I feel a rising resentment of the restaurant’s approach to gastronomy. Yet, I increasingly admire the waiters. The pride in what they do. Their no-non- sense work ethic. The Sisyphean nature of the job: redemption through repetition. The camaraderie. The competition. Their relationship with money and the ephemeral. The way they feel part of a great lineage, of something distinctly French. That they, unlike the rest of the citizens of the city, know something special. A secret order of magicians, perhaps. Just a lot less glamorous.
Because, if a waiter is doing his job correctly, he will be manipulating your perception of reality. He is, to all intents and purposes, an illusionist and his job is to deceive you. He wants you to believe that all is calm and luxurious, because on the other side of the wall, beyond that door, is hell. He is, in effect, the living example of the façade.
Doctors said the young man’s future was bleak: Save for his eyes, he would never be able to move again. Lopes would have to live with locked-in syndrome, a rare condition characterized by near-total paralysis of the body and a totally lucid mind. LIS is predominantly caused by strokes in specific brain regions; it can also be caused by traumatic brain injury, tumors, and progressive diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.
Yet almost 30 years later, Lopes now lives in a small Paris apartment near the Seine. He goes to the theater, watches movies at the cinema, and roams the local park in his wheelchair, accompanied by a caregiver. A small piece of black, red, and green fabric with the word “Portugal” dangles from his wheelchair. On a warm afternoon this past June, his birth country was slated to play against Spain in a soccer match, and he was excited.
Since 1947, the Japanese government has distributed a booklet to expectant mothers, encouraging them to record their journeys through pregnancy, delivery, and matrescence. Prepartum, women can jot down their diet and exercise regimes, and the details of their doctors’ visits; after giving birth, they can note vaccination dates and developmental milestones. In Japanese, the handbook is known as boshi techō, where techo means “planning journal” and boshi means “mother and child.” Emi Yagi has titled her début novel, translated into a rinsed, clear English by David Boyd and Lucy North, kūshin techō—a log not for mother and child but for “an empty core.” American readers will encounter the book as “Diary of a Void.”
This sprawling upstate network has kept up with the city’s demands for more than a century. This week it’s at about 80 percent of capacity — not bad but below normal. A writer could begin a buzzard-black apocalyptic novel with a scientist noticing levels are falling.
Lucy Sante’s new book, “Nineteen Reservoirs,” is about the construction of this system from 1907 to 1967, an Egyptian task, and about the villages and farms and schools and churches that were demolished and submerged to make way for it.
Salesses’s foremost concern is the way that the behavioral and artistic norms of writing workshops suppress or distort the voices of writers of color, but his deeper purpose is to suggest that the question “What makes a story ‘good writing’?” can’t be answered until you know who the story is for.
But where our species has been provided with genetic instructions and incentives galore to reward itself for procreation — such that the feeding-cleaning-rearing burdens placed on mothers are ones we tend to tacitly approve, romanticize and even enjoy — there is no oxytocin rush or cultural capital coming down the pike for adult children caring for aged parents.