The Art of Quotation (Part I)

Jonathan Kramnick, in his absorbing Criticism & Truth (2023), argues that quotation is a key element of critical writing. He says, “Much of literary criticism turns on the art of quoting well.” He sees quotation as a form of craft – “weaving one’s own words with words that precede and shape them.” I agree. Kramnick identifies two types of quotation – in-sentence quotation and block quotation. In-sentence quotation is “embedding language from a text within your sentences.” Block quotation is “setting off larger gobbets in block form.” In-sentence quotation is a form of weaving; block quotation is a form of mortaring. Both forms are creative: “The skilled practice of writing about writing makes something new in the act of interpreting it. It is fundamentally and irreducibly a creative act.”

It’s tonic to see these points being made. Not all critics are quoters. Edmund Wilson rarely quoted. He preferred paraphrase to quotation. But, for me, the best critics are the ones who quote extensively, e.g., John Updike, Helen Vendler, James Wood, Janet Malcolm, Dan Chiasson, Leo Robson. 

Updike included quotation as Rule #2 in his “Poetics of Book Reviewing”: “Give enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste” (Higher Gossip, 2011).

That’s one compelling reason for critics to quote. Another is to point something out. Mark O’Connell, in his review of James Wood’s The Fun Stuff, says, “When Wood block-quotes, you pay attention—as you would to a doctor who has just flipped an X-ray onto an illuminator screen—because you know something new and possibly crucial is going to get revealed (“The Different Drummer,” Slate, November 2, 2012). This is an excellent description of Wood’s method. It’s a form of literary noticing. Kramnick calls it “fundamentally demonstrative and deictic: look at these lines, this moment; observe how they do this thing.” 

Seldom have I seen such a deep appreciation of quotation as Kramnick’s. He calls it an art, and he shows why. I applaud him. 

Top Ten "New Yorker & Me": #9 "Minimal Realism: Pawel Pawlikowski's 'Ida' "

Still from Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida (2013)

This is the second post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is "Minimal Realism: Pawel Pawlikowski's 'Ida' " (August 6, 2014):

I like the look of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida, and the feel of it. Pawlikowski has a poet’s gift for using objects, landscapes, and people expressively, so that they all become part of his vision. It’s this gift, I think, that makes Ida a rich, emotionally charged experience.

The best description of Pawlikowski’s technique that I’ve read is found in David Denby’s " 'Ida': A Film Masterpiece" (“Culture Desk,” newyorker.com, May 27, 2014):

The director and his fledgling cinematographer, Lukasz Zal, shot the movie in hard-focus black and white; they have produced images so distinct and powerful that they sharpen our senses. “Ida” might be called static were it not for the currents of emotion from shot to shot, which electrify the women’s relation to each other throughout. Clearing away clutter, Pawlikowski almost never moves the camera; many of the scenes are just long-lasting shots, fed by a single light source that often puts the faces in partial shadow (what we understand of these two women will always be limited). Sometimes the figures are positioned at the bottom of the frame, with enormous gray Polish skies above them, as if the entire burden of a cursed country weighed on its people. Both beautiful and oppressive, the bleakness of the landscape in winter suggests something uncanny in the air, as if we were watching a horror film without ghouls.

One can trace possible influences—Carl Theodor Dreyer, very likely, and Robert Bresson, and European art films from the sixties and early seventies like François Truffaut’s “The Wild Child,” and also Polish movies made in the period in which “Ida” is set. But I can’t recall anything major that looks quite like this movie. Pawlikowski is not after commonplace realism but something you would have to call minimal realism, in which the paring away of cinematic junk makes our attention to what remains almost rapt: the clinking of the nuns’ spoons at a silent convent dinner, some gentle country sounds, the transfixing boredom of long drives through the flat landscape.

That “minimal realism, in which the paring away of cinematic junk makes our attention almost rapt,” is an excellent description of Pawlikowski’s style. I prefer it to, say, “stylistic austerity,” and variations thereof, which some critics are using to describe Ida’s form. See, for example, Dana Stevens, "Ida" (Slate, May 2, 2014): “In many ways, Ida feels like a film that might have been made anytime in the past 50 years. It’s set in the early 1960s, and its stylistic austerity and interest in theological questions often recall the work of Robert Bresson (though Pawlikowski lacks, I think, Bresson’s deeply held faith in salvation).”

