Innholdsfortegnelse for December 6, 2018 i The New York Review of Books

MARCIA ANGELL is a member of the faculty of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. MATTHEW AUCOIN is a composer and conductor. He is the Artist in Residence at Los Angeles Opera, a Co–Artistic Director of the American Modern Opera Company, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. MOLLY CRABAPPLE is the author of Drawing Blood and, with Marwan Hisham, of Brothers of the Gun. Her artwork is in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art. NOAH FELDMAN is the Felix Frankfurter Professor at Harvard Law School and a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. His most recent book is The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President. ELISA GABBERT is the author of three…

On my way to water the strawberriesat dusk—I gardened in those days—I saw a raccoon clasping the outdoor spigotlike a sailor’s wheel, using both paws,that seemed more and more like handsas it kept twisting until water gushedout of the copper nozzle and it drank. I hadn’t thought of it in years, not evenafter I saw another raccoon, high-steppingthe coyote fence midday with a limp voleoverhanging its mouth. Such a singular sight,I had to tell you, and blurted it out as soonas I saw you, a piece of domestic gossiplike the first crocus or noisy neighbors: common property, like so much in marriage—a small business, a friend called it, down tothe cooked books. Only later, after I recognizedthe raccoon sauntering through a linein one of your poems… only after the pressurecooker…

Those Wild Wynd hams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power by Claudia Renton. Knopf, 458 pp., $30.00 In February 1899 John Singer Sargent was invited to the Belgravia home of the wealthy Wiltshire landowner Percy Wynd ham to meet his three married daughters. Wynd ham had commissioned a group portrait of the women as a way of marking a recent advance in the family’s fortunes. For while the sixty-four-year-old paterfamilias had lost his parliamentary seat some years earlier, his eldest son George was now gaining a reputation as a shrewd politician at Westminster, where he served as under secretary at the War Office. Meanwhile George’s three sisters, Mary Elcho, Madeline Adeane, and Pamela Tennant, enjoyed a growing cachet as hostesses of discreet country house weekends at which statesmen of…

The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe by David I. Kertzer. Random House, 474 pp., $35.00 David Kertzer has written a number of important books on modern Italy, including The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, which won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2015.* In 1997 he published The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, the first modern account of the abduction of a young Jewish boy by Catholic authorities in Bologna in 1858. A Christian maid in the family had baptized the boy because, she claimed, he was ill and might die. Pope Pius IX took him into his care, and he was never returned to his parents. The case…

To the Editors: In Tornillo, Texas, in rows of pale yellow tents, some 1,600 children who were forcefully taken from their families sleep in lined up bunks, boys separated from the girls. The children, who are between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, have limited access to legal services. They are not schooled. They are given workbooks but they are not obliged to complete them. The tent city in Tornillo is unregulated, except for guidelines from the Department of Health and Human Services. Physical conditions seem humane. The children at Tornillo spend most of the day in air-conditioned tents, where they receive their meals and are offered recreational activities. There are three workers for every group of twenty children. The children are permitted to make two phone calls per week…

Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963–2017 an exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, April 22–July 29, 2018; and the Met Breuer, New York City, September 6–December 2, 2018. Catalog of the exhibition by Katy Siegel, with contributions by Aleesa Alexander, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Kelly Baum, and others. Baltimore Museum of Art/Gregory R. Miller, 191 pp., $55.00 There is a somewhat mystifying, what-am-I-looking-at quality to Jack Whitten’s paintings, and this spirit hovers over the exhibition “Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963–2017,” now at the Met Breuer. Whitten, who died this past January at seventy-eight, was a highly respected member of the art world, though his renown was, I think, largely among artists. He was known for making quite large abstract works that often looked at a glance like vast fields of mosaics,…

The tall building on Uprising Squareis a monumentto the luminary of all sciences.But soar up in the lift,enter Gnesin’s apartment—and cults and monumentsslip out of your mind.With this tall stone needleStalin may have scratchedthe sky of socialism,but the old composer’s apartmentmakes you forget this.“These spectacles,” I hear,“were worn by Nikolay Andreyevich.”(Gnesin is telling me abouthis teacher, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov.)“And this book,” adds Galina Mavrikiyevna,“is a present from him.” A breathof the past, of the sea, of the composerswe callthe Mighty Handful.Gnesin sits down at the piano.He sits there for a long time,bowing his headwith its triangular beard.He sits there so longI wonderif he has dozed off.And Galina Mavrikiyevnabegs him not to play, notto remember, not to upsethimself. But it’s impossiblenot to remember. Not to remember hurts. To rememberhurts still more. But…

