Latest news with #MyDinnerwithAndre
The Guardian
26-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Sister Europe by Nell Zink review – all the ideas Trump deems most dangerous
On 7 March 2025 the New York Times published a list of words that the Trump administration was systematically culling from government documents and educational materials. This list, which includes the words 'gender ideology', 'affirming care', 'confirmation bias', 'ethnicity', 'identity', 'immigrants', 'racism', 'prostitute', 'political', 'intersectional' and 'privilege', reads like a bingo card for Nell Zink's astonishingly prescient new novel, Sister Europe, in which a large cast of racially, economically and gender-diverse characters convene over the course of a single evening to attend a literary awards ceremony in Berlin. On its surface, Sister Europe is a comedy of manners set among Berlin's exclusive and elusive cultural elite. The prose is searingly quick, revelatory and funny: Zink's dialogue reads like our best plays. Entertaining banter could be this book's largest trophy, were it not for the contents of the banter, which are so ambitious and ethically interested that they make it clear that Zink is one of our most important contemporary writers. Like the film classic My Dinner with Andre, in Sister Europe the interactions between characters are vehicles through which philosophical quandaries are explored. However, while the questions in My Dinner with Andre are largely posed in the abstract, here they are shockingly specific. For example, Demian, a German art critic, struggles to reconcile his admiration for the Arabic writer being honoured, Masud, with racist elements in Masud's writing: On reading [Masud's] books, Demian discovered to his consternation a grating and persistent anti-Black racism. Was it excusable? He excused it, on the grounds that it would be hard for an anti-Black racist to do much damage in Norway, where anti-Muslim racism was a deadly threat (admittedly much of it intersectional, directed against Somalis). Was it patronising to suspend his ethical standards because the man was a genius, or Eurocentric not to suspend them, and which was worse? In this way, Zink repeatedly names systems of power without being moralistic. She is simultaneously stringent and funny, which is disarming. Humour is one of our best tools for processing extreme violence: Zink knows this, and accordingly deploys her singular wit throughout. Over the course of the evening, Zink's characters vocalise their desires, fears and prejudices. Nothing, including narrating from the consciousness of an economically privileged 15-year-old trans girl who tries her hand at streetwalking, is off limits. The most working-class character in the book is an Israel-loving antisemitic German cop who takes bribes from pimps but also delivers an exacting critique of the decriminalisation of prostitution under the Social Democratic-Green German government in 2002. In this way, Zink endows each of her characters with both moral high grounds and glaring blind spots. In Sister Europe, as in life, who is the oppressed and who is the oppressor is not fixed. The ever-shifting flow of social and sexual power between the characters is nerve-racking and tantalising: there are no saints and no demons. Though her work is rarely discussed in the context of politics, Zink is one of our most ambitious and explicitly political writers. Here she shows us that the Trump administration's embargoed words are not weapons, but questions. Nothing is more dangerous to a dictator than someone who can anticipate, and therefore interrogate, their actions. Sister Europe performs an intellectually rigorous interrogation of the ideas the Trump administration deems most dangerous, all the while dressed in the outfit of an extravagant Hermes-clad literary gala. While this is a novel of ideas, the narrative is never cold or cerebral. It's beautifully felt, and emotionally open-handed. I wanted love and joy for each of the 13 main characters, which the book (surprisingly!) delivers. As the long night is coming to an end, and morning is threatening to creep over the winter streets of Berlin, Zink's large cast pairs off and an unlikely couple trade pillow talk: Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion He whispered hesitantly, speaking into the towel over her ear, 'You want to change your life.' 'That was stupid,' she replied. 'Life should change me. I don't want to be destructive of a living thing, flattening it with my identity.' She said the word slowly. As though identities were something ubiquitous, but distasteful, like dust mites, that might be dispensed with, given careful hygiene. This book is not a rejection of identity politics, but a plea for the possibility of an evolving self; a bid against inner stagnancy. Like Erasure by Percival Everett, Sister Europe addresses the claustrophobia that can accompany an identity. No character, real or imagined, enjoys being flattened. Rita Bullwinkel's novel Headshot is published by Daunt. Sister Europe by Nell Zink is published by Viking (£14.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Boston Globe
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
‘My Dinner with André' gives you a few things to chew on
Was it worth the effort? Perhaps. Your mileage may vary. Directed by Louis Malle, The Harbor Stage production, billed as the first theatrical adaptation of the film, is the handiwork of Jonathan Fielding and Robert Kropf, who star as Shawn and Gregory, respectively, and who also co-direct the piece. (When Harbor Stage brought its gripping production of Advertisement The first half of the movie-turned-play version of 'My Dinner with Andre'' is static, but it grows sharper and more absorbing in its second half. Questions about careers and purpose and existence are posed that have no easy answers. Crucially, Wally starts to challenge André a bit, so certain scenes have the flavor of a dialectic rather than a one-sided performer-audience dynamic. When we first meet Wally, as he is called, he's on his way to meet André for dinner at a swanky Manhattan restaurant. He's not looking forward to it at all. He's heard tales of André dropping out of the New York theater scene and leaving his wife and children for extended periods of travel abroad to — no way to avoid these next two words — find himself. Advertisement Wally, meanwhile, is stalled professionally, unable to get his plays produced or land acting jobs. He's in financial straits so dire that his girlfriend has had to take a job waitressing three nights a week. 'After all,' he explains, 'somebody had to bring in a little money.' It does not seem to have occurred to him that perhaps he could, you know, get a job. André seems under no such pressure. In monologues punctuated by bursts of metaphysical maundering, he describes his adventures in Tibet, on the dunes of the Sahara, and in the forests of Poland, dwelling at length on his encounters with Jerzy Grotowski, the legendary Polish director and theater theorist. Wally is more captivated by André's tales than you are likely to be. There are amusing elements to 'My Dinner with André' but the play, like the movie, doesn't commit to a satirical point of view. Are we meant to view Wally and André, with their massive combination of self-absorption and self-indulgence, as fundamentally absurd? Or are we to identify with them as embodiments of the eternal human struggle to live lives of meaning? When André casually says that he and his companions borrowed 'Dick Avedon's property out at Montauk,' are we meant to roll our eyes at his unacknowledged privilege? Fielding deftly captures Shawn's awkwardness, manifested in his conversational rhythms, often a beat behind, or in his clumsily phrased queries to André. Kropf's performance as André is just superb, a precisely calibrated lesson in the power of subtlety and nuance even — or especially — when inhabiting a character with an outsized personality. There are traces of Gregory's diction in his delivery, but Kropf creates a voice of his own, in every sense. Advertisement The folks at Harbor Stage seem to be in a prandial state of mind these days. 'Dindin,' a taut psychological drama written by the aforementioned Withers, unfolds at a dinner party with two couples that goes seriously awry. The movie is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video and on Apple TV Plus, and stars four of the founders of Harbor Stage: Withers, Kropf, Fielding, and Stacy Fischer. MY DINNER WITH ANDRE Based on the film by Wallace Shawn and André Gregory. Adaptation by Jonathan Fielding and Robert Kropf. Directed by Fielding and Kropf. Presented by Harbor Stage Company. Plaza Black Box Theatre, Boston Center for the Arts. Through March 30. Tickets $25 to $40. At 617-933-8600 or Don Aucoin can be reached at
