Innholdsfortegnelse for July 11, 2013 i The New York Review of Books

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner Scribner, 383 pp., $26.99 A young woman from Reno, an artist (and motorcyclist), comes to New York and the Seventies downtown art scene, and is promptly dubbed “Reno” by one of the art scene people. That’s the starter motor for Rachel Kushner’s novel. Reno is intelligent. She is shy and bold. She is attractive. She has a winning gap between her front teeth. She wants to do her art. She has brought the American West east. Here she is, alone in New York, a bit at a loss. She is looking for her story. She is the story, or rather hers is the voice that tells about many of the events in the book and inspires much of the dialogue of the other characters. She…

One morning in mid-May I drove to Manouba University, the largest in Tunisia, to meet Habib Kazdaghli, the dean of the Faculty of Letters and one of the most prominent critics—and victims—of a campaign by Salafist radicals to Islamize the country. An avuncular man with a shock of white hair and a trim gray mustache, Kazdaghli is a secular scholar of ethnic minorities in Tunisia who has fought to keep religion out of university affairs. He received me in his office, which he had fortified with extra locks. “In the current atmosphere, I have to be careful,” he told me. Kazdaghli’s troubles began during the first days of the academic year two years ago. A Salafist and former student at Manouba named Mohammed Bakhti—who had been released from prison in…

New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012 by Charles Simic Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 355 pp., $30.00 Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell by Charles Simic New York Review Books, 82 pp., $14.00 (paper) 1. Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell was reissued in 2011 and now is followed by the publication of his New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012. The two books together give us a rich picture of Simic’s art: like Cornell’s boxes, Simic’s poems are little rectangles full of surprising juxtapositions, optical illusions, effects of scale, dreams, riddles, jokes, demurrals, boasts, all framed arbitrarily and rather impersonally by Simic’s manner, which finds an eerie evenness no matter what his poems contain. Simic, who emigrated to the United States from Yugoslavia, via Paris, when he was sixteen, has…

The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel Bloomsbury, 405 pp., $28.00 1. On a May morning in 1836, at a stockade called Parker’s Fort near the Navasota River in Texas, some ninety miles south of present-day Dallas, a nine-year-old girl was taken captive by a Comanche raiding party. At the beginning of March 1955, a famous director at a crisis point in his career began shooting a movie distantly derived from that earlier event. From these separate stories—the abduction of Cynthia Ann Parker and its long aftermath, and the making of John Ford’s The Searchers, and its own cultural aftermath as a belatedly acknowledged masterpiece—the veteran journalist Glenn Frankel has constructed a powerfully suggestive book. In effect it is two books, of roughly equal length. In…

Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross by Ben Downing Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 338 pp., $28.00 In the autumn of 1892, Mark Twain, having fled to Europe in serious financial difficulty and with his wife Olivia increasingly ill, moved into Villa Viviani on the slopes of the village of Settignano, then some five miles to the east of Florence. Shortly after he arrived, he wrote to his sister-in-law, Sue Crane, that Janet Ross, who had recommended the villa to him, had put all in order: Some seventeen years later, young Virginia Woolf spent a fortnight in Florence with her sister and brother-in-law, Vanessa and Clive Bell, and on her way back to England, she wrote to her friend Madge Vaughan, the daughter of John Addington Symonds, to whom…

Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick Viking, 398 pp., $32.95 A recent publication by the United States Army provides surprising insight into the origins of the American Revolution. Field Service Manual 3-24, released in 2006 and apparently the brainchild of General David Petraeus, explains how in the future the military might devise more effective counterinsurgency strategies. Successful counterinsurgency operations, of course, require an informed grasp of the political and cultural wellsprings of insurgency. It is not an easy task. As the report states, “every insurgency is contextual and presents its own set of challenges.” But whatever the differences may be, we learn that all insurgencies “use variations of standard themes and adhere to elements of a recognizable revolutionary campaign plan.” Although defeating these movements requires…

On Constitutional Disobedience by Louis Michael Seidman Oxford University Press, 162 pp., $21.95 Does the US Constitution do more harm than good? Last year, the most important social welfare legislation since the New Deal, the Affordable Care Act, was nearly invalidated by the Supreme Court on grounds that Congress does not have the power to require people who can afford to purchase health insurance to do so or pay a tax. This term, the Court may strike down both the University of Texas’s affirmative action program and a Voting Rights Act provision that has had a central part in curtailing racially discriminatory voting practices in the South. Three years ago, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Court ruled that the Constitution bans limits on corporate spending on elections.…

