Innholdsfortegnelse for February 10, 2022 i The New York Review of Books

PETER BROWN is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton. His books include Augustine of Hippo: A Biography and, most recently, Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity. JACEK DEHNEL is a Polish poet, novelist, translator, and painter. His latest books published in English are Aperture, a selection of poetry, and the novel Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing, cowritten with his husband, Piotr Tarczyński. ANN FRENKEL and GWIDO ZLATKES’s recent translations from the Polish include the autobiography Riding History to Death by Karol Modzelewski and Against the Devil in History: Poems, Short Stories, Essays, Fragments by Aleksander Wat. ANNE DIEBEL works as a private investigator with QRI in New York City. GAVIN FRANCIS is a primary care physician in Edinburgh. His latest book, Recovery: The…

The job of a poet is to sit in the morning at a deskand sift through the news that crackles with other peoples’ lives. The job of a poet is to imagine entering those liveslike putting on someone else’s clothes.The clothes pinch. The clothes are pinched for food they are pinched for drink they hope. The job of a poet is to imagine a control linewith deciduous or coniferous trees trampled grass a face behind a burdock leafsome eyes some chinks on the body of the border a poet must imagine the soundof wet shoes and the feel of wet socks on both the left and the right ice-cold foot. The job of a poet is to examine words and phrases distrustfully and poets ask themselvesbecause who else can they…

Silverview by John le Carré. Viking, 215 pp., $28.00 In the classic espionage novel, there are certain day jobs that make an ideal cover for spies: foreign correspondent, trade delegate, cultural attache. But the star intelligence officer in John le Carre’s recent, posthumous novel, Silverview, has a more fitting job for her times. At the height of the “war on terror,” Deborah Avon is the jingoistic head of a foreign-policy think tank—a quango, in British technocrat parlance—whose sole aim seems to be outdoing its more influential American counterparts in sheer bloodlust. Her neighbor, Julian, buys her story. So he’s surprised, when she dies, to see shadowy men removing computers and a safe from her house. These are “the people she worked for,” Deborah’s daughter explains. “In her quango?” “Yeah, right,…

A Cultural Biography of the Prostate by Ericka Johnson. MIT Press, 239 pp., $27.95 (paper) Year of Plagues: A Memoir of 2020 by Fred D’Aguiar. Harper, 323 pp., $26.99 At the small family practice in Edinburgh where I work as a physician, I happen to be the only male staff member—all my medical, nursing, and administrative colleagues are female. Perhaps that’s why I see a great many men about their prostate problems and carry out a disproportionate number of prostate examinations. The attitude of most men is an odd mixture of anxiety and jokey bravado; they find it easier to make wisecracks about the prostate than to confess their fear of disease. I’m reminded of a routine by the Scottish comedian Billy Connolly, who joked about reaching an age when…

The great Rosa Luxemburg, radical extraordinaire, possessed a rich appreciation of life in all its glorious variety. While the potential for socialist revolution was her passion, she was sensually engaged by love and literature, flowers and music, sunlight and philosophy. She had, as well, an ardent interest in replacing the theory-driven jargon that dominated the speech and writing of her fellow socialists with the lucid plain-speak that could stir the hearts as well as the minds of the rank and file. She wanted working men and women to feel the beauty of Marxism as she felt it. Luxemburg also loved a man who was her polar opposite: Leo Jogiches, a rigid Marxist whose temperament was as angry, brooding, and remote as Rosa’s was warm, open, and immediate. Jogiches subscribed wholly…

DEEPER IN THE DRAWER To the Editors: It has been brought to my attention that the essay on Isaac Babel written by my father, Irving Howe, and described as “recently unearthed” [“Finding Babel in the Drawer,” NYR, December 16, 2021] had been previously published in the April 29, 2002, issue of The New Republic under the title “The Right to Write Badly.” (A previous article about Babel by my father was published in The New Republic in 1955 with the same title.) Both my father’s widow, Ilana Howe, and I, the literary executor of his estate, were unaware of this earlier publication. Last fall, Ilana found in a drawer the original typed version of the essay—which my father probably intended as an introduction to a collection of Babel’s stories that…

Let sadness tell you what to read. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Joan Didion begins her essay “The White Album” by recalling a time when, she says, she had mislaid the script of life. She who had reread all of George Orwell on the beach of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu is talking about her loss of faith in the intelligibility of narrative: “I suppose this period began in 1966 and continued until 1971.” Her evocation of what the late Sixties were like in her feckless part of Los Angeles displays the gifts of her style, starting with a California Old Settler dryness. She may have had an attack of “vertigo and nausea” in the early summer of 1968, and she may have been an outpatient…

Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms by Kira Thurman. Cornell University Press, 351 pp., $32.95 In his book Wagnerism (2020), Alex Ross writes about what he calls “Wagner scenes” in literature—episodes in which a young concertgoer is spiritually transformed by an encounter with Richard Wagner’s music. One of Ross’s most fascinating examples is “Of the Coming of John,” a chapter in W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in which Du Bois turns to fiction to describe the intellectual awakening of a young Black man from a small town in Georgia. John Jones’s epiphany comes when he attends a performance of Lohengrin in New York and feels a new world opening up: “The infinite beauty of the wail lingered…

