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

The twenty years of war since the September 11, 2001, attacks have killed more than 900,000 people, displaced at least 38 million, and cost the United States an estimated $8 trillion.1 During these two decades of intense fighting and killing, the US has been responsible for a quantity of suffering that would have been unthinkable when President George W. Bush, with the near-unanimous backing of Congress, launched his assault on Afghanistan. It is clear now that America’s leaders deluded themselves and failed to ask basic questions about the ultimate goal of the war before invading: its human and financial costs, its benefits, or how it would end. One might assume that such disastrous results, and the ignominious end of the war in Afghanistan last year, would lead to a period…

Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn a film written and directed by Radu Jude The New Romanian Cinema edited by Christina Stojanova, with the participation of Dana Duma. Edinburgh University Press, 323 pp., $110.00; $29.95 (paper) The Romanian Cinema of Nationalism: Historical Films as Propaganda and Spectacle by Onoriu Colăcel. McFarland, 212 pp., $65.00 (paper) Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn, the Romanian director Radu Jude’s exuberantly rude and bawdy new film, is a movie about us. Or rather, it’s a comedy about our world: how we live under surveillance, with diminished boundaries, plagued by conspiratorial thinking and multiple pandemics—virtual as well as actual. As if tossed in a bottle, Jude’s message arrives from an obscure corner of Europe, albeit one that as of last November was suffering the world’s…

A Cure for Darkness: The Story of Depression and How We Treat It by Alex Riley. Scribner, 452 pp., $28.00; $19.99 (paper) In early 2015 Alex Riley, then twentyfour years old, was working as a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, using CT-scanning technology to study the teeth and skeletons of sharks and rays. A dinosaur fan since childhood, he was thrilled to be studying both living and extinct species in such detail, and he spent his lunch breaks wandering through the museum, contemplating the remains of giant sloths and prehistoric marine reptiles. But Riley felt unmoored: his parents had recently separated after three decades of marriage, and he had left a Ph.D. program in evolutionary development for a less certain professional path. When Riley and his museum…

The American Scene by Henry James, edited by Peter Collister. Cambridge University Press, 664 pp., $110.00 A few days before his sixtieth birthday, in 1903, Henry James wrote to his brother William of his desire to return to his native land after twenty-some years of self-exile. William quickly responded that the trip was a bad idea; he could imagine “the sort of physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you,” including “the vocalization of our countrymens…. It is simply incredibly loathsome.” Henry was undeterred: Simply and supinely to shrink—on mere grounds of general fear and encouraged shockability has to me all the air of giving up, chucking away without a struggle, the one chance that remains to me in life of anything that can be…

Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Gluck. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 42 pp., $25.00 The website of the Nobel Prize Committee describes Louise Gluck’s poetry as “free of poetic formalities” and notable, by contrast, for its use of “daily spoken language.” This has the distinction and utility of being almost exactly wrong. Rather, Gluck subjects conventional poetic tropes to a rigorous process of abstraction until they become close to indistinguishable from everyday speech. Behind each modest “you” looms a ceremonial “thou”; the oracular glows inside the ordinary. A good analogue might be Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, which, if you’ve never seen it, is exactly what it sounds like. In 1953 Rauschenberg asked Willem de Kooning, an artist he greatly admired, for a piece of work he could…

Coral Reefs: A Natural History by Charles Sheppard. Princeton University Press, 240 pp., $35.00 Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs by Juli Berwald. Riverhead, 336 pp., $28.00 Snorkeling or diving over a coral reef, with its exceptionally vivid colors and proliferation of life in utterly unfamiliar forms, is about as close as most people get to visiting an alien world. The temptation is to try to take in the reef as a whole, but the true wonder lies in observing it up close. The closer you look, the more layers of complexity and living brilliance are revealed: follow a minuscule fish, its front half electric blue, its rear brilliant orange, as it scoots along and you can find yourself in the purple maw of a giant…

Willful Disregard: A Novel About Love by Lena Andersson, translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death. Other Press, 196 pp., $15.95 (paper) Acts of Infidelity by Lena Andersson, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel. Other Press, 332 pp., $16.99 (paper) Son of Svea: A Tale of the People’s Home by Lena Andersson, translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death. Other Press, 278 pp., $16.99 (paper) In the opening pages of Lena Andersson’s novel Willful Disregard, we are told that Ester Nilsson, a thirty-one-year-old poet and essayist in Stockholm with “eight slim but densely written publications to her name,” renounced expensive living, ate cheaply, was always careful about contraception, only traveled rationally, had never been in debt to the bank or to any private person, and did not get herself…

Wannsee: The Road to the Final Solution by Peter Longerich, translated from the German by Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes. Oxford University Press, 176 pp., $25.95 On January 20, 1942, SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, presided over a meeting at a villa on the shore of the Wannsee, a lake in an affluent Berlin suburb. Of the fifteen participants, eight held doctorates. They represented important ministries in Berlin, German occupation administrations on Polish and Soviet territory, and various SS agencies. The two sources for our knowledge of what transpired in this meeting are a surviving protocol (a summary of discussion points—some detailed and some very brief—but not a verbatim transcript) and the postwar testimonies of one participant, Heydrich’s adviser for Jewish policy, Adolf Eichmann. The conference opened with…

Editors’ Note: On February 24, six hours after this article was filed, Russia began an all-out attack on Ukraine. Kyiv/Kiev weather forecast: +5C, windy, chances of Russian attack 30%, feels like 95%.—Tweet by the novelist Andrey Kurkov, February 19, 2022 In the spring of 2014, when Russianbacked separatists were seizing parts of eastern Ukraine, I wrote a piece from there for these pages titled “Ukraine: The Phony War?”1 Well, here we are again: for the past couple of months Russian forces have been gradually massing along Ukraine’s borders. One day in mid-February, as darkness fell over Kharkiv, the country’s secondlargest city, I noticed about twenty people kneeling at the edge of a park on Sumska Street, the central boulevard.2 They were silent and were holding their hands as if in…