Innholdsfortegnelse for May 13, 2021 i The New York Review of Books

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

CONTRIBUTORS

RUMAAN ALAM is the author of Rich and Pretty and That Kind of Mother. His third novel, Leave the World Behind, was published in October. HILTON ALS is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He received the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. JOHN ASHBERY (1927–2017) published over two dozen poetry collections and won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, among many other awards. The entirety of his poem excerpted in this issue, “The History of Photography,” will be published in Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, edited by Emily Skillings and with a foreword by Ben Lerner. MATTHEW AUCOIN is a composer, conductor, and 2018 MacArthur Fellow. His new opera, Eurydice, will come to the Metropolitan Opera in November. COLIN B. BAILEY is…

3 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

A Dance to the Music of Death

The Exterminating Angel an opera by Thomas Adès, with a libretto by Tom Cairns in collaboration with the composer; performed by Amanda Echalaz, Audrey Luna, Alice Coote, Joseph Kaiser, Rod Gilfry, Christine Rice, Iestyn Davies, and others; the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Thomas Adès. Warner Classics, $30.00 (Blu-ray); $25.00 (DVD) Adès Conducts Adès: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra and Totentanz performed by Kirill Gerstein, Mark Stone, Christianne Stotijn, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Deutsche Grammophon, $16.00 (CD) The inhabitants of the planet Tlön, in Jorge Luis Borges’s story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” have a radically different understanding of the universe than we Earthlings do: “For the people of Tlön,” Borges’s imaginary historian tells us, “the world is not an amalgam of objects in space; it is a…

19 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

His Own Worst Enemy

Vincent van Gogh: A Life in Letters edited by Nienke Bakker, Leo Jansen, and Hans Luijten. Thames and Hudson, 432 pp., $39.95 Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him by Mariella Guzzoni. University of Chicago Press, 231 pp., $25.00 If ever an artist needed a degree of protection against his public, surely it is Vincent van Gogh. Reproductions of his most emblematic paintings, especially the gyrating nightscapes and the blazing series of sunflower studies made in his late years, adorn countless bedrooms, living rooms, and bathrooms all across what used to be known as the developed world. The popularity of the works executed in the great flowering of this last period, which began around the time of his revelatory visit in the autumn of 1885 to the…

19 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

Why Did They Vanish?

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes. Bloomsbury, 400 pp., $28.00 If you visit an even moderately old museum display on human evolution, or open anything but the latest textbooks on the subject, you’ll encounter cave-dwelling, mammoth-hunting Neanderthals who are beetle-browed, stooped, and distinctly unintelligent-looking. But over the past few years the Neanderthals of our imaginations have evolved marvelously, so that recent images closely resemble us (the Neanderthal woman in the Museum of the Confluences, Nice, with her direct gaze, is a prime example). This transformation has been driven partly by new discoveries in archaeology, some of which are truly astonishing, but also by changing societal attitudes about how we depict others. Kindred by the archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes is a dense work, packed with information and…

14 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

C.V.

A ruthless catalog of sorrows:years in front of the screen, diplomas before jobs,and languages—all that torture—now ranged under Languages.Where are all the wasted days? The nightsof walking with hands stretched outand the visions that crept over the walls?Where are the feelings of guiltand the sudden sadness faced with a little hill of fruitatop a handcart in a forgotten street?Years with no mention of the empty hours or the funerals,expunged of black depressions and nibbled nails,the housekeys forgotten inside the house.There isn’t a single open window.No trace of the desire, deferred, to leap out.A life overstuffed with accomplishments,scrubbed free of dirt:proof that she who livedhas cut all ties to the earth. (translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell)…

