like a soaked sarong. Shadows deepen the tinges of each fernto jade, while we descend into the naveof this cavern where paramours gather,unmournful, by the cascade, to witnessthe arrival of bright nymphs at nightfall. Prattle, muttered by the gentle showerin its pool of shade, softens our voiceswhile we wait, rebuking the ruby glowfrom a camera, its lamplight forbidden,a red ray doused to…

In Majorca, jet-lagged at the airport, Nathan bought a one-liter bottle of Tanqueray, and then, after an hour’s drive, their van stopping in a small, possibly medieval town, a second bottle of gin, soda water, limes. They drove farther, another half hour, the sea beside them, before reaching the house. The house was isolated, far from town, on the side of a cliff that plunged into water so clear that from the terrace Nathan could see fish swimming at the water’s base. There was a woman waiting for them. She took them through the house, each room all sparse white walls, wooden beams across the ceiling. She had all seven of them cram into the bathroom, where she demonstrated flushing the toilet. It was how one usually used a toilet.…

APPEARING HERE GINNY, thirty-four, a woman with Down syndrome, a volunteer, a choir singer CHRISTOPHER, thirty-three, Ginny’s half brother, teaches at the local community college JUSTICE, sixty-eight, Ginny and Christopher’s honorary aunt, a librarian, a writer SETTING Ginny’s house in Corsicana, Texas. One-story, ranch-style, doesn’t get great light. Christopher gets home. He’s a little drunk. Justice is watching TV with Ginny. JUSTICE Hey, there he is. How was it? GINNY Hey, buddy-o. CHRISTOPHER Who’s buddy-o? GINNY That’s you. JUSTICE How was your friends? CHRISTOPHER They were okay. Yeah. He sits down. Is that Mariah Carey? JUSTICE I don’t think so. GINNY Yes, it is. JUSTICE Oh. They watch. CHRISTOPHER Is this a VHS? GINNY Yes, it is. CHRISTOPHER DVD player still not working? GINNY No, it’s not. CHRISTOPHER Is this…

Everyone had the same IKEA bed.She tied my wrists to hers, above my head. (She liked what she called “clean lines,” I would learn;her major had been architecture.) Sometimes when I lay there, waiting, bound or free,I’d envision its assembly: the tiny standard-issue wrench that torquedthe socket of the bolt, drawing the particleboard flush against the rails. The hundred screws.The greasy crossbar with its queues of stapled slats. The wooden dowels,which had seemed too large to fit their holes, that gently she’d forced in. The plastic pegs.The vinyl footboard, trussed between the legs.…

I. Imagine an abandoned labyrinth, bisected, shimmering with lesions. Muddy. Imagine a photograph pressed into a wet wall. An image develops for about two seconds before someone throws it in the trash, mistaking it (the weak photograph) for packaging. The photograph blanches then recedes then fizzes, like soda on a stain. I remember a bone, the swimmer’s turn visible through my own taut skin. In the socket. In the photograph. Yes, like that. The electricity, which will never be born and which never died, came from somewhere else and then was captured. It is volatile. It has a legal structure. There’s no caption. It smells. Some questions: Is this infancy? Is this a shrine? Eat the photograph. There’s nothing to transmute. II. We didn’t have a telephone. We didn’t have…

It doesn’t smell here.I can be whoever I want to be.I can leave my dull citizen-life behind,but have you ever walked aroundlooking for what was alreadyin your hands? Standing upright,with arms down, staring straight ahead,I could be a statue or a pine tree.The love-canceling hours are gone.There is no ick factor.I do not cut down more than I can grow.It’s like living a simple lifein a forest, or splitting offa part of me to grow. You probably think that I ammore like a swan than a panther,since tears, those most ludicrous of things,once stuck my eyes together. But all thatis over now. Don’t get me wrong:Sometimes I still get so excited thatmy love can scarcely express itself.Sometimes I eat a toad to prove a point.Sometimes I succumb to flattery.Sometimes I…

We lived in a poor part of town but we had the greatest entertainment. We had the goldfish ponds, we had Motorcycle Hill, we had the dump and Bicycle Jenny. We made rafts for the creek. We lived off the land. Down the street was a family who’d moved off the reservation—grandfather and kids and grandkids. The grandkids were our age and we spent a lot of time with them. The grandfather liked to tell me about his religion, his beliefs. I loved his stories and his tales. I called him Grandpa. The old man—he was very well loved but he liked to drink. His daughter and her husband locked him out of the house when he got drunk. I’d say, Grandpa can stay with us—I’ll sleep in my sister’s…

