Innholdsfortegnelse for July 21, 2022 i The New York Review of Books

Scholars of Color First Book Award. The Scholars of Color First Book Award supports innovative and important books authored by scholars of color. This fund exemplifies our commitment to publish works by rising stars and to celebrate books with exceptional promise by scholars of color who might otherwise not receive recognition and support from their institutions. The Terrible We Thinking with Trans Maladjustment CAMERON AWKWARD RICH ASTERISK In the Shadow of the Palms More Than Human Becomings in West Papua SOPHIE CHAO Suspicion Vaccines, Hesitancy, and the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados NICOLE CHARLES Magical Habits MONICA HUERTA Writing Matters! Maroon Choreography FAHIMA IFE Black Outdoors The Lettered Barriada Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico JORELL A. MELÉNDEZ BADILLO Toward Camden MERCY ROMERO Black Outdoors…

The Murderer by Roy Heath. McNally, 240 pp., $18.00 (paper) In the dream of Caribbean migration in the 1950s from the British colonies to the so-called Mother Country, four thousand miles away, the travelers always promised to return. As newcomers to Britain, they may have reconciled themselves to residing temporarily in one of its austere, monochrome, and forbidding inner cities, but they lived, really lived—as they had in the past and would in the future—in the Technicolor splendor of the Caribbean, in Kingston, Georgetown, or Port of Spain, brimming with flamboyant characters. Invariably, their five-year plan to stay and “work some money” (save and prosper) turned to ten years, then to fifteen. And finally, one day they woke from their self-imposed exile and decided to change the wallpaper, as they…

Either/Or by Elif Batuman. Penguin Press, 360 pp., $27.00 Who is the titular fool of Elif Batuman’s 2017 novel The Idiot? It’s plainly Selin, the heroine, a goofy kid from New Jersey with a hyperactive mind, freshly matriculated at Harvard. But it’s also Ivan, a classmate from beginning Russian with whom she’s besotted. It’s every friend or acquaintance Selin meets, because the essential qualities of being eighteen, nineteen, twenty—idiocy or just naiveté, a yearning to become—are Batuman’s subject. It’s a testament to her skill that Selin’s intellectual bravado and her attempts at seduction make readers cringe, remembering our own youthful pretensions and ill-fated crushes. The Idiot follows Selin through her freshman year. Either/Or, Batuman’s new novel, opens at the start of her sophomore year, its first line “It was dark…

What do I know about the whitePeople I don’t know in my bloodDoes their blood pale my father’s whereIt meets his blood Where in my body does the paleBlood meet the dark blood? In my heartHow red might it have been were myBlood pure, my heart Which red? How much of which red redA pale red, or a dark red, bloodRed, heart red? White blood white as blue dayIn the heart, black blood In the heart, black as the breathing sundownMy father’s father’s father’s heartMight all day long have pounded towardThen through, whose heart Kept him awake and running allNight, mighthave, orhisfather’sbloodRushing, if either ran. Who runsStill in my blood Who chases? Whose blood darkens whereThey meet? Who fights still in my heartFor what? What violence is the beat-ing of…

RUMAAN ALAM is the author of three novels, most recently Leave the World Behind. SARAH BLACKWOOD is an Associate Professor of English at Pace and the author of The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States. She is working on a book about mid-twentieth-century children’s book editors and writers. DEBORAH EISENBERG is the author of five collections of short stories. FT’s most recent work is Two Essays on Spinoza’s Ethics. COLIN GRANT’s latest book, I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be, will be published in January. He is the director of WritersMosaic, a plat-form for new writing and an initiative of the Royal Literary Fund. JENNIFER GROTZ’s most recent book of poems is Window Left Open. HELON HABILA teaches creative writing at George Mason. He is…

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, with an afterword by Sophie Mackintosh. Transit, 173 pp., $16.95 (paper) This mesmerizing oddity opens with a prefatory couple of pages about something—some sort of memoir or testimony—that the narrator has just finished writing: I was gradually forgetting my story. At first, I shrugged, telling myself that it would be no great loss, since nothing had happened to me, but soon I was shocked by that thought. After all, if I was a human being, my story was as important as that of King Lear or of Prince Hamlet that William Shakespeare had taken the trouble to relate in detail. Before calmly delivering this striking and eccentric declaration, she mentions spending “a lot of…