1 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

Planning an Aryan Paradise

Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway by Despina Stratigakos. Princeton University Press, 313 pp., $29.95 Legacies of the Nazi Camps in Norway: Falstad 1941–49 by Trond Risto Nilssen and Jon Reitan. Zurich: LIT, 248 pp., $52.95 (paper) Kathe—Always Been in Norway by Espen Søbye, translated from the Norwegian by Kerri Pierce, with an introduction by Sarah Wildman. Oslo: Krakiel, 207 pp., $24.95 1. So horrendous were the manifold atrocities perpetrated by Adolf Hitler and his followers that decades passed before scholars began to address the Nazis’ use of the visual arts in their comprehensive program for domination. This blind spot was attributable to the long-held notion that cultural aspects of the Third Reich must be ignored, because even to acknowledge them was tantamount to approval. Some…

19 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

When Slaves Fled to Mexico

South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War by Alice L. Baumgartner. Basic Books, 365 pp., $32.00 There has long been a fascination with the plight of enslaved Blacks who ran away from southern slaveholders in the decades before the Civil War. Powerful autobiographies by runaways such as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs immerse us in their physical pain and psychological suffering, their longing and frustration, and their sense of liberation when they succeed in escaping. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential best seller Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) features a suspenseful plot about a couple and their young child who flee slavery in Kentucky. Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987) dramatizes the real-life story of Margaret Garner, a fugitive who, on the verge of…

13 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

MERCHANTS OF DEATH

THE LEDGER AND THE CHAIN How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America “Antebellum America was simultaneously a robust marketplace of strivers and a landscape of horror for the millions who were enslaved. In this groundbreaking work, Joshua Rothman reveals the intimate connection between the two….The Ledger and the Chain is detailed, incisive, and devastating.” —T. J. STILES, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The First Tycoon and Custer’s Trials “Joshua Rothman carefully and empirically builds from a forensic accounting of the lives and practices of those Frederick Douglass termed the ‘man-drovers’ and others called the ‘soul drivers’ to a social autopsy of the whole of American slavery in the nineteenth century. Essential.” —WALTER JOHNSON, author of The Broken Heart of America basicbooks.com…

1 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

Children’s Lib!

Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy by Leslie Brody. Seal, 335 pp., $30.00 In 1963 thirty-four-year-old Louise Fitzhugh was fresh off a successful exhibition of her paintings and drawings at an Upper East Side gallery when she suddenly declared her fine art career a catastrophe. She’d recently illustrated the children’s book Suzuki Beane, a charming Beatnik spin on Eloise, written by her friend and sometime lover Sandra Scoppettone, and it was to children’s literature that Louise turned again. She wrote to her lifelong friend the poet James Merrill to tell him about her new book project: “It is called Harriet the Spy and is about a nasty little girl who keeps a notebook on all her friends.” Published…

15 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

from THE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY (1993)

I.First takers, first makers.The first sip of intelligencesplits the diapered sky, already crackledwith the losses that events are. At the old treehouse one is cloggedwith sleep in any case. Dust garlands that swaylike chains of mice. And up from underthe palaver there is golden food. So let it be clean at least.The first person to be photographed was a manhaving his boots cleaned. There were othersin the same street, but they moved and becameinvisible. How calm I am! Baron de Meyer saw the horse and it too moved on.Nor was the lesson of satin lost on him.It all came to seem a big joke, his cake.Besides, who would care, a little later, later on? Not the house dog. The twig of coal?Not the letterhead, though it is preserved, shiningwhere tulle…

3 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

See More, Think More

Michelangelo’s Sculpture: Selected Essays by Leo Steinberg, edited by Sheila Schwartz. University of Chicago Press, 226 pp., $65.00 Michelangelo’s Painting: Selected Essays by Leo Steinberg, edited by Sheila Schwartz. University of Chicago Press, 382 pp., $65.00 Renaissance and Baroque Art: Selected Essays by Leo Steinberg, edited by Sheila Schwartz. University of Chicago Press, 299 pp., $65.00 After Michelangelo, Past Picasso: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints an exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, February 7–May 9, 2021 Objectivity is a conundrum. At least it is in the humanities. Different people define it differently, and what one person claims is an objective opinion or interpretation another will dismiss as little more than prejudice. These debates, which have become especially strident in academic circles in recent years, fascinated the art…