To the Editors: In his review of my piece on the Obama administration’s choices in Syria [“Stay Out of Syria!,” NYR, June 20], David Bromwich accuses me of “looking” for reasons to intervene in Syria and of being “drawn to the idea” of a military solution to the conflict. In fact, not a single word in the article offers anything remotely approaching a policy prescription. The essay examines the pros and cons of a possible American intervention in Syria, and in the course of doing so considers a number of points of view and possible scenarios. This is known as balanced journalism. Only the most willful sort of ideologue, for whom the prospect of 80,000 dead Syrians matters less than having the right political line, could read the piece and…

To the Editors: In his interesting piece on genealogy [“In Quest of Blood Lines,” NYR, May 23], Gordon Wood cites “the use of DNA to show that Thomas Jefferson was the likely father of at least some of the children of his mulatto slave Sally Hemings.” The insistent reiteration of this misconception does not make it true. The DNA test performed in Oxford some years ago made use of patrilineal DNA derived from a Jefferson uncle. It showed only that in some generation, not necessarily Jefferson’s, the two strands of DNA were mixed. At least three Jefferson relatives (a brother and two nephews) are regarded as more likely contemporary candidates as fathers of Sally Hemings’s children. Among molecular biologists, it is common learning that matrilineal DNA (such as was used…

The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat by Vali Nasr Doubleday, 300 pp., $28.95 For the last decade or so, Vali Nasr has published original, pragmatic work about Middle Eastern politics. The Shia Revival, his 2006 book, confidently mapped how the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq strengthened Iran and reanimated sectarian conflict in the Arab world and beyond. Forces of Fortune followed three years later; it described presciently the potential of Arab middle classes just before Tunisian, Egyptian, and Libyan urbanites helped ignite the “Arab Spring.” By that time Nasr had entered the State Department as a senior adviser to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, whom President Obama appointed as a special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. After Holbrooke died suddenly in December 2010, Nasr left the State Department and in…

Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted by Andrew Wilson Scribner, 368 pp., $30.00 American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath by Carl Rollyson St. Martin’s, 319 pp., $29.99 This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the suicide of the poet Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), and as one might expect given the sensational details of her short and appalling life, both her US and UK publishers are celebrating the occasion with a kind of vulpine festivity. Faber has just issued an “anniversary” edition of The Bell Jar (1963)—the harrowing autobiographical novel Plath had just published at the time of her death—and has been marketing it, distastefully enough, as “chick lit” avant la lettre. A clutch of new biographies (including the two reviewed here) are likewise among…

Art and Artists There are those who believe that delving into the biography of artists ensures a deeper perception of their art. I am not one of them. The notion that a work of art has to mirror the person of the artist, that man and work are an equation, that the integrity of the person warrants the integrity of his production—such belief seems to me to belong, particularly in the area of music, to the realm of wishful thinking. (The poet Christian Morgenstern has his hero Palmström assert that “there cannot be what must not be.”) Beethoven’s frequently chaotic handwriting in his letters and musical autographs reminds us of his domestic disarray as we know it from pictures and descriptions. In complete contrast, there is the enduring order of…

Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas by Eric Fischl and Michael Stone Crown, 357 pp., $26.00 In 2010, the artists David Salle and Richard Phillips mounted a first-rate show, to which they gave the provocative title “Your History Is Not Our History,” that was about the art of the 1980s. The point of the exhibition, which included, among others, Carroll Dunham and Barbara Kruger, Julian Schnabel and Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Eric Fischl, Jeff Koons and Salle himself, was to set the record straight on a messily, and excitingly, varied time. The organizers wanted to show how the large and often representational paintings of the era, which were tagged “neo-expressionist”—and flew in the face of a widely held belief that painting in itself was no longer…

Something in the Air a film by Olivier Assayas Une adolescence dans l’après-Mai: Lettre à Alice Debord by Olivier Assayas Paris; Cahiers du Cinéma, 95 pp., f13.00 (paper) Something in the Air, the suggestively vague title given to the English-language release of Olivier Assayas’s film Après Mai, brings to mind Thunderclap Newman’s 1969 hit of the same name (perhaps as an inescapable earworm, for persons of a certain age). Very much of its time, the song wanly if not complacently urges its listeners to “get together,” because the revolution is “here” and, assuredly, “right.” “Revolution” was an omnipresent concept in the Western world for several years beginning in 1968, although it could mean anything from an imminent sociopolitical event of considerable magnitude to the certainty that the under-thirty demographic…