Empty Wardrobes by Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, with an introduction by Kate Zambreno. Two Lines, 183 pp., $14.95 (paper) Empty Wardrobes is an appropriate if brutally reductive title for this unsparing depiction of the lives of women in mid-twentieth-century Lisbon, executed by the Portuguese writer Maria Judite de Carvalho (1921–1998) as precisely and without sentiment as an autopsy. Originally published in 1966, it is the first work by Carvalho to appear in English, in what seems an excellent translation by Margaret Jull Costa. Deftly and cunningly written, narrated by an observer who glides in and out of the text with the patrician disdain of a Nabokov character, Empty Wardrobes is gradually revealed to be a double portrait: at its core are two…

Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser by Susan Bernofsky. Yale University Press, 378 pp., $35.00 Readers—fans, devotees—of Susan Bernofsky’s nonet of Robert Walser translations and cotranslations (from Masquerade in 1990 to Looking at Pictures in 2015) have been alerted for some years now to a biography in progress (“she is now at work on a biography”), and perhaps wondered whether they would ever see such a thing. I know I did. It’s self-evidently a good idea: an English life of the Swiss cult author, and, for the translator, a way of valorizing and preserving decades of unique, irreplaceable thought and attention, making visible an otherwise largely unilluminated service to an original. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many translations does a biography weigh? Well,…

Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor. Catapult, 278 pp., $26.00 Jon McGregor published his first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002), at the age of twenty-six. Set on an urban street in northern England, much of the book takes place over the course of a single day, at the end of which a fatal accident happens. Life—in the mundane manners of tea drinking, house painting, ball playing, bed making, lovemaking, telephoning, eavesdropping, looking and watching, not looking and not seeing—is spilled into public view, while mysterious joys and secretive pains remain out of sight, like precious organs tucked inside a body. There is a familiar narrative formula in fiction: something dramatic, tragic, or otherwise life-changing happens and the novel explores the aftermath, showing how the characters’ lives are…

On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times by Michael Ignatieff. Metropolitan, 284 pp., $26.99 In 1793 the French mathematician, intellectual, and moderate revolutionary the Marquis de Condorcet, who had hoped that the Revolution could bring about a peaceful era of equality, justice, and human rights, and who for denouncing the bloodthirsty despotism of Robespierre and the Jacobins had been banished and threatened with death, was in hiding in a house in Paris. He had been taken in by a courageous landlady, Mme Vernet. On the day Condorcet learned that thirty of his moderate colleagues had been guillotined, he broke down and wept, lamenting his outlawed state. Mme Vernet told him that the Jacobins could make him an outlaw, but that “no one could expel him from the human race.” To…

Even in weekone you show upscuffed and muddyit’s just your natureand no onelikes youbut we drivethrough your townof boot andbouillon factoriesinto March withits shoe storeand soup restaurant.Forty-five yearsago a friendadvised I dressup for you orbe an emotionalgoner—so true!From within thewalled city of yourcalendar monththe special editionssail back overunread becausebeing more experiencedthan us who look downour noses at youyou takethe high groundand cultivate compassiongrant us permissionto not lookyet again atthe photos or relivethe country’sclose call;having been doledthe fewest daysyou know enoughis enough ofthe year beforeso I vote you asofficially startingthe yearand resolve to seeyour strengths. Evenyour two r’sanalogy forthe way we stubour toes gettingthrough time—how like real lifeyou are. We arehopeful creatures;what covers upthe mess alsofeeds the bulbsand we need thatto elevate ourself-image whichcan be terribly lowjust now, sothank you.…

New Rome: The Empire in the East by Paul Stephenson. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 432 pp., $35.00 The Rich and the Pure: Philanthropy and the Making of Christian Society in Early Byzantium by Daniel Caner. University of California Press, 410 pp., $34.95 The Last Great War of Antiquity by James Howard-Johnston. Oxford University Press, 446 pp., $45.00 The Formation of Christendom by Judith Herrin, with a new preface by the author. Princeton University Press, 530 pp., $24.95 These four books describe a remarkable society that once stood like a colossus between the Danube and the Euphrates, and was governed from its newly built capital, Constantinople (modern Istanbul). In the year 450 CE, at a time when the Roman Empire was about to vanish from Western Europe, there emerged a different…

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin. Penguin Press, 382 pp., $28.00 A decade ago, a friend of mine attended a party at the SoHo loft of the Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes on the occasion of his acquiring The New Republic. (Hughes had left Facebook in 2007 and gone shopping for legacy publications; word on the street was that he had first tried, and failed, to purchase this one.) She drifted into the custom-built library and noted two shelves of well-worn titles that, in content and range, struck her as books that had stayed with Hughes since his days as an undergraduate at Harvard. But there was something impersonal about the remainder of the substantial collection, an impression confirmed as she counted, among other…