Innholdsfortegnelse for December 3, 2020 i The New York Review of Books

COLIN B. BAILEY is Director of the Morgan Library and Museum. His books include Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris, which was awarded the 2004 Mitchell Prize, and Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting. MARIANNE BORUCH’s most recent book of poems is The Anti-Grief. Her forthcoming collection, Bestiary Dark, was completed through her research as a 2019 Fulbright Scholar in Australia. DAVID COLE is the National Legal Director of the ACLU and the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center. His latest book is Engines of Liberty: How Citizen Movements Succeed. ARIEL DORFMAN, a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke, is the author of the play Death and the Maiden. His books include, most recently, the children’s story The…

The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith: And Other Lesser Lives by Diane Johnson, with an introduction by Vivian Gornick. New York Review Books, 242 pp., $17.95 (paper) There were three people at the funeral of Mary Ellen Meredith when she died at the age of forty, in 1861: two women servants and an acquaintance of her second husband, the poet and novelist George Meredith. No one else came. Not her father, the comic writer Thomas Love Peacock, then in his seventies, nor any of his family. Not one member of the family of her first husband, the late Edward Nicolls, nor their daughter, Edith, then in her teens. Not, obviously, the novelist, whom she had left in 1857 after eight years of marriage, nor their young son, Arthur.…

Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power by Pekka Hamalainen. Yale University Press, 530 pp., $35.00; $22.00 (paper) In the spring of 1870 Congress was in the process of debating the Indian Appropriations Bill. While the bill’s main purpose was to renew or enhance funding for Native peoples and communities, it contained a rider that finally formally ended what is known as the treaty period of federal Indian policy: no longer would Indian tribes be treated as independent nations. Rather, Native people would be treated as individuals, and they would henceforth be considered “wards” of the state. Native Americans weren’t considered, and certainly were not treated as, citizens (of the United States or any other nation). Instead, the rhetorical categories of the “Great White Father” and his pitiful “Red…

Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century by Sarah Abrevaya Stein. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 317 pp., $28.00; $18.00 (paper; to be published in January) Salonica, the historic city on the Aegean Sea (now called Thessaloniki), was at the turn of the twentieth century probably as close to paradise as a European Jew was likely to get. The salon cultures of Berlin, Vienna, or Paris may have been more glittering, but there Jews sat uneasily on the edges of elite society and public life, warily eyeing growing anti-Semitism. In this vibrant, multicultural, and multiconfessional Mediterranean port, by contrast, Jews were the dominant population, preeminent in various commercial sectors, pillars of municipal life, and enjoying close relations with the ruling Ottoman Empire. The pride felt by Salonican Jews in…

It is an infallible law that if Seamus Hea ney is the Irish poet of choice, things are looking up, but if W. B. Yeats is in the air, they look ominous. Joe Biden at the National Democratic Convention in August created great expectations with Heaney’s “once in a lifetime/ … longed-for tidal wave/Of justice.” But there is no blue tsunami. Instead, we must turn, fretfully, to Yeats: “We are closed in, and the key is turned/On our uncertainty.” That key was always in the hands of Donald Trump. It has been obvious for many months that his strategy for retaining power would center on the generation of a force field of radical indecision. As Barton Gellman put it in The Atlantic, “He could prevent the formation of consensus about…

National discussions of abortion—of any services that might end a pregnancy, make contraception available, or provide other means of regulating one’s capacity to bear children—usually focus on the Supreme Court. But for many Americans, Roe v. Wade might as well have been overturned already. Whether RBG or ACB, five conservative justices or six, many American women live in counties without clinics, or cannot afford to pay for an abortion, or do not know how to slip under the limbo bars to get one. Many Americans cannot access basic medical care no matter what decisions they make, but state-level legislation makes abortion in particular nearly impossible to procure in much of the country. Almost four hundred state-level restrictions were proposed in the first half of 2019 alone. This week in Louisiana,…

