Innholdsfortegnelse for June 10, 2021 i The New York Review of Books

JAROSLAW ANDERS is a writer and translator specializing in Eastern European literature. He is the author of Between Fire and Sleep: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose. CHRISTOPHER CARROLL is a Senior Editor at Harper’s Magazine. ANDREA COHEN’s seventh collection of poems, Everything, was published this year. MARGARET EBY is the author of South Toward Home: Travels in Southern Literature. HELEN EPSTEIN is Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Global Public Health at Bard. She is the author of Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror and The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa. CLAUDE GATEBUKE is a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. He is Executive Director of the African Great Lakes Action Network. FRANCESCA MARI has written for The…

I’m splashing in the driveway in a ditchIn which a corpse of rain has gathered, hereA corpse has gathered, wearing nothing,a full diaper. I am three. A clear Sky leans as if upon a bar uponThe house and everyone in the picture, myGrandmother, me. I am the rain come downMy mother’s parents have just kidnapped me I am the corpse in which I play. I’m dancingin the corpse. The clear sky sickensWatching, but with no clouds in the sky the sky can’t move Away. Behind me, pickingFlowers my mother’s mother sees the green has fled the leafO reader, listener, stay. You are now evidence…

Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong. PublicAffairs, 488 pp., $32.00 On New Year’s Eve, 2013, Rwanda’s former intelligence chief Patrick Karegeya was strangled to death in an upscale Johannesburg hotel. According to a South African inquest, Karegeya, who’d fled Rwanda six years earlier, had been lured into a deadly trap by operatives working for Paul Kagame, the leader of the regime he’d once served. As a youth, Karegeya embodied the promise of postcolonial Africa. He was born into a pastoralist family in 1960 and seemed destined for a life of family, clan, and cows, but his sharp intelligence was recognized early on, and he was encouraged to attend university. He grew up to become a sophisticated government official,…

The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World by Linda Colley. Liveright, 502 pp., $35.00 “We need to broaden and diversify our gaze,” Linda Colley asserts in The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen. Her dazzling global history does just that, pulling away the blinkers of national stories, widening the focus, and showing—as the current pandemic has done—how interconnected all our lives and interests are. In this bold, packed account of the growth of written constitutions from the mid-eighteenth century until the advent of World War I, a web of connections spins between continents, entangling, clashing, looping back, increasing in speed and complexity. In a daring revisionist move that overturns explanations of the proliferation of constitutions “only by reference to the rise…

A Lover’s Discourse by Xiaolu Guo. Grove, 271 pp., $26.00 Never have the literary habits of so many readers been determined by so few people. Publishing is more centralized than it has ever been—with the proposed acquisition of Simon and Schuster by Penguin Random House, what was once the Big 5 would become a Big 4; the names of the genteel publishers of yore are now fronts for international conglomerates based in Germany and France. This has created a situation in which books need to be international not only in their origins but in the sense that the writing can be easily exported. The last few years have seen many exciting writers published in translation by small presses. It is thanks to tiny, often nonprofit outfits like Two Lines Press,…

Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn edited and with an introduction by Andrei Codrescu, with a foreword by Jack Zipes. Princeton University Press, 206 pp., $22.95 Japanese Ghost Stories by Lafcadio Hearn, edited by Paul Murray. Penguin, 228 pp., $16.00 (paper) Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things by Lafcadio Hearn, with photographs by Hiroshi Watanabe and an introduction by Paul Murray. Unicorn Publishing Group, 137 pp., $35.00 In 1890 Lafcadio Hearn arrived in Japan on a reporting assignment for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Just shy of forty years old, he was a popular journalist and novelist, his work marked by a hatred of modern industrial life and a fascination with what he called “survivals”—traditions or folktales that he hoped would provide a living link to a more ancient form of…

Alindarka’s Children (Things Will Be Bad) by Alhierd Bacharevian, translated from the Belarusian by Jim Dingley and Petra Reid. Edinburgh: Scotland Street, 325 pp., £11.99 (paper) In the months following its disputed presidential election last August, Belarus—often referred to as “the last dictatorship in Europe”—was the scene of enormous protests. The election predictably confirmed the continuation of authoritarian rule by the country’s first and only president, Alexander Lukashenka, who has remained in power since 1994. Many of the protests were organized and carried out predominantly by women, including the now exiled pro-democracy leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who had run against Lukashenka after her husband, Sergei Tikhanovsky, was barred from doing so and imprisoned. Despite the rigorously nonviolent character of the demonstrations, they were met with police brutality. Thousands of people have…

THE RISKS OF GENE EDITING To the Editors: In her recent review of four books on the prospects of applying CRISPR and related gene modification technologies to the improvement of human biology [“Editing Humanity’s Future,” NYR, April 29], Natalie de Souza appropriately emphasizes the safety of such manipulations as a fundamental requirement, as well as the profound social ramifications of decisions to use these technologies. What de Souza, in common with the authors of all the books under review, sidesteps, however, is that “safety” means entirely different things when therapeutic alterations of the tissues of a mature body are considered, in contrast to those that are administered at early embryonic stages. The engineering of retinal cells to relieve blindness, for example, is not comparable to ridding embryos of genes associated…

Nuestra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation by Claudio Lomnitz. Other Press, 445 pp., $27.99 The gist, the true essence, of Claudio Lomnitz’s Nuestra América is expressed not in its rather anodyne title, which simply means “Our America” in Spanish, but in its enigmatic subtitle: “My Family in the Vertigo of Translation.” A reader might wonder what exactly is being translated—another book? a stack of letters?—and how that process could possibly generate such a powerful sensation of confusion and disorientation. But the uncertainty does not last long, for Nuestra América quickly develops into an account of one extended family’s persistent, sometimes bewildered, even dizzying search, as they ricochet among four continents, for a language, culture, identity, and place they can call their own. It is, explains Lomnitz—an anthropologist…

Ultimate Price: The Value We Place on Life by Howard Steven Friedman. University of California Press, 221 pp., $26.95; $24.95 (paper) What is a human life worth? That is an impossibly abstract question, so let’s ask a more concrete one. Suppose that while walking home at night, Mary Jones, a forty-year-old doctor, was killed by a negligent driver who was texting and not looking at the road. Suppose that Jones’s widower and children sued the driver, claiming that he committed the tort of “wrongful death” and seeking damages. How much money should they get? The legal system offers some answers: Jones’s family should receive an amount to compensate for the “pain and suffering” that she experienced before her death; the cost of any medical treatments she may have had as…

In On the Genealogy of Morality Friedrich Nietzsche considers the nature of revenge. People with power, he suggests, can take a literal revenge on their enemies: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. People with little or no power, Nietzsche writes, when “denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with imaginary revenge.” They have to create “a truly grand politics of revenge, a far-sighted, subterranean revenge.” This is a useful way of thinking about Brexit—and indeed its American cousin, Trumpism. Those who perceive themselves to be outsiders—whether they are or not—found in 2016 a vehicle for their resentment, a way to kick out at the so-called elites. But their triumph could not produce much by way of concrete action to change their lives.…