Volume 50, Number 11 · July 3, 2003
Where the Fun Starts
By Charles Simic
The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, The Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World Since 1953
by the editors of The Paris Review, with an introduction by George Plimpton
Picador, 751 pp., $30.00
Perhaps the ideal place to think about the literature of the last fifty years is in a library surrounded on all sides by rows of shelves well stacked with bound copies of old literary magazines. One can probably spend months there in some corner without being noticed, choking on dust, turning the yellowed, crumbling pages, lingering over some poem or story, and even sneak in Chinese food and an occasional bottle of wine to get rid of the blues. Time is cruel to all living things, but what it does to literary reputations is downright mean. Sometimes it takes no more than twenty years for someone thought of as a great writer by his or her contemporaries to be completely forgotten. Literary movements that were once a scandal now make one yawn. To read through decades of literary quarterlies and avant-garde magazines is to begin to feel a tinge of sympathy for Chairman Mao, who, when he grew tired of writers and poets, used to send them into the countryside to harvest rice and dig ditches.
Review, 3572 words
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