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

The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years by Ricardo Piglia, translated from the Spanish by Robert Croll, with an introduction by Ilan Stavans. Restless, 448 pp., $19.99 (paper) 1. In the long history of novelists and their doubles, doppelgangers, and alter egos, few have given more delighted attention to the problem of multiplicity than the Argentine novelist Ricardo Emilio Piglia Renzi. He was born in 1940 and died last year in Buenos Aires. Under the name of Ricardo Piglia he published a sequence of acrobatic, dazzling novels and stories that consistently featured a novelist called Emilio Renzi. This division between public author and imaginary novelist was the little motor inside the vast machine of Piglia’s sprawling literary activity: not just fiction but essays, lectures, articles, screenplays, and seminars. He was…

“It is a general rule that [religious and philosophical] objections do not allow business owners … to deny protected persons equal access to goods and services under a neutral and generally applicable public accommodations law.” So wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which was decided by the Supreme Court on June 4. The case, which I argued in the Court on behalf of Charlie Craig and David Mullins, a gay couple denied a wedding cake by a Denver-area bakery, posed the question of whether the bakery owner had a First Amendment right to refuse to sell the couple a wedding cake because he objected on religious grounds to same-sex marriage. The answer, at least according to Justice Kennedy’s “general rule,” would…

Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, translated from the Greek by Pamela Mensch, edited by James Miller. Oxford University Press, 676 pp., $45.00 Poor Diogenes Laertius. He gets no respect. A “perfect ass”—“asinus germanus”—one nineteenth-century scholar called him. “Dim-witted,” said Nietzsche. An “ignoramus,” declared the twentieth-century classicist Werner Jaeger. In his lyric moods he wrote “perhaps the worst verses ever published,” an anthologist pronounced. And he had “no talent for philosophical exposition,” declares The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Then why waste time on him? For this excellent reason: Diogenes Laertius compiled the sole extant work from antiquity that gives anything like a comprehensive picture of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy. He may have been a flaming mediocrity. He may have been credulous and intellectually shallow. He may have produced…

Last Stories by William Trevor. Viking, 212 pp., $26.00 William Trevor, one of the finest writers of this and the last century, was born William Trevor Cox in 1928 in a small town in County Cork to middleclass Protestant parents. He left Ireland in 1954, lived for much of his life in Devon, loved and often visited Italy. He and his wife, Jane, whom he met when he was a history student at Trinity College, Dublin, were married from 1952 until his death in 2016. Before he started writing he worked as a sculptor in wood, a teacher, and an advertising copywriter. He published his first book in 1958, wrote fourteen novels, some memorable novellas (including the sublime Reading Turgenev), eleven volumes of short stories, and two essay-memoirs. His collected…

After Ireland: Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present by Declan Kiberd. Harvard University Press, 540 pp., $39.95 “Confusion,” according to the schoolmaster Hugh in Brian Friel’s play Translations, “is not an ignoble condition.” Confusion is rife in Declan Kiberd’s energetic, imaginative, exasperating literary history After Ireland, both as a description of the current state of the Irish nation and as a reflection of his explosively scattershot approach to Irish cultural experience. The book follows Kiberd’s earlier surveys, Inventing Ireland, Irish Classics, and The Irish Writer and the World; Inventing Ireland in particular has exercised a huge influence on a generation of students, at once pioneering a synthesizing, comparative, and internationalist approach to Irish writing through the centuries and paying close attention to the fortunes of the Irish language.…

You ask how was it for me. To answer I must go back some fifty years to a warm Friday midnight and the moment when I whispered with utmost delicacy into the ear of my new friend the indelicate question. I was lying beneath her and she was in all her glory, naked but for a studded choker of lapis lazuli and gold. Even in the amber light of a bedside lamp, her skin gleamed white. Her eyes were closed as she swayed above me, her lips, minimally parted, allowed a glint of beautiful teeth. Her right hand rested lovingly on my left shoulder. She smelled faintly, not of perfume but of sandalwood soap. Those bars, imprinted with an ancient sailing ship and folded in tissue within a long rectangular…

Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny by Witold Szabłowski, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Penguin, 233 pp., $16.00 (paper) The Dancing Bears Park is Europe’s largest sanctuary for bears rescued from captivity. Located in Belitsa, in the Rila Mountains of southwest Bulgaria, it is a major tourist site. The park is managed by Four Paws, an international animal welfare organization that has been liberating circus and performing bears in central and southeastern Europe since the 1990s, when the end of communism in this part of the world gave rise to hopes that bears might enjoy their freedom too. For many decades, if not centuries, young bears had been taken from their mothers in the wild, domesticated by their keepers, and trained to dance…

Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna by Edith Sheffer. Norton, 317 pp., $27.95 Long-deceased Viennese doctors, unless they’re called Freud, rarely make newspaper headlines. But one has recently done so on both sides of the Atlantic. On April 19, the academic open-access journal Molecular Autism published a detailed article by the Austrian medical historian Herwig Czech about Hans Asperger, the Viennese pediatrician whose name has since the 1980s designated a syndrome that forms part of the wider autism spectrum. Like many prominent Austrian medical figures of his generation, Asperger’s wartime record of involvement in some of the deadliest aspects of Nazi medical practice had long remained unquestioned or was glossed over. Now he stood exposed as having been far from an opponent of Nazi thinking; racial hygiene…

