Innholdsfortegnelse for December 19, 2013 i The New York Review of Books

Levels of Life by Julian Barnes Knopf, 128 pp., $22.95 Julian Barnes was married for thirty years to a woman he loved, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh. Levels of Life is an examination of the void she left behind when she died in 2008. The book is short, crisp, measured, and deeply felt. Not a grief memoir so much as a grief meditation, it is divided into three improbable parts: an appealing discussion of ballooning; a touching short story about the fictional romance of a real English adventurer named Fred Burnaby and the celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt; and a thoughtful consideration of grief. In The Sense of an Ending, his novel that won the Man Booker Prize in 2011, Barnes’s celebrated literary playfulness and skill sometimes came off almost as…

The Leonard Bernstein Letters edited by Nigel Simeone Yale University Press, 606 pp., $38.00 In 1966, Leonard Bernstein conducted The Rite of Spring and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5 with the London Symphony Orchestra, and just recently that BBC event has been released on DVD for the first time. It’s a fascination—not only for the strong performance, but even more so for the chance to watch “Lenny” in action, close-up. Yes, all conductors have highly personal characteristics, but has there ever been one as theatrical, as showy, as hammy as he was? Or as exciting, as persuasive, as dedicated? There’s the Lenny problem: Is he for real or is he an act? Do we love him or do we want to kick him in the ass? Is his heart only on…

Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman Blue Rider, 580 pp., $30.00 The afterlife of a champion boxer recalls Karl Marx’s remark about history repeating itself first as tragedy, then as farce. Even when the boxer manages to retire before he has been seriously injured, it is not unlikely that repeated blows to the head will have a long-term neurological effect, and the accumulative assaults of arduous training and hard-won fights will precipitate the natural deterioration of aging; it is certainly likely that the boxer has witnessed, or even caused, very ugly incidents in the lives of other boxers. As welterweight champion Fritzie Zivic once said, “You’re boxing, you’re not playing the piano.” The boxer has journeyed to a netherworld of visceral, violent experience that most of us, observing…

From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity by Kyle Harper Harvard University Press, 304 pp., $33.95 One of the most lasting delights and challenges of the study of the ancient world, and of the Roman Empire in particular, is the tension between familiarity and strangeness that characterizes our many approaches to it. It is like a great building, visible from far away, at the end of a straight road that cuts across what seems to be a level plain. Only when we draw near are we brought up sharp, on the edge of a great canyon, invisible from the road, that cuts its way between us and the monument we seek. We realize that we are looking at this world from across a sheer,…

Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps by Chet Van Duzer London: The British Library, 143 pp., $35.00 (Distributed in the US by the University of Chicago Press) Sea Monsters: A Voyage Around the World’s Most Beguiling Map by Joseph Nigg University of Chicago Press, 160 pp., $40.00 Witches and Wicked Bodies an exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, July 27–November 3, 2013; and the British Museum, London, September 2014–January 2015 Catalog of the exhibition by Deanna Petherbridge. National Galleries of Scotland, 128 pp., £14.95 (paper) In “The Tale of ’Abd Allah of the Land and ’Abd Allah of the Sea” from the Arabian Nights, a poor fisherman fails day after day to catch anything but at last, in answer to his ever more desperate prayers,…

Roads to Berlin: Detours and Riddles in the Lands and History of Germany by Cees Nooteboom, translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson, with photographs by Simone Sassen MacLehose, 434 pp., $24.95 There has been no more potent symbol of division than the Berlin Wall. It not only divided ideologies, but seemed to separate two incompatible eras of history. To pass through Checkpoint Charlie or Friedrichstrasse station into East Berlin was to travel back half a century, and when the Wall began to come down in November 1989 the two Germanys that confronted one another had been drastically estranged for nearly forty-five years. The eminent Dutch travel writer, poet, and novelist Cees Nooteboom was a close witness of that time, temporarily living in West Berlin, and his chronicle of the…

Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books by Claudia Roth Pierpont Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 353 pp., $27.00 The work of Philip Roth, if we are to believe him, has been completed. He has retired from the business of novel-writing; there will be no more alter egos, no more splitting or doubling. As Dr. Spielvogel, in the punch line to Portnoy’s Complaint, asks: “Now vee may perhaps begin. Yes?” This fixity was the “precondition” for the New Yorker writer Claudia Roth Pierpont’s Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, which could only have been written “with the full arc of Roth’s work completed.” She believes, then, that there is an arc to the work, and that we can only now—now that it terminates—trace that arc properly. This might read as…

