Innholdsfortegnelse for April 19, 2018 i The New York Review of Books

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness by Rhodri Lewis. Princeton University Press, 365 pp., $39.95 In the decades after it was first staged, probably in 1600, Hamlet seems to have been popular, though not especially so. It was performed at the Globe Theatre, in Oxford, Cambridge, and elsewhere, and revived at least twice at court. But editions of Hamlet were published less frequently than those of Richard III, Richard II, or even Pericles, and aside from echoes of it in the works of other dramatists, the play is mentioned by only a couple of Shakespeare’s contemporaries (one saying that it appealed to the “wiser sort,” another that it managed to “please all”). It wasn’t until 1711 that anyone wrote at length about Hamlet; the Earl of Shaftesbury spoke of it…

Daidō Moriyama: Record edited by Mark Holborn. Thames and Hudson, 424 pp., $70.00 Provoke: Between Protest and Performance—Photography in Japan 1960/1975 edited by Diane Dufour and Matthew S. Witkovsky, with Duncan Forbes and Walter Moser. Steidl/LE BAL/Fotomuseum Winterthur/Albertina/Art Institute of Chicago, 679 pp., $75.00 (paper) Daido Tokyo by Daidō Moriyama. Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain/Thames and Hudson, 192 pp., $40.00 One of Moriyama Daidō’s most famous black-and-white photographs is of a stray dog, a bit wolfish, with matted hair, looking back into the camera watchfully, with a hint of aggression. He took the picture in 1971 in Misawa, home to a large US Air Force base, in the northeast of Japan. Moriyama has described this dog picture as a kind of self-portrait: I wander around, glare at things, and…

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson. Random House, 270 pp., $27.00 Early in the fourth story of The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, we are introduced to a shadowy character named Darcy Miller, a writer dying of liver cancer in the middle of nowhere. The narrator tells us that this writer, his friend, once published under the name “D. Hale Miller.” He goes on to say that “I’m aware it’s the convention in these semi-autobiographical tales—these pseudo-fictional memoirs—to disguise people’s names, but I haven’t done that.” Even granted the latitude of fiction, this statement is simply untrue. There has never been an author named D. Hale Miller, but there certainly was Denis Hale Johnson, who died at the age of sixty-seven in May 2017, also of liver…

THE RIGHT SUPPER To the Editors: An old-time reader of The New York Review and a Russianist, I am heartened by your continued interest in Russian history, politics, and culture, as in the review of the most recent translations of Isaac Babel [Gary Saul Morson, “The Horror, the Horror,” NYR, February 8]. The reviewer’s general thesis is spot on. Babel’s prose (for that matter, any modernist prose) loses its eclat when translators substitute their interpretive elaborations for the master’s condensed staccato phrasing. But one begins to question the reviewer’s judgment when he refers to Babel’s protagonist-narrator in Red Cavalry as Vasily (he is Kiril) Lyutov and then proceeds to quote from a new translation of “Crossing the Zbruch,” ignoring a real howler: “shards of the hidden dishware Jews use once…

Clement Attlee: The Man Who Made Modern Britain by John Bew. Oxford University Press, 670 pp., $39.95 Was any public figure ever so conspicuous for being inconspicuous? “An empty taxi drove up to Number 10 and Mr. Attlee got out.” I think this was the first political joke I ever laughed at; I must have been nine or ten at the time. It was attributed to Winston Churchill, but it dates back to the nineteenth century when it was applied to Sarah Bernhardt, though for her thinness, not her dimness. “Mr. Attlee is a modest little man with plenty to be modest about.” Churchill did say something along these lines, though in one form or another that too is an ancient insult. A “sheep in sheep’s clothing” was also attributed…

The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution by Marci Shore. Yale University Press, 290 pp., $26.00 Near Abroad: Putin, the West, and the Contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus by Gerard Toal. Oxford University Press, 387 pp., $29.95 Conversations in the government quarter, the imposing Soviet and Art Nouveau buildings that house the offices of Ukraine’s top leaders, often turn to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s late-night phone calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin. These are said to be quite frequent and quite relaxed for two presidents who have been unofficially at war in eastern Ukraine for the past four years. Poroshenko, a secretive figure who reputedly does not like to delegate, says little about his calls, according to senior government figures, so speculation often runs wild. I once asked…