The nearly audible click of snowon snow, clickof eye contact, tinglingin the scalp that movesslowly down the neck, soundheated until it changesstate, tenseliquid in the mouth, cadencefalling on and on, the breathcolliding withthe pane, inaudibleclick of the tongue againstthe alveolar ridge, sunlight fallingaround a helpless thing.This is a recordingof rain stopping, power being cut, roomtone you take outside, release into the trees, silverleavesshifting in the dark, the almostsound when deer look up, smallroots dangling from their mouths,scattering earth,ashes, lightscattering the soundof opening the throat as if to speak.I want to make that soundof setting something downon paper as opposed to underglass, ghostly opposition, vowelof stone fruitsoftening, whisper of internalinflammation, want to praisethe low grade euphoria produced by making finedistinctions, clickof tiny differences, bowdrawn across a metal platecovered with a finelayer…

The Secret to Super human Strength by Alison Bechdel, with coloring by Holly Ray Taylor. Mariner, 233 pp., $24.00 When she was six years old, the cartoonist and graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel accompanied her parents and brother on a twoweek trip to Europe. There, she experienced a “freedom from convention” that, she recalls, “was intoxicating.” Writing about the trip in her first book-length work, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, she explains how Europe’s looser mores provided a brief respite from the oppressive gender norms of American childhood. Bechdel speculates, however, that her parents had a very different experience: “While our travels widened my scope, I suspect my parents felt their own dwindling.” The page-wide drawing that accompanies those words depicts Bechdel’s father, paused mid-trudge in a busy airport, twisting around…

How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue. Random House, 364 pp., $28.00; $18.00 (paper) Thirty years ago, in a review of Cities of Salt and The Trench, two novels by the Saudi writer Abdelrahman Munif, Amitav Ghosh lamented the dearth of American fiction on what he dubbed the Oil Encounter—the coming together of oil-producing companies (mostly Western multinationals like Exxon or Chevron) and the communities from whose land the oil is extracted. Considering the importance of oil to American life, why should it be so little imagined and written about? One reason, Ghosh suggested, is that the encounter is not well understood by Americans—it happens far away from the Western countries where most of the oil is consumed, and is often shrouded in corporate secrecy. Another is that, well, American…

KOEHLER BOOKS | DISTRIBUTED BY INGRAM koehlerbooks.com; (800) 435-4811 EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING A Treatise on Education by Brian A. Facemire The modern education system is in dire need of reform. In Experiential Learning, Facemire provides key insights into how to change and break down the old systems. 978-1-64663-712-6 • Paper, $14.95; 978-1-64663-714-0 • Hardcover, $22.95; 978-1-64663-713-3 • e-Book, $7.99 • 110 Pages • Educational Policy & Reform Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound. Author’s website: brianalanfacemire.com HEELER BOOKS heelerbooks.com; (847) 910-2556 A REVOLUTION OF THE MIND by M V Perry In this literary tour de force, a social pariah leads a groundbreaking movement for mental health awareness. A timely, relevant debut on American mental illness. 978-0-578-31404-4 • Paper, $19.99 • 496 Pages • Literary Fiction Available on Amazon, Indie Bound,…

FRANK CLOSE ELUSIVE How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass “A perfect marriage of subject and writer. With verve, insight, and rigor, Frank Close beautifully illuminates the life and times of one of physics’ great, unheralded giants. Elusive is a triumph of a book.”—JIMMY SONI, bestselling author of The Founders “Elusive is both a deep, exciting, intellectual history and an elegantly told portrait of a quiet man whose one great idea changed modern physics forever.”—DAVID N. SCHWARTZ, author of The Last Man Who Knew Everything “Rich, compelling, and surprising. Fundamental physics can be equal parts awe-inspiring and head-spinning, and Frank Close masterfully captures those qualities in this deeply satisfying tale of Peter Higgs’s convoluted, and very human, journey through life and science.”—CALEB SCHARF, author of The Ascent of Information…