The comparison of Ida with Bresson’s work is, I think, a mistake. Bresson’s films, particularly Diary of a Country Priest (1950), are austerely beautiful. But they’re also intolerably pious and inhumanly pure. In her capsule review of Diary of a Country Priest, Pauline Kael says of the young priest whose faith is neither understood nor accepted by his parishioners, “Does Bresson know what a pain this young man is? The priest’s austere spirituality may give the community the same sort of pain that Bresson’s later movies give some of us in the audience” (5001 Nights at the Movies, 1991). Ida is brief; it is spare; it is shot in black-and-white; it is dominated by the color gray, not because Pawlikowski wants to be austere, but because he wants to be true to the times (“What was that lovely city beneath Communism’s gray casing?” Adam Zagajewsky asks, in his memoir Another Beauty). But Ida also has jazz in it, and sex, and vitality. There’s a young naïve, pious Catholic nun in it, but there’s also a worldly, cynical, hard-drinking, nicotine-addicted aunt known as Red Wanda.

Ida is, as Anthony Lane says, in his "Road Trips" (The New Yorker, May 12, 2014), “a road movie, of sorts” (“Thus to our surprise, this small tale becomes a road movie, of sorts, and a journey back into a divisive past”). That “of sorts” is crucial. Most road movies (e.g., Thelma & Louise, The Motorcycle Diaries, Sideways) are wild rides. Ida is more solemn (Denby calls it a “spiritual journey”). But it’s still a thousand times wilder than Bresson’s painstakingly tedious and offensively holy Diary of a Country Priest. In Ida, two women – tough, wry Wanda and her young niece, Ida, a Catholic nun – set off by car to discover how Ida’s parents died. Their vehicle, a white Wartburg, has almost as much presence as the Norton motorcycle (“the Mighty One”) in Motorcycle Diaries. At one point, we see an intoxicated Wanda driving it, and in the next moment, we see it being hauled back onto the road by a handsome team of workhorses. I leaned forward to absorb this remarkable scene, but it vanished in an instant – just one example of Ida’s many wonderful, understated details.

Road movie landscapes are often ravishing (e.g., the gold-and-green Santa Ynez Valley in Sideways, the soaring Andean vistas in Motorcycle Diaries); not so in Ida. Well, let me qualify that. Ida’s landscape is ravishing if you relish, as I do, the beauty of bleakness – “the moon-gray landscape of eastern Poland,” as Lane describes it ("Ida," newyorker.com). This is a landscape soaked in repressed memory, and Ida is an opening to it, an excavation of horrific memory buried in the Polish ground.

June 14, 2021 Issue

A James Wood review has a distinctive look. Instead of the narrative approach that most literary critics opt for – paragraph on paragraph of plot summary and interpretation trailing down the page – Wood quotes and analyzes the writing. Mark O’Connell, in his review of Wood’s The Fun Stuff, says, “When Wood block-quotes, you pay attention—as you would to a doctor who has just flipped an X-ray onto an illuminator screen—because you know something new and possibly crucial is going to get revealed” ("The Different Drummer," Slate, November 2, 2012). This is an excellent description of Wood’s method. You see it in his “Where I’m Coming From,” a review of Francisco Goldman’s novel Monkey Boy, in this week’s issue. Midway in the piece, up goes the block quote:

An extended recollection from this period of Frankie’s life demonstrates the hospitable rhythms of the prose:

The memory of sitting in my bedroom’s window seat and passing my toy truck out through the bars to an Indian woman who took her baby boy out of her rebozo and set him down on the patterned old paving stones of the sidewalk so that he could play with the truck and my astonishment that he was naked. A memory like the broken-off half of a mysterious amulet that can only be made whole if that now-grown little boy remembers it, too, and we can somehow meet and put our pieces together. I don’t even remember if I let him keep the truck or not, though I like to think I did. Not all that likely that he’s even still alive, considering what the war years were like for young Maya men of our generation. Who knows, maybe he’s up here somewhere and even has children who were born here.