“We’d like to leave our readers with a great gift before they move on to other books,” writes Yoel Hoffmann near the end of Moods. “But we’re like a building contractor whose tools are limited. At most he puts up a wall or lays down a floor and says to the client that he should use his imagination to fill in the rest.” Moods is the latest of Hoffmann’s books to be translated from Hebrew into English, and they are all faithful to this aesthetic of the evocative fragment, the unbuilt structure. To call them novels would be misleading, and even the label “fiction” only makes sense if that category functions as a catch-all for any kind of imaginative writing. In Moods, Hoffmann spoofs the kind of conventional realism he…

Debussy: A Painter in Sound by Stephen Walsh. Knopf, 323 pp., $28.95 The world of classical music loves an anniversary to celebrate the already celebrated. The 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth in 2006 brought performances of all twenty-two of his operas in his hometown of Salzburg, among innumerable other festivities worldwide; the 225th anniversary of his death in 2016 prompted the release of a two-hundred-CD set of his complete works. In advance of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 2020, the German government has declared him a “matter of national importance,” as if he were a precious, rapidly disappearing natural resource. One could be forgiven for wondering exactly why the most-performed composers in history need these promotional blitzes. The subjects of this year’s two most prominent classical-music anniversaries could…

Brazil: A Biography by Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling, translated from the Portuguese. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 761 pp., $40.00 If we were to think of Brazil as a person rather than a country, as Lilia Schwarcz and Heloisa Starling encourage us to do in their sweeping new history Brazil: A Biography, it would be someone who, at the moment, seems schizophrenic. Consider, for example, the October 28 run-off election to choose the country’s next president. One candidate was a neofascist former army captain with a penchant for insulting Afro-Brazilians, women, indigenous peoples, and sexual minorities; a declared affinity for the military dictatorship that ruled the country brutally from 1964 to 1985; and a desire to fight crime by allowing citizens to arm themselves and letting trigger-happy cops…

Kolyma Stories: Volume One by Varlam Shalamov, translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Donald Rayfield. New York Review Books, 741 pp., $22.95 (paper) By the end of the twentieth century, nearly every country in Western Europe that had experienced Nazi occupation had undergone a reckoning with the painful topic of collaboration, including in the Holocaust. This process encountered resistance. But its replication across most of what then constituted the European Union testified to the emergence of a shared awareness, at least among elites. Separate national narratives of victimhood at the hands of Nazi occupiers were yielding to a supranational history of collective moral responsibility. In 2000, two dozen European countries issued the Stockholm Declaration, pronouncing the Holocaust “unprecedented” and an assault on “the foundations of civilization.” Two…

The Order of the Day by Éric Vuillard, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti. Other Press, 132 pp., $21.95 Éric Vuillard won the 2017 Goncourt Prize, France’s most prestigious literary honor, for his book L’Ordre du jour. Its 132 small pages form very likely the slenderest volume ever awarded the prize since it was established in 1903. The book’s oddities do not end with brevity. The Goncourt Prize is usually awarded for fiction, but L’Ordre du jour, recently published in an English translation under the title The Order of the Day, comes closer to nonfiction. The author calls it a récit, a term with no exact English equivalent that means a narrative, not necessarily autobiographical, in which we are always aware of the presence of an intervening narrator. The…

Moods translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole. New Directions, 160 pp., $15.95 (paper) Curriculum Vitae translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole. New Directions, 128 pp., $14.95 (paper) The Shunra and the Schmetterling translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole. New Directions, 128 pp., $16.95 (paper) The Heart Is Katmandu translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole. New Directions, 144 pp., $13.95 (paper) The Christ of Fish translated from the Hebrew by Eddie Levenston. New Directions, 150 pp., $13.95 (paper) Bernhard translated from the Hebrew by Alan Treister with Eddie Levenston. New Directions, 174 pp., $14.95 (paper)…