Innholdsfortegnelse for November 23, 2017 i The New York Review of Books

COLIN B. BAILEY is Director of the Morgan Library and Museum. His books include Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre- Revolutionary Paris, which was awarded the 2004 Mitchell Prize, and Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting. GEREMIE BARMÉ was the Founding Director of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University and is the Editor of China Heritage. His books include The Forbidden City (Wonders of the World) and In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture. APRIL BERNARD ’s most recent books are Miss Fuller, a novel, and Brawl & Jag, a collection of poems. CHRISTIAN CARYL is the Editor of the DemocracyPost blog at The Washington Post and the author of Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the Twenty-first Century. FRANCES FITZGERALD ’s…

21 rue La Boétie an exhibition at the Museé de La Boverie de Liège, September 22, 2016–February 19, 2017; and the Museé Maillol, Paris, March 2–July 23, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition based on the book by Anne Sinclair. La Boverie/Tempora, 287 pp., €15.00 (paper) The Belgian city of Liège was a fitting location to inaugurate the riveting exhibition “21 rue La Boetie.” At the sale in Lucerne in June 1939 of 125 works of “degenerate” art deaccessioned from German museums, Liege acquired nine outstanding paintings, including works by Gauguin, Ensor, Marc, and Picasso, for the municipal collections. Paul Rosenberg—the preeminent Parisian dealer of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury French painting who was the subject of the exhibition—was outspoken in his opposition to collectors or institutions making purchases that brought revenue to…

The Vietnam War a documentary directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey C. Ward, with an introduction by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Knopf, 612 pp., $60.00 Ken Burns achieved renown with lengthy film histories of the Civil War, World War II, jazz, and baseball, but he describes his documentary The Vietnam War, made in close collaboration with his codirector and coproducer Lynn Novick, as “the most ambitious project we’ve ever undertaken.” Ten years in the making, it tells the story of the war in ten parts and over eighteen hours. Burns and Novick have made a film that conveys the realities of the war with extraordinary footage of battles in Vietnam and antiwar demonstrations in the United States. The narration, written…

The Aeneid by Virgil, translated from the Latin by David Ferry. University of Chicago Press, 416 pp., $35.00 One of the most magical passages in the Aeneid occurs when the hero, in search of the golden bough that will allow him entrance to the Underworld, is shown the way by two doves, emblems of his mother, Venus. In David Ferry’s new translation, the moment unfolds as follows: He stood there where he was and watched to see What signs he might be given by how they went, Alighting to feed a little, then flying a little, Alighting a little again to feed on the grass, Then flying a little way, and alighting again, Then flying a little again, feeding and flying, Keeping themselves just far enough ahead So that they…

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, edited by Jerόnimo Pizarro, and translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa. New Directions, 468 pp., $24.95 In 1894, when he was six years old, Fernando Pessoa invented a French literary figure named Chevalier de Pas, “through whom”—he later remembered—“ I wrote letters from him to myself.” His father had died of tuberculosis the previous year. He would soon leave his birthplace of Lisbon for colonial Durban, where his new stepfather was the Portuguese consul. By thirteen, according to his translator Richard Zenith, Pessoa was assembling “elaborate, three- column” newspapers “containing real and invented news, poems, short stories, historical features, riddles, and jokes, signed by a gallery of writers with distinct interests and literary styles.” He was still a teenager when, in…

Mrs. Osmond by John Banville. Knopf, 369 pp., $27.95 It is twenty- seven years since John Bayley, writing in these pages about John Banville’s seventh novel, The Book of Evidence, noted that the author “does not quite coordinate pace with expectation in the reader’s mind; his felicities are apt to hold him up, so that the reader wants to read faster than the author is doing the writing.” In the novels that have followed, Banville has done little to assist the reader who feels held up in the tight curves of his prose. There is a willfulness about his method, with its seeming disregard for the niceties of story line. As Bayley intimates, the reader is often anxious to push on, to cease drifting aimlessly in a rapture of thickly…

Benched: Abortion, Terrorists, Drones, Crooks, Supreme Court, Kennedy, Nixon, Demi Moore, and Other Tales from the Life of a Federal Judge by Jon O. Newman. William S. Hein, 306 pp., $29.95 (paper) Judges come in many flavors. Thurgood Marshall could be salty, even spicy. In dissent, Antonin Scalia could be sour and occasionally bitter. Almost no judge qualifies as sweet. But in his autobiography, Benched, the distinguished federal appellate judge Jon O. Newman seems to embody what scientists have described as the fifth basic taste—umami, meaning savory or, as appropriate here, meaty. Newman has served as a federal judge for more than forty- six years, most of them on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals (which handles federal appellate cases arising in New York, Connecticut, and Vermont). Within the legal…

Jottings Under Lamplight by Lu Xun, edited by Eileen J. Cheng and Kirk A. Denton. Harvard University Press, 329 pp., $35.00 A New Literary History of Modern China edited by David Der- wei Wang. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1,001 pp., $45.00 1. Addressing an audience at the Hong Kong YMCA in February 1927, the writer Lu Xun (the pen name of Zhou Shuren, 1881–1936) warned that despite ten years of literary revolution and the promotion of a written vernacular language, Chinese people had still not found a voice. They were all living in what he called wushengde Zhongguo, “voiceless China.” “Youth must first transform China into a China with a voice,” he declared. “They must speak boldly, move forward courageously, forget all considerations of personal advantage, push aside the ancients,…

You open your hand cautiously, it’s blind and dumb. Shameless, stripped bare. Stamped, entered in the records. Spinoza’s friends are gone now, so are those who denied him, and the inquisitors of his time, and the clouds crossing the borders of his time, and the reasons for his demise likewise no longer obtain; his coat, quilt, and shirts now cover no one, new books are in new bookstores, exiles in exile, papillary lines in folders, barbed wire on borders, occupants in apartments, jurors in boxes, manuscripts in desk drawers, smiles on lips, blood in veins, workers in workplaces, soldiers in uniforms, potatoes in stomachs, citizens in country, documents in pockets, country inside, foreignness outside, tongue behind teeth, prisoners in prisons, teeth on concrete, earth in universe (which either contracts or…

The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution by Yuri Slezkine. Princeton University Press, 1,104 pp., $39.95 Over the past one hundred years, some 20,000 books on the Russian Revolution have been published, roughly six thousand of them in English. It’s as if, starting on October 25, 1917—or November 7, according to the Western calendar the Bolsheviks adopted soon after seizing power—a new book on that topic appeared without fail every weekday (with summers off). It could be worse: there are now over 70,000 books on the French Revolution. Which one are you going to read? The Russian Revolution reshaped global time and space. The replacement of the House of Romanov by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics inaugurated what came to be known as the “short twentieth…

A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré. Viking, 264 pp., $28.00 1. George Smiley came into the world as a very different kind of spy, one perfectly adapted to the crepuscular realm of cold war intrigue. He appeared the same year as the Berlin Wall in Call for the Dead (1961), the first novel by his creator, John le Carré. The book is a rather modest murder mystery set in London against a background of East– West espionage, its palette dominated by woolly browns and smoggy grays and the embers of wan coal fires. It begins with a brief chapter devoted entirely to the main character: Short, fat and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his…