Bertha “Birdie” Lusch (1903–1988) worked for most of her life on an assembly line at the Timken Company, a metal-bearing manufacturer in Columbus, Ohio. She began making poetry, collages, carvings, and illustrations as a teenager. In the seventies and eighties, she constructed bouquets from clippings of the Columbus Dispatch and supplements to Sunday magazines, which she pasted onto Hallmark sales catalogues. Each is signed with a drawing of a small bird.…

On November 16, 1989, I phoned the Soviet embassy in Paris and asked to speak to Mr. S. The switchboard operator did not reply. After a long silence, a woman’s voice said: “You know, Mr. S. returned to Moscow yesterday.” I immediately hung up. I felt as if I’d heard this sentence before, over the phone. The words were not the same but they had the same meaning, the same weight of horror, and were just as impossible to believe. Later, I remembered the announcement of my mother’s death three and a half years earlier, how the nurse at the hospital had said: “Your mother passed away this morning after breakfast.” The Berlin Wall had fallen a week earlier. The Soviet regimes established in Europe were toppling one after the…

CHIBUIHE OBI ACHIMBA is a poet, essayist, and editor whose work has appeared in the New York Times and Harvard Review. WILL ARBERY is a playwright and screenwriter. Corsicana will premiere in June at Playwrights Horizons. CHRISTIAN BÖK is the author of Eunoia, which won the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS (1890–1935) is a heteronym created by the Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935). LAKIESHA CARR’s debut novel, An Autobiography of Skin, is forthcoming from Pantheon in 2023. HENRI COLE’s selected sonnets, Gravity and Center, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2023. PAUL DALLA ROSA’s debut short story collection, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, will be published this summer by Allen & Unwin in Australia and Serpent’s Tail in the UK. ANNIE ERNAUX is a French writer. PATRICIO FERRARI is…

The Plimpton Circle is a remarkable group of individuals and organizations whose annual contributions of $2,500 or more help advance the work of The Paris Review Foundation. The Foundation gratefully acknowledges: 1919 Investment Counsel • ACE Content • Gale Arnold • Debbie & Mark Attanasio • Helen & William Beekman • Christine Meleo Bernstein & Armyan Bernstein • BNY Mellon • Bernard F. Conners • Katherine & Usama Cortas • Boykin Curry • Sarah Dudley Plimpton • Cheryl Henson & Ed Finn • Larry Gagosian • Mala Gaonkar • Ashley Goodale • Toni K. & James C. Goodale • Marian Goodman Gallery • Matthew Greene • Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks, P.C. • Lucy & Lawrence H. Guffey • The Harf Family • Gabriela & Austin Hearst • Alexander Hecker…

is about you: not about your father who mildly streams youdown your years. I pretend a knowing of your skin or,beneath it, the wells of yourself, over the time it tookyou here. Where and who do I go with withoutmyself? The long widths of you across a year ofmyself near you—shuttered now by another mind—I am in need of me. You pan your lens towardanother version of your old man. You have constructed him. I hearan aria again, I want to think strawberries,I think mulch. There is too much potential in this dyingplanet not to believe you are at the end of this. Yes, even Ihear you long enough to hear another person: and think shewas as clever as you said you were at the start of this: whois not…

Green Moon Green, how I want you green. —Lorca I am sorry I let you downI was writing this poemIn the middle of everythingThe way they wanted itSpring like a gun to the headGreen how I want youI’m so sorry flowerI let you downI was a pink warriorA violent concoctionSomeone mixed me up by accidentBut don’t be sorry for meNothing like a lakeTo go admireAs you drive past itOn the way to somethingA real miracleAnd if you showed up here tonightLike I wanted you toI wouldn’t stop to apologizeI’d embrace youWithout thinkingHow I wanted you thenHow I still doGreen like I know you betterIf I could do it over againI wouldn’t Twins Man in an Easter suitLeans into meTo kiss me But I am not in the mood for thatI…

