Innholdsfortegnelse for December 20, 2012 i The New York Review of Books

Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie Random House, 636 pp., $30.00 When Anis Rushdie read his son’s novel Midnight’s Children for the first time in 1980, he became convinced that Ahmed Sinai, the drunken father in the book, was a satirical portrait of himself. A family row ensued. Rushdie fils did not deny that Sinai was based on his father—“In my young, pissed-off way,” he would later tell The Paris Review, “I responded that I’d left all the nasty stuff out”—but he objected to his father’s wounded reaction and thought it revealed a crude understanding of how novels worked. “My father had studied literature at Cambridge so I expected him to have a sophisticated response to the book, but the person who did was my mother.... She understood it…

Despite their considerable efforts, the Republicans were not able to buy or steal the election after all. Their defeat was of an almost biblical nature. The people—large swaths of the public who have traditionally supported the Democrats—whose votes they had plotted, schemed, and maneuvered, unto nearly the very last minute, to deny rose up and said they wouldn’t have it. If they had to stand in line well into the night to cast their vote they did it. The long lines were the symbol of the 2012 election—at once awe-inspiring and enraging. On election night, the Romney camp had at least four planes ready and aides had bags packed to take off as soon as a state’s result appeared narrow enough to warrant a challenge. But they ended up with…

This year, Aleppo will produce no soap. The late-medieval souks in which craftsmen fashioned blocks of the famous olive oil and laurel savon d’Alep succumbed to a conflagration during battles at the end of September. The Jubayli family’s soap factory inside the Mamelukes’ thirteenth-century Qinnasrin Gate survived the inferno, but relentless combat has left it inaccessible to workers and owners alike. By late November, following the harvest in the groves west of Aleppo, residue from the olive oil presses should be boiling in vats and poured onto carpets of wax paper stretched over stone floors. Sliced into two-by-three-inch blocks, the bars would be stacked to dry for six months before being sold. Deprived by war of the soap, fabrics, processed foods, and pharmaceuticals its region has so long produced, Aleppo…

Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane Dalkey Archive, 255 pp., $14.95 (paper) Inland by Gerald Murnane Dalkey Archive, 169 pp., $13.95 (paper) Between 1840 and 1914 Ireland emptied itself of half its population. Famine claimed as many as a million people, but most left their native land in hope of a better life abroad. Though North America was the favored destination, over 300,000 Irish took passage to Australia. By 1914 Australia was the most ethnically Irish country in the world outside Ireland itself. In Australia, Irish community life centered on the Catholic Church, which retained its predominantly Irish complexion until, after World War II, waves of immigrants began to arrive from southern Europe, inflecting its forms of worship with their own rituals and folkways. Strong on obedience to doctrine and on…

Sin: The Early History of an Idea by Paula Fredriksen Princeton University Press, 209 pp., $24.95 Heaven’s Purge: Purgatory in Late Antiquity by Isabel Moreira Oxford University Press, 310 pp., $65.00 It was once said of President Calvin Coolidge, a perfunctory churchgoer and notoriously short-spoken, that when questioned by his wife about the theme of the sermon he had just heard, he answered in one word: “Sin.” When asked to elaborate on what the preacher had said, all he vouchsafed was: “He was against it.” Paula Fredriksen’s vivid little book is calculated to make even the most inert churchgoer sit up. In three chapters she traces the history of the idea of sin in the first centuries of Christianity. She does this by taking major figures from each century and…

1.  Columbus, Ohio Clamorous and overpowering, campaign images are vivid as dreams and vanish as quickly. Was it real, that huge white aircraft hangar in Columbus, Ohio, the night before the election? I’d raced there from downtown Columbus’s Nationwide Arena, where President Obama, introduced by Bruce Springsteen and Jay-Z, his voice hoarse and his face worn, had addressed fifteen thousand or so enthusiastic, mostly young supporters. From the moment Springsteen had begun singing (“No retreat, baby, no surrender...”), they had risen to their feet, cheered, shouted and stomped, and, on hearing Romney’s name, lustily booed. (“Don’t boo—vote!” Obama had answered. “Folks can’t hear you boo, but they can hear you vote!”) But the sound at Nationwide Arena, though the crowd was larger, had been nothing compared to the volcano of…

 To the Editors: Joyce Carol Oates’s review of my novel Freud’s Sister [NYR, December 6] contains several points that demand a reply. Despite Ms. Oates’s claim that “like the fine mist of poison gas that hisses into the Nazi death chamber at Terezín at the terrifying conclusion of Freud’s Sister,” both in the novel and in reality, there were no gas chambers in Terezín. This is clear from what Ottla Kafka tells Adolfina, and from the narration of the train transfer from Terezín to the other camp, where the gas chambers are. Stating that in my novel Sigmund Freud’s “identification with German culture is predominant, and his sense of himself as Jewish secondary,” Ms. Oates names several authors (including Peter Gay) with “differing views of the subject of Freud’s Jewishness.”…