Byrd by Kerry McCarthy Oxford University Press, 282 pp., $39.95 Of all the great Renaissance composers, William Byrd (circa 1540–1623) is perhaps the most approachable, the most direct in his communication, and arguably the most modern in his concerns. The gloriously continual euphony associated with Palestrina and his school has for many listeners characterized the sound of the Renaissance, experienced over generations as a model that both gave expression to the Counter-Reformation and provided a template for how music should (until recent decades) weave seamlessly into the celebrations of the Roman Catholic liturgy. Byrd’s music seems to offer something tauter and more concentrated than this. The English music that directly preceded his was wonderfully effusive, as in the endlessly elaborated, decorative lines of the Eton Choirbook, designed for performance in…

To the Editors: I spotted an uncanny correlation of figures in Amartya Sen’s article on India [“India’s Women: The Mixed Truth,” NYR, October 10]. This is almost too neat. But it makes sense, at least superficially: the less women—the more rape. Lothar Luken County Cork, Ireland To the Editors: I was surprised to see in Amartya Sen’s interesting article about violence against women in India no mention of the dowry system. Violence against women in India is not only sexual. Data regarding the maiming, murder, and suicide of brides resulting from in-law dissatisfaction with the money or motorcycles or other goods delivered [as a dowry] following marriage are similarly gruesome as those for rape, and the poor response by police and the courts similarly disturbing.1 Recent studies on the persistence…

To the Editors: Mark Lilla’s essay “Arendt & Eichmann: The New Truth” [NYR, November 21], as well as its sequel, “The Defense of a Jewish Collaborator” [NYR, December 5], describe the uproar over Hannah Arendt’s account of the Judenräte. Lilla rightly sees that anger over her characterization of Jewish leaders was overblown, based on taking offending phrases out of context. But Lilla’s argument misleads when addressing Arendt’s view that Eichmann exemplified “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.” Lilla accuses Arendt of calling Eichmann “a cog”; in fact, she argues otherwise, writing—in sections IV, VII, and the epilogue to Eichmann in Jerusalem—that he went beyond orders, enthusiastically supporting the Final Solution. Lilla writes that Arendt “made evil seem banal”; in fact, Arendt contrasts the horrific evil of the Holocaust with Eichmann’s…

American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell by Deborah Solomon Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 493 pp., $28.00 1. At the time of his death in 1978 at the age of eighty-four, Norman Percevel Rockwell (who had always hated his fancy, “almost effeminate” middle name) was one of the most popular artists in America and one of the most maligned. Despite the championing, late in his career, of, among others, John Updike and Andy Warhol (who, not surprisingly, bought Rockwell’s portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy), and a retrospective exhibition that traveled to seven US museums including the Guggenheim between 1999 and 2002, the suspicion has lingered—and Rockwell himself was not immune to it—that perhaps he shouldn’t have been considered an artist at all, as opposed to an illustrator (as he…

Now, more than ever, it is harder to argue for the compatibility of political Islam and democracy. The ejection of the Muslim Brotherhood from the government of Egypt has delivered a heavy blow to the prospects of an accommodation between the two. The Brotherhood came to power democratically, governed dismally and repressively, and was toppled in a bloody military coup. Many Egyptian Islamists now associate democracy with pain, humiliation, and death. The effects of the Egyptian debacle have been widely felt. Saudi Arabia and Jordan feel more politically secure than at any time since the start of the Arab Spring, although Jordan has the heavy burden of absorbing some 500,000 Syrian refugees. The prospect of a democratic Syria has in any case long since disappeared behind the blood and smoke.…

Blue Is the Warmest Color a film directed by Abdellatif Kechiche Can a moviegoer set academic theory aside and still ask, What is the cinematic male gaze, and is it so very different from the female one? Is the camera inherently masculine, a powerful instrument of anxiety, and lust, forever casting women as objects? (The phallic pen has never once deterred a woman writer.) And when is a gaze not a gaze but something else—something prurient or false or constructed as if through a rifle sight, or, as one filmmaker friend of mine has said, “as something to be viewed in the safety of a dark theater”? Moreover, is “gazing,” with its fraught exile and exiling, what a camera should be doing anyway? Shouldn’t the camera instead be trying…

Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 281 pp., $25.00 Novels about middle-aged male college professors brought low by love affairs with their female students are so numerous, by now, as to constitute a genre of their own. That there can be an erotic dimension to the teacher–student relationship is not exactly news—just look at Socrates and Alcibiades; and that such relationships can be perilous, Abelard and Heloise testify graphically. But when we look at characters like David Lurie, in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace; Mickey Sabbath, in Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater; Lawrence Miller, in James Lasdun’s The Horned Man; or Howard Belsey, in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, it becomes clear that in the last twenty years or so the professor who sleeps with his students has exerted…

In the last days of 1936, Spain was five months into a bitter civil war, in which volunteers from many countries were helping the elected government of the Spanish Republic battle a military coup led by General Francisco Franco and backed by Hitler and Mussolini. Some foreigners flocking to Spain, though, had come for another reason as well: the northeast part of the country, particularly Catalonia, was in the midst of the most far-reaching social revolution ever seen in Western Europe. Workers had taken over factories and peasants the large estates; waiters were running restaurants and trolley drivers the transport systems. Municipal garbage trucks carried anarchist slogans. Hundreds of idealistic visitors wanted to take part in a revolution that came not, as in Stalin’s Russia, from the top down, but…

