Innholdsfortegnelse for October 21, 2021 i The New York Review of Books

MATTHEW AUCOIN is a composer and conductor. His new opera, Eurydice, will come to the Metropolitan Opera in November, and his book The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera will be published in December. CLARE BUCKNELL is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She is writing a book about poetry anthologies. MARTIN FILLER contributed to the catalog for the exhibition “On the Edge: Los Angeles Art 1970s–1990s from the Joan and Jack Quinn Family Collection,” on view at the Bakersfield Museum of Art in Bakersfield, California, until January 8, 2022. RUTH FRANKLIN’s most recent book, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. CHARLES GLASS is a former Chief Middle East Correspondent for ABC News. He is the author of Syria Burning…

Estamos Bien: La Trienal 20/21 an exhibition at El Museo del Barrio, New York City, March 13–September 26, 2021. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Rodrigo Moura, Susanna V. Temkin, and Elia Alba. El Museo del Barrio, 331 pp., $35.00 (paper) In 1925 the Mexican philosopher, writer, and former education minister Jose Vasconcelos published an essay that was as consequential as it was absurd. “La raza cosmica” (“The Cosmic Race”) was an esoteric meditation on the future of civilization, which helped shape the way race is viewed in Latin America to this day. Its premise is that history is a lengthy struggle between Latin and Anglo-Saxon cultures; this conflict continued in the New World with Spain and England’s enterprises there. In the future, he argued, this struggle would be resolved…

Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford. Yale University Press, 327 pp., $28.00 We, the Robots?: Regulating Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of the Law by Simon Chesterman. Cambridge University Press, 289 pp., $39.99 Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose. Random House, 217 pp., $27.00 The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 312 pp., $29.95 In 2015 a cohort of well-known scientists and entrepreneurs including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Steve Wozniak issued a public letter urging technologists developing artificial intelligence systems to “research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls.” To that end, they wrote, “We recommend expanded…

Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health by Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty. MIT Press, 538 pp., $27.95 We live life with companions. Some, like parents, are present from our moment of birth; others are met at school or work and become friends or spouses. These companions influence our behavior and emotions, and so contribute to our physical and mental health. But as Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty show in Gut Feelings, we also live life with an invisible companion: the microbiome, the trillions of microbes (bacteria, fungi, viruses, and occasionally protozoa and parasites) that inhabit our gastrointestinal tract and reside in our upper airway and skin. The products of these microorganisms are thought to modify the workings of our genes (a process called epigenetics) and to directly affect the…

Yi Sang: Selected Works edited by Don Mee Choi and translated from the Korean by Jack Jung, Don Mee Choi, and Joyelle McSweeney, and from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu. Wave, 232 pp., $25.00 (paper) Bong Joon Ho’s film Parasite (2019) unfolds in two of the most memorable domestic spaces in recent cinema: the Kim family’s squalid apartment, on a Seoul street prone to fumigation and floods, and the tech entrepreneur Nathan Park’s sleek modernist mansion, which the grifting Kims infiltrate. In a delirious twist halfway through the movie, Bong reveals that the Park home, like similar structures built within living memory of the Korean War, has a “secret [bunker] where you can hide in case North Korea attacks or creditors break in.” (Neither Communists nor capitalists can be trusted.)…

PALMETTO PUBLISHING GROUP www.palmettopublishing.com;1 (888) 408-8965 TEARS OF RAIN In the Pandemic and a Physician by Zeenat Chowdhury-Jackson MD Zeenat Chowdhury-Jackson MD, author, wants to share the common struggles and emotions during the pandemic year 2020 through her modern poetry. 9781638371861 • Paper, $11.99; 9781638371865 • e-Book, $5.99 • 96 Pages • Poetry Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Target. Author’s website: www.zeepoetry.com KINDLE DIRECT PUBLICATION kdp.amazon.com A GOOGLY IN THE COMPOUND A Novel of the Raj by Boman Desai The Sanjanas planned to enjoy the tiger cub and surrender the adult to the zoo, but no plan had been made for the adolescent. “[A] wide-lensed meditation on power dynamics—within countries and within families.” —Kirkus Reviews 9798716256620 • Paper, $17.99; e-Book, $5.99 • 421 Pages • Historical Novel Available…

