Partisan Review articles from March 2002

Partisan Review archives from March 2002

From letters to a young novelist.
March 22, 2002... STYLE IS AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT, though not the only element, of narrative form. Novels are made of words, and the way a writer chooses and orders his language largely determines whether his stories possess or lack the power of persuasion. Of...

Planting the seeds of modernism: an evening with Annie Cohen-Solal.
March 22, 2002... Edith Kurzweil: I first want to thank Dan and Joanna Rose for their hospitality and to welcome you to celebrate Annie Cohen-Solal's new book, Painting American. The French title is more provocative: Un jour, ils auront des peintres. This was...

Trivializing tragedy: an interview with Norman Manea.(Norman Manea)(Interview)
March 22, 2002... Edward Kanterian: "Someday something terrible might happen," you wrote in your story "The Balls of Faded Yarn." It refers to the threat to mankind that conjures up the ubiquity of the apocalypse, an apocalypse that no longer allows a Kingdom...

Cynthia Ozick, Aesthete.
March 22, 2002... IN ROUGHLY THE SAME WaY that a playful Benjamin Franklin signed himself "Benjamin Franklin, Printer" and William Faulkner tried to put off his overly solemn critics by dubbing himself "William Faulkner, Farmer," I mean to talk about Cynthia...

The job.(Short Story)
March 22, 2002... TO WORK in the Saraswati Publishing Company has been my desire for four years. You mustn't think that I'm begging for food in the streets. I bring home a hundred and fifty rupees a month from the bookstore, even though I regularly nod off to...

A star. (Poems).(Poem)
March 22, 2002... A star A star is a flame's invention A spark's whim the opinion of a lamp longing for eternity one of God's secret maneuvers revealed by the dictionaries ... . Poetry by VENUS KHOURY-GHATA has received the Prix...

We explained. (Poems).(Poem)
March 22, 2002... We explained We explained our despair to the thorn bush and the juniper our only cousins in a foreign language we wept on the shoulder of the pomegranate tree which bled every month on our doorstep We asked the...

Clouds. (Poems).(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Clouds Clouds played no part in this story their shadows on the roofs brought nothing to the unities of time and space they were just compass points to someone teaching algebra to the nightingales The village...

Don't turn. (Poems).(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Don't turn Don't turn the pages upside down my mother would say backwards words get dizzy the troubled ink curdles like bad milk The pages we leafed through came from the forest that watched us read from the...

Faithful to Life. (Poems).(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Faithful to Life The city on Sunday quite late when there's peace except a radio drones out of the bowels of the dark wharves and for him who enters the wide slit of a street cut clean through the...

Homecoming. (Poems).(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Homecoming And now the holiday leads him to the heart of his old city agog on a weekday. And he feels lost --is it still me?-- from one to the other of those astonishing streets drawn into a net...

The Invention of the Parachute. (Poems).(Poem)
March 22, 2002... The Invention of the Parachute One day Lenormand showed his design with two parasols: as he leapt from a tree two girls, sunstruck, looked on. One asked if one might snag on a sprig as, steering from his beech...

On Taking the Body Off the Cross. (Poems).(Poem)
March 22, 2002... On Taking the Body Off the Cross The moon seems close, the docks are saturated, a small boat rocking like a light seed caught by the torn thread of a web, its catching noticed only as what has not been heard, like...

A Life of Crime: St. Julien l'Hospitalier. (Poems).(Poem)
March 22, 2002... A Life of Crime: St. Julien l'Hospitalier In awe and transport what pregnant queen would not hold dear the augur's words, "Your son will be a saint."? She told no one. The boy galloped his horse beside his father. ...

Caliban in After-Life.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Caliban in After-Life Prospero, what hollow art makes human humane? Excepting one, I can accept the other. Neither a deity nor its dog sits court upon a question of this sort. So answer, Sorcerer....

