Innholdsfortegnelse for November 3, 2022 i The New York Review of Books

John Banville’s novel The Singularities was published in October. Robyn Creswell teaches Comparative Literature at Yale and is the translator, most recently, of Iman Mersal’s poetry collection The Threshold. Merve Emre is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Wesleyan. She is working on a book called Love and Other Useless Pursuits. James Gleick’s most recent books are Time Travel and The Information. Giles Harvey, a former member of The New York Review’s editorial staff, is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. Jane Hirshfield’s most recent book is Ledger. The Asking: New and Selected Poems will be published next year. She is currently the Seamus Heaney International Visiting Poetry Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast. Kathryn Hughes is Professor Emerita of Life Writing at the University of East…

Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life by Lydia Moland. University of Chicago Press, 568 pp., $35.00 In 1859, after John Brown’s failed attack on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, where he hoped to spark a slave insurrection, Lydia Maria Child asked permission from Virginia governor Henry Wise to visit Brown, who was awaiting execution. She said she merely wanted to comfort the brave old freedom fighter. It was an odd request—and of course a political gambit, which Wise instantly understood. He likely knew who Child was. Most of the country knew who she was: for more than twenty-five years she’d written novels, children’s literature, domestic advice manuals, and countless essays. And she was a determined opponent of slavery. “If the monster had one head,” she once said, “assuredly I…

The cat walks the narrow shelf beneath the windowwhere many delicate things are arranged—polished ammonites,a dried starfish, three turtle netsuke,a few curls of birch bark, two long-unused kerosene lanterns. As if on their own, two hands fly up to cover the person’s face,to cover the eyes already closed. The crash, as it must, arrives. The hands lower slowly.The cat sits on the floor in the room’s middle, calmly licking one paw. The law of cats is simple: one arrangement becomes another. People are strange.…

To the Editors: In the otherwise clear and informative review “Understanding Diabetes—and Paying for It” by Jerome Groopman [NYR, October 6], which appropriately also addresses social and economic issues, there is a very strange and glaring omission. No mention is made of the determination of the amino acid sequence of insulin by Frederick Sanger and collaborators, carried out between 1945 and the early Fifties. This work, which involved strikingly novel methodologies, is not only fundamental for the history of diabetes, but for the onset of molecular biology. It was the first time that the whole amino acid sequence of a protein was elucidated. The Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to Sanger in 1958, “for his work on the structure of proteins, especially that of insulin.” In the awarding speech,…

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When dead blue bridegrooms from Russia come back from the war they lie down forever in bed with their brides. They are lying between clean sheets as if they were lying in coffins and the still living women are lying next to them as if they were lying in coffins and all the people in every prefabricated concrete high-rise are lying as if they were lying in coffins. And they are horrifying, these bridegrooms. They are not just blue and reeking like an abattoir, they also have individual injuries: the guts of one are hanging loose, half the face of another is baked together and runny, yet another is missing both legs. It is hard to love bridegrooms like these but it isn’t easy to bury them, either. The women…

Rilke: The Last Inward Man by Lesley Chamberlain. London: Pushkin, 253 pp., $29.95 On the first page of her deeply perceptive and passionately argued study of Rainer Maria Rilke, mainly as a poet but also as a personality, Lesley Chamberlain admits that she is speaking symbolically in describing her subject as “the last inward man,” since there are some who “will always be attracted to the mystical and the metaphysical.” All the same, she is in no doubt that “the age of inwardness, the flowering of cultures in the West that were individualistic and reflective, has passed.” Many of us are apprehensive as to the direction taken in recent times by what used to be called “culture.” Few of us would be so brisk in announcing that the game is…

The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler by Kathryn S. Olmsted. Yale University Press, 314 pp., $30.00 The Media Offensive: How the Press and Public Opinion Shaped Allied Strategy During World War II by Alexander G. Lovelace. University Press of Kansas, 354 pp., $44.95 (paper) If President Joe Biden thinks that Rupert Murdoch is “the most dangerous man in the world,”* President Franklin Roosevelt felt much the same about “the McCormick/Patterson newspaper Axis.” The Murdochs of their day were Colonel Robert McCormick and the siblings Joseph Patterson and Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson, a newspaper owning cousinhood united by hatred of Roosevelt. Their grandfather Joseph Medill had co-owned the Chicago Tri bune, which eventually passed to his grandson McCormick, while another grandson, Joseph Patterson, founded the New York Daily…

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer. Seven Stories, 239 pp., $18.95 (paper) For about a year, beginning in September 1988, the French writer Annie Ernaux lived in a state of exquisite torture. Torture, because the man with whom she was having a passionate affair was not only married but a citizen of a foreign country, to which, as the lovers knew from the start, he must return; they even knew the date. Exquisite, because of the “erotic splendor,” unlike anything she had experienced before. “In one month, we’ve gone from inept sex to a kind of perfection—well, almost,” she writes in her book Se perdre, first published in 2001 and now as Getting Lost in a translation by Alison L. Strayer. And a little…

Lessons by Ian McEwan. Knopf, 431 pages, $30.00 How much news, how much event glamour, can a novel absorb before it begins to capsize under the weight of its own timeliness? Over the past decade, but especially since the epochal events of 2016, a growing number of writers have been running a sort of stress test on the form, stuffing their books to the point of bursting with headlines, social media posts, and other such glittering ephemera. I am thinking, among others, of Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016), Olivia Laing’s Crudo (2018), Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020), Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021)—short, frenetic, highly praised books, from which, it can sometimes seem, almost all the standard novelistic furniture (scene, plot, character) has been removed in order to accommodate the…

Brian T. Watson is an architect and cultural critic. For eighteen years, he was a columnist with the Salem News in Salem, Massachusetts, focused primarily on current affairs and the forces that were and are shaping societies both here and abroad. btwatson20@gmail.com (781) 367-2008 Paper, $13.00 e-Book, $9.99 Available on Amazon Independent of the pandemic, we are beset by a range of unprecedented developments that together, in this century, threaten the very existence of civilization. The current states of just ten forces—capitalism, technology, the internet, politics, media, education, human nature, the environment, population, and transportation—are driving society in predominantly negative ways. These forces are powerful and interconnected and their combined dynamics will carry us into any number of disasters well before 2100. We have the knowledge and solutions to address…

The essay form … bears some responsibility for the fact that bad essays tell stories about people instead of elucidating the matter at hand.—Theodor Adorno The personal essay is a genre that is difficult to define but easy to denounce. The offending element is rarely the essay as a form, but its content, “the personal,” “a permanent temptation for a form whose suspiciousness of false profundity does not protect it from turning into slick superficiality,” writes Adorno. A list of counterparts to the personal essay might include more admirable imaginary genres such as the structural essay, the communal essay, the public essay, the critical essay, and the impersonal essay. Or, as Adorno insinuates, the good essay, which prioritizes “elucidating the matter at hand” instead of telling “stories about people,” as…