Liberation: Diaries, Volume Three: 1970–1983 by Christopher Isherwood, edited and with an introduction by Katherine Bucknell, and a preface by Edmund White Harper, 875 pp., $39.99 1. Most of Christopher Isherwood’s novels are autobiographical. Many are nar- rated by someone named either Chris- topher Isherwood or William Bradshaw. Despite this, Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood—the name he was given at birth in 1904—was in some ways the least egocentric of novelists. The narrator who shares his name seems almost invisible, merely a hole in the air. All the other characters, who reveal their secrets to him while asking nothing in return, are physically real and emotionally larger than life. The rogue and double agent Mr. Norris in Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935), the bohemian chanteuse Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin (1939),…

Too Much Johnson a film directed by Orson Welles in 1938 Directors Guild of America Theater, New York City, November 25, 2013. My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles edited and with an introduction by Peter Biskind Metropolitan, 306 pp., $28.00 Orson Welles in Italy by Alberto Anile, translated from the Italian by Marcus Perryman Indiana University Press, 349 pp., $35.00 (paper) In a famous sequence in the 1941 knockabout film Hellzapoppin’ the comedians Olsen and Johnson walk through a series of different movie sets, magically changing costumes as they go. As they leave the last set (an igloo on an icefield, fish displayed beside it), Johnson bumps into a small sled hanging on a frame. The word “Rosebud” is written across it. Johnson says, “I…

On Poetry by Glyn Maxwell Harvard University Press, 170 pp., $19.95 When poets write prose about their art the result tends to be either a manifesto or ars poetica; a grab bag of lectures, expanded reviews, and commencement addresses; or a manual, a teaching aid. The English poet Glyn Maxwell’s new book On Poetry is a curious alloy of all three, comprising soapbox declarations of what makes poetry endure, close readings of various canonical pieces, and a fictionalized account of a poetry workshop run by Maxwell for four apprentice writers. Books by poets about poetry tend to argue for the primacy of their own kind of writing, and Maxwell’s is no different. He favors well-tended poetry that is not obscure and that bears some relation to rhyme or meter or…

To the Editors: Although Michael Hofmann recognizes that Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project represents a unique experiment [NYR, October 24], this and a handful of other insights are buried in a screed hurled at Karl Kraus, a writer Hofmann deems “too squalid” to be “brilliant” while giving ample evidence of not having read him attentively. Hofmann is particularly ill informed about Kraus’s masterpiece, The Last Days of Mankind, which, he claims, is “rarely read, much less performed and only translated (so far) in abridgment.” This is wrong on all counts. The Suhrkamp paperback edition of the great antiwar drama has sold thousands of copies in Germany since 1986. Full-scale productions have perhaps been rare, but not theatrical experiments of great intensity. In 1991, Luca Ronconi created a furor by staging…

To the Editors: Robert Paxton is incorrect, in his statement regarding Alexander Wilson’s work [NYR, October 10], that Charles Lucien Bonaparte “revised and updated it in a four-volume set published in Edinburgh in 1831....” Bonaparte published a four-volume supplement to Wilson’s work in Philadelphia in 1825–1833, a completely independent work from that of Wilson. At the same time a second edition of Wilson was published in Philadelphia, in a different format (there were nine folio volumes in Wilson’s first edition, but three octavo volumes and a single folio plate volume in the second). The 1831 Edinburgh edition was the first to combine the two texts, but it did not revise Wilson. A Scot named Robert Jameson edited this new edition. Also, Meriwether Lewis has only one “r” in the first…

On November 14, six weeks after the failed launch of HealthCare.gov, the federal government’s insurance marketplace website and the public face of the endlessly contested Affordable Care Act, President Obama stood behind a podium at the White House and offered a mea culpa that was anything but. True, he did repeat “that’s on me” and “that’s on us” when he wasn’t invoking jocular sports metaphors (“we fumbled the rollout on this health care law”), but he also said this: And so we are left to wonder how it was that the president not only had not been informed (note the passive construction), but how it was that he did not make it a point to be informed, not merely because he is the president and that’s his job, not merely…

I dwell in a land of despair In the city of despair Among desperate people Myself desperate I embrace my desperate lover With desperate hands Whispering desperate words Kissing him with desperate lips. In despair we make children In despair we strangle them And feed our desperate offspring With our own despair So that they may multiply By giving birth to ever more desperate children And so on. For the God of Despair is our Lord And his envoys of despair With their instruments of despair That coat our homes with despair Drape our windows with despair And board up our doors with it As despair rises around us like walls. Preaching the religion of despair For gain and wealth Instructing us in Holy Despair For which…

