Innholdsfortegnelse for November 19, 2015 i The New York Review of Books

The Other Paris by Luc Sante. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 306 pp., $28.00 All cities have ruts—paths worn by the routines of their inhabitants as they go about their business. Paris is especially rutted, and the Parisians have an expression for the sense of imprisonment that it imposes on them: “métro, boulot, dodo” (subway, job, sleep). But there is another Paris, the city inhabited by those who don’t have jobs, either because they can’t find employment or because they have opted out of life in a rut. The marginal, the poor, the eccentrics, the bohemians, the dropouts, and the down-and-outs haunt the pages of Luc Sante’s vivid tour of that other Paris, most of it buried under what remains of the nineteenth century. Subterranean Paris still exists, some of it…

The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne by Anna Bikont, translated from the Polish by Alissa Valles. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 544 pp., $30.00 Thomas Mann believed that all good stories are slow stories. He was doubtless thinking of Wagner, his greatest literary influence—but also, naturally, of Thomas Mann. And in the best hands, slowness can feel the exact speed necessary for truthfulness. In less sure hands, it can produce a kind of maximalist minimalism: see Karl Ove Knausgaard. But Mann’s dictum also applies to other narrative forms, like the documentary film. One of the greatest documentaries of the last fifty years is Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. This most terrifying of films doesn’t open with haunting images or pumped-up voice-over claims. It opens with the…

Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief by James M. McPherson. Penguin, 301 pp., $32.95 The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters by James M. McPherson. Oxford University Press, 219 pp., $27.95 By early April 1865, the Confederacy was in free fall. William Tecumseh Sherman had cut a swath of destruction through Georgia and the Carolinas. On April 2, Ulysses S. Grant broke Robert E. Lee’s line at Petersburg, Virginia. The next day Grant took Richmond, the Confederate capital. Abraham Lincoln arrived there on April 4 and was greeted by jubilant crowds of emancipated blacks. Meanwhile, Jefferson Davis, the gaunt, austere president of the Confederacy, had joined the evacuation of Richmond and had fled to Danville, Virginia. But he had not lost faith in…

Introduction On October 8, the Nobel Committee announced that the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature was being awarded to Svetlana Alexievich, a writer and journalist whose body of work is unique both in scope and in genre. The bare facts of Alexievich’s biography reflect the nature of her greater subject: the memory, aspirations, tragedy, and fluid historical identity of Homo sovieticus. She was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, a city in western Ukraine that lies at the eastern edge of the Carpathian Mountains, about 85 miles south of Lviv, and a mere 150 or so miles from the borders of Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia, respectively. The city was annexed by the USSR only a few years before her birth in 1948. Her mother was Ukrainian and her father Belarussian. She grew…

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James. Riverhead, 688 pp., $28.95; $17.00 (paper) If hell were a place on earth, a Bob Marley concert in Jamaica isn’t the first place you’d expect to find it. But perspective is everything. Bam-Bam, the first character to die in Marlon James’s new novel, has been running for two days when he reaches the show, held in the park where he sleeps. He is covered in dog spit, desperate for cocaine, and relentlessly pursued by his partners in a failed assassination. The crowd around him is moving to the “Positive Vibration,” but Bam-Bam is alone, hemmed in by nightmarish visions. Invisible flames lick at his ankles, three-eyed, batwinged babies swarm around his head, and ghostly “duppies,” the revenant spirits of Caribbean folklore,…

The Real Planet of the Apes: A New Story of Human Origins by David R. Begun. Princeton University Press, 246 pp., $29.95 How many apes do you know? I don’t mean as individuals but as types, or if you wish to be scientific about it, as genera: subdivisions of biological families. Well, I’m sure you can name the chimpanzee (which has the generic name Pan) and the gorilla (Gorilla) for the African apes, and they are indeed the only two African genera that exist, with three or four species within each. I suspect you will name the orangutan (Pongo, two species) and probably the gibbon (Hylobates, twelve species) as Asian apes. I would certainly hope you appreciate our evolutionary heritage and list humans (Homo, one species) as another type of…

All Days Are Night by Peter Stamm, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann. Other Press, 185 pp., $22.00 Two thirds of the way through the Swiss-German writer Peter Stamm’s most recent novel, events appear to be moving toward an exciting climax. An artist has been commissioned to do a show at a small Alpine cultural center. He is determined not to repeat the work that made his name, a series of female nudes in domestic settings— “naked housewives,” as his gallerist calls them. But he has no fresh ideas. Recently separated from his wife and weighed down by teaching commitments, he’s badly blocked. At the cultural center, he meets someone he once knew, a former presenter on a TV arts show, who was badly disfigured in a car crash…