In the East: How My Father and a Quarter Million Polish Jews Survived the Holocaust by Mikhal Dekel. Norton, 433 pp., $18.95 (paper) Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union by Eliyana R. Adler. Harvard University Press, 433 pp., $49.95 Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag by Julius Margolin, translated from the Russian by Stefani Hoffman, with a foreword by Timothy Snyder and an introduction by Katherine R. Jolluck. Oxford University Press, 578 pp., $39.95 My maternal grandparents were people who had suffered. Even in my earliest memories, their faces are deeply lined, their hair sparse. My grandfather, a tall man, was perpetually stooped, his chest sunken; my grandmother’s knuckles were swollen with arthritis. Each wore a…

Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 580 pp., $30.00 In 1972, when Jonathan Franzen was thirteen, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat reported that parents in his town were worried: high school kids in Webster Groves were spending too much time at church. The reason was Fellowship, a rapidly growing Christian youth group, and its edgy leader, Bob Mutton—a youth pastor with a “tormented Jesus” look about him. Emulating his style, his followers grew their hair long, dressed in their most worn-out clothes, smoked cigarettes, and played guitar. They flocked to Sunday evening meetings, where they blindfolded one another and performed trust exercises, palpated one another’s faces with their fingers, and practiced radical honesty in drawn-out sessions of uncomfortable truth telling. A member for six years, Franzen spent his adolescence…

Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald by Carole Angier. Bloomsbury, 617 pp., $32.00 He told friends his first novel had been accepted for publication when it hadn’t; he said he was “at home” in Vienna before he’d ever gone there; he claimed, falsely, to have directed a play by Harold Pinter during his student days at Freiburg; he said he was a photojournalist for an American magazine, which wasn’t true; “he told Brigitte,” the wife of a friend, “that he had six first names (not just three, his usual claim later, which wasn’t true either), and that he had ridden to his final exams on a horse.” Less funny, more disconcerting: in his master’s thesis he quotes from two letters he received from Adorno, but in fact Adorno sent…

The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, edited by Angus Gowland. London: Penguin Classics, 1,324 pp., £40.00 The Empire of Depression: A New History by Jonathan Sadowsky. Polity, 228 pp., $35.00 How to Be Depressed by George Scialabba. University of Pennsylvania Press, 146 pp., $27.50 The Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is now best known for two works: the Gothic novel Uncle Silas and Carmilla, the first great tale of a female vampire. Of his other writings, the one most often encountered is an 1871 story called “Green Tea.” Like several other Le Fanu stories, it is taken from the supposed casebook of a German physician resident in England, Martin Hesselius. Hesselius is approached at a party by a clergyman, the Reverend Mr. Jennings, who has heard of his…

A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin’s Descent of Man Got Right and Wrong About Human Evolution edited by Jeremy DeSilva. Princeton University Press, 258 pp., $27.95 The Origins of the World: The Invention of Nature in the 19th Century an exhibition at the Musee d’Orsay, Paris, May 19–July 18, 2021. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Laura Bossi and translated from the French by Valentina Baslyk, Jill Corner, and others. Gallimard, 384 pp., $55.00 The Natural History of Edward Lear: New Edition by Robert McCracken Peck, with a foreword by David Attenborough. Princeton University Press, 227 pp., $29.95 (paper) “The wholesale murders going [on] now in Paris are heartrending.” Charles Darwin received this news in a letter from the paleontologist Vladimir Kovalevsky, dated May 28, 1871, the final day of a…

The Poet and the Publisher: The Case of Alexander Pope, Esq., of Twickenham Versus Edmund Curll, Bookseller in Grub Street by Pat Rogers. Reaktion, 470 pp., $35.00 English Men of Letters, launched in 1878 by Macmillan, was a series of popular biographies of the greatest names in English literature. Its volumes—the lives of Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth—were fixtures of the Victorian classroom and public library, delivering verdicts about writers’ achievements and personalities that shaped the imaginations of a generation of readers. Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father, was in charge of the Alexander Pope volume and took a dim moral view of his subject. Whatever Pope’s accomplishments in other genres, Stephen argued, the fact that he had excelled as a satirist made his personal character—and, by extension, his writing—impossible to defend.…