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout Knopf, 715 pp., $37.50 About twenty-five years ago I read many of these letters, in libraries and archives, for a book on Willa Cather published by the British imprint Virago, dedicated to breathing new life into classic, neglected, or forgotten women writers. Cather wasn’t exactly neglected in Britain in the 1980s, but like many notable twentieth-century American women writers (Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Ellen Glasgow, Jean Stafford) she did not have the status she deserved. I wrote my book in the hopes of attracting more British readers to her work. In the quarter of a century since then, there have been dramatic shifts in Cather’s reputation. Fierce Cather wars have raged in the American literary and scholarly…

Ambition, a History: From Vice to Virtue by William Casey King Yale University Press, 248 pp., $30.00 “Ambition” has long been an elusive word for an equivocal trait. It is an insistent vice, and yet its presence assures us that something in society is alive and kicking. It is also a necessary but dangerous virtue. The pejorative sense of the word goes back to the accusations by the Roman republicans Cato the Younger and Brutus against usurpers whose lust for power created an empire of limitless pride. A history that started there might predictably close with a paradox of democracy first propounded by Tocqueville. A revolution, he said, always appeals to large ambitions, but a democratic revolution multiplies the rewards while diminishing their size. Tocqueville spelled out his view of…

To the Editors: Christopher Benfey snickers at David Reynolds’s calling Hawthorne a “doughface” Democrat [“An Exchange on John Brown,” NYR, May 9]. And he distorts my critique of Hawthorne in The Abolitionist Imagination [“Terrorist or Martyr?,” NYR, March 7]. As I note, Hawthorne’s politics were even more disgraceful. An anti-Lincoln Copperhead Democrat, Hawthorne advocated “amputation,” hoping that the Confederacy would remain a separate slaveholding nation. This is precisely what the Confederacy wanted. No wonder that Confederates viewed Copperheads as allies, funding their newspapers and encouraging their leaders, including Hawthorne’s close friend Franklin Pierce. General Robert E. Lee urged President Jefferson Davis “to give all the encouragement we can...to the rising peace party of the North.” Not surprisingly, Hawthorne had little sympathy for slaves. He thought that masters and slaves in…

To the Editors: For openers, Pico Iyer declares that the absence of incident in Japanese fiction reflects the uneventfulness of Japanese life—what he is actually identifying is merely reticence—and cites the novelist Natsume Sōseki as a prime example [“‘Masters of Doing Nothing at All,’” NYR, February 7]. “Even the titles of his books,” he writes, “(such as Sorekara, or And Then), often stress the fact of nothing happening.” This is a curiously tendentious interpretation, especially in view of the fact that something does indeed happen, something terrible: the hero, Daisuke, takes his friend’s wife for himself and is left confronting madness as he contemplates the social implications of his actions. And Then was a 1909 sequel to Sōseki’s enduringly popular novel Sanshiro; almost certainly, he intended the title to mean…

Sontag: Reborn a play adapted and performed by Moe Angelos, directed by Marianne Weems New York Theatre Workshop, New York City, May 28–June 30, 2013 Like many avid readers, Susan Sontag had a lifelong habit of keeping lists of books that she planned to read in the near future. One of these lists appears early in Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963*; at age fifteen, in 1948, she names seventeen titles that are “just a few” of “so many books and plays and stories I have to read.” The play Sontag: Reborn, a one-woman show based mainly on the first volume of Sontag’s journals, has an ingenious way of representing her teenage list-making. Moe Angelos, the actor who plays Sontag, picks up an armful of books and lays them out one…

Austerity has failed. It turned a nascent recovery into stagnation. That imposes huge and unnecessary costs, not just in the short run, but also in the long term: the costs of investments unmade, of businesses not started, of skills atrophied, and of hopes destroyed. What is being done here in the UK and also in much of the eurozone is worse than a crime, it is a blunder. If policymakers listened to the arguments put forward by our opponents, the picture, already dark, would become still darker. How Austerity Aborted Recovery Austerity came to Europe in the first half of 2010, with the Greek crisis, the coalition government in the UK, and above all, in June of that year, the Toronto summit of the group of twenty leading countries. This…

