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

Parallel Mothers a film written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar When the Spanish parliament enacted an amnesty law in 1977, two years after the death of General Francisco Franco, it seemed to fulfill a demand of prodemocracy groups. After all, one of the main slogans roared out by demonstrators in marches throughout Spain was ¡Amnestía y Libertad! Amnesty was associated with freedom; it meant that political prisoners could be released and many enemies of the old regime could return from exile. It was an exciting time in pain. I remember being in a taxi in Barcelona one Saturday night in April 1977 when the driver let out a huge, joyous cry and started to honk the horn in excitement. It felt as though his team had won the soccer championship.…

The Strudlhof Steps, or, Melzer and the Depth of the Years by Heimito von Doderer, translated from the German by Vincent Kling and with an afterword by Daniel Kehlmann. New York Review Books, 850 pp., $24.95 (paper) I began reading Heimito von Doderer’s The Strudlhof Steps at the start of the Omicron surge, when the threat of another winter lockdown made it seem like the perfect moment for a dense and demanding 850-page Austrian novel. This hugely original book requires intense concentration to follow its switchback plot turns, to navigate its confusing leaps in time, to untangle its page-long metaphors, but most of all to keep track of its enormous cast of characters. A classic of German-language literature, first published in 1951, it is only now appearing in English, in…

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 145 pp., $25.00; $16.00 (paper) White War, Black Soldiers: Two African Accounts of World War I by Bakary Diallo and Lamine Senghor, translated from the French by Nancy Erber and William Peniston, edited and with an introduction and annotations by George Robb. Hackett, 189 pp., $49.00; $17.00 (paper) The French writer David Diop manages to recount a war he never experienced with the intimacy of a witness. A historian at the University of Pau, in southwest France, Diop studies European depictions of Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and his slim novel At Night All Blood Is Black, which won the International Booker Prize last year, turns what little…

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei, translated from the Chinese by Allan H. Barr. Crown, 380 pp., $32.00 As I read 1000 Years of Joys and Sor rows, I felt as if I’d finally come upon the chronicle of modern China for which I’d been waiting since I first began studying this elusive country six decades ago. What makes this memoir so absorbing is that it traces China’s tumultuous recent history through the eyes of its most renowned twentieth-century poet, Ai Qing, and his son, Ai Weiwei, now equally renowned in the global art world. It guides us from Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist era in the 1930s, through Mao Zedong’s revolution in the 1950s and 1960s, and on to the “reform era” of Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s…

Permanent Evolution: Selected Essays on Literature, Theory and Film by Yuri Tynianov, translated from the Russian and edited by Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko, with an introduction by Daria Khitrova. Academic Studies Press, 352 pp., $119.00; $39.95 (paper) Lieutenant Kizhe by Yury Tynianov, translated from the Russian by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and with illustrations by Olga Smart. Look MultiMedia, 51 pp., $9.99 (paper) Küchlya: Decembrist Poet by Yury Tynianov, translated from the Russian by Anna Kurkina Rush, Peter France, and Christopher Rush. Cherry Orchard, 357 pp., $119.00; $24.95 (paper) The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar by Yury Tynyanov, translated from the Russian by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush. Columbia University Press, 599 pp., $40.00; $19.95 (paper) Young Pushkin by Yury Tynyanov, translated from the Russian by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher…

Love Letters: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West with an introduction by Alison Bechdel. London: Vintage, 280 pp., £9.99 (paper) When Virginia Woolf met Vita Sackville-West in December 1922, she had just published, at the age of forty, the first of her distinctive novels, Jacob’s Room, which followed the more traditional The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919). Most of her published writing consisted of unsigned book reviews, so she was known to very few people. Virginia belonged by descent and marriage to Britain’s elite of arts and letters: her father, Leslie Stephen, had been a distinguished intellectual whose first wife was Thackeray’s daughter. Julia Margaret Cameron, the great Victorian photographer, was her aunt. Her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, was married to a prominent art critic, Clive Bell,…

The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris by Colin Jones. Oxford University Press, 571 pp., $32.95 Imagine a government divided between two ferociously opposed political forces, both of which claim the right to power. A crisis develops, with many officials caught between the two sides, confused and uncertain which to support. There are threats of violence, previously inviolable political spaces are invaded, and blood is shed. Anxious onlookers predict civil war. The United States experienced a crisis of this sort on January 6, 2021, when pro-Trump rioters attacked the Capitol to halt the certification of Joe Biden’s election as president. The pattern is a familiar historical one, but such crises have often had far more devastating outcomes than the one in Washington did. In England in the 1640s,…

Whatever You Say, Say Nothing by Gilles Peress, with texts by Chris Klatell. Steidl, 3 volumes, 1,960 pp., $480.00 On January 30, 1972, Gilles Peress was in Northern Ireland photographing a march against internment without trial when British soldiers shot dead thirteen men (a fourteenth died later in the hospital). The event came to be known as Bloody Sunday, and it marked a turning point in Irish history, resulting in direct rule from Westminster and a section of the populace being driven away from the concept of civil rights and into supporting the IRA. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Peress returned sporadically to Northern Ireland, and Whatever You Say, Say Nothing (the title is from an IRA poster, and was made famous by a Seamus Heaney poem) presents his work…