Innholdsfortegnelse for March 7, 2019 i The New York Review of Books

JOHN BANVILLE’s latest novel is Mrs. Osmond. SARAH BOXER is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and the author of two cartoon novels, In the Floyd Archives: A Psycho-Bestiary and its forthcoming sequel, Mother May I?: A Post-Floydian Folly. ROBYN CRESWELL is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale. He is the author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut. TIM FLANNERY’s new book is Europe: A Natural History. J. HOBERMAN’s Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan will be published in July. LYNN HUNT is Distinguished Research Professor in History at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her books include Inventing Human Rights, Writing History in the Global Era, and, most recently, History: Why It Matters. E. TAMMY KIM is a freelance reporter, former…

Sophie Taeuber-Arp and the Avant-Garde: A Biography by Roswitha Mair, translated from the German by Damion Searls. University of Chicago Press, 222 pp., $55.00 The story of twentieth-century art is crowded with chastened and disabused idealists. How could it be otherwise? Each of the great movements—Fauvism, Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism—began with its own kind of evangelical fervor. These artists were rejecting quotidian experience as they pursued emotional states so unfamiliar or so overpowering as to call into question the fundamentally empirical and materialistic nature of a work of art. Painters and sculptors were raising hopes for artistic catharsis that no painting or sculpture, not even a masterpiece, could ever be expected to fulfill. Sooner or later, the long, hard hours in the studio had a way of…

Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely by Andrew S. Curran. Other Press, 520 pp., $28.95 Catherine and Diderot: The Empress, the Philosopher, and the Fate of the Enlightenment by Robert Zaretsky. Harvard University Press, 258 pp., $27.95 The most radical thinker of the eighteenth century, Denis Diderot (1713–1784), is not exactly a forgotten man, though he has been long overshadowed by his contemporaries Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. After the French Revolution of 1789, the French right routinely blamed every ill of modern life on Voltaire and Rousseau. The expressions “It’s the fault of Voltaire” and “It’s the fault of Rousseau” became so familiar that Victor Hugo could satirize them in a ditty sung by the urchin Gavroche in Les Misérables (1862): “Joy is my character; ’tis the fault of…

Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism by Alexander Knysh. Princeton University Press, 389 pp., $29.95; $21.95 (paper) Hallaj: Poems of a Sufi Martyr by Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj, translated from the Arabic by Carl W. Ernst. Northwestern University Press, 253 pp., $18.95 (paper) Simon Ockley was the first writer in English to compose a history based on Arabic sources. The Conquest of Syria, Persia, and Ægypt, by the Saracens (1708), which recounts the Arab conquests following the death of Muhammad, deeply influenced Edward Gibbon and, in the words of a recent scholar, “revolutionized the treatment of Islamic civilization throughout Europe.” Ockley, a professor at Cambridge University, also translated a twelfth-century Arabic parable, The Improvement of Human Reason, Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan (1708), the story of…

Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain by Richard Davenport- Hines. HarperCollins, 642 pp., $25.99 A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean by Roland Philipps. Norton, 440 pp., $28.95 The very mention of the “Cambridge spies” conjures a world of louche living, sexual shenanigans, and covert betrayal that had become defunct long before the end of the cold war, only surviving liminally in the gritty but entertaining fictions of the likes of John le Carré and Len Deighton. However, anyone who looks forward to curling up for a comfy read with Richard Davenport- Hines’s Enemies Within will suffer an early shock— although the book is in many places funny enough, in its mordant way, to make one laugh out loud. At the start…

82 nyeon saeng Kim Ji-young [Kim Ji-young, Born in 1982] by Cho Nam-joo. Seoul: Minumsa, 192 pp., 13,000 won In October 2016 the Korean publishing house Minumsa released a short novel called Kim Ji-young, Born in 1982, the latest in a series of works of fiction by “today’s young writers.” The author is a former television scriptwriter, Cho Nam-joo, born in 1978, who had published well-received short stories. She wrote the novel in two months, inspired by her favorite English-language writer, Rebecca Solnit, and maddened by the turns her own life had taken as a Korean woman and the treatment she faced as a new mother. One day, while taking a coffee break with her baby, she heard male passersby refer to her as,or “mom-worm,” a nasty epithet for mothers…

Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s by George Hutchinson. Columbia University Press, 439 pp., $35.00 1. George Hutchinson’s Facing the Abyss has bracing and revelatory things to say about American culture in the 1940s; also, by contrast and implication, about American culture today. The book brings into focus intellectual and emotional realities of the decade during and after World War II that current historical memory largely occludes behind heroicizing or condescending stereotypes. On the one hand, popular media serve up nostalgia for a “Greatest Generation.” On the other hand, academic dogma rebukes the decade’s aspirations for “universality,” for an inclusive sense of what it means to be human, portraying those hopes as imperialist cudgels designed to impose Western values on a postcolonial world. Hutchinson’s demolitions of…

Berlin by Jason Lutes. Drawn and Quarterly, 577 pp., $49.95 In 1997 Jason Lutes, a comics editor and cartoonist in Seattle known for Jar of Fools, a graphic novel about an alcoholic magician and his senile mentor, set out to create an ambitious comic about Berlin in the late Weimar period, just before Hitler’s rise to power. The idea occurred to him when he happened to see an advertisement for a book of photographs called Bertolt Brecht’s Berlin. Before Lutes began his research—two years’ worth, as it turned out—most of what he knew of his subject, as he told me in an interview at a comics expo this past fall, came from the movie Cabaret. He didn’t speak or read German. At age twenty-eight, he figured the project might take…

Not to Read by Alejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish and edited by Megan McDowell. London: Fitzcarraldo, 278 pp., £12.99 (paper) “I abandon books easily,” the Chilean novelist, story writer, poet, and essayist Alejandro Zambra said in a 2015 interview with the Peruvian novelist Daniel Alarcón. Before, especially when I wrote literary criticism, I had the urge to read books from cover to cover. If I was writing about them, I’d read them twice over. I didn’t enjoy that, in part due to the obligation to say something beyond the obvious. I don’t do that anymore; I became more impulsive—there are just too many books I want to read. The specter of “obligatory readings” haunts Not to Read, Zambra’s collection of reviews, essays, and lectures; it’s also the title of…

Les rois ne touchent pas aux portes.—Francis Ponge It is the month of May: you openand you close; you open and closethe door, the press, a small plasticreplica of the house. You bringto the implacable destructionof small towers the ambling gaitof a watchful gunslingertumbled smack to the floor.For that he starteth and leapethand boundeth with jubilation,thinks the tabby cat hunchedalarmed-faced at your feet.You slide the glass door open andsurprised but pleased seeyour face swim into placeon another behind it. Wallsare doors, shifting tectonicplates of the open and closed,the way in and out. Imaginethe sadness of kings nevertouching doors for themselvesor uncovering with smallanemone fingers trailed roundthe edge of the door their faces.Face waiting all that timeto emerge from behindyour mother’s and mine, thereis the you behind the doorand the you…

Brrring! I answer like a retro panther in my polyester sheath.As long as I’ve got my hair I’ll make it. SweetnessIn the air or on the streets, my city, give us any chance …In the Pyramid only the good girls were real. Back-to-backLike dancing might make us strong. We were poorAs a fake fur lined with fake fur, no loco, city of anglesAnd steel beams to bring our lungs to. Bring back the girlsWe were before the story ended. I sweep like a flamingoInto the velvety streets. Catsuit city. Sometimes my faceIs shorthand for a face. Turned out like a girl seen at an angle,Askance. Sweet, then sour. My lips the color of Doubt.…