The Paris Review 191

(Reviewed by Eden Carter Wood)

The Winter issue of the Paris Review, just about to be superceded by their newly-sprung Spring issue, has been something a fixture on my commute in to the office for the last few weeks. It's more-or-less perfect for the train journey home, with an engaging mix of content: poetry, short fiction, interview, memoir, dispatch and photography to choose from.

My favourite story here is Aimee Benders's Faces, told from the point of view of a boy whose mother suspects he's hiding something- an inability to process facial expressions. Their visit to see a doctor has some particularly memorable moments:
'My mother launched into it right away: "Hello there doctor, thank you so much for seeing us, my son has this funny thing where he can't tell the difference between a group and a person."
"Well," chortled the doctor, "isn't that interesting."
Her neck was so long it seemed strange that she was a doctor specializing in perception.

There's also short fiction by Argentinian author Patricio Pron, and by Carsten Rene Nielsen, as well as an interview with the 'extraordinarily elusive' Mary Carr, author of The Liar's Club, her 1995 memoir of her Gothic childhood in East Texas. For those yearning for a beach, Massimo Vitali's photographs of Bathers provides another, non-verbal method of transportation; amazing panoramic spreads of green, crystal bathing pools in Croatia, bleached pale beaches in Brazil and and the Canary Islands will have you reaching for your passport.

The poetry on offer is similarly diverting, varied and thought-provoking. Dorothea Tanning's 'Cultivation' opens nicely, for example, with this thought:

Cultivating people can be arduous,
With results as uncertain as weather.

Grab yourself a copy of the Paris Review for your next commute (or to read anywhere, now I think about it). It's great stuff.

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