Thomas Harris, the creator of one of literature’s most terrifying monsters, arguably has one of the darkest imaginations of any writer working today. His infamous serial killer, Hannibal Lecter, devours his victims’s organs after delicately preparing them, and once ate a man alive, serving slices of his brain with truffles and caper berries.
So it’s somewhat unnerving to hear Harris insist that he doesn’t invent anything.
“I don’t think I’ve ever made up anything,” he tells me as we drive across Miami’s 79th Street Causeway, which takes us past a small island called Bird Key where a climactic scene in his new novel, “Cari Mora,” takes place. “Everything has happened. Nothing’s made up. You don’t have to make anything up in this world.”
Collier’s, a glossy weekly with a circulation of 2.8 million, was known as a forum for stellar writing. It was perhaps the most prestigious magazine in America, rivaled only by The Saturday Evening Post. It had commissioned Hemingway to cover what are now some of the most famous events in history, including the western Allies’ invasion of France and the collapse of the Third Reich.
We might have remembered that reportage alongside the best of his fiction. But we don’t—because Hemingway’s stint at Collier’s was a disaster.
On December 6, 2018, five months after the death of its long-time editor, Claude Lanzmann, Éditions Gallimard announced that Les Temps Modernes, the legendary intellectual journal, would cease publication. Its editorial committee had earlier proposed changing to a digital format and holding public forums, but Gallimard wasn’t interested. As the editors wrote in Le Monde on May 2, “the review created by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945, and led by Claude Lanzmann starting in 1986, now belongs to history.”
Its disappearance, the editors admitted, would not “change the face of the world,” its latest issues having failed to inflect the public debate, and even its closing barely having been noted in the press. The shuttering of Les Temps Modernes is significant not simply as the end of a review that had lived seventy-three years—a short life, compared to other intellectual journals in France, like the staid (Revue des Deux Mondes, which has been around since 1829; the Mercure de France*, appearing in its present form since 1890 and in an earlier incarnation since 1692; and Esprit, founded by the Personalist philosopher Emmanuel Mounier, which first published in 1932—but as the last symbol of an epoch, what Bernard-Henri Lévy called “Sartre’s century.”
A typical rehearsal lasts two hours. It may include: a quick check-in, to gauge how each man is doing; an acting exercise, maybe improvisational; then some focused work rehearsing whatever scenes are up that day. In other sessions, the men may work through the text in detail with Heller. At the end, the men reflect on the day’s work, and consider how they might bring its positive aspects into their daily lives. Morton said a common misconception is that prison theater is frivolous activity. “It’s hard work they do,” she told me. “They’re doing a lot of outer work with blocking and overall presentation, but there’s also a lot of inner work that’s going on.”
On the drive home in my dented Chevy Aveo, I cried hard and angrily, which is something you can do for extended periods of time in L.A. traffic. There has been plenty said about the emotional toll the 405 has on an Angeleno, but for all the road rage and automotive breakdowns, there is also this: Our cars offer us personal space that allows for grieving in transit, the trauma of heartbreak compassionately confined in a steel box.
By the time I got to my doorstep, 50 minutes and three freeways later, my tears had dried.
Cars are the enduring third wheel in an L.A. courtship, the backdrop of breakups, makeups and all the shifting status updates in between.
Alternate realms and wacky ideas can only take a writer so far; the works of literary surrealism that never leave us are those that find the perfect blend of the fantastic with the familiar. Russell’s work claims its place at the literary heights by accomplishing just that, and by remaining accountable to the consequences. This is particularly true of her new and deftly chimeric collection, Orange World and Other Stories.
Multilayered and complex, these new stories reveal a maturity that results from persistent experience and, of course, that fiendish trickster we call time. It’s no surprise to learn that Russell penned them amid significant transitions in her own life, as well as the nightmarish tribulations that have developed in our society and world.
Surely the most dismaying message of Rebirding is that the British are gardening their islands to death. Everythingfrom landscapes to individual endangered species are being managed and monitored according to human-set targets. But nature is dynamic: populations and habitats need to grow, mature and change if biodiversity is to thrive. If only the British would keep their hands off it and let nature take its own course, Macdonald contends, it would stand a chance.