Innholdsfortegnelse for February 24, 2022 i The New York Review of Books

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH teaches philosophy at NYU. His latest books are As If: Idealization and Ideals and The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. JULIAN BELL is a painter based in Lewes, England. He is the author of What Is Painting? SEYLA BENHABIB is a Professor Emerita of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale and Senior Scholar in Residence at Columbia Law School. She is the author of Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin. JAKE BERNSTEIN is a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. He was the senior reporter for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists on the Panama Papers. A movie adaptation of The Laundromat, his most recent book, was released in 2019. REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS is a poet, lawyer, and founder of Freedom…

Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit. Viking, 308 pp., $28.00 Nineteen thirty-six was a momentous year for George Orwell, then aged thirty-two. On January 31 he went north to Lancashire and Yorkshire to collect material for his book about the living conditions of the working classes, The Road to Wigan Pier. On April 2 he rented a cottage in the Hertfordshire village of Wallington and settled down to the life of a writer. On June 9 he married Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a thirty-year-old Oxford English literature graduate then studying for a master’s in educational psychology, and in late December he left for Barcelona to fight with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War; his account of the experience was published in 1937 as Homage to Catalonia. These two books of reportage consolidated…

Phenomenal Blackness Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory Mark Christian Thompson “Thompson’s deep and holistic dive into an entangled and phenomenal Blackness gives us back an intellectual history well-nigh lost.” —Michelle M. Wright, Emory University PAPER $26.00 The Science of Character Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism S. Pearl Brilmyer “This is an extraordinarily original and important contribution, both to the history of realism and the novel and to new theorizing about matter.”—George Levine, Rutgers University PAPER $30.00 Radium of the Word A Poetics of Materiality Craig Dworking “Radium of the Word proposes a radically new approach to reading poetry, focusing on textual features that are not necessarily intentional. This book will be of importance to anyone interested in contemporary poetics.” —Charles Bernstein, author of Near/Miss PAPER $30.00 Cartesian…

Second Place by Rachel Cusk. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 183 pp., $25.00 Rachel Cusk’s novels are merciless. She believes nerviness and irritation are necessary habits of mind to explore and put down on paper. Difficulty is her bread and butter. This is not to say her work is mean or mean-spirited. But her exacting mien makes me, as a reader, feel awkward: too large, too wrinkled, too eager to please. There is a spare intensity to her prose that makes it seem written with a thin person’s pen: a control that implicitly criticizes sloppiness of body or mind. Which is why her new novel, Second Place, is so perplexing. The novel has a conventional frame: an outsider enters a constricted space; a woman looks outside her marriage for sustenance; an…

This is how it happens, one morningThe ground is only the ground, & thenGreen shoots through the rich brown loam.I learned the word loam when I was starvingFor something: fools would call it love,& I would say it was a time machine, longingFor some days, months, years, when the regretsDidn’t bloom like this thing from the groundThat I can barely name. Tell me how thesePeonies have migrated from Asia to my garden,Have found their way into my line of visionDespite prison and all the suffering I don’t speakOf. It all happens so sudden is what I mean to say,When sadness because a beauty before yourEyes so startling you ask friends what to nameThis flower before you. I admit, I’ve pretendedTo be god. To give a name to this thing that…

Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel, March 19–June 20, 2021; Tate Modern, London, July 13–October 17, 2021; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, November 21, 2021–March 22, 2022. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Anne Umland and Walburga Krupp with Charlotte Healy. MoMA/Kunstmuseum Basel, 351 pp., $75.00 Sophie Taeuber-Arp was given a small show at the Museum of Modern Art forty years ago, but the large exhibition there now is the first opportunity for American audiences to have an in-depth look at the Swiss artist, who is probably little more than a name for most viewers. It is a show of some wonderful pieces and, especially from her early years, pictures and objects with a novel mixture of charm and formal strength. Although…

VIRTUOSO SIGNALING To the Editors One should have had reason to rejoice that Yuri Slezkine reviewed Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory [NYR, November 18, 2021]. He is a historian whose work includes The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (2017), a masterful account of those who lived in the building made famous by Yuri Trifonov’s novel The House on the Embankment. He draws sensitively on Trifonov’s fiction as well as on a vast body of historical material. So we expected a review alert to the ways in which Stepanova’s text crafts a framework for writing about the past, a review that adeptly described the new aesthetic language in which Stepanova builds her account of the twentieth century. But Slezkine surprisingly flattens this complex narrative almost beyond…