WHAT IS THE N.E.D.’S MISSION? To the Editors: We were very surprised to read the inaccurate and misleading description of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in “Ortega in His Labyrinth” by Stephen Kinzer [NYR, September 23]. NED is an independent and bipartisan grant-making organization that has worked since 1984 to strengthen democratic processes around the world by providing support to civil society groups and activists in one hundred countries, including Nicaragua. NED does not encourage or fund protests, opposition groups, or “foment… rebellions,” as Kinzer falsely claims. Rather, NED’s demonstrable record is one of fostering the growth of a wide range of democratic institutions abroad, including a vibrant civil society, that ensure human rights, independent media, and rule of law. Had Kinzer cared to check the facts, readily available…

why the new flawless birdswired to perfectionwhose beauty song flight lifthover settle youcannot tell fromthose not coming back are not thesame, whosefeathertips shineas if in the old sunlight, whosespeckled wingsmottle further withperfect shadow-speckle, whose necks havethe sweet up/downjerk of worry, whosethroat is made to throb so slightlyas was the casewhen song wasexpelled why do they not satisfyus, why is itonly if we shut oureyes the trills— you can choosethe kind of bird—arereal, they cometo our sills, they leave unexpectedly bc wemove… How theyflocked up across ourfields. How that last morning in that world, in rising ground-mist,in the pull of its fastevaporation as that strangesun rose, armsoutstretched & laughing, out ofbreath, we ran to chase themtill they disappeared.…

All you have been and allyou have experienced has happened to me.I travel from my future to your past to losemy origins. What’s the beginning?Where? There was a loophole, and I was the camelthat went through. One hump or two?The answers to my questions are beyond mebut I only ask questions with answers I can believe.I have seen the world without you in itand it’s not what you think.In the future you will seethat it was me who gave you the order to ruin my past.In my past you will seem wicked.I will not accept your innocence.…

A Daughter of Isis: The Early Life of Nawal El Saadawi, In Her Own Words translated from the Arabic by Sherif Hetata. Zed, 354 pp., $14.95 (paper) Walking Through Fire: The Later Years of Nawal El Saadawi, In Her Own Words translated from the Arabic by Sherif Hetata. Zed, 292 pp., $14.95 (paper) The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World translated from the Arabic by Sherif Hetata and with a foreword by Ronak Husni. Zed, 446 pp., $18.95 (paper) Woman at Point Zero translated from the Arabic by Sherif Hetata and with a foreword by Miriam Cooke. Zed, 142 pp., $14.95 (paper) Memoirs from the Women’s Prison translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth. University of California Press, 204 pp., $29.95 (paper) The Fall of the Imam translated…

Collected Stories by Shirley Hazzard, edited by Brigitta Olubas and with a foreword by Zoe Heller. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 356 pp., $28.00; $18.00 (paper; to be published in November) The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, with an introduction by Lauren Groff. Penguin, 355 pp., $18.00 (paper) In 1994, shortly after her husband’s death, the Australian-born novelist Shirley Hazzard was quoted in The New York Times as saying that their three-decade marriage had really been a menage a trois. For anyone who’d been paying attention, this can hardly have come as a surprise. The three principals are all represented in the jacket photo for Hazzard’s first book, the short story collection Cliffs of Fall, which came out in 1963. There is the young author, smiling coyly at the camera…

Cautivos by Ariel Dorfman. OR, 191 pp., $18.00 (paper) Quichotte by Salman Rushdie. Random House, 396 pp., $18.99 (paper) I don’t think I understand what Don Quixote is about, and I don’t think anybody knows what Don Quixote is about. —Keith Dewhurst, author of the play Don Quixote (1982) Miguel de Cervantes concluded The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha in 1605 with a phrase in Italian from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso: “Forse altro cantera con miglior plettro” (Perhaps another will sing with a better [guitar] pick). While his book was selling in record numbers, Cervantes turned to short stories and pastoral poetry. In 1614 the pseudonymous Alonzo Fernandez de Avellaneda published an unauthorized sequel to Don Quixote, prompting a furioso Cervantes to publish his own second volume of the…