Wilhelm von Gloeden, Girl in a Garden. I met Daniel at 4:00 one August morning in 1999. It was on the roof of my building, where, in the grip of a long bout of insomnia, I would wait for first light to mark the end of another summer night. Daniel couldn’t sleep either. He was […]
The Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra was born in 1975, two years after the violent military coup that ousted Chile’s democratically elected, Socialist president, Salvador Allende. It would be impossible to overstate the shattering impact of that coup, not only on Chile but on the entire Left in Latin America. It was the darkest event in one of South America’s darkest decades.
“How do you feel about representing New York at our literary festival here in Frankfurt?” asked the voice on the phone in halting, German-inflected English. The voice belonged to Wolfram, the organizer of the festival. “Writers from other cities are also invited,” he said, ticking off the names of authors who would be embodying the […]
Come winter, when New York’s street life grows scarcer and the public parks become frozen stretches you either race through or avoid, my fantasies of suburban life are revived. They began when I was a boy, and I’ve held on to them, I think, out of a deviant nostalgia for a way of life that […]
A scene from Robert Bresson’s L’argent (1983), based on a story by Tolstoy. After landing in Paris, from New York, I went straight to the Gare Saint-Lazare to board a train to the town of Valognes in Normandy, a three-hour ride. On the train, I fell into a rushing sleep, then woke with a jolt, […]
Desire is a question to which there is no answer, yet much of the time it’s the only question that matters. “Love . . . makes one little room, an everywhere,” wrote John Donne. Death, in its not-so-different way, does the same. The place of one’s final heartbeat is immense, or so it seemed to me at age eight when I inadvertently became sole witness to a murder.
Jealousy may be the closest a sane person can get to the experience of psychosis. I’m referring to the kind of florid, full-blown jealousy that strikes poor, enraged Leontes in The Winter’s Tale—a jealousy that leads to complete ruin. It is sometimes confused with envy, but the difference is fundamental: With envy you want to possess what the other person has—money, power, beauty, fame—whereas with jealousy you want to possess the actual person. Its true cousin is paranoia; both are anchored in a kind of warped, iron-clad logic. The thrill of jealousy, like that of paranoia, is that every sign
My friend Matt paid me a visit to confide his anxieties about his impending marriage. “I wonder if I’m cut out for the whole thing, the enormity of it,” he said. “It’s not hesitation about the person, just a reckoning with the profundity of the challenge ahead, even in the best of circumstances.” He ticked […]
My friend Tom invited me to visit him in Tbilisi. He’s a fearless, openhearted man, an international aid worker who had put in hard time in Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Now, he was the head of child protection for UNICEF in Georgia. “You can stay at my apartment, I’ve plenty of room. It’ll more than cancel out the price of the ticket to get here.” To entice me further he quoted a piece of graffito he had seen scrawled on the side of a building that afternoon: NO GOD, ONLY KINGS. “That’s the kind of place this is. Original. Enigmatic.
I’ve been thinking about constricted spaces lately, those crammed, no-exit corners that make us feel diminished in some way, wishing to expand, to break free. In New York, you fit yourself into these spaces daily. They have a way of dictating the very procedure of your mind: the segments, the modules, the shortcuts you think in. Adjustments are made. Your thoughts become the size of the bus seat you occupy—concentrated, balled up. In the subway we press together like guests at a doomed cocktail party, alienated from one another and acutely attuned. We grow increasingly introverted as more riders pour