The density of the memory, the playing over present and past, the essayistic space made for an ongoing political dimension, along with an insistent optimism—all these are characteristic of the novel as a whole, and of Goldman’s feel for a kind of narrative phrasing that allows an ideally sauntering and shifting perspective.

This is quintessential Wood, and I love it. His artful use of quotation gives the reader a taste of the book under review. And, at the same time, it gives Wood an opportunity to do what he does best – analyze style. 

James Wood's "Serious Noticing"

I relish criticism that takes me inside the heart of a piece of writing. James Wood’s essays and reviews accomplish this magnificently. In his How Fiction Works (2008), he says of Viktor Shklovsky and Roland Barthes, “Both were great critics because, being formalists, they thought like writers: they attended to style, to words, to form, to metaphor and imagery.” This is what Wood does, too. Exhibit A for his exquisite art is his new Serious Noticing, a collection of twenty-eight of his best pieces, twenty two of which are picked from his previous four collections, and the remaining six skimmed from his recent New Yorker work.

Dip into Serious Noticing almost anywhere and you’ll find Wood exploring the interior of a piece of writing, describing how it works. For example, in “What Chekhov Meant by Life,” he points out, “Detail is hardly ever a stable entity in Chekhov’s work; it is a reticent event.” In “Anna Karenina and Characterization” he refers to “the way Tolstoy slows down the tempo of realism.” In “Saul Bellow’s Comic Style,” he shows that the way Bellow describes his characters is a form of sculpture “pressed into by the artist’s quizzical and ludic force.” 

For me, the key to Wood’s art is quotation. He is an astute and generous quoter. Mark O’Connell, in his review of Wood’s The Fun Stuff, says, “When Wood block-quotes, you pay attention—as you would to a doctor who has just flipped an X-ray onto an illuminator screen—because you know something new and possibly crucial is going to get revealed” ("The Different Drummer," Slate, November 2, 2012). This is an excellent description of Wood’s approach. Serious Noticing brims with examples of it. For instance, in “ ‘Reality Examined to the Point of Madness’: László Krasznahorkai,” Wood writes,

Here is a necessarily long quote from early in the book, as Krasznahorkai introduces Korin’s relentless mental distortions:

because he didn’t feel like going home to an empty apartment on his birthday, and it really was extremely sudden, the way it struck him that, good heavens, he understood nothing, nothing at all about anything, for Christ’s sake, nothing at all about the world, which was a most terrifying realization, he said, especially in the way it came to him in all its banality, vulgarity, at a sickeningly ridiculous level, but this was the point, he said, the way that he, at the age of forty-four, had become aware of how utterly stupid he seemed to himself, how empty, how utterly blockheaded he had been in his understanding of the world these last forty-four years, for, as he realized by the river, he had not only misunderstood it, but had not understood anything about anything, the worst part being that for forty-four years he thought he had understood it, while in reality he had failed to do so; and this in fact was the worst thing of all that night of his birthday when he sat alone by the river, the worst because the fact that he now realized that he had not understood it did not mean that he did understand it now, because being aware of his lack of knowledge was not in itself some new form of knowledge for which an older one could be traded in, but one that presented itself as a terrifying puzzle the moment he thought about the world, as he most furiously did that evening, all but torturing himself in the effort to understand it and failing, because the puzzle seemed ever more complex and he had begun to feel that this world-puzzle that he was so desperate to understand, that he was torturing himself trying to understand, was really the puzzle of himself and the world at once, that they were in effect one and the same thing, which was the conclusion he had so far reached, and he had not yet given up on it, when, after a couple of days, he noticed that there was something the matter with his head.