The first biography of Siddhartha, the future Buddha, reveals that for a long time he was entirely unaware of the wretchedness of the human condition. A royal son, he spent his youth in pleasure and luxury, surrounded by music and worldly delights. He was already married by the time the gods decided to enlighten him. One day he saw a decrepit old man; then the suffering of a very sick man; then a corpse. It was only then that the existence of old age, suffering, and death—all the painful aspects of life to which he had been oblivious—was brought home to him. Upon seeing them he decided to withdraw from the world to become a monk and seek the path to Nirvana. We may suppose, then, that he was happy…

Saul Steinberg: A Biography by Deirdre Bair Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 732 pp., $40.00 Saul Steinberg, who died in 1999, was better known for the eighty-nine New Yorker covers that appeared between 1945 and 2004 than for anything else he ever did. The most famous of them was the one that appeared on March 29, 1976, with its comically parochial depiction of what in the mind of a New Yorker the rest of United States looked like beyond the Hudson River all the way to the Pacific Ocean. View of the World from 9th Avenue became a poster sold in every souvenir shop and was freely adapted by chambers of commerce elsewhere to promote their own cities. Time and again, his lawyer had to restrain him from suing someone who ripped…

1. The Supreme Court has now heard oral arguments in a case—Fisher v. University of Texas—in which it is likely to overrule or eviscerate its own 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger allowing limited “affirmative action” plans in public institutions of higher education. These are admissions policies through which universities seek to increase the number of qualified minority students in their classes by counting their race as an advantage in choosing among the large number of well-qualified candidates, all of whom they cannot admit. I believe that affirmative action is of great value to American society generally, but the five ultraconservative Supreme Court justices are widely expected to seize this opportunity to outlaw it. Chief Justice John Roberts, in his opinion in an earlier case, made his position clear. “The…

The Final Solution: A Genocide by Donald Bloxham Oxford University Press, 410 pp., $29.95 (paper) Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941–1944 [German Occupation Policies in Lithuania, 1941–1944] by Christoph Dieckmann Göttingen: Wallstein, two volumes, 1,652 pp., €81.30 Jest taki piękny, słoneczny dzień: Losy Żydów szukających ratunku na wsi polskiej 1942–1945 [It Is Such a Beautiful, Sunny Day...The Fate of Jews Seeking Rescue in the Polish Countryside 1942–1945] by Barbara Engelking Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 292 pp., zł39.99 Judenjagd: Polowanie na Żydów 1942–1945. Studium dziejów pewnego powiatu [Hunt for the Jews 1942–1945: A Study of the History of a Certain County] by Jan Grabowski Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 262 pp., zł37.99 Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust by Jan Tomasz Gross with Irena…

One warm night in September, I sat in an outdoor café in Cairo’s Shubra neighborhood with a young member of the Ultras Ahlawy, an organization of hard-core fans of the Cairo soccer team Al Ahly. Mahmoud, a pseudonym, was a diminutive twenty-one-year-old with bulging biceps, a red athletic shirt, and gelled hair swept up in a James Dean pompadour. He pulled out a laptop computer and showed me a grainy video taken on February 1, 2012, documenting a tragedy that continues to trouble Egypt. That night, at Port Said’s soccer stadium, some 125 miles from Cairo, a mob of fans surged across the field following the victory of the home team, Al Masry, over Al Ahly. Then they attacked the Cairo team’s supporters. Hundreds of Al Ahly fans, including many…

The Works of William Congreve edited by D.F. McKenzie, prepared for publication by C.Y. Ferdinand Oxford University Press, three volumes, 2,200 pp., $495.00 1. Shortly after the opening of John Vanbrugh’s comedy of 1697, The Provoked Wife, two ladies discuss what they would do if they discovered their husbands were unfaithful. The first lady declares that she would pay him back in his own coin, but the second protests that we are taught to return good for evil. On thinking this over, the first lady remarks, “That may be a mistake in the translation.” The new independence of women could affect even biblical criticism. This registers an important change in the relation of the sexes. Women could now openly claim the same entitlement to sexual pleasure that had always been…

To the Editors: Martin Filler, in his article “Smash It: Who Cares?” [NYR, November 8], is mistaken in stating that the Pan Am Building was designed by “Walter Gropius and the Architects’ Collaborative.” The architect was Richard Roth (Emery Roth & Sons). What happened was that when Roth’s designs were made known, the New York City arts community was outraged. In response, the developer, Erwin Wolfson, engaged Pietro Belluschi and Walter Gropius as consultants (as individuals, not with their firms). After the consultation, Wolfson said, as I recall, “They told me to articulate the mullions. It cost me a million dollars.” As built, the Pan Am Building is not significantly different from Roth’s original design, with only very minor modifications. P.S. I am an architect who worked on the Pan…