Building: Letters 1960–1975 by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle London: Chatto and Windus, 680 pp., $59.95 The stoutest defenders of the status quo will inevitably be those whom it rewards most richly. In the period covered by Building: Letters 1960–1975, the third of four projected volumes of his correspondence, Isaiah Berlin achieved lavish success in his life and in his career. He was happily, indeed blissfully, married to a well-to-do woman and living with her and her sons in some style in her fine house outside Oxford; he had attained worldwide fame as a historian of ideas whose essays were read with admiration and envy both inside and outside academe; he was the confidant of presidents and statesmen, with an entrée to many a corridor of…

Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World by Leo Damrosch Yale University Press, 573 pp., $35.00 The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift: Parodies, Hoaxes, Mock Treatises: Polite Conversation, Directions to Servants and Other Works edited by Valerie Rumbold Cambridge University Press, 821 pp., $130.00 Early in the twentieth century, a collector of folklore spoke to a farmer in County Cavan, near to where Jonathan Swift had written much of Gulliver’s Travels almost two hundred years earlier. The farmer told the folklorist that there were still people called Bradley living in the area and that they were remarkably small. Their equally tiny ancestors, he said, had worked as laborers for the more prosperous landowners, the Brookes, who were in turn neighbors of Swift’s friend Thomas Sheridan. Sheridan’s laborers…

Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture by Dana Goodyear Riverhead, 262 pp., $27.95 As the familiar cultural world slowly, messily deconstructs itself, it was inevitable that cuisine would be transformed as well and that it would begin in California, especially the Los Angeles area with its lively authentic Latino-Asian food culture and its tutelary genius, the brilliant, obsessed Jonathan Gold, the only food writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for criticism. For her new book, Anything That Moves, Dana Goodyear, a staff writer for The New Yorker, “set out,” with Gold among her guides, “In our contemporary cuisine,” she writes, This antinomian cuisine, she writes, “is about pleasure—pleasure heightened at the brink of calamity.” “If this is the end of…

Nebraska a film directed by Alexander Payne Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is a comedy without boffo punch lines, jokey monologues, chases, pratfalls, flights of whimsical invention, or preposterous coincidences. What it does have is incipient dementia, terminal boredom, lingering resentment, and the collapsed remains of a crib where an infant died of scarlet fever, served up with repetitive snatches of melancholy fiddle music and the sublime desolation of empty highways and decaying towns. Although working uncharacteristically with a screenplay by another writer (Bob Nelson), Payne has made a film that seems steeped in personal preoccupations and that in retrospect adds new dimensions to his earlier films. Its premise is so bald that the film seems to run through its possibilities in the first fifteen minutes. Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), a…

Félix Vallotton: Le Feu sous la glace [Félix Vallotton: The Fire Under the Ice] an exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris, October 2, 2013–January 20, 2014; the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, February 14–June 1, 2014; and the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo, June 14–September 23, 2014 Catalog of the exhibition with contributions by Guy Cogeval, Isabelle Cahn, Marina Ducrey, Katia Poletti, and others Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux/Musée d’Orsay, 287 pp., €45.00 Félix Vallotton is best known for the pungent wit of the woodcuts he executed in Paris in the 1890s—images that often appear in these pages. Later, he gained a certain notoriety for the tart and confrontational canvases he exhibited in that city’s annual Salons. Born in Lausanne, he died in a French cancer clinic in 1925, aged sixty. “The…

The Unknown Known a film directed by Errol Morris Known and Unknown: A Memoir by Donald Rumsfeld Sentinel, 815 pp., $36.00 By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld by Bradley Graham PublicAffairs, 803 pp., $18.95 (paper) 1. A bare two weeks after the attacks of September 11, at the end of a long and emotional day at the White House, a sixty-nine-year-old politician and businessman—a midwesterner, born of modest means but grown wealthy and prominent and powerful—returned to his enormous suite of offices on the seventh floor of the flood-lit and wounded Pentagon and, as was his habit, scrawled out a memorandum on his calendar: It is a touching and fateful scene, this trading of confidences between the recovering alcoholic president and the…

To the Editors: In her review of The Most of Nora Ephron [NYR, November 21], Francine Prose cites “a beautiful essay in which Rebecca West speculates about how much greater an artist Charlotte Brontë might have been had she not been hobbled by the pressure of supporting her siblings.” Greater artist? How much greater can you get if you have written Jane Eyre and Villette? Prose’s condescending words about Nora Ephron’s brilliant elliptical essays are similarly puzzling. Janet Malcolm New York City Francine Prose replies: Janet Malcolm appears to assume that I was expressing my own view of Charlotte Brontë’s great novels, when in fact I was referring to Rebecca West’s consideration of the ways in which a writer’s circumstances and character can influence her work. One need not agree…