Innholdsfortegnelse for May 25, 2017 i The New York Review of Books

JOHN BANVILLE ’s most recent novel is The Blue Guitar. DEBORAH COHEN is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at Northwestern. She is the author of Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain. JAMES FENTON is a British poet and literary critic. From 1994 until 1999, he was Oxford Professor of Poetry; in 2015 he was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize. He is the author of School of Genius: A History of the Royal Academy of Arts and Yellow Tulips: Poems, 1968–2011. CHARLES GLASS is a former ABC News Chief Middle East Correspondent. He is the author, most recently, of Syria Burning: ISIS and the Death of the Arab Spring. MICHAEL GORRA ’s books include Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the…

A difficult visit, though elementary particles never commented on current events. Hans Frank, a subtle connoisseur of art, a murderer, had been his older brother’s classmate —they shared a love for music. You don’t pick your brothers, or their friends. He couldn’t quite see why Frank had picked the royal castle for his residence. The passersby struck him as sad, they moved like black puppets, above, the clouds were ominous, violet, below, the city like a frosted mirror. It was December, a frosted month. The elementary particles were mute. He gave a lecture (just for Germans). He couldn’t understand those clouds, that mirror, fortunately, other matters soon absorbed him; his homeland was in flames. Those dark streets were not his homeland. Those leafless trees, that chill, the women wrapped in…

Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. Riverhead, 262 pp., $27.00 1. Álvaro Enrigue’s new novel, Sudden Death, is so waywardly intelligent, violently disparate in its settings, and excitingly intricate in its composition that perhaps the best way of beginning a description of the pleasures it offers is to inspect an isolated early chapter. It’s called “Beheading,” and it tells the story of Anne Boleyn’s execution by Jean Rombaud—brought from France for the purpose by Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s fixer. As told by Enrigue, the execution is a sequence of macabre detail, a snuff spectacle. Anne Boleyn’s braids of hair are shaved by her ladies- inwaiting. Rombaud makes a tenderly deceptive joke: “With his sword raised high and ready to come down upon the queen’s…

By Women Possessed: A Life of Eugene O’Neill by Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb. Marian Wood/Putnam, 869 pp., $50.00 Of all the great playwrights, Eugene O’Neill is undoubtedly the worst. At times, even late in his career, he produced work so gauche that without his name on the playbill, one might ascribe it to an overwrought adolescent. In 1936, O’Neill won the Nobel Prize. Just two years earlier, he had produced Days Without End, a drama of religious crisis that is utterly, though alas unintentionally, hilarious. In the climactic scene, the protagonist John Loving, split into two antagonistic halves called John and Loving, wrestles with himself beneath a crucifix in a Catholic church: John: The Cross! Loving: The symbol of hate and derision! John: No! Of love! Mercy! Forgive! Loving:…

ANTHROPOLOGY Vanilla Landscapes: Meaning, Memory, and the Cultivation of Place in Madagascar Sarah R. Osterhoudt Valued in the world market as a luxury good, the vanilla bean from Madagascar is originally from Mesoamerica. In choosing to cultivate vanilla, the local farmers respond to basic requirements of maintaining agroforestry fields such as hand-pollinating each vanilla f lower. By way of process, farmers infuse their landscapes with political histories, personal memories, and moral ideas. Pub 4/17. 7 x 10 in.; 192 pp. 25 b&w images; New York Botanical Garden Press; ISBN 978-0-89327-548-8 P/$96.00. ART HISTORY Latinx Comic Book Storytelling: An Odyssey by Interview Frederick Luis Aldama The pages of this collection do more than just tell the reader about Latinx comics; it immerses them. Upon opening this dynamic collection of works, readers will be…

Four Novels of the 1920s: The Glimpses of the Moon, A Son at the Front, Twilight Sleep, The Children by Edith Wharton, edited by Hermione Lee. Library of America, 1,031 pp., $40.00 The marriage of Edith and Teddy Wharton had for a long time looked workable, marked by a shared passion for travel and dogs and later for automobiles, if not by passion itself. They each suffered from the neurasthenia common in their time and class, and lacking children their movements from house to house and continent to continent were a touch more restless than the change of seasons required. Her one affair stayed secret. None of his did, but when in 1913 Edith sued in Paris for divorce her husband’s adultery was the least of her reasons. Teddy had…

Night of Fire by Colin Thubron. Harper, 358 pp., $26.99 Toward the close of Night of Fire, Colin Thubron’s first novel in fifteen years, and surely his finest, an old Tibetan monk, having denied the existence of the self, remarks merrily that in the view of Buddhists, “life is a burning house.” The same might be said, figuratively if not literally, of Thubron’s novel. It is set at the New Year, in a shabby late-Victorian apartment house in a run-down English seaside town. Just after midnight, the unnamed landlord, an amateur astronomer, is in his homemade observatory on the roof, with his telescope and his notebook and his muffler and padded jacket, awaiting the appearance of the Quadrantids, an annual meteor shower that occurs in early January in the constellation…

George Washington’s Journey: The President Forges a New Nation by T.H. Breen. Simon and Schuster, 304 pp., $28.00; $17.00 (paper) In 1968 Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act to take effect in 1971. It moved the observance of several holidays to Mondays in order to create more three- day weekends for the nation’s workers. In the case of George Washington’s birthday, which had traditionally been celebrated on February 22, Congress designated the third Monday in February as the new holiday. Because February is the birth month of Abraham Lincoln and several other presidents, including Ronald Reagan, that day soon came to be popularly known as Presidents’ Day. Although the federal government still refers to the Monday holiday as Washington’s Birthday, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act has had the effect…

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann. Harper, 862 pp., $40.00 The dictum “Less is more” is usually attributed to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who in 1947 summed up the principles of minimalism in an interview with Philip Johnson.* Nobody knows who coined its unrepentantly exuberant, even vulgar, offspring, “More is more.” It’s been credited variously to the postmodern architect Robert Venturi, to the fashion designer Gianfranco Ferre, to the novelist Stanley Elkin, to the graphic designer Deborah Sussman, and sometimes to the spangled queen of glitz herself: Dolly Parton. Both “Less is more” and “More is more” are the catchphrases of a consumer society faced with unimagined plenty. Following World War II, “Less is more”…