I pitched through the lobby door and then, as I caught my breath, stood looking back at the storm. It was bad out there. The city had been reduced to dim outlines and floating lights; snow moved down Nineteenth Street in waves. I beat it from my hat and coat, knocked my boots together. Under those high ceilings, each sound reverberated. Only the emergency lights were on, there was no one at the front desk, all the elevators in the bank sat open and waiting. And in a fit of hope, I thought there might not be, in all the building, even one other soul. Though I hadn’t hit that button, the elevator stopped on nine: silence, nothing but cubicles in the faint light of an alarm panel. When the…

The woman in Édouard Vuillard’s Woman Sweeping, painted between 1899 and 1900, is Marie Michaud Vuillard, the painter’s mother. She is tall and stocky, her posture—that slight give of the back to the broom, without bending—marking a nonchalant style of carrying out a chore that routine hasn’t made any less complex. As Madame Vuillard sweeps, her gaze seems to fall on the broom or the floor. We might detect deference or humility in such a pose, but the turn of her head, her face ringed with a whitish glow as if lit by an inner ardor, conveys ease. We cannot see her gaze; we are given only the black slash of her eyelashes, which suggests an almost closed-eye intensity. Madame Vuillard is invested in her work and in herself, though…

partial recollection a ghost is hangingfrom the doorpostof our past— can you see it?it has wounds—it’s bleedingyears from its mouth [.] when we left ourhouses that aprilit was for history’s pleasure— twice the war wasin far-flung townsthen it grew a light foot and veeredtoward us like anarrow [.] it was not my intentionto lie on behalfof the government— or on behalf of historywe did not leavethe village or the house nor the portmanteauby the curbside spillingits shame of rancidmilkand steamed vegetables we were driven outin small pickup truckswith the windows compact like buttonholes shutteredin the dense grip of putty-glueveiled in carbide-soot [.] there was a blizzardof houseflies early thatmorning thronging the bomb-seared trusses (somethinghad died in the ceiling— an animal, a child)then the footfallsof soldiers hard against asphalt theirlaughter hitting…

I. When I look at myself I see a stranger.So obsessed am I with feelingThat I sometimes lose my way when I step freeFrom all the sensations I receive. The air I breathe, the liquor I imbibe,Both belong to my way of existing,And I never quite know how to concludeThe sensations I so unwillingly conceive. Nor have I ever properly ascertainedIf I do actually feel what I feel. Am IReally the person I seem to be? Am I really who I believe I am?Even in my sensations I’m a semi-atheist,Unsure that I am the one feeling those feelings. II. The Praça da Figueira in the morningWhen it’s a sunny day (as it always isIn Lisbon) is never far from my mind,However futile that memory might be. There are so many…

We’d arranged to meet under the High Line,Outside the Whitney; I was running down fromThis photo shoot in Chelsea so I hadMy clothes stuffed into a hiking backpackAnd I was naked except for stilettos.Felix was coming from choir practice.He was tall, very thin, ginger-nut hair,A two-vest situation, naked below the knees.Hi, I said, glistening from the running;You must be J.’s friend. Shall we fuck?The ginger nut didn’t say anything, eyes white.I stuck out my hand. He looked at my updo. Hi,He said. I’m in three choirs, did J.Tell you? One’s way in Harlem, that’s the oneI like best, the other two down here, one at this churchIn Tribeca, the other one’s sort of Midtown?He had this soft, moony Irish brogue.Two women in actual pillbox hats, tweed suits,Wheezed past me on…

Cover: Copyright © Andrew Cranston, courtesy of the Ingleby Gallery, photograph by Alan Dimmick. Page 14, courtesy of the Phillips Collection, acquired 1939, copyright © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; pages 24–25, 54, courtesy of Jane Corrigan; pages 56, 60, 63, 66, 69, 71, 74, 77, courtesy of Jane Gardam; pages 85–100, copyright © Frida Orupabo; page 119, courtesy of Jane Corrigan; page 160, courtesy of Jamaica Kincaid; page 166, copyright © 1992 by Jamaica Kincaid, used with permission of The Wylie Agency; page 169, courtesy of Jamaica Kincaid; page 172, courtesy of Ann Arlen; pages 175, 178, 181, 182, courtesy of Jamaica Kincaid; page 184, copyright © Mariana Cook, 1995; page 185, copyright © Mariana Cook, 1996; page 188, interview still frame courtesy of Stephanie Black; pages…