Innholdsfortegnelse for September 27, 2018 i The New York Review of Books

COLIN B. BAILEY is the Director of the Morgan Library and Museum. His books include Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris and Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting. SYLVIE BAUMGARTEL ’s first book of poetry, Song of Songs, will be published next year. IAN BURUMA is the Editor of The New York Review. His memoir, A Tokyo Romance, was published this year. SIMON CALLOW is an English actor and director who has written about Orson Welles, Charles Dickens, Charles Laughton, and Oscar Wilde. His latest book is Being Wagner: The Story of the Most Provocative Composer Who Ever Lived. DEBORAH COHEN is Peter B. Ritzma Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at Northwestern. She is writing a book about American foreign correspondents who reported from interwar Europe…

In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea by Danny Goldberg. Akashic, 360 pp., $16.95 (paper) New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative by Paul Goodman. PM Press, 194 pp., $20.00 (paper) The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America by Doug Rossinow. Columbia University Press, 500 pp., $36.00 1968: The Rise and Fall of the New American Revolution by Robert C. Cottrell and Blaine T. Browne. Rowman and Littlefield, 291 pp., $38.00 1968: Radical Protest and Its Enemies by Richard Vinen. Harper, 446 pp., $29.99 Ballots and Bullets: Black Power Politics and Urban Guerilla Warfare in 1968 Cleveland by James Robenalt. Lawrence Hill, 376 pp., $27.99 Struggle for a Better South: the Southern Student Organizing Committee, 1964–69 by Gregg Michel. Palgrave McMillan,…

The Secret State: A History of Intelligence and Espionage by John Hughes-Wilson. Pegasus, 510 pp., $19.95 (paper) Spy Watching: Intelligence Accountability in the United States by Loch K. Johnson. Oxford University Press, 615 pp., $34.95 In the Enemy’s House: The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker Who Caught the Russian Spies by Howard Blum. Harper, 317 pp., $29.99 The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton by Jefferson Morley. St. Martin’s, 328 pp., $27.99 The United States spends more than $70 billion a year on the gathering and assessment of information about its enemies—and friends. Other nations lavish proportionate amounts, which can only increase now that cyberwarfare and information games have become inextricably entangled with intelligence and counterterrorism. China is estimated to employ…

Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum by Kathryn Hughes. Johns Hopkins University Press, 414 pp., $29.95 Virginia Woolf liked to celebrate modern biographers’ break with Victorian precedent by implying that the books themselves had gone on a diet. “In the first twenty years of the new century,” she wrote in 1927, “biographies must have lost half their weight.” Rather than bulk up their volumes with “countless documents,” she suggested, recent biographers had figured out how to capture a person’s essence in a telling detail: “The tone of a voice, the turn of a head, some little phrase or anecdote picked up in passing.”1 But even Woolf didn’t imagine that someone might attempt to make that voice or head not just a brief synecdoche for character…

First Person by Richard Flanagan. Knopf, 351 pp., $26.95 “I have been missing since I was born.” —First Person As Isaiah Berlin noted the distinction between thinkers who know many things, like Archilochus’s fox, and thinkers who know one big thing, like Archilochus’s hedgehog, so it’s helpful to distinguish between writers who explore myriad strategies of fiction, more resembling chameleons than foxes, and writers who rarely venture beyond their early successes, refining and refurbishing familiar, well-traversed burrows. Consider one of the great experimental writers in English: Who could have predicted on the basis of James Joyce’s Dubliners that this quietly devastating realist in the tradition of Chekhov and Turgenev would next write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, an idiosyncratic reinvention of the bildungsroman; then Ulysses, a…

TELLWELL PUBLISHING 201-1028 Fort Street, Victoria, BC, V8V 3K4 1-888-415-1541 ext 107; philipmwilson47@gmail.com; www.philipmwilson.com. THE LIBRARIAN by Philip Wilson When shy librarian, Sarah Andrews, is framed by the cops for a crime she didn’t commit, she plots a chilling revenge, hunting them one by one. 9781773021102 • Cloth, $35.99 CAD, $26.99 USD 9781773021096 • Paper, $18.99 CAD, $13.99 USD 978177302119 • eBook, $3.99 CAD, $3.99 USD 412 Pages • Thriller Available at Amazon, Chapters, and Barnes and Noble. SONGS FOR LUCY by Philip Wilson Allison Connelly has it all—pretty, popular, and smart. But, when confronted with a terminal diagnosis, she’s forced to reconsider what constitutes a meaningful life. 9781773706603 • Cloth, $34.50 CAD, $26.99 USD 9781773706597 • Paper, $18.00 CAD, $13.99 USD 9781773706610 • eBook, $3.99 CAD, $3.99 USD 402…

STALKERS To the Editors: John Nathan is always worth reading, even when it’s an unhappy review of my book The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature [NYR, August 16]. While he reports on only a few of the chapters, I find myself often in agreement when it comes to what he does focus on. Nathan read the book carefully, perhaps more carefully than anyone will in our niche field of Japanese literary studies. He summarizes many of my arguments correctly, and I am grateful for that. But I would appreciate a chance to set the record straight on a few points. My definition of “modern” is not absent, in fact, but on display on nearly every page. Not just the traditional signal dilemma of a novel’s individual at loggerheads…

The Luck of Friendship: The Letters of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin edited by Peggy L. Fox and Thomas Keith. Norton, 392 pp., $39.95 There can scarcely be a better documented dramatist in the Western world than Tennessee Williams. His most recent, and best, biographer, John Lahr, counts forty books written about him since his death in 1983.1 Not that he was exactly unknown during his lifetime. After his epoch-making Broadway debut in 1945 with The Glass Menagerie and his subsequent and precipitate anointment as the savior of the modern American theater, his progress both as a writer and as a man was closely interrogated by the usual authorities. In this process Williams, like many a guileless artist before him, colluded, responding with a running commentary on the phenomenon of…