Throw Yourself Like Seed: after Miguel de Unamuno. (Poems).(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Throw Yourself Like Seed after Miguel de Unamuno Defeat? Shake it off, take yourself back. Lying in bed, sheet over your eyes, you'll miss the wheel that grazes your heel as it passes by, turning-- whoever wants to live...

Post-mortems of the sixties: deep structure specters and walking zombies.
March 22, 2002... Interpretation of the 1960s has become a primary instrument of political self-definition by both Liberals and Conservatives. The differing perspectives of that decade have taken on a function analogous to the decisive role played by the French...

Leaving Italy.(Editorial)
March 22, 2002... SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I visited a small exhibition of sixteenth-century Sienese paintings at Siena's Palazzo Chigi Saracini. There were several fine works on display, but Il Sodoma's "Allegory of Heavenly Love" was in a class by itself. It struck...

The new anti-Americanism: America as an Orwellian Society. (Poems).(Editorial)
March 22, 2002... IN 1999, NATO CELEBRATED its fiftieth anniversary with a victory in the Serbian War. It was also the year the alliance added countries from the now-defunct Warsaw Pact. While it seemed that NATO was at the peak of its might, some new,...

Heartaches and limitations: Isaac Bashevis Singer.
March 22, 2002... I FIRST MET ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER shortly before he was mugged. He was then known as an ethnic writer only to a rather small circle of readers; the grand scheme of his writings was not yet apparent. He lived on Central Park West just above...

The autumn of our discontent.
March 22, 2002... OVER THIS PAST THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY, following an absence of several years, I paid a brief visit to London where I reconnected with a number of old British (and other European) friends. Not surprisingly, the first and principal topic of...

Intellectuals or pundits?(PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS: A STUDY OF DECLINE)
March 22, 2002... PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS: A STUDY OF DECLINE. By Richard A. Posner. Harvard University Press. $29.95. UNTIL ABOUT THIRTY YEARS AGO, sociology was a budding social science discipline, which gradually lost its attraction and its way, whereas...

From bildungsroman to family saga.(THE SWEETEST DREAM)
March 22, 2002... THE SWEETEST DREAM. By Doris Lessing. HarperCollins. $26.95. IN HER LONG CAREER, Doris Lessing has used many genres and has never left them as she found them. The first three volumes of Children of Violence resemble other twentieth-century...

T. S. Eliot's achievements.(WORDS ALONE: THE POET T. S. ELIOT)(Denis Donoghue)
March 22, 2002... WORDS ALONE: THE POET T. S. ELIOT. By Denis Donoghue. Yale University Press. $26.95. DENIS DONOGHUE'S Words Alone, which he says is "partly a memoir, partly a study of [T. S.] Eliot's poetry," recounts Donoghue's young manhood in Dublin,...

Advice from an elder statesman.(DOES AMERICA NEED A FOREIGN POLICY?: TOWARD A DIPLOMACY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY)
March 22, 2002... DOES AMERICA NEED A FOREIGN POLICY?: TOWARD A DIPLOMACY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY. By Henry Kissinger. Simon & Schuster. $30.00. NO FORMER AMERICAN STATESMAN alive today receives as much abuse as Henry Kissinger. Radical critics of the...

Clement Greenberg.
March 22, 2002... CLEMENT GREENBERG: A CRITIC'S COLLECTION. By Karen Wilkin and Bruce Guenther. Princeton University Press. $49.95. CLEMENT GREENBERG NEVER BOUGHT a painting. He acquired his collection not by purchases but as gifts from artists. Artists...

Living by the word.
March 22, 2002... I REMAIN: VOICES OF THE HUNGARIAN POETS FROM TRANSYLVANIA. Edited by Gyongyver Harko. Translated by Paul Sohar. Pro-Print. $13.00. Show me the poets you read, and I'll tell you who you are ... Show me the poets you rally...

Letters.
March 22, 2002... To the Editor: Herbert Lottman begins his review of my book Emigre New York by stating that "a reviewer must resist the temptation to blame the author for not having written the book he or she hoped to read." And denial, as the New York...