The passage displays many of Krasznahorkai’s qualities: the relentless ongoingness of the syntax; the way Korin’s mind stretches and then turns back, like a lunatic scorpion trying to sting itself; the perfect comic placement of the final phrase. The prose has a kind of self-correcting shuffle, as if something were genuinely being worked out, and yet, painfully and humorously, these corrections never result in the correct answer. As in Thomas Bernhard, whose influence can be felt in Krasznahorkai’s work, a single word or compound (“puzzle,” “world-puzzle”) is seized and worried at, murdered into unmeaning, so that its repetition begins to seem at once funny and alarming. Whereas the characters in Bernhard’s work engage in elegant, even oddly formal rants—which can be removed from the fictions and performed as bitterly comic set pieces—Krasznahorkai pushes the long sentence to its furthest extreme, miring it in a thick, recalcitrant atmosphere, a dynamic paralysis in which the mind turns over and over to no obvious effect.

Wood’s commentary on Krasznahorkai’s passage displays many of Wood’s qualities: the focus on formal elements (syntax, word choice, phrase placement), the brilliant use of metaphor (“like a lunatic scorpion trying to sting itself), the descriptive analysis of the prose (“a kind of self-correcting shuffle, as if something were genuinely being worked out, and yet, painfully and humorously, these corrections never result in the correct answer”; “Krasznahorkai pushes the long sentence to its furthest extreme, miring it in a thick, recalcitrant atmosphere, a dynamic paralysis in which the mind turns over and over to no obvious effect”).

In addition to block-quotation, Wood creates wonderful collage-like assemblages of short quotations. “Saul Bellow’s Comic Style” contains this beauty: 

This life-sown prose moves fast, logging impressions with broken speed. Rereading Herzog, one encounters too many marvels to record. There is Herzog’s mistress Ramona, sparkily described as “certainly not one of those little noli me tangerines.” And there is a brief memory of Strawforth, a fat schoolboy, with his “fat curling thumbs,” and a rabbi, “short-bearded, his nose violently pitted with black.” And Nachman, who played the harmonica in the lavatory stalls: “You heard the saliva in the cells of the tin instrument as he sucked and blew.” And the light bulb that Herzog remembers at home, ” which had a spike at the end like a German helmet. The large loose twist of tungsten filament blazed.” Herzog recalls his asthmatic brother Willie in the grip of a breathing fit: “Trying to breathe he gripped the table and rose on his toes like a cock about to crow.”

My favourite piece in Serious Noticing is “On Not Going Home,” in which Wood connects his personal experience of expatriation with his deep appreciation of, among other works, W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. It’s an example of what Wood calls, in Serious Noticing’s Introduction, “writing through” (“And let Brendel’s performance on the piano, his inability to quote without also recreating stand for the kind of criticism that is writing through a text, the kind of criticism that is at once critique and re-description: sameness”). In “On Not Going Home,” the texts that Wood writes through, in addition to The Emigrants, are Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile,” Aleksandar Hemon’s Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls, and Ismail Kadare’s Chronicle in Stone. Two passages in “On Not Going Home” are, for me, unforgettable. The first is an inspired description:

Take the beautiful American train horn, the crushed klaxon peal you can hear almost anywhere in the States – at the end of my street at night-time, across a New Hampshire valley, in some small Midwestern town: a crumple of notes, blown out on an easy, loitering wail. It sounds less like a horn than a sudden prairie wind or an animal’s cry. That big easy loiter is, for, me the sound of America, whatever America is. 

The second is an inspired notion:

What is peculiar, even a little bitter, about living for so many years away from the country of my birth, is the slow revelation that I made a large choice many years ago that did not resemble a large choice at the time; that it has taken years for me to see this; and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life – is indeed how life is lived. Freud has a wonderful word, “afterwardness,” which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: it is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.

That “and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life – is indeed how life is lived” speaks to me. I read it six years ago when “On Not Going Home” originally appeared in the London Review of Books. I immediately incorporated it into my own viewpoint. It’s great to see it preserved in such a beautiful book. 

February 29, 2016 Issue

Jeffrey Toobin’s Talk piece, "Looking Back," in this week’s issue, perfectly expresses my view of Antonin Scalia:

Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor.

I’ve read several comments on Scalia’s death, e.g., Lawrence H. Tribe’s "The Scalia Myth" (NYR Daily, February 27, 2016), David Cole’s "Scalia: The Constitution in Politics" (NYR Daily, February 15, 2016), Dahlia Lithwick’s "Why Liberals Loved to Hate Antonin Scalia" (Slate, February 14, 2016). Toobin’s piece strikes me as the only one that's adequately damning.   