Pioneers of African-American Cinema directed by Richard Norman, Richard Maurice, Spencer Williams, and Oscar Micheaux; curated and including essays by Charles Musser and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart. Kino Lorber, five DVDs, $79.95 Gustave Flaubert’s next best seller after Madame Bovary was Salammbô, a historical novel about a revolt of mercenaries in third-century-BC Carthage. The black novelist Charles Chesnutt saw the Italian film director Domenico Gaido’s adaptation, Salambo, in a Cleveland movie theater in 1915. Chesnutt remembered that when Spendius, the mercenary general’s black lieutenant, came on the screen, a white woman sitting next to him remarked, “Well, look at the coon! He’s a spy and a traitor, no doubt.” The medium of film was still rather new, but the attitudes projected through it were the familiar, vicious ones that Chesnutt, born…

In February, President Donald Trump took to Twitter once again to attack his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. He decried as “DISGRACEFUL” Sessions’s referral to the Justice Department’s inspector general of a Republican accusation that department lawyers had acted improperly in seeking a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant in October 2016 to eavesdrop on Carter Page, a Trump campaign aide. Trump insisted that Sessions should have investigated the charges himself. This was only the latest in a long line of public recriminations Trump has unleashed against his attorney general, in what New York Times reporters Peter Baker and Katie Benner aptly described as “an almost Shakespearean rift.” The most recent complaint and the long-standing rift are curious for several reasons. First, Sessions was one of Trump’s earliest and most loyal…

Not pretending to be shopping,they canvass cobblestoned Water Street, near-sightedas beach sweepers, their devices feeling aheadfor which alleyway, or corner of a yard,might sprout a Snorlax, a purple Aerodactyl. “These are the Pokemon Go people,” explains a villagerto her guest, careful not to point as one group passes,their jean shorts to mid-shin, arms arabesquedwith dates or skewered hearts, some steering strollers. Scattered among the eighteenth-century colonials,the Improvement Association’s clapboard plaquesremember Hale, ship captain, and Stewart, joiner,each calling stenciled right beneath the name.In this new life, vocation’s not so certain— assignments can vibrate at any time, the locationof a needed creature flash, then disappear.You almost have to be waiting there already,disconsolate after a day of nothingas light drains at the former hotspot in Cannon Square. When two wild Pikachu clamberover the…

Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1768–1800 by François-René de Chateaubriand, translated from the French by Alex Andriesse, with an introduction by Anka Muhlstein. New York Review Books, 550 pp., $19.95 (paper) One might start with his tomb, which he had built on the islet of Grand Be, just off the Breton port of Saint-Malo, facing the tempestuous sea that was the companion of his first years. He was adamant that it should have no inscription, no name, no date, only a simple cross: “The cross will tell that the man at rest was a Christian: that will suffice to my remembrance.” It is typical Chateaubriand in its passive-aggressive insistence on an extraordinary monument (it took years of negotiation with the local authorities to permit the gravesite) along with the claim…

John Davis Gallery 362 ½ Warren Street, Hudson, NY 12534; (518) 828-5907; art@johndavisgallery.com; www.johndavisgallery.com John Lees, Drawings March 31–April 22 "…Nerval confessed in one of his progress reports to his editor: the more he wrote, the more he crossed out…only in erasure does the true image of our desire take shape." —"Introductory note to 'Angelique' and 'Sylvie'" by Richard Sieburth, in Selected Writings by Gérard de Nerval (Penguin Classics, 1999) This exhibition is in conjunction with a solo show of paintings by John Lees at Betty Cuningham Gallery. Lyman Allyn Art Museum 625 Williams Street, New London, CT 06320; (860) 443-2545; www.lymanallyn.org. Spirited: Prohibition in America (on view April 4–May 25, 2018), a new traveling exhibition from NEH on the Road, brings visitors back to the period of flappers and suffragists,…

FRIESENPRESS Suite 300-990 Fort St, Victoria, BC, Canada, V8V 3K2 www.friesenpress.com REVOKED by MK Pachan “Revoked is compelling and complicated, and the resolution will be tough for mystery lovers to guess”—Kirkus Reviews 9781525516603 • Cloth, $19.99 9781525516610 • Paper, $13.99 9781525516627 • eBook, $2.99 288 pages • Fiction/Mystery & Detective/Police Procedural See the author’s website at www.mkpachan.com. Also available on www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com, and wholesale distributor, The Ingram Book Company. EAST ENDPRESS 19 West 21st Street, Suite 1101, New York, NY 10010 A PASSIONATE JOURNEY A Memoir by Robert Mann A Passionate Journey by Robert Mann is the story of a boy born to immigrant parents who became the founding violinist of the Juilliard String Quartet and one of the musical giants of the 20th and 21st centuries. 9780997530445 • Paper,…