19 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

Masterpieces Unmediated

The Sleeve Should Be Illegal and Other Reflections on Art at the Frick edited by Michaelyn Mitchell, with a foreword by Adam Gopnik. The Frick Collection/DelMonico/DAP New York, 168 pp., $29.95 Holbein’s Sir Thomas More by Hilary Mantel and Xavier F. Salomon. The Frick Collection/D Giles, 72 pp., $17.95 Constable’s White Horse by William Kentridge and Aimee Ng. The Frick Collection/D Giles, 72 pp., $24.95 Rembrandt’s Polish Rider by Maira Kalman and Xavier F. Salomon. The Frick Collection/D Giles, 84 pp., $19.95 Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid by James Ivory and Margaret Iacono. The Frick Collection/D Giles, 64 pp., $19.95 Gouthière’s Candelabras by Edmund de Waal and Charlotte Vignon. The Frick Collection/D Giles, 64 pp., $19.95 In his diary for May 6, 1997, the English essayist and playwright Alan Bennett—a trustee…

20 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

Return of the Nameless Man

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Grove, 403 pp., $17.00 (paper) The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Grove, 345 pp., $27.00 “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces,” says the narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel, The Sympathizer, by way of introduction. He’s not talking to us. The book is a political prisoner’s mea culpa, addressed to his jailer, the Commandant, who is faceless in that he’s an abstract presence throughout the book but also literally so (napalm). The narrator’s captors have demanded a confession, so, from a cell in Vietnam—“this jackfruit republic that served as a franchise of the United States”—the narrator sifts through his entire life in search of his crime. No shortage of material there. He admits to being a…

17 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

Kubrick’s Human Comedy

Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker by David Mikics. Yale University Press, 233 pp., $26.00 Paul Mazursky, to whom Stanley Kubrick gave his first substantial role in Kubrick’s own first feature film, Fear and Desire (1953), recalls their driving together on a mission to hit up the young director’s uncle for a loan to finance the film. “I’m gonna get the money from him no matter what—I can tell you that right now,” Kubrick said. “And he spat at the windshield from inside the car.” Some sixty years later, Michael Herr, the author of the Vietnam memoir Dispatches and collaborator with Kubrick on Full Metal Jacket (1987), wrote, “You’d have to be Herman Melville to transmit the full strength of Stanley’s will.” This Jewish Ahab grew up in the Bronx, where he…

24 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

Light in the Palazzo

The Torlonia Marbles: Collecting Masterpieces an exhibition at the Capitoline Museums, Rome, October 14, 2020–June 29, 2021 (currently closed due to Covid-19 restrictions). Catalog of the exhibition edited by Salvatore Settis and Carlo Gasparri. Milan: Electa, 335 pp., €39.00 In 1968 the Roman aristocrat Alessandro Torlonia, Prince of Fucino, applied for a permit to repair the roof of his family’s private museum, a nineteenth-century industrial building just out-side the ancient Porta Settimiana in Trastevere that had been transformed by his great-grandfather, another Alessandro, into a sprawling seventy-seven-room venue for the family’s vast collection of ancient sculpture. Decked out in neoclassical splendor, the Torlonia Museum opened in 1876, but only to visitors inscribed in the Golden Book of Italian Nobility, a manu-script in the Central State Archive in Rome that provided…

17 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

The Writer Apart

I want to say everything—that is the purpose of this book. —Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man On August 4, 1914, German troops invaded neutral Belgium, and by day’s end Britain and Germany were at war. Three days later, in an otherwise perfunctory letter to his brother Heinrich, Thomas Mann made an uncharacteristic confession: I still feel as if I’m dreaming…. What a visitation! What will Europe look like after, inwardly and outwardly, when it is over? …It is fairly certain that if the war lasts long, I shall be what is called “ruined.” So be it! What would that signify compared with the upheavals, especially the large-scale psychic upheavals which war must necessarily bring? Shouldn’t we be grateful for the totally unexpected chance to experience such mighty things?…

