Innholdsfortegnelse for May 12, 2016 i The New York Review of Books

Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, February 5–April 27, 2016; and the Museo Jumex, Mexico City, June 9–September 17, 2016. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Nancy Spector and Nat Trotman. Guggenheim Museum/DelMonico/Prestel, 379 pp., $52.00 Delightful and funny aren’t words one regularly associates with contemporary art, but they certainly fit aspects of the work of Peter Fischli and David Weiss. At least, I heard a fair amount of giggling at the Guggenheim Museum’s beautifully laid-out retrospective of the Swiss collaborative team. Not that they were exactly entertainers. (One speaks of their partnership in the past tense because, although Fischli is sixty- three, Weiss died in 2012, at sixtyfive.) In work straddling photography, sculpture, films, installation art,…

The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, 1932–1943 edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky and translated from the Russian by Tatiana Sorokina and Oliver Ready. Yale University Press, 584 pp., $40.00 Could World War II have been avoided? Or if not avoided, since Hitler was Hitler, could it have been postponed until the Western democracies were better prepared to defeat him? A credible threat in 1938 from the Soviets, backed by the British and French, to come to the aid of the Czechs might have stopped Hitler in his tracks. The Soviets had issued such a guarantee to the Czechs in 1932, but it was contingent on the French keeping their part of the bargain. In 1938, Hitler gambled that the Soviets and the West would never stand…

The English and Their History by Robert Tombs. Knopf, 1,024 pp., $45.00 At a time when the breakup of the United Kingdom seems ever more likely, any attempt at a history of England, separate from that of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, is bound to seem a political statement. To dwell on English achievements and English distinctiveness is to supply fodder for the growing number of those who defiantly fly the cross of St. George—an emblem of English soldiers since the thirteenth century—in their back gardens and see no reason why Scottish and Northern Irish members of Parliament should vote on measures affecting England alone. To emphasize that the English way of doing things has often differed radically from that of its Continental neighbors risks adding ammunition to the currently…

Gernika, 1937: The Market Day Massacre by Xabier Irujo. University of Nevada Press, 311 pp., $44.95 In Gernika, 1937: The Market Day Massacre, the historian Xabier Irujo reveals the hitherto unknown fact that the destruction of the historic Basque town of Guernica was planned by Nazi minister Hermann Göring as a gift for Hitler’s birthday, April 20. Guernica, the parliamentary seat of Biscay province, had not as yet been dragged into the Spanish civil war and was without defenses. Logistical problems delayed Göring’s master plan. As a result, Hitler’s birthday treat had to be postponed until April 26. Besides celebrating the Führer’s birthday, the attack on Guernica served as a tactical military and aeronautical experiment to test the Luftwaffe’s ability to annihilate an entire city and crush the morale of…

Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, March 26–July 24, 2016. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Jodi Hauptman. Museum of Modern Art, 239 pp., $50.00 Edgar Degas was a paradoxical man, disconcerting in both his actions and his appearance. “With his silk hat on his head, his blue spectacles over his eyes—not to forget the umbrella—he is the image of a notary, a bourgeois of the time of Louis- Philippe,” according to Paul Gauguin. A notary, really? Not to the eyes of Paul Valéry, who describes him opening the door of his atelier, “shuffling about in slippers, dressed like a pauper, his trousers hanging, never buttoned.” The portrait painter Jacques- Émile Blanche saw him as neither a bourgeois nor…

Kathmandu by Thomas Bell. London: Haus, 500 pp., $29.95 Battles of the New Republic: A Contemporary History of Nepal by Prashant Jha. London: Hurst, 358 pp., $30.00 (paper) (distributed in the US by Oxford University Press) A few minutes before noon on April 25, 2015, the Great Himalayan Thrust, a fault line between the Indian and Eurasian continental plates, ruptured deep beneath Gorkha district, fifty miles northwest of the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu. The sudden slippage caused an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale that sent seismic waves ripping through the Kathmandu Valley, the site of three ancient cities— Patna, Kathmandu, and Bhaktapur— and seven UNESCO World Heritage sites. In sixty- five seconds, much of Nepal’s cultural patrimony was damaged or destroyed. One hundred eighty people died when the two-…

Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning) by Marion Nestle, with a foreword by Mark Bittman and an afterword by Neal Baer. Oxford University Press, 508 pp., $29.95 About eight years ago, faced with dwindling sales of Coke, Sprite, Barq’s Root Beer, and other candied and generally carbonated beverages in the Coca- Cola Company’s vast product line, Chris Dennis, a director of product management, retreated to a basement with a small team of engineers and related personnel to come up with the next big Real Thing. The team considered itself an edgy start-up operation within the larger parental whale, Dennis has said, able to “move fast” and “fail fast” without “the traditional red tape,” which at Coca- Cola must be very red indeed. The end result of that basement…

Sorrow is a stubborn piece of land through which, darkling, the blessed mind sends down roots so as to bloom. Whereas, in you, my resting heart, all things stay nameless. It’s from the outside things are named: named for doubt, named for the moment; but see how quick we set bliss amongst the names. And then, the speckless hind steps out, and, over her, the strongest star, fulfilled within the frame.…

CHRISTIANS IN THE KORAN To the Editors: Thanks to Garry Wills for describing so well his problems with reading the Koran in “My Koran Problem” [NYR, March 24]. I share his struggles. But I do not agree with him that Christians and Muslims are on the same page regarding their religious beliefs. That’s because in Sura 4 the Koran says that Jesus never died on the cross for our sins, and that God isn’t triune. And in Sura 2 it says it abrogates or replaces previous revelations. Wills comments on neither of these notorious passages. I wish he would have because his account would have been more compelling if he had. Reverend Ronald F. Marshall First Lutheran Church of West Seattle Seattle, Washington Garry Wills replies: The editors tell me that…

One could swear that nothing has changed. The chaotic lines we travelers form in front of Cuba’s stern immigration officers; their belligerent slowness; the noise and heat in the too-small room; the echoing shouts across the room from one olive-green-clad person to another (an argument or a conversation about the lunch menu, in Cuba one can never tell which); the parents who stand patiently in line with their children, waiting for them to go berserk. Still to come is the long line to have our hand luggage inspected, and the longer wait for our checked bags, which, mysteriously, aren’t inspected at all, and the exit line that will take us from purgatory into Cuba at last, but not before we’ve done one final penance waiting for a driver who never…

All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin by Douglas Field. Oxford University Press, 220 pp., $35.00 Early Novels and Stories by James Baldwin, edited by Toni Morrison. Library of America, 970 pp., $35.00 Collected Essays by James Baldwin, edited by Toni Morrison. Library of America, 869 pp., $35.00 Later Novels by James Baldwin, edited by Darryl Pinckney. Library of America, 1,075 pp., $40.00 The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings by James Baldwin, edited and with an introduction by Randall Kenan. Vintage International, 365 pp., $16.95 (paper) “On one side of town I was an Uncle Tom,” said James Baldwin in an interview with The Paris Review, “and on the other the Angry Young Man.” But the list of epithets was much longer than that. Robert Kennedy, apoplectic…

Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson. New Directions, 142 pp., $14.95 (paper) Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim, with an introduction by Adam Thirlwell. New York Review Books, 117 pp., $14.00 (paper) Bohumil Hrabal’s complete works in Czech add up to nineteen volumes, of which at least twenty books have been translated into English, an achievement not many foreign fiction writers of the recent past can claim. I first heard his name when I saw Closely Watched Trains, a film based on his short novel of the same title that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1968. But we had…

Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio by Misha Glenny. Knopf, 293 pp., $27.95 Although visitors lured by the prospect of sun, surf, samba, and soccer may not perceive it, Rio de Janeiro is actually two very distinct cities. Some fi ve million people live at or near sea level in what Brazilians describe as “the asphalt,” supplied with all the usual public services: subways, electricity, garbage collection, and at least a semblance of the rule of law. But another million or more Cariocas, as Rio residents call themselves, have been consigned to “the hillside,” a world of squatter settlements known as favelas, most of them indeed on hills, in which normal urban amenities like sewers and running water are scarce and a strikingly different system of laws, values,…

The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold by Jeanette Winterson. Hogarth Shakespeare, 273 pp., $25.00 The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare, directed by Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh, at the Garrick Theatre, London, October 17, 2015–January 16, 2016 Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time, the inaugural volume of what Ho garth Press is calling, borrowing the language of recording studios, “cover versions” of Shakespeare’s plays, is a retelling of the late romance The Winter’s Tale, first performed at the Globe and then before King James I at court in 1611. The Winter’s Tale is, famously, a play that begins as tragedy, and transforms itself at the very end of its third act, with the intervention of Time itself, into another play altogether, neither tragedy nor comedy, but a miraculous…