Risotto Night with the Verdis

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I picked up Alexander Chee’s exhilaratingly over-the-top historical fiction melodrama The Queen of the Night to revel in 19th-century opera lore. I know I’m late to the party, but when the book dropped in 2016, I didn’t know a mezzosoprano from a heldentenor. It wasn’t until the pandemic years that the subject held much interest for me. My brother was once as opera-ignorant as I was but he’d become so fluent in bel canto and opera buffa that those sheltering in place with him were soon infected with a rapidly metastasizing cultural virus. Before 2020, I had never sat through a full-length opera. Six years later, I’ve seen almost all of the established canon via 24 live performances at Chicago’s Lyric Opera, three at the Met in New York, 19 at other regional theaters or concert halls, 34 in movie theaters, and at least 20 through streaming services and physical media. So let’s just say I came to Chee all in for thematic and narrative intersections with sung-through dramas from Aida to Zelmira. On the other hand, I did not come expecting the nuance of psychology, thought, and expression that is the hallmark of great literature. For the most part, The Queen of the Night aligns with my expectations. It is as self-indulgent as my reasons for reading it and as grand and silly as most 19th-century libretti. Still, there is a certain gravity to the book, derived from the way the broadly shifting fortunes of its heroine—from frontier orphan to kept woman to pampered superstar—reflect the broader condition of women in the historical period it explores.

Six Chekhovs

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“I have tried … to avoid unnecessary dwelling on my own feelings, or my own needs, or my own—oh dear—character. … I now wonder …whether all writing has a tendency to flow like a river towards the writer’s body and the writer’s own experience.” - A.S. Byatt, The Biographer’s Tale

The gradual acceptance of self-revelation is a rite of passage for many introverted authors, a fact I contemplated while reading the introduction to Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, a short fiction compilation translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. “He constantly portrayed himself in his work,” asserts Pevear, “and constantly denied it.” The necessity of exposure is explored in Chekhov’s plays, too. In the opening scene of The Seagull, Konstantin Treplev is an explosively insecure dramatist who writes inscrutable symbolist poetry to experience the rewards of self-expression without the risks of self-revelation. By the end of the play, he has matured into a short story writer heavily influenced by his rival Boris Trigorin, a novelist so addicted to self-exposure that he can’t take a walk without being tortured by ideas for autobiographical stories. Chekhov had more in common with Treplev than Trigorin. He too was uncomfortable with dwelling on his own—oh dear—character. He would have hated me for saying this, but to read the thirty Selected Stories that span from an 1883 comic trifle to a 1903 meditation on mortality is to gain a fuller understanding of Chekhov. Despite his desire to hide behind his pen, the author cannot help revealing at least six distinct versions of himself.

Septimus Carr

Risotto Night with the Verdis

Six Chekhovs