One day in the late spring of 1983, toward the end of my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh, I stopped by during office hours to see my poetry teacher, Ed Ochester, up on the fifth floor of the Cathedral of Learning. I had just been asked to join a band that some guys I knew were putting together. It’s possible, looking back, that I went to see Ed because I was excited, and wanted to share the news with a paternal figure who was likely to be more excited than my father about my imminent baptism in the church of rock ’n’ roll, but I’m not sure. You didn’t really need a reason to stop by and see Ed Ochester. He would always make time for you and…

The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam by G.W. Bowersock Oxford University Press, 181 pp., $24.95 Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity by G.W. Bowersock Brandeis University Press/ Historical Society of Israel, 95 pp., $45.00; $19.95 (paper) The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism by Patricia Crone Cambridge University Press, 566 pp., $99.00 These three books, each in its different way, deal with the centuries in which a very ancient world suddenly and unexpectedly turned upside down. In Empires in Collision and The Throne of Adulis, Glen Bowersock takes us far to the south of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean—to Yemen, Axum (the capital of the nascent empire of Ethiopia), and to the dangerous waters between the Red Sea and the Horn…

Following is an excerpt from a letter from George Orwell to Dwight Macdonald, written in December 1946, soon after the publication of Animal Farm in the US. According to the editor of the letters, Peter Davison, who also supplied the footnotes, Macdonald wrote Orwell that Orwell’s reply will appear in George Orwell: Life in Letters, to be published by Liveright in August. Re. your query about Animal Farm. Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean it to have a wider application in so much that I meant that that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters. I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical…

The Good, the True, and the Beautiful: A Neuronal Approach by Jean-Pierre Changeux, translated from the French and revised by Laurence Garey Yale University Press/Odile Jacob, 386 pp., $35.00 The mind being an elusive thing, people are apt to be captivated by borrowed models of what it is and how it works. At one time the mind was likened to a theater, later to a hydraulic system (Freud), then to a collection of behavioral reflexes, more recently to a computer. Currently, there is a vogue to model the mind on the brain—the brain as a connected network of nerve fibers, operating by electricity and chemistry. The mind may not look very neuronal—this is not evident to introspection—but we are assured that there is really nothing more to it than neurons…

Satantango by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes New Directions, 274 pp, $25.95 1. One evening in October 2010, the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai—a man in his fifties with a biblical look—appeared on the balcony of the Collegium Hungaricum in Berlin, a white modernist building that’s a block north of Unter den Linden. At the same time an image of a dog, in silhouette, was projected from inside the building onto a large window below the balcony. Without introduction or explanation, Krasznahorkai then began to speak. And at first, I suppose that the uninformed commuter in Berlin might have assumed that the monologue this man was pronouncing was in the imaginary voice of the silhouetted dog—stretched out, as if leaping. Whenever Krasznahorkai paused, in precise synchronization, a…

To the Editors: In his review of Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran [NYR, June 6], Roger Cohen largely agrees with the 75 percent of our book treating Iran’s foreign policy and America’s Iran policy. But he scorns it for the 25 percent on Iranian politics—especially the 10 percent on Iran’s 2009 presidential election. Cohen typifies Western liberals who backed the Iraq war and blame Bush for botching it. Cohen believes most Iranians seek secular liberalism—with Islamic veneer, perhaps, but mosque–state separation nonetheless. He wants “soft” regime change in Iran, not by force but through Western-encouraged “democratization.” We, by contrast, left the White House before the Iraq war, disagreeing with policy. We believe most Iranians want an order grounded…

Violence, being instrumental by nature, is rational to the extent that it is effective in reaching the end which must justify it. And since when we act we never know with any amount of certainty the eventual consequences of what we are doing, violence can remain rational only if it pursues short-term goals. Violence does not promote causes, it promotes neither History nor Revolution, but it can indeed serve to dramatize grievances and to bring them to public attention. As Conor Cruise O’Brien once remarked, “Violence is sometimes needed for the voice of moderation to be heard.” And indeed, violence, contrary to what its prophets try to tell us, is a much more effective weapon of reformers than of revolutionists. (The often vehement denunciations of violence by Marxists did not…