Postscript: One of the best sentences in this week’s issue is Peter Schjeldahl’s “Take Rat and Bear, their costumed roles as fame-hungry artists turned murder detectives in the very funny Super-8 film 'The Least Resistance' (1980-81), which they made in L.A. on a budget not far north of nothing, despite a triumphant finale involving a helicopter” ("Light Heavyweights") – where “best” means surprising, delightful, specific, textured, variegated, surreal. 

October 26, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. I’m pleased to see André Carrilho back in the magazine after a lengthy absence. His portrait of Jeb Bush for Ryan Lizza’s "What Would Jeb Do?" is an eye-catcher. Carrilho has produced some of the magazine’s most inspired illustrations. See, for example, his portrait of Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, for Sasha Frere-Jones’s "Show Runners" (June 27, 2011) and his depiction of Paul Auster for James Wood’s "Shallow Graves" (November 30, 2009) 

2. Dina Litovsky’s photo illustration for Silvia Killingsworth’s "Tables For Two: Timna" beautifully captures the wonderful kubaneh-filled clay flowerpot that Killingsworth mentions in her delectable piece.

3. What to make of Meghan O’Rourke’s "Unforced Error"? Of this much I’m sure – it’s great, even better than her superb "My Aunts" (The New Yorker, July 20, 2009), one of my all-time favorite poems. “Unforced Error” is more complex than “My Aunts.” Like “My Aunts,” it celebrates life. But in “Unforced Error,” failure to see death in the midst of that life is considered a mistake. The combination of disparate images and thoughts is ravishing: “I made a mistake. Now I have a will. It says when I die / let me live. A white shirt, bare legs, bones beneath. / Numbers on a board. A life can be a lucky streak, / or a dry spell, or a happenstance. / Yellow raspberries in July sun, bitter plums, curtains in wind.” That final line is very fine – a form of still life/nature morte. “Unforced Error” is death-haunted. My take-away: Don’t take life for granted.

4. I strongly disagree with the view expressed in Masha Gessen’s "The Memory Keeper" that “the border between journalism and literature is inviolable.” One of this blog’s main premises is that no such boundary exists, and that fact pieces such as Ian Frazier’s "Blue Bloods," Burkhard Bilger’s "Towheads," Lauren Collins’s "Angle of Vision," William Finnegan’s "Dignity," Raffi Katchadourian’s "Transfiguration," Dexter Filkins’s "Atonement," to name just a few recent examples, are as artful, arresting, and meaningful as any novel or short story.