Death Fugue by Sheng Keyi, translated from the Chinese by Shelly Bryant. Artarmon, Australia: Giramondo, 375 pp., AU$29.95 (paper) A Map of Betrayal by Ha Jin. Pantheon, 280 pp., $26.95 Kinder Than Solitude by Yiyun Li. Random House, 327 pp., $26.00; $16.00 (paper) The Dog: Stories by Jack Livings. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 226 pp., $25.00 Can writers help an injured society to heal? Did Oe Kenzaburo, who traveled to Hiroshima in 1963 to interview survivors of the dropping of the atomic bomb on that city eighteen years earlier, and then published a moving book called Hiroshima Notes, help his compatriots to recover? Did Primo Levi, with his several books on the Holocaust, from the shocking Survival in Auschwitz (1947) to the profoundly humane The Drowned and the Saved (1986),…

This was, indeed, a very different presidential debate from the ones Republicans had in August and September. Sixteen candidates then used their allotted time trying to outdo each other in scaring Americans out of their pants by warning them about enemies everywhere, from illegal immigrants pouring across our borders, selling drugs and sex and bringing all kinds of disease, to jackbooted government agents wrestling guns out of the hands of mothers protecting their children from thugs breaking into their homes, to countries like Iran, Russia, and China interfering with our ambitions to make the planet a cradle of democracy, to which they promised ultimatums followed by military action once they got into the White House. All this when they were not raising alarms about living babies being chopped up here…

In his book On Late Style, published after his death, the critic Edward Said ponders the aura surrounding work produced by artists in the last years of their lives. He asks: “Does one grow wiser with age, and are there unique qualities of perception and form that artists acquire as a result of age in the late phase of their career?” He considers the idea that some late works possess “a special maturity, a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity often expressed in terms of a miraculous transfiguration of common reality.” Yet he also questions the very notion of late serenity: “But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce the serenity of ‘ripeness…

Letters to Véra by Vladimir Nabokov, edited and translated from the Russian by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd. Knopf, 794 pp., $40.00 Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita by Robert Roper. Bloomsbury, 354 pp., $28.00 When he mailed the first missive to the woman who would become his wife, Vladimir Nabokov was a penurious, Berlin-based poet known to the emigre community as “V. Sirin,” a name that felt more familiar to him than his own. He dreamed still of Russia. When he mailed his last letter, he was a wealthy American novelist living in Switzerland, self-conscious about the quality of his Russian. In between came a shelf of literature, three wrenching changes of country, and nearly fifty years of marriage. It was the longest-running, most intimate correspondence of…

American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers by Perry Anderson. Verso, 272 pp., $24.95 Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy by David Milne. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 609 pp., $35.00 At the age of seventy-seven, Perry Anderson is the most distinguished living member of a generation of British Marxist historians and theorists who dominated intellectual life on the British left from the late 1950s until the 1990s. They included Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, Ralph Miliband, Isaac Deutscher, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Stuart Hall, Raphael Samuel, and Gareth Stedman Jones. If you were a young historian just starting out in the London of the 1970s, as I was, these figures were lodestars. You didn’t have to share their politics to be inspired by their work. They championed a social…

Entrepreneurial Litigation: Its Rise, Fall, and Future by John C. Coffee Jr. Harvard University Press, 307 pp., $45.00 In 2009, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged that the top executives of Bank of America, in connection with asking their shareholders to approve the bank’s $50 billion acquisition of Merrill Lynch, defrauded those shareholders by failing to reveal the full extent of Merrill’s huge and growing losses and by secretly agreeing to pay Merrill’s executives year-end bonuses of up to $5.8 billion. That is, the SEC charged that the bank was obliged by law to reveal these important facts to its shareholders and did not. If the shareholders had known these facts, they might have voted against the acquisition. The SEC, which sued only the bank and none of its executives,…

Keeping the Vow: The Untold Story of Married Catholic Priests by D. Paul Sullins. Oxford University Press, 322 pp., $29.99 Last year in a Pew poll, most American Catholics (72 percent) said they want their priests to be married. I don’t know how many saying this realize that there are already married priests in the Roman Catholic Church. Probably not many—and this is no accident, as the priest-sociologist D. Paul Sullins writes in Keeping the Vow. The married priests are advised not to draw attention to themselves. Their most direct contact with the laity, as pastors of a parish, was for a long time forbidden. A concentration of more than two of them in one diocese was discouraged, so they were spread around to keep them exceptional, not the norm.…

Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change by Edmund Phelps. Princeton University Press, 378 pp., $29.95 In his inaugural address on March 4, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to reassure his fellow citizens that he would devote full effort to putting them back to work and lifting them out of the widespread poverty and destitution into which the Depression of the past three years had sunk so many. But the new president also struck a different tone, departing from the stricken nation’s natural focus on restoring employment and material living standards. “Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money,” Roosevelt declared; “it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten…

Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva by Rosemary Sullivan. Harper, 741 pp., $35.00 Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator by Oleg V. Khlevniuk, translated from the Russian by Nora Seligman Favorov. Yale University Press, 392 pp., $35.00 In her revealing biography of Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, Rosemary Sullivan portrays a woman who was never able to find herself. Her yearnings for a lifelong partner were never fulfilled and she was constantly disappointed in her choices of places to call home. Yet she carried on with determination until 2011, when she died of cancer at the age of eighty-five, with a handful of devoted friends who stuck by her despite her unpredictable temperament, and an American-born daughter who loved her unconditionally until the end. It is no…