WRB—May 31, 2025

“some petty domestic arrangement”

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate—hell and becoming the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books are not the same. But they have something in common, and what they have in common is finality. Nothing will ever be the same again; he will never be the same again—if he takes another step. There is about him an agony of choice; this now is the quality of love.

N.B.:

May’s D.C. Salon will meet tonight to discuss the question “Can lying be moral?”

Links:

Reviews:

• In our sister publication out West, Bekah Waalkes reviews a new translation of a novel by Tezer Özlü (Journey to the Edge of Life, 1984, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely, April):

  It’s easy to imagine a young Özlü voraciously reading Pavese, finding in his words a key to understanding her own unhappiness. But as the narrator draws closer to Santo Stefano Belbo, the reader begins to wonder if reading Pavese might also have had a negative influence on Özlü. Could his writing about suicide—a topic that Pavese thought and wrote about obsessively from a young age—have imparted a particularly melancholic narrative to Özlü? This tension betrays the novel’s central question: what is the boundary between life and literature?

  Özlü takes the residue of books very literally, using the novel’s intimate and diaristic form to illustrate how language and ideas remain stuck in one’s consciousness after a lifetime of reading. Always written from the particularities of memory, Journey to the Edge of Life portrays reading as simultaneously sustaining and destructive.

  [That’s how they get you; you think the reading is sustaining, but it’s actually destructive. It’s how they got Emma Bovary too. —Steve]

• In Review 31, Jon Repetti reviews Aliocha Coll’s last novel (Attila, 1991, translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore, April) and Javier Serena’s novel about him writing it (Attila, 2014, translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore, April):

  Whatever Coll has or has not achieved in Attila—and that achievement is so bound up with his use of language at the all-but-untranslatable syllabic level that I can only defer that judgment to better readers of Spanish than myself—his most urgent contribution to the literature of our time lies not in any single passage or stylistic innovation, but in the fact that his writing prompts at every turn a particular question: How does one write a literature “for” the future when that future (as figured in Melantho) is conceived as radically indeterminate?

  This is not the question of the romantic poet languishing in obscurity who wonders, “Will my works be discovered after my death?”; nor is it the question of the modernist avant-gardiste who asks, “What must the novel of the future look like, stylistically and formally, and how can I be the one to write it?” It is instead a meta-question about temporality and legibility as such, posed in roughly these terms: If to write for the future is to address the readers of the future, and thereby to affirm that future, how can the writer—or, better yet, how can anyone—affirm a futurity that is not a mere continuation of the present but constituted by a break, a break as decisive as the fall of Rome itself, which is narrated in the central section of the novel? What would it mean to address an audience that is so radically other than oneself? How could one even begin to do so?

  [The answer settled on—throw everything that interests you in there, and the future can figure out what is useful—is a good one. Some things are universal, most are not, and nothing would speak as it does without both. And past a certain point it’s not something an artist can plan; Homer didn’t intend to speak to us, after all. —Steve]

• In the TLS, Jacqueline Banerjee reviews two books about Victorian publishing (Fiction on the Page in Nineteenth-Century Magazines, by Maria Damkjær, March; and The Victorian Mind’s Eye: Reading Literature in an Age of Illustration, by Julia Thomas, May 6):

  Of special interest to Damkjær are the contents of a given periodical that this form of publication implicitly demanded. Page-fillers, for example—isolated paragraphs, or the odd sentence completing a column that was otherwise left wanting—were not necessarily deployed at random. They might relate subtly to the main item on the page, even present a challenge to it. Damkjær has unearthed a self-righteous piece by a “Mrs. White,” for instance, published in the Home Circle, criticizing working-class slovenliness. Just beneath it appears a warning: “BEWARE of forming a hasty judgment concerning the fortunes of others. There may be secrets in the situation of a person that few but God are acquainted with.” Whatever motivated this “sassy page filler,” Damkjær welcomes it as a “small indictment not just of White’s piece, but of moralizing middle-class journalism as a whole.” Much more commonly, a page-filler reinforces the journal’s agenda for its presumed readership. A rival periodical to the Home Circle, the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, is peppered with homiletic anecdotes encouraging strength of will: a filler on “Decision” warns the reader that those of an “irresolute constitution” will suffer torments whenever called on to make up their minds over “some petty domestic arrangement.” Surely the Englishwoman should have more backbone?

  [I would love to do stuff like this, but it’s taking the commitment to obnoxious and tedious bits a bit far even for noted fan of obnoxious and tedious bits Steve Larkin. Also, it is a well-known fact that the Washington Review of Books is, among other things, the ideal domestic magazine for Victorian Englishwomen. (What could be more important than laundry, and what could be a greater sign of our interest in it than our URL?) —Steve]

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• Americans read reviews of T. S. Eliot

• Romantic love in Dante and the Beatles

• K. T. on a Poem by C. D. Wright and completeness

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the newsletter with a friend. —Steve]