5. The most absorbing piece in this week’s issue is Nicholas Schmidle’s "Ten Borders," which reconstructs the harrowing, dogged, courageous journey of a Syrian refugee named Ghaith from his hometown of Jdeidet Artouz (“Across the street, a sedan was spewing flames. Body parts littered the road”) to Bar Elias (“Ghaith met the smuggler at a restaurant, and paid him five hundred dollars for the plane ticket and the fake passport”) to Beirut (“The officers discovered Ghaith’s Syrian passport in his backpack and arrested him”) to a Beirut jail (“One day, Ghaith watched, horrified, as a pregnant prisoner fell to the floor, blood pooling around her”), back to Jdeidet Artouz (“He felt imperilled whenever he left the house”), then to Istanbul (“After several days, Turkish smugglers herded Ghaith and the others onto buses”), then to Mersin (“Ghaith hitched a ride to the center of Mersin in the back of a produce truck, among piles of oregano, mint, and parsley”), then to Alanya (“Eventually, they were dropped off late one night at a gas station near Alanya, a tourist town on the Turkish Riviera, two hundred and twenty miles west of Mersin”), then via boat into the Mediterranean (“Water slopped over the gunwales and a gaseous odor filled the cabin”), then back to the Turkish Riviera (“Police officers arrived and stretched crime-scene tape around a swath of the beach”), then to Mersin (“In mid-June, Bilal learned that yet another smuggler from Mersin, known as Abu Omar, was running rubber dinghies from Izmir, on Turkey’s western coast, to Lesbos, a Greek island fifteen miles away”), then to Izmir (“At eight o’clock, Turkish smugglers hustled them onto a bus; along the way, they collected another group of refugees, many of whom had to squat in the aisles”), then via rubber dinghy to Lesbos (“The refugees cut the motor and the raft floated to shore”), then to Moria (“They were dropped off at a refugee center that resembled a prison: high fences, watchtowers, concertina wire”), then on an overnight ferry to Athens (“He and Bahaa stood on the deck, watching the sun set on the terra-cotta roofs of Mytilene, Lesbos’s capital”), then via train to Evzonoi, then by foot to Gevgelija (“The Macedonian police collected Ghaith and his friends in a paddy wagon and took them back to the Greek border”), then, following the railroad tracks, trekking to a village five-stops north of Gevgelija, where he and dozens of other refugees boarded a train going north; then disembarking at the last stop before the Serbian border; then trekking to Preševo; then via bus to Belgrade (“Ghaith took a shower to wash off the mud caked behind his ears”); then via smuggler’s van to Vienna (“Ghaith, Bahaa, and Bilal crouched on the floor, so that they couldn’t be seen through the windows”); then via train to Salzburg; then via taxi to Munich; then via train to Copenhagen, and then to Malmö, crossing into Sweden on the Øresund Bridge. It’s an amazing journey, with many close calls and memorable experiences along the way. Schmidle is to be commended for the skillful, detailed way he’s reported it.

6. I read Leo Robson’s "Delusions of Candor" with interest. James Wood, in his recent Slate interview, mentions Robson as one of the critics he regularly reads. He says Robson is “extremely good on fiction.” “Delusions of Candor” is the first Robson piece I’ve read. It’s a review of two books on Gore Vidal – Jay Parini’s Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal and Michael Menshaw’s Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal. Robson describes Vidal’s style as “Olympian detachment, patrician hauteur.” This strikes me as exactly right. I’m not a fan of Vidal’s writing. But I did enjoy Robson’s review, especially his argument that Parini “wants to give us the real Gore, but he keeps on falling for the pose.” I like the way he uses passages from Anais Nin’s diary describing Vidal as “lonely,” “hypersensitive,” “insecure,” contrasting her view with the image of the “strapping, self-assured, untouchable Vidal” that Parini presents in his book. Argument, for me, is a key element of a stimulating book review. Robson appears adept at it. I enjoyed his “Delusions of Candor” immensely.

In Praise of John Updike's Criticism (Contra James Wood)

John Updike (Illustration by Tom Bachtell)

James Wood, in his recent interview with Isaac Chotiner (Slate, August 18, 2015), makes explicit what I’ve always suspected – his distaste for John Updike’s criticism. Chotiner says to him, “And yet, I never liked, say, John Updike’s criticism, just because I felt like he was always just sort of going through the motions of telling me what the book was about.” Wood replies,

I know, I never liked it either. The redescription in Updike’s criticism is obviously of a high order, and [of] a certain kind of generosity, too—that’s to say, he was a very patient and hospitable quoter of other people’s texts. But I always felt that there was a certain kind of ungenerousness in Updike’s work, too. The maddening equilibrium of his critical voice—never getting too upset or too excited—enacted, I always felt, a kind of strategy of containment, whereby everything could be diplomatically sorted through, and somehow equalized and neutralized, and put onto the same shelf—and always one rung below Updike himself. That’s perhaps unfair. But I think his fiction worked in the same way, too, despite the passionate attention of his prose: It existed to clothe the world in superb words, to contain it, somehow.

Well, there’s no accounting for taste. The great literary critic of my life is Updike. His reviews are like no others; they show how criticism can be a breathtaking art in itself.  