V. S. Naipaul’s fastidiousness was legendary. I met him for the first time in Berlin in 1991, when he was being feted for the German edition of his latest book. A smiling young waitress offered him some decent white wine. Naipaul took the bottle from her hand, examined the label for some time, like a fine art dealer inspecting a dubious piece, handed the bottle back, and said with considerable disdain: “I think perhaps later, perhaps later.” (Naipaul often repeated phrases.) This kind of thing also found its way into his travel writing. He could work up a rage about the quality of the towels in his hotel bathroom, or the slack service on an airline, or the poor food at a restaurant, as though these were personal affronts to…

Sometime near dawn, driving a stolen carSo fast I will never arrive,Floating without a destination and without a licenseAlong the empty highways across the Mississippi from St. Louis,Just the occasional big interstate truck’s Prong of headlights sticking into the darkThrough the misty summer odor of to get away!At age fifteen, too young to drive or drink—Is what I did a lot of, with a lot of drink,And the driver’s-side window open To loll my head out to sniff the oncoming breeze like a dog,Quaffing the opiate of the gigantic fields of Illinois,Sucking in deep breaths of the huskyThick bittersweet bituminousRising already at this early hour from the factory smokestacks Of collapsing factories made of roseate bricks,Ecstatic, as though of prednisone I had drunk,And that cold black earth smell out in…

I go to Spain to see where my rules come from.The nuns feed me the soft gray brains of sheep.My brain clenches like a fist.I am violent & sweet.I like to make things &I like to break things. Up the stairs before a man, down after.I please you, I fear you.This is a jam spoon, this is a honey spoon.Into an elevator before a man, speak after.It’s this fork for fish & that fork for cake.I trip over my tongue. I delicately remove the egg-yolk orangeStamens from the Casablanca liliesSo the pollen doesn’t fallOnto the table cloth and stain it.I set the table for tea.I like discipline.I like Goya’s nightmares.I have chairs on my head& chairs coming out of my mouth. Lucas Cranach the Elder paintedLucretia’s shame over & over…

Free Woman: Life, Liberation, and Doris Lessing by Lara Feigel. Bloomsbury, 323 pp., $28.00 What did Doris Lessing mean when she called Anna and Molly in The Golden Notebook “free women”? Certainly not that they were happy. The two friends, living in late-1950s and early-1960s London without men, supporting themselves through their art, devoting themselves to politics, still wish to be married. Regarded by generations as a bible of women’s liberation, The Golden Notebook was Lessing’s breakout work, a complex and shifting account of a woman making a life for herself among the competing ideologies of the 1960s. When it opens, Anna Wulf has written a novel that pays her bills, has had affairs and adventures, has fought racism in Africa, has a child. She knows that her independence comes…

Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago by Brian McCammack. Harvard University Press, 364 pp., $49.95 High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing by Ben Austen. Harper, 384 pp., $27.99 If public housing is the physical manifestation of a hope for social progress, that hope has its own historical twist in the United States. After the abolition of slavery in 1865, white Americans, faced with the prospect of living with African-Americans, opted for segregation. In the southern United States segregation was not only de facto but also de jure. Jim Crow laws, passed by local governments as early as the 1870s and 1880s, mandated the segregation of public facilities, education, and transportation. When it came to housing, segregation was enforced through racially restrictive covenants—binding legal…

The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994–2017 by Martin Amis. Knopf, 392 pp., $28.95 Novelists, as a class, abhor reading criticism of their work, and with good reason—the only adequate account of a novel, at least for its author, is the one that lies between its covers. The experience of reading dissections of one’s work can be traumatizing, like watching a medical student hack awkwardly at a body. As a coping mechanism some novelists forswear writing criticism altogether; others confine themselves within the padded walls of blurb-writing and brainless Twitter cheerleading. Many of the novelists who do write criticism distance themselves from the task rhetorically, assuming a sober formality that would be out of place in their fiction. Virginia Woolf was as reverential of…

Charlie announced once in New York:we will be friends—and we were friendsfor thirty years He was impatient, high-handed at times,but he understood that only kindness bindsTall, with the face of a Spanish nobleman He headed for his study every morninglike a worker off to the vineyardsarmed with great shears of imagination He wrote slowly, revised his poems timeand again, guiding a line of rapturefrom thickets of dense prose He didn’t seem poetic at first glanceHis father sold refrigerators and TVsBut a messenger approached him, spoke in whispers On summer vacations near Lucca he’d get up firstand in the garden, in his white djellaba from Moroccohe hunched over his black computer His grandmother said she’d come from Austria,but she was born in Lvov, before Ellis Islandher name had been Grabowiecka Friendship…

Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One an exhibition at Tate Britain, London, June 5–September 23, 2018. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Emma Chambers. London: Tate, 128 pp., $24.99 (paper) Before the Fall: German and Austrian Art of the 1930s by Stefanie Heckmann, Andreas Huyssen, Olaf Peters, Alfred Pfabigan, and Ernst Ploil. Prestel, 288 pp., $50.00 Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Republic an exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, October 27, 2017–February 25, 2018. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Ingrid Pfeiffer. Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt/Hirmer, 300 pp., $55.00 On Hyde Park Corner in London, facing the Duke of Wellington’s old house, where one can still see a giant sculpture of a fully nude Napoleon towering over the hall, stands a curious monument known as the Royal Artillery…