Property: Stories Between Two Novellas by Lionel Shriver. Harper, 317 pp., $26.99 In Lionel Shriver’s world, there are “Mugs” and there are “Mooches.” Mooches live off the generosity of Mugs, who work, pay taxes, build up insurance deductibles, and generally follow the rules. In our warped society, Shriver’s books argue time and again, Mugs are suckers and Mooches are winners. It’s a division she laid out in the starkest terms in her tenth and perhaps most devastating novel, So Much for That (2010), which served, albeit in novelistic form, as a timely indictment of the American health care system. All his life, Shep Knacker had been a Mug. Forty-eight years old, he had single-handedly provided for his wife, Glynis, and their two children, paid exorbitant rent on their house in…

To the Editors: A historian may have the responsibility to uncover facts that remain obscure and, in doing so, to correct even the memories of those who have witnessed or participated in the events in question. What he does not have the right to do is, even through mere implication, to use his questioning to impute guilt to any individual without positive evidence to support the charge. Nor is it justified to use the subject’s unwillingness to discuss such matters to imply guilt. Jonas Mekas, whose accomplishments as a poet, writer, and filmmaker as well as a founder of the magazine Film Culture and Anthology Film Archives Michael Casper sets out at the beginning of his article “I Was There” [NYR, June 7], is evidently an unreliable narrator of the…

In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers by Bernice Yeung. New Press, 225 pp., $25.99 Is the #MeToo “moment” the beginning of a new feminism? Coined by the civil rights activist Tarana Burke in 2006, the term took off in 2017 when celebrities like the actress Alyssa Milano began using it as a Twitter hashtag. Extensive reporting in The New York Times and The New Yorker on harassment in the entertainment and tech industries helped the movement bring down some of those fields’ most powerful figures. By speaking out, a number of famous actresses—some of them better known previously for their not-so-feminist roles as cute witches and beguiling prostitutes—have done so as well. To date, most of #MeToo’s attention has been aimed…

Ritz and Escoffier: The Hotelier, the Chef, and the Rise of the Leisure Class by Luke Barr. Clarkson Potter, 312 pp., $26.00 Cesar Ritz (1850–1918) gave his name to some of the world’s most luxurious hotels—in Paris, Madrid, and London—as well as to the ninety-one hotels in the Ritz-Carlton chain and, posthumously, to a cracker. His surname even became an adjective, “ritzy.” The success of his original hotel enterprises owed much to his partner, Auguste Escoffier (1846–1935), history’s most celebrated cook and still the secular patron saint of most professional chefs. They were both crooks. (So was Ritz’s deputy, Louis Echenard.) On March 7, 1898, their employers, the Savoy Hotel in London, where Ritz was the general manager, sacked them for larceny, embezzlement, and fraud. The Savoy managed to recoup…

Common Ground by Justin Trudeau. HarperCollins, 343 pp., CAN$19.99 (paper, 2014) Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests by Peter H. Russell. University of Toronto Press, 535 pp., $39.95 Could It Happen Here?: Canada in the Age of Trump and Brexit by Michael Adams. Simon and Schuster, 178 pp., $24.00 Maximum Canada: Why 35 Million Canadians Are Not Enough by Doug Saunders. Knopf Canada, 249 pp., $20.95 A cover of The Economist in 2003 featured a moose—that universally recognized symbol of Canada—wearing sunglasses. Inside, the magazine extolled Canada’s new sophistication: its openness, even then, to legalizing gay marriage and decriminalizing marijuana; its cosmopolitan cities (Toronto would soon become the most diverse metropolis in the world, with over half of its residents foreign-born); and its growing international cultural clout. It…

For many years my late husband, Gardner Botsford, kept a small black-and-white snapshot on his desk of a man and woman wearing shorts, walking one behind the other on a tennis court. I didn’t know who the couple were but assumed they were friends from Gardner’s life before our marriage, people he had been close to and fond of. One day I asked him who they were and he laughed and said he had no idea. He had plucked the picture from a pile of rejects on their way to the wastebasket. It had leaped out at him as an example of an outstandingly terrible snapshot, one that had everything the matter with it. The couple had their backs to the camera; the tennis court showed a few white lines;…

The Yangtze Valley and Beyond: An Account of Journeys in China, Chiefly in the Province of Sze Chuan and among the Man-tze of the Somo Territory by Mrs. J. F. Bishop (Isabella L. Bird), with an introduction by Dervla Murphy. London: Folio Society, 420 pp., $112.00 Ever since the Romans imagined an empire of elysian peace at the eastern limit of the world, China has been the repository of Western fantasy and delusion. More than three centuries ago Leibniz marveled at the country’s rumored enlightenment, and Voltaire cited its secular governance as a desirable model for France. For many decades afterward, the image of a willow-patterned realm enshrined in its own past proved quaintly durable. But with the decline of the Qing dynasty during the nineteenth century this idealized China…

Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now) an exhibition at the Met Breuer, New York City, March 21–July 22, 2018. Catalog of the exhibition by Luke Syson, Sheena Wagstaff, Emerson Bowyer, Brinda Kumar, and others. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 300 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) In 1868 the Dutch-born English painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema completed his Phidias and the Frieze of the Parthenon, Athens, in which he imagined a sort of varnishing day at the Acropolis. The good citizens of Athens, husbands and wives, have turned out for the occasion, climbed the somewhat rickety-looking wooden scaffolding, and are now admiring the work later known, in its ruined state, as the Elgin Marbles. Phidias himself stands with a quiet pride in front of his roped-off frieze, which—this is the…