As an offset against Wood’s sour remarks, I want to quote a passage from Orhan Pamuk’s "Updike at Rest" (New York Times Sunday Book Review, April 17, 2014), a review of Adam Begley’s Updike:

In 1985, on my first visit to America, I found a copy of Updike’s recently published “Hugging the Shore” in a secondhand-book shop. In this collection of book reviews (written in large part for The New Yorker), I discovered an Updike who had been invisible from Istanbul: Updike the essayist. For years thereafter, I bought The New Yorker just in case it might contain one of his reviews. As his admirer Julian Barnes once wrote, it may be difficult to find anyone who has read all of Updike’s books. But I may well have read all of his essays, as collected in “Picked-Up Pieces,” “Hugging the Shore,” “Odd Jobs,” “More Matter,” “Due Considerations” and the posthumously published “Higher Gossip.” These book reviews and, later, his art reviews collected in “Just Looking,” “Still Looking” and the posthumously published “Always Looking,” have given me as much pleasure as his novels, and in fact reading Updike’s invariably sensitive, fair and entertaining essays has changed the way I read his fiction, armed with the knowledge that those novels and stories have been written by perhaps one of the world’s most distinguished men of letters.

These words make me smile; I totally identify with them. Updike’s critical writings have been a tremendous source of pleasure in my life, too. From the wonderful Updike collections that Pamuk mentions, here are a dozen of my favorite lines:

In the interminable rain of his prose, I felt goodness. [“Remembrance of Things Past Remembered,” in Picked-Up Pieces]

He slices up ordinary experience into paper-thin transparencies and feeds it back in poetic printout. [“Layers of Ambiguity,” in Hugging the Shore]

Mind permeates Bellow’s renderings; permeability is the essence of his fluid, nervous, colorful mimetic art. [“Draping Radiance with a Worn Veil,” in Hugging the Shore]

And what is a cop kebap? The prose tells us, and something of present-day, real-life Istanbul springs into being. [“Dutchmen and Turks,” in Odd Jobs]

Beauty lives, surely, in a harmonious excitement of particulars. [“Logic Is Beautiful,” in Still Looking]

The will to describe, the willingness to be transported by details of the humble actual, is a novelist’s requisite [“Worlds and Worlds,” in Hugging the Shore]

His lavish, rippling notations of persons, furniture, habiliments, and vistas awaken us to what is truly there. [“Toppling Towers Seen by a Whirling Soul,” in Hugging the Shore]

Love of language might be an answer – language as a semi-opaque medium whose colors and connotations can be worked into a supernatural, supermimetic bliss. [“The Doctor’s Son,” in Hugging the Shore]

Her details – which include the lyrics of the songs her characters overhear on the radio and the recipes of the rather junky food they eat – calmly accrue; her dialogue trails down the pages with an uncanny fidelity to the low-level heartbreaks behind the banal; her resolutely unmetaphorical style builds around us a maze of familiar truths that nevertheless has something airy, eerie, and in the end lovely about it. [“Stalled Starters,” in Hugging The Shore]

That nasal squeak like fingernails on silk shows an avid realism. [“Fairy Tales and Paradigms,” in Due Considerations]

They live, in short, and like all living feed on air, on the invisible; the spaces between the words are warm, and the strangeness is mysteriously exact, the strangeness of the vital. [“An Introduction to Three Novels by Henry Green,” in Hugging the Shore]

He lived for art, its appreciation as well as its creation. [“Imperishable Maxwell,” in Higher Gossip]

Minimal Realism in Pawel Pawlikowski's "Ida"

I like the look of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida, and the feel of it. Pawlikowski has a poet’s gift for using objects, landscapes, and people expressively, so that they all become part of his vision. It’s this gift, I think, that makes Ida a rich, emotionally charged experience.

The best description of Pawlikowski’s technique that I’ve read is found in David Denby’s " 'Ida': A Film Masterpiece" (“Culture Desk,” newyorker.com, May 27, 2014):

The director and his fledgling cinematographer, Lukasz Zal, shot the movie in hard-focus black and white; they have produced images so distinct and powerful that they sharpen our senses. “Ida” might be called static were it not for the currents of emotion from shot to shot, which electrify the women’s relation to each other throughout. Clearing away clutter, Pawlikowski almost never moves the camera; many of the scenes are just long-lasting shots, fed by a single light source that often puts the faces in partial shadow (what we understand of these two women will always be limited). Sometimes the figures are positioned at the bottom of the frame, with enormous gray Polish skies above them, as if the entire burden of a cursed country weighed on its people. Both beautiful and oppressive, the bleakness of the landscape in winter suggests something uncanny in the air, as if we were watching a horror film without ghouls.