Guerre [War] by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, edited by Pascal Fouché and with a foreword by François Gibault. Paris: Gallimard, 184 pp., €19.00 (paper) Déshonneur et patrie: retour sur l’affaire Céline [Dishonor and Country: A Review of the Céline Affair] by Philippe Roussin. Available at en-attendant-nadeau.fr Peut-on dissocier l’oeuvre de l’auteur? [Can the Work Be Dissociated from the Author?] by Gisèle Sapiro. Paris: Seuil, 233 pp., €17.00 (paper) In 1973 my professor at the University of Bordeaux assigned Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night, 1932) in his course for foreign students on major French novels. He warned us that the book was important, magnificent even, but that its author had dishonored himself during the Nazi occupation. The nickname we gave the professor, the…

Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World by Scott Reynolds Nelson. Basic Books, 356 pp., $32.00 “I have not felt so much at home for a long time,” wrote Mark Twain of arriving in Odessa in 1867. It was a curious sentiment. The jewel of New Russia—an oasis of Italian opera on the Ukrainian steppe—would seem a long way from the riverboat culture from which Twain sprang. But its resemblance to his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, was surprisingly strong. Odessa, like Hannibal, was a fastgrowing limestone city laid out on a grid at the water’s edge. Twain knowingly sized up its broad streets, briskpaced pedestrians, low and sparsely decorated houses, and “familiar new look.” When a “smothering cloud of dust” greeted him, Twain and his party welcomed it…

Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet by John W. Reid and Thomas E. Lovejoy. Norton, 302 pp., $30.00 The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth by Ben Rawlence. St. Martin’s, 307 pp., $29.99 Where I live is edged to the south by a treeline: red maple, sugar maple, red oak, white pine, two kinds of hickory. Beyond the treeline lies the forest. It isn’t a named forest, and it clearly isn’t forest in the historic sense: royal land (wooded or not) preserved for hunting. It’s protected only by private ownership and the extraordinary power of benign neglect. And yet the network of trees just beyond my office is connected to thousands and thousands of acres of more or less contiguous forested land…

July and the sound of cicadas is unceasingas doubt or death or dust’s bright splintering in the sun.Along the Vieux Port, boats are raised on pulleys,under which tanned men scrape down the hulls.Urine drying on the hot sidewalk in the noon heatmixes with the smell of fish, where the morning’s catchis spread on tables under umbrellas for sale.Thank you for not urinating on the groundthe sign entering the boulodrome readsbecause it’s mostly men who play pétanque.Often they stand so still with concentrationyou can see the sun-bleached sand in their eyebrows,sand a sirocco blew from Africa. Cigarette tuckedbehind his ear, one player draws a circle in the dustwith his boot. Another swings a lead ball in one handand lets go. The smell of perspiration is holy, the skycouldn’t be more blue.…

Portrait of an Unknown Lady by María Gainza, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead. Catapult, 177 pp., $24.00 The original title of María Gainza’s second novel, Portrait of an Unknown Lady, fluently translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead, is La luz negra. “La luz negra” (the black light) refers to a type of flashlight used both by forensic specialists to detect traces of bodily fluids and by art authenticators “looking for… the final additions to any work.” The narrator, who is from Buenos Aires, first learns about the black light after she yields to family pressure to accept a job in the fine art valuations department of Ciudad Bank. She is twenty-five at the time, with a “personal credo … of a firm commitment to drifting along, to…

WHO WAS FIRST? To the Editors: Ruth Bernard Yeazell writes, “In 1548 the Flemish painter Catharina van Hemessen produced what is generally regarded as the first self-portrait of any artist in the act of painting” [“Painting Herself,” NYR, May 12]. If drawing in preparation for painting is considered an integral part of the act of painting, then Rogier van der Weyden’s painting Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin and Child (circa 1435) in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts should be acknowledged as predating Hemessen in depicting the subject of the self-portrait of an artist at work. Confirmation that Rogier’s Saint Luke is a depiction of Rogier himself, which is widely considered to be the case, is provided by his likeness to a portrait inscribed with his name. In depicting himself as…