Two Interesting New Critics

Alberto Savinio, "Self-Portrait as an Owl" (1936)

I enjoy critical writing immensely. “The Critics” is my favorite section of The New Yorker. It’s always a pleasure to discover new critics – new to me, that is. Two such discoveries I’ve made recently are Lidija Haas and Gini Alhadeff. Haas’s “The Disbelieved” (The New Yorker, June 4 & 11, 2018) is a brilliant review of Porochista Khakpour’s “Sick,” a chronicle of Khakpour’s experiences with Lyme disease. Haas says that Khakpour “resists the clean narrative lines of many illness memoirs—in which order gives way to chaos, which is then resolved, with lessons learned and pain transcended along the way.” I like the way Haas makes a theme of this resistance. She quotes Susan Sontag’s warning in Illness as Metaphor that “nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one,” then takes issue with it: “This idea implies an injunction against interpretation and against narrative shaping that’s all but impossible for a writer on the subject to obey.” She sees this longing for narrative logic and simultaneous distrust of it as a function of illness itself: “Pain and suffering are what they are – they resist meaning and the narratives that make it.” She talks about Sick’s “paranoid logic and spiralling, dizzying structure.” The more she says about this intriguing book, the more I want to read it – a sure sign of a great review.

Another sign is a review that seduces me to read about an artist I didn’t even know existed. Such a piece is Gini Alhadeff’s “Against Seriousness” (The New York Review of Books, May 10, 2018), a review of an exhibition of Alberto Savinio’s paintings at the Center for Italian Modern Art, New York City. The piece begins magnificently:

Alberto Savinio, the hidden spring of metaphysical modernism, lives on in his Self-Portrait as an Owl (1936). His face, with its marked eyebrows, dark eyes, thin lips, and air of melancholic diffidence, sketched in swirling feathers, resembles that of his brother, Giorgio de Chirico, who did a pencil drawing of the two siblings—or Dioscuri, as they liked to call themselves, after the mythical twins Castor and Pollux—at the start of their working life in Paris, one as a musician, the other as an artist. In Self-Portrait, Savinio wears a dark suit, and his shapely hand, the thumb hooked over a waistcoat button, takes up one fifth of the image. The scarf wound around his neck partly conceals a feathered chest. 

I read that and just kept going right to the end, devouring Alhadeff’s wonderful descriptions of Savinio’s surrealism. For example:

In one of these, My Parents (1945), his mother and father have become stone armchairs, very expressive ones, with just one eye each. The mother’s chest looks pubescent above an exposed ribcage, her arms replaced by a rolled upholstery trim, her head the skull of a camel or a horse. The father is headless, an expansive chest grafted onto an armchair with one immense, powerful eye staring out of it. The shadows they cast consist of dense handwritten lines that narrate a brief story of their lives: “My mother was called Gemma, she sang with a beautiful mezzo-soprano voice.”

“Against Seriousness” brims with such descriptions. I enjoyed it enormously.

Lidija Hass and Gini Alhadeff – two critics I look forward to reading more of. 

Postscript: I see Alhadeff has a piece on William Eggleston in the June 7 New York Review of Books. It’s tempting to read it online. But I’ll wait for the print version.