WRB—Nov. 5, 2025

“alien speech”

Having an active and inquisitive mind, the Managing Editor never, except in his paroxysms of intemperance, was wholly negligent of study: he read what is considered as polite learning so much, that he is mentioned by Wood as the greatest scholar of all the nobility. Sometimes he retired into the country, and amused himself with writing libels, in which he did not pretend to confine himself to truth.

Links:

• In the Wall Street Journal, an excerpt from Margaret Atwood’s new memoir (Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, November 4) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Nov. 1, 2025.]:

  One morning I got up to find our mother gone and a pile of blood-soaked sheets in the hallway. Something horrible had happened, but what? Explanations from our father were evasive. She had become ill (with what?), was at the hospital (that much was believable) and would be back soon (dubious). Our father struggled on as best he could. Breakfasts and short-order cooking were within his skill set, but when it came to doing my ringlets with what our mother called “his stubby little fingers”—as opposed to her long, elegant and ringlet-adapted ones—I’m afraid he got an F.

  Our mother did reappear, looking wan and smiling bravely, and we had to pretend that she was fine. It took me a while to figure out that she had “lost a baby.” I found one eloquent knitted baby sock—pale green in color—when looking for wool. How did one lose a baby? Not like losing the house keys: much more dangerous and blood-soaked. Where had such a baby gone? Much later, she told me that there had been another lost baby between my brother and me. Background sadness.

  If you trace in this event the origins of a similar scene in Alias Grace (1996) and also one in The Blind Assassin (2000), you would be right.

  [That last sentence rubs me the wrong way. The writers of fiction use and adapt material from their own lives in their work, of course, but Atwood is not doing that here. She is turning material from her life into an answer key for an Easter egg hunt. She doesn’t go on to explain how her mother’s miscarriages influenced the scenes, either; she’s content with a statement that might as well be prefaced with “Note to biographers.”

  I was going to call it “blunt,” but it really isn’t. (Blunt would be something like “This event was the origin of similar scenes in Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin.”) Instead the information comes in the form of an alienating and unnecessary conditional. It puts the reader, and not Atwood, in the position of having noticed the similarities between Atwood’s life and work. She wants the credit for sharing this with the reader, but she doesn’t want to be so blatant about it. And the awkwardness of the sentence is its own rebellion against what it is being asked to do.

  Anyone of Atwood’s stature who writes a memoir is thinking, in some way, about the biographers. It’s inevitable. But the moral of this story is not to let that thinking about the biographers become obvious. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In The Atlantic, Lily Meyer reviews Ella Berman’s latest novel (L.A. Women, August):

  Berman embeds these views in her heroines’ discussions about writing, which are the way their friendship grows. Lane is proud of her masculinely “short, stark sentences with few adjectives and even less emotion.” Gala, meanwhile, is a funny, charming writer who prefers books that don’t resist interiority. On reading a draft of Lane’s debut novel, she warns Lane that the book as it stands is so lacking in feeling and detail that it’s “impossible for anyone to ever know” the protagonist. (Thanks to Gala’s advice, the book becomes a nationwide hit.) “Or maybe,” Gala adds, “the problem is that you don’t want them to. You haven’t even given her a name.”

  Unknowable, anhedonic, and frequently nameless female protagonists are abundant in the literary fiction of the twenty-first century, in works by Danzy Senna, Katie Kitamura, Christine Smallwood, Claire-Louise Bennett, and others (many of which are quite good). These books can feel obstinate in their refusal of pleasure—an approach that does not seem to interest Berman in the slightest. (One thing that L.A. Women does have in common with these novels is the uselessness of its men. All of them are stock figures, which keeps the readers’ focus on Lane and Gala’s relationship.)

  [I had some notes on the cultural moment around female friendship, specifically in connection with “heteropessimism,” in WRB—Oct. 11, 2025. I mention it here because Meyer argues that L.A. Women is part of a trend: “feminist art is getting fun.” Maybe so; but what does creating this fun art require? L.A. Women is not set in the present day but in the ’70s. Lane begins the novel with the literary approach of a rather uninsightful Hemingway imitator—“few adjectives,” sure, but “even less emotion”? The point of the comparison to the iceberg is that the emotional weight is hidden under the surface, not that it does not exist. (Even Didion, referring to Hemingway’s “very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes,” said nothing about emotion. From this starting point Lane learns about the importance of female friendship. And female friendship is the only thing on offer because the men are “stock figures” united in “uselessness.”

  All very fine, and perhaps very fun, but it is a rather backwards-looking kind of fun that relives battles fought and won a couple generations ago. What happened to imagining a future? Again, nobody writes like Hemingway now, and nobody has his persona either. Those “unknowable, anhedonic, and frequently nameless female protagonists” may not be as enjoyable to read about as Berman’s women, but they at least try to reckon with what things look like now. And levity is not necessarily opposed to seriousness anyway. —Steve]

• In The Point, Barry Schwabsky reviews a recent translation of Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil: The Definitive English Language Edition, translated from the French by Nathan Brown, January):

  Yet a translation like Brown’s, which understandably forgoes the specific formal constraints under which Baudelaire worked, must almost inevitably give the reader a false perspective, making the poems seem more contemporary than they really are and discounting their traditionalism—the alexandrine, the sonnet and so on, the aspects that would have been seen as reflecting “the eternal and the immovable”—in their pursuit of the poem’s semantic content. Brown goes in the opposite direction of Fredric Jameson, who recognized “many Baudelaires, of most unequal value indeed,” of which “the hardest to grasp” would be “the eternal freshness” of the poet, “whose language is bought by reification, by its strange transformation into alien speech.” The “sense” of the poetry may be oblique to “rhyme schemes and metrical patterns that,” Brown says, “can never adequately be rendered in English.” Well, it depends on how pedantic you want to be about adequacy; some of Roy Campbell’s mid-century rhymed translations remain better poetry in English than any other versions of Baudelaire I know. There’s something else to poetry beyond its sense on the one hand and the poet’s specific formal choices on the other—not just a rhyme scheme, for instance, but the decision to rhyme these particular words: let’s call it the poem’s unheard melody.

  [We linked to an interview with Brown in WRB—Apr. 12, 2025.]

[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:

• Anthony Hecht and angry poetry

• Somehow I forgot about a song by the Smiths

• A Poem by the Earl of Rochester and intentionally terrible arguments in poetry

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. 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 WRB with other people. —Steve]