One can trace possible influences—Carl Theodor Dreyer, very likely, and Robert Bresson, and European art films from the sixties and early seventies like François Truffaut’s “The Wild Child,” and also Polish movies made in the period in which “Ida” is set. But I can’t recall anything major that looks quite like this movie. Pawlikowski is not after commonplace realism but something you would have to call minimal realism, in which the paring away of cinematic junk makes our attention to what remains almost rapt: the clinking of the nuns’ spoons at a silent convent dinner, some gentle country sounds, the transfixing boredom of long drives through the flat landscape.

That “minimal realism, in which the paring away of cinematic junk makes our attention almost rapt,” is an excellent description of Pawlikowski’s style. I prefer it to, say, “stylistic austerity,” and variations thereof, which some critics are using to describe Ida’s form. See, for example, Dana Stevens, "Ida" (Slate, May 2, 2014): “In many ways, Ida feels like a film that might have been made anytime in the past 50 years. It’s set in the early 1960s, and its stylistic austerity and interest in theological questions often recall the work of Robert Bresson (though Pawlikowski lacks—I think—Bresson’s deeply held faith in salvation).”

The comparison of Ida with Bresson’s work is, I think, a mistake. Bresson’s films, particularly Diary of a Country Priest (1950), are austerely beautiful. But they’re also intolerably pious and inhumanly pure. In her capsule review of Diary of a Country Priest, Pauline Kael says of the young priest whose faith is neither understood nor accepted by his parishioners, “Does Bresson know what a pain this young man is? The priest’s austere spirituality may give the community the same sort of pain that Bresson’s later movies give some of us in the audience” (5001 Nights at the Movies, 1991). Ida is brief; it is spare; it is shot in black-and-white; it is dominated by the color gray (not because Pawlikowski wants to be austere, but because he wants to be true to the times (“What was that lovely city beneath Communism’s gray casing?” Adam Zagajewsky asks, in his memoir Another Beauty). But Ida also has jazz in it, and sex, and vitality. There’s a young naïve, pious Catholic nun in it, but there’s also a worldly, cynical, hard-drinking, nicotine-addicted aunt known as Red Wanda.

Ida is, as Anthony Lane says, in his "Road Trips" (The New Yorker, May 12, 2014), “a road movie, of sorts” (“Thus to our surprise, this small tale becomes a road movie, of sorts, and a journey back into a divisive past”). That “of sorts” is crucial. Most road movies (e.g., Thelma & Louise, The Motorcycle Diaries, Sideways) are wild rides. Ida is more solemn (Denby calls it a “spiritual journey”). But it’s still a thousand times wilder than Bresson’s painstakingly tedious and offensively holy Diary of a Country Priest. In Ida, two women – tough, wry Wanda and her young niece, Ida, a Catholic nun – set off by car to discover how Ida’s parents died. Their vehicle, a small, white Polish sedan (is it a Trabant? a Syrena? I’d love to know) has almost as much presence as the Norton motorcycle (“the Mighty One”) in Motorcycle Diaries. At one point, we see an intoxicated Wanda driving it, and in the next moment, we see it being hauled back onto the road by a handsome team of workhorses. I leaned forward to absorb this remarkable scene, but it vanished in an instant – just one example of Ida’s many wonderful, understated details.

Road movie landscapes are often ravishing (e.g., the gold-and-green Santa Ynez Valley in Sideways, the soaring Andean vistas in Motorcycle Diaries); not so in Ida. Well, let me qualify that. Ida’s landscape is ravishing if you relish, as I do, the beauty of bleakness – “the moon-gray landscape of eastern Poland,” as Lane describes it ("Ida," newyorker.com). This is a landscape soaked in repressed memory, and Ida is an opening to it, an excavation of horrific memory buried in the Polish ground.