18 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

The Self Unmoored

Divorcing by Susan Taubes, with an introduction by David Rieff. New York Review Books, 265 pp., $16.95 (paper) Susan Taubes’s novel Divorcing begins with the death of its main character. Sophie Blind wakes up in an apartment by the Hudson River, still groggy from a dream, or perhaps still dreaming, to find her lover bending over her, saying, “you’re dead Sophie.” Then she remembers: I died on a Tuesday afternoon, struck by a car…. The sensation of my head severed from my back is still vivid. My body growing enormous, its thousands of trillions of cells suddenly set free, spread, speeded, pressed jubilant. It’s a vision of death that holds terror and freedom at once: the body enlarged rather than destroyed, its cells liberated. “Spread, speeded, pressed”: even the sibilance…

22 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

‘I’ve Lost Everything to the Beast’

MS-13: The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang by Steven Dudley. Hanover Square, 339 pp., $28.99 Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas by Roberto Lovato. Harper, 325 pp., $26.99; $17.99 (paper; to be published in September) The Hollywood Kid: The Violent Life and Violent Death of an MS-13 Hitman by Óscar Martínez and Juan José Martínez, translated from the Spanish by John B. Washington and Daniela Ugaz. Verso, 305 pp., $26.95 State of War: MS-13 and El Salvador’s World of Violence by William Wheeler. Columbia Global Reports, 139 pp., $15.99 (paper) Mara Salvatrucha, better known as MS-13, is a Salvadoran street gang, but it was born in the US about forty years ago. Salvadorans had been coming to California since the early 1900s, a…

23 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

‘And You Give Yourself Away’

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa. Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 326 pp., $16.95 (paper) Arthur O’Leary was the scion of a high-born Irish Catholic family in County Cork who, in 1773, ran into trouble with a local English magistrate, Abraham Morris. Morris either took colonialist umbrage at the impudent O’Leary—who had also been a hussar in Empress Maria’s Austro-Hungarian army—or simply coveted his prizewinning mare, which, under Great Britain’s oppressive Penal Laws, he was at liberty to seize for the insulting sum of £5. O’Leary taunted Morris and escalated the conflict, but before he was able to escape to the continent, Morris’s men shot him dead. The tale is immortalized in the “Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire,” or “Lament for Art O’Leary,” which was composed by his wife,…

11 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

Remembrance of Things Past

When I was a little boy, not more than ten or eleven, I would label photographs. In our apartment in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn—I lived there with my mother, an older sister, and my little brother—photographs were kept in boxes or in albums, in which after a while the thick paper they had been affixed to would tear or, if touched, start to crumble altogether. I was always afraid of losing the photographs we had managed to save, because that would mean losing memories—memories of things that, more often than not, I was too young to have lived with the people in them. But what did that matter? I wanted to love people and their stories, because everyone had a story: photographs told us that. And so did the…

6 min

The New York Review of Books|May 13, 2021

Ancient Egypt for the Egyptians

A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology by Toby Wilkinson. Norton, 510 pp., $30.00 Barra and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy by Youssef Rakha. Palgrave Macmillan, 111 pp., $59.99 Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb a documentary film directed by James Tovell The Egyptian Museum in Cairo moved into its peach-colored, arcaded neoclassical building in 1902. Its collections include the five-thousandyear-old Palette of Narmer—one of the earliest examples of hieroglyphics, commemorating the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt—a bust of the “heretic” pharaoh Akhenaton, and the golden treasures of the boy king Tutankhamun. Its façade is inscribed with the names of famous Egyptologists, all male, all European: six Frenchmen, five Britons, four Germans, three Italians, a Dutchman, a Dane, and a Swede. The…

23 min