Bronze an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, September 15–December 9, 2012 Catalog of the exhibition edited by David Ekserdjian London: Royal Academy of Arts, 301 pp., $65.00 (distributed in the US by Abrams) This fall the Royal Academy in London has put on one of the most astonishing exhibitions of sculpture ever mounted. Titled simply “Bronze,” the show brings together an abundance of masterworks in bronze and other copper alloys from a dazzling range of cultures and periods. On display are more than 150 pieces, coming from nearly every continent, and made over a span of almost six thousand years. The excitement of the show lies not only in the chance to see so many great works, from prehistoric to contemporary, in a single visit. Gathering in…

At that hour when the onshore breeze drove the waves of panting crystal onward over the ribbed sand, tugging their shadows beneath them toward the pastel hotel, and the light-shot shallows were marbled with the first premonitions of autumn, I said to the beach chair attendant, to the one colored Etruscan red with a boar’s head tattooed on his shoulder, I said, as the ball of the sun lowered itself moment by moment with an almost erotic delay toward the steep sides of an island standing off on the horizon, I said—Could you please tell me the name of that island? And he smiled and said to me—That is no island, but the headland of Monte Circeo, for the bay curves far past Terracina to where, in one of forty-three…

The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo: How a Murder Exposed the Cracks in China’s Leadership by John Garnaut Penguin, $2.64 (e-book) In traditional Chinese religion, a fashi, or ritual master, will recite a set of phrases to turn an ordinary space into a sacred area where the gods can descend to receive prayers and rejuvenate the community. The ceremony can last days, with breaks and feasts, until the rites end and secular life resumes. I was reminded of this while watching the Communist Party’s eighteenth Congress unfold in mid-November in Beijing. The location was the auditorium at the Great Hall of the People, the gargantuan, 170,000-square-meter temple to Communist Party power off Tiananmen Square. The hall was built with political-religious imagery in mind: the outward appearance is…

Building Stories by Chris Ware Pantheon, 260 pp. boxed set, $50.00 Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware Pantheon, 380 pp., $35.00 The ACME Novelty Library #19 by Chris Ware Drawn and Quarterly/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 80 pp., $15.95 The ACME Novelty Library #20 by Chris Ware Drawn and Quarterly/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 72 pp., $23.95 The ACME Novelty Library Final Report to Shareholders and Saturday Afternoon Rainy Day Fun Book by Chris Ware Pantheon, 108 pp., $27.50 Quimby the Mouse or, Comic Strips, 1990–1991 by Chris Ware Fantagraphics, 69 pp., $14.95 (paper) In 1988, Gore Vidal predicted that by 2015 “The New York Review of Comic Books will doubtless replace the old NYR.” It was a joke, of course, and a warning (Vidal preferred…

Ancient Light by John Banville Knopf, 288 pp., $25.95 Vengeance by Benjamin Black Henry Holt, 304 pp., $26.00 In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s praise for the work of other writers is almost undetectable, especially those from whom he had learned some elements of style—Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson in particular. Early in his memoir, however, Hemingway singles out a novelist whose books provide what he calls “after-work” pleasures that will fill “that empty time of day or night.” The pleasures he is referring to involve light reading, entertainment, and escapism; and the woman whose books have given him this variety of after-hours relief is none other than Marie Belloc Lowndes, author of The Lodger. About The Lodger and another Belloc Lowndes novel Hemingway displays a rare (for him) critical enthusiasm:…

 To the Editors: I am very glad that Ian Johnson has found the time to peruse my work, although I am not sure that he got very far [“China: Worse Than You Ever Imagined,” NYR, November 22]. So let me keep this short and focus on the “Essay on the Sources,” the only part of Mao’s Great Famine he mentions in any detail. The key point the essay makes is that when it comes to the best work on the Great Leap Forward, “the centre of gravity has decidedly moved back to China.” I praise the pioneers who have opened up archival research on the famine, for instance Yu Xiguang (“by far the historian with the most experience in the archives”), Gao Wangling (“a model of originality”), and Lin Yunhui…

 To the Editors: The New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University is seeking applications for the part-time position of director. The institute, established in 1976 by sociologist Richard Sennett, is a forum for promoting the exchange of ideas between academics, writers, journalists, artists, policymakers, and other professionals in New York City. The director is responsible for programming and hosting a weekly lunch-lecture series attended by institute fellows, and for developing several interdisciplinary public programs—ranging from conferences, symposia, and panels to readings, screenings, and performances—for which some fund-raising is required. The director will be assisted by a full-time associate director. The new director should be ecumenical in his or her intellectual interests and eager to bring stimulating ideas to the institute’s programming, with the goal of hosting a…