★ Planes Flying over a Monster: Essays
Daniel Saldaña París, trans. from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman. Catapult, $26 (224p) ISBN 978-1-646-22231-5
Novelist París (Ramifications) reflects in these striking essays on the complicated relationship between place and identity. Traversing the cities “that have marked my life,” the author explores in the title essay how he spent his 20s trying to make it as a writer in Mexico City before his life briefly unraveled. In “The Madrid Orgy,” París recounts a disastrous party he threw for his college girlfriend and a sophisticated group of intellectuals he was trying to impress, and muses on the perspective afforded by time and age (“Literature has such miracles: one can return to a scene from the past and suddenly be able to observe it with the eyes of an onlooker; a witness capable of compassion and laughter”). Throughout, París casts a perceptive and compassionate eye on his preoccupation with alcohol and drugs as a means of dissociation (“I observed the advance of my alcoholism with tenderness, as others watch the growth of the child”), while keeping the focus on what it means to belong to a place, to create a self, and to attempt to record that self on paper. These electric essays linger in the mind. (Aug.) words of critic Matthew Cheney, while actor Blair Brown credits her ability to “traverse genres from sci-fi to high lit and mediums from the stage to the small screen to film” for her remarkably durable career. What emerges from these and other interviews is less a creative blueprint than an admiring portrait of the perseverance, talent, and drive that fuels creatives. While D’Erasmo’s self-reflections sometimes detract from the focus on her subjects, the final product inspires. Artists seeking inspiration would do well to check this out. (July)
In the late 2010s, a Cardiff University researcher trying to show that Hawaii’s James Clerk Maxwell Telescope could make observations at a certain frequency range unexpectedly found evidence of phosphine molecules (considered a signature of life) in Venus’s atmosphere, suggesting that the planet may have at one time harbored living organisms. Abundant footnotes aim to amuse but end up distracting (one laments the “extortionate” data roaming fees that would result from bringing a cell phone to Jupiter). However, they don’t detract from detailed case studies that depict the scientific process as detective work. For instance, Lintott describes how astronomers deduced the elongated shape and possible composition of the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua, whose passage through our solar system in 2017 took scientists by surprise, from data showing it varied in brightness and lacked a comet’s tail. The result is an illuminating look at chance’s role in science. Photos. Agent: Will Francis, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (June)