The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry a bilingual edition translated from the French by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pp., $40.00 Although I have not visited the graveyard in the French town of Sete that is the subject of Paul Valery’s extraordinary poem “Le Cimetiere Marin” (“The Cemetery by the Sea”), I know of a counterpart at the opposite end of the Cote d’Azur, on the Italian border, in Menton. Both cemeteries perch above the Mediterranean, their tombs and mausoleums white and gold in the sun, stretched before them the infinite, ever-changing ocean, and above, the vast, eternal sky. To read Valery’s poem—published in 1920, when he was almost fifty—is to be transported to the landscape of his birth: This peaceful roof of…

First Saturday of the month and unlike the Greeks, sometime ancient cynics of beauty and warning, these sirens at least test the level of dog agony in town. Faint howls. Loud howls. Indifferent howls for the hell of it—surely mutt boredom in alley and yard, new octaves of ache, a high heaven’s blast though now it’s not just ordinary life and death that go on around here. Oh alert alert to fire and wind and plague, what leaps out of myth. Then quiet in an autumn seeming—so much of it—like summer, a winter half-assing the drill of fall, you-call-this-cold? where glaciers drop too many veils to the sea, whole counties of blitz-burnt convenient stores and bedframes, earthquakes in the mind’s eye gulping playgrounds, a high rise, an old Toyota still…

Flying over the Andes in the dead of night, you know you’ve reached Bolivia because towns and villages become visible: neat crosshatches of light, every street illuminated. The terminal at El Alto International Airport may not have the best design or the most punctilious construction standards, but in the freezing predawn of this high plateau—the Andean altiplano—one could weep with gratitude that it is heated. Thirty years ago El Alto was not a city but a straggle of unpaved, unlit streets spreading out from a ramshackle improvisation of piled-up luggage and technology-free checkpoints. Visitors arriving to the shock of 13,000 feet above sea level gasped for air, stumbled into a taxi, and rattled their way down a pitted, hairpin road to the capital, La Paz. El Alto today represents everything…

THEY WERE HUNGARIANS To the Editors: Diarmaid MacCulloch’s review of John Anthony McGuckin’s history of the Eastern Orthodox Church [“The Vitality of Orthodoxy,” NYR, July 2] is a concise treasure trove of intriguing detail and insight, but it cries out for one small amplification. When explaining “the respectful attitude of Orthodoxy toward authority,” Professor MacCulloch appropriately points to the example of Romanian dictator Ceausescu’s overthrow in 1989 as having been initiated not by those steeped in Orthodox tradition, but by the Reformed Protestants of the city of Timi-soara. He does not, however, mention the fact that those Protestants were ethnically, linguistically, and culturally Hungarian, thus a casual reader might be led to believe they were ethnic Romanians whose ancestors had somehow joined the Reformation. It’s true that several Hungarian princes…

The Silence by Don De Lillo. Scribner, 117 pp., $22.00 The Silence is full of voices, a work of talky minimalism whose characters are all troubled by the absence of sound. Five of them, three men and two women: a string quintet, and with the youngest, a high school physics teacher, as a decidedly insistent cello. Noise, chatter, the smother of static, the wearing hum in one’s head: you might think you’d welcome its stopping, and enjoy the grace of an unsought calm. You might think these characters especially would welcome it, New Yorkers all—two long-married middle-class couples, and then Martin, the younger man, a former student of one of the women. But this is Don De Lillo, for whom white noise is both comfort and scourge. It deadens our…

Beowulf translated from the Old English by Maria Dahvana Headley. MCDxFSG, 138 pp., $15.00 (paper) Translations of Beowulf are often judged by their first word. “Hwæt,” that enigmatic monosyllable, became a stately “behold” or “lo” in older versions of the epic. Modern poets have used their choice here as a calling card, announcing their intentions with more or less boldness. They have transformed “hwæt” into a firm “listen,” a laid-back “hey,” or a cheery “right!” A little over twenty years ago, Seamus Heaney gave the Old English tale an Irish lilt by beginning it with “so.” In her new rendering of the poem, Maria Dahvana Headley goes him one better and lobs the poem into contemporary slang like a ping pong ball into a red Solo cup: “Bro.” It is…