DAVID LEVINE AUTHOR MUG Caricatures by world-renowned artist David Levine enriched and enlivened the pages of The New York Review of Books for almost five decades. Thirty-three of Levine’s most arresting and iconic caricatures of authors decorate this heirloom quality bone china mug, including the artist’s self-portrait. Each time you pick up one of these mugs, you’ll find more to look at in the wonderfully detailed illustrations which express the wit, commentary, and virtuoso technique for which Levine’s caricatures received worldwide acclaim. Authors depicted are: Zora Neale Hurston, William Shakespeare, James Joyce, Beatrix Potter, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde, Colette, Anton Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, Voltaire, Rachel Carson, Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville, Langston Hughes, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, Jane Austen, W. E.…

Snow by John Banville. Hanover Square, 299 pp., $27.99; $16.99 (paper) April in Spain by John Banville. Hanover Square, 318 pp., $27.99 John Banville’s first novel, Nightspawn, published more than fifty years ago, is set in Greece, which was then ruled by a military junta. The Irish protagonist, Benjamin White, is asked, “As a visitor, Benjamin, what do you think of the situation here, I mean the political situation?” He shrugs: “I’m not a political animal.” In The Untouchable, published more than a quarter-century later, the narrator, Victor Maskell, is a version of the English art historian and Soviet spy Sir Anthony Blunt. When Maskell is being recruited by the KGB, he pretends to believe that the artist has “a clear political duty.” He later concludes that his real act…

Donald Trump was, by all accounts, obsessed with the presidential pardon. It matched his pre-election conception of the presidency, which he saw through the prism of his business experience. At his private company, Trump imposed his will on subcontractors, bankers, even local governments. At his hotels, the control he exerted extended to the precise length of male employees’ facial hair (no more than a quarter-inch) and female employees’ fingernails (a maximum of three eighths of an inch). Once in office, Trump found that Congress, the courts, and administrative rules constrained his capacity to act. But the ability to grant pardons is the one area of executive authority, other than launching nuclear weapons, where a US president’s power is nearly absolute. As it is spelled out in Article II of the…

Europe’s Babylon: The Rise and Fall of Antwerp’s Golden Age by Michael Pye. Pegasus, 272 pp., $28.95 In 1563 Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted two versions of the Tower of Babel, one in Antwerp and the other in Brussels, after he had married and moved there to distance himself from his mistress. The move, Michael Pye suggests in Europe’s Babylon, his exuberant history of sixteenth-century Antwerp, changed the artist’s viewpoint. The first painting is a scene of construction, with sheds and cranes, ladders and chutes. Nimrod, the mighty hunter and God-defying tyrant, stands before a recognizable panorama of Antwerp’s wharves, spires, walls, and windmills: “Furious, muddled energy is building a heap which will have the look of a city.” In the second version, Nimrod has vanished. The ziggurat tower-city is…

BLUE TRIANGLE PRESS FredMisurella.com A PONTIAC IN THE WOODS by Fred Misurella A young woman’s rude, sometimes primitive narrative about living alone, in a novel that packs a surprising punch. “Beautifully and empathically written.” —lndieReader 978-0-578-71792-0 • Paper, $14.00 • e-Book, $4.99 • 306 Pages • Literary Fiction, Young Adult Fiction Available on Amazon, Bookshop.org, and FredMisurella.com FIAT JUSTITIA LITERARY INC. fjlpress.com; (514) 377-5645 THE BASTARD OF COLONIA Volume One of The Song of the Francs by T. J. S. Hayes The Bastard of Colonia, volume one of The Song of the Francs, recalls the life of Charles Martel, medieval Europe’s greatest hero. 9781777724009 • Paper, $24.00 • 552 Pages • Historical Fiction Available on Amazon. MEDUSA BOOKS THE ORPHAN KING A Short Novel Based on the Brief Life of…

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, translated from the French by Richard Philcox, with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, a foreword by Homi K. Bhabha, and an introduction by Cornel West. Grove, 251 pp., $17.00 (paper) They were out to get him. It was at once a source of terror and a form of tribute. Frantz Fanon was targeted as an Algerian revolutionary, but he was also a psychiatrist, and he knew how emotions could be linked with their opposites. In May 1959—to choose one consequential incident—he was being driven near a base that Algerian insurgents had set up on the Moroccan border when the driver lost control of the car and Fanon was hurled from it, badly injuring his back. Some suspected that the road had been…