Innholdsfortegnelse for January 13, 2022 i The New York Review of Books

In mid-November Éric Zemmour, the French far-right presidential candidate, professional provocateur, and virulent Islamophobe, made a campaign stop in Bordeaux, one of France’s most affluent bourgeois strongholds. The hall was packed, notably with young white men in baseball caps who came for the rousing speech, but there were also many women, several of whom thanked Zemmour for his rejection of “feminist dogma.” Thousands of people were lined up outside to buy copies of his latest book, La France n’a pas dit son dernier mot (France Hasn’t Had Its Last Word). Whatever happens in the election next April—Zemmour’s chances of winning are almost nonexistent—he will certainly sell boatloads of books, as he does every time he publishes another lament about national decline or “suicide,” as the title of his best-known book,…

The centennial of Ulysses is in 2022, and coming back to the book after a gap of some years I remember the way it makes me fall asleep somewhere in the middle of Stephen’s walk across Sandymount Strand. The first two episodes—all fine. Surprisingly easy. What’s all the fuss about? Then the book unlooses itself entirely in the mind of Dedalus and starts to dream: “He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss.” Hang on. Did Stephen actually visit his aunt’s house, or just imagine that he did? Is he still thinking of his mother’s death? There is a dead dog on the strand, and also a live dog called Tatters, and this living dog is actually quite funny,…

James Castle: Memory Palace by John Beardsley. James Castle Collection and Archive/Yale University Press, 279 pp., $65.00 Every James Castle picture seems to contain a secret. Approaching one of his works for the first time, you peer into pockets of shadow and smudge, examining the depopulated landscapes and interiors for explanations. Here, an empty rural road, with telephone poles standing like sentries at precise intervals, stretching to the drawing’s vanishing point; there, a cryptic attic space with a yawning doorway, captured on disintegrating paper that is then stitched to cardboard backing with red string. A series of drawings from multiple angles depicts the walls of an unloved upstairs bedroom, which seem to be shadowed by cage-like patterns hovering behind the brooding furniture arranged haphazardly around the space. Another piece shows…

Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine by Anna Della Subin. Metropolitan, 462 pp., $35.00 When he stepped ashore in October 1492, in what he understood to be part of India or Japan, Christopher Columbus’s first act was to claim possession of the land for the Spanish crown. After that, he distributed cloth caps, glass beads, bits of broken crockery, “and many other things of little value” to its inhabitants, recording in his diary that they were a “very simple” people, who could easily “be kept as captives… [and] all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them.” They reminded him of the aboriginals of the Canary Islands, the most recent victims of Castilian conquest, Christianization, and enslavement. “They are the colour of the Canarians, neither black…

The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations by Eva Illouz. Polity, 315 pp., $19.95 (paper) It was a September afternoon in 1796, and Mary Wollstonecraft had one thing on her mind. “What say you,” she wrote to her lover William Godwin, “may I come to your house, about eight—to philosophize?” This use of code was typical. If she wanted him she would ask to borrow books or ink; he liked to say he needed soothing, like a sick child. In his journal Godwin used dots and dashes to log what he and Wollstonecraft had done, when they had done it, and where. After their third date he wrote, “chez moi, toute.” Were Godwin and Wollstonecraft having casual sex? Sure. Neither was interested in marriage, which Wollstonecraft thought turned…

Eurydice an opera by Matthew Aucoin, with a libretto by Sarah Ruhl, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, November 23–December 16, 2021 The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera by Matthew Aucoin. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 299 pp., $28.00 It seemed appropriate that after the first performance of Matthew Aucoin’s opera Eurydice at the Met, conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin led the entire orchestra onstage to take a bow. They had certainly been playing a lot of music, sustaining an unabated pulse for three acts with a brightness, clarity, and percussive precision that might almost have made you forget you were watching an opera about dying. They did more than justice to an insistently vigorous score full of quick changes and fleeting stylistic intrusions of everything from Philip Glass to tango music…

Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution by Woody Holton. Simon and Schuster, 779 pp., $37.50 American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–1850 by Alan Taylor. Norton, 515 pp., $35.00 The battles over American history provoked during the latest national reckoning on race have focused heavily on the Revolution and the Civil War. As David A. Bell recently observed in these pages, descriptions of America’s egalitarian founding principles as covers for white supremacy—“formulated to promote exclusion and oppression”—have gained a sudden currency.1 By these lights, the Revolution was in large measure a proslavery secession sparked by American fears of British threats to slavery. The Civil War supposedly originated as a clash between contending white supremacists over the spread of slavery, which ended by replacing…

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, September 29, 2021–February 13, 2022. Catalog of the exhibition by Carlos Basualdo and Scott Rothkopf. Philadelphia Museum of Art/Whitney Museum of American Art, 347 pp., $60.00 (Distributed by Yale University Press) If contemporary art had a book of Genesis, it might well start with the night in late 1954 that Jasper Johns dreamed he was painting an American flag. He was twenty-four years old, a serious but largely untrained artist making scruffy assemblages of found objects, almost all of which he destroyed. Of the dream and its consequences he later remarked, “The unconscious thought was accepted by consciousness gracefully,” though completing the actual painting took months. However slick and…

The Tragedy of Macbeth a film written and directed by Joel Coen Those who have long followed the Coen brothers and their cinematic universe of criminals, nihilists, and over-reachers may see in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth a long-deferred reckoning with Shakespeare, who has been there before them. We don’t typically think of Shakespeare as a writer interested in crime stories, but he surely was, from the earliest play in which he likely had a hand, Arden of Faversham—a true crime story in which a wife conspires with her lover to kill her husband—through Hamlet and Macbeth. There are moments in The Tragedy of Macbeth when Shakespeare and the Coens feel in perfect alignment, such as the scene in which Macbeth suborns two nameless murderers to kill Banquo.…

Raymie Nightingale by Kate DiCamillo. Candlewick, 263 pp., $16.99; $7.99 (paper) Louisiana’s Way Home by Kate DiCamillo. Candlewick, 227 pp., $16.99; $7.99 (paper) Beverly, Right Here by Kate DiCamillo. Candlewick, 241 pp., $16.99; $7.99 (paper) Marina Warner’s scholarship has long demonstrated how fairy tales can transmit female secrets. An older woman communicates something to a girl that can be said only in the code of stories. Think of a tale like “Beauty and the Beast” being told to a child who may one day find herself married off to a brute. Or consider the harsh destinies of the unkind stepsisters in “Cinderella”: in some versions they cut off their own toes or heels, and pigeons peck out their eyes. A story of female revenge is perhaps most wisely told in…

99 Variations on a Proof by Philip Ording. Princeton University Press, 260 pp., $24.95; $19.95 (paper) Mathematics is writing. For all the quantification it makes possible and all the technological and scientific discoveries it has helped to produce, it is ultimately words upon words. There is a bedrock of definitions (“A point is that which has no part,” says Euclid) crosscut by axioms (“A straight line segment can be drawn joining any two points”), whose only restrictions are that they not contradict one another. From this starting material we derive the terse assertions of consequences that are known as theorems and lemmas and corollaries. Were a theorem the result of a prosecutor’s successful argument, then the lemmas would be the settled issues of fact, the corollary the sentencing. The arguments…