The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three Ellises (for fiction), McClellands (for essays), or Whitakers (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Ellis, McClelland, or Whitaker indicates a generally positive review.

⏰ Fiction

“Predictions and Presentiments” by Valeria Luiselli. No Ellises. finding, finishing, fishy. I found Luiselli’s previous novel, Lost Children Archive, to be a hugely ill-considered exercise in making the immigration crisis all about her anxieties about her divorce and its effect on her children. (She is Mexican-American and has lived around the world.) This story has a less distasteful plot – the autofictional speaker has divorced and fled with her daughter to Italy – and there is one clever scene here (the café interview, just one paragraph but a crucial one) that suggests Luiselli’s project has grown more self-aware. But apart from that Luiselli’s self-seriousness and cod-poetic sensibility remain major deterrents. Everything is a “meteoric flicker of mischief” or a “radical exercise in trust and intimacy between two almost strangers” – the latter describing a shave. The pairing of an academic remove and supposed deeply-felt emotions clanks throughout; it feels less like the speaker is repressed and more like Luiselli is trying to hide things from us. That’s her prerogative, but it sinks the story.

⏰ Weekend Essay

“A Bridge to Venezuela” by Daniel Alarcón. No McClellands. crisis, criminal, cross. Not much here that wasn’t in Armando Ledezma’s letter a few weeks ago; Alarcón hasn’t found enough of a story to justify an essay. He’s in a border town, reporting that there isn’t anything new to report, and remarking on how “a veritable parade of international media had arrived in search of a story only to find none.” Alright… so then don’t write it.

⏰ Random Pick

“Popular Science” (The Current Cinema) by David Lardner. One Whitaker. restraint, reflections, reach. A very short review of Madame Curie, justifying its biopic inaccuracies but noting their predictability. (The film has “a certain bedtime-story aspect”). No especial stylistic verve can be detected, but I appreciate its brevity; not every review needs a framing device. Lardner, horribly, died less than a year later when his car hit a land mine while he reported on the second World War. He was only 25. Jeez!

⏰ Something Extra

The Karin Coonrod King Lear, remounted at La MaMa, is as good as you may have heard, deeply felt, and not as over-clever as you might fear from a description. (Everyone plays Lear at some point! Mostly they walk around the audience while they talk!) Lear is not a Shakespeare that lives in my heart, but this brought it closer.

Sunday Song: