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

Christopher de Bellaigue’s new book, The Lion House, will be published in November. April Bernard’s sixth collection of poems, The World Behind the World, will be published in March. Reginald Dwayne Betts is the Founder and CEO of Freedom Reads. His new book, Redaction, cowritten with Titus Kaphar, will be published in 2023. Serhiy Zhadan is a Ukrainian poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and activist. In 2017 he established the Serhiy Zhadan Charitable Foundation, which provides humanitarian aid to cities and towns on the front line of the war with Russia. Marci Shore is the author of The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution and an Associate Professor of History at Yale. Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler are literary translators who work with both Russian and Ukrainian writers. Yevhenii Monastyrskyi…

There are empty spaces we makeand empty spaces we growaccustomed to, as though they were alwaysthere—a gold mine you can descend an hour intoby elevator before reaching its networkof tunnels—or always will be,as in the photosynthetic capacity of treesto absorb carbon dioxide into their diameter, their height.As a forest is torn down, as it dries out, dies off,the trees that are left won’t absorb as much carbonas they used to. Studies show them storing less, fitting lessinto themselves. The trees are falling downon the job, as they say,then we say. The shareholders sayingthrough us, from inside us. And we cannotsqueeze into tree cells to enlarge them by pushing outwardin all directions at once, like da Vinci’s sketchof the proportions of the human bodyaccording to Vitruvius. A sketch of a manover…

from a poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt What we try to snag and hold fastof laughter, wood smoke, but especiallythe necessary ignoranceto go forward, to trust: I have nettedbaubles from air bubbles, pictures of cozylife in books, the way hot ciderby a warm stove completes winterand sunset was sunset because you said“Look at that!” to someone you loved.At a reading, John Ashbery was asked,“But what was that about?” and he said,“I guess I’m just sad about time,”and who can be sorry he was sad, whensuch fabric lengths of poems came offthe loom, in down-home-and-I-guess baroque.Sometimes my dog turns, flops down,and presses against me with a sigh thatfills the world with peace, makingpermanent what would otherwise fly awayon the lash of a clock’s tick. You have to thinkabout things in a…

FROM UNIVERSITY PRESSES AMERICAN POLITICS/RACE RELATIONS What the Eyes Can’t See Ralph Northam, Black Resolve, and a Racial Reckoning in Virginia Margaret Edds Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s “blackface scandal” could have destroyed any politician. Drawing on unprecedented access to the governor, his aides, and Virginia Legislative Black Caucus members, former reporter Margaret Edds describes the tumultuous and consequential final years of Northam’s term. She uncovers the story of how and why a governor’s personal redemption collided and entwined with Black anger and resolve to influence a reckoning with racism at the local, state, and national levels. November 1, 2022. 6 × 9 in. 296 pp. University of South Carolina Press 978-1-64336-352-3 Cloth, $29.99; 978-1-64336-353-0 e-book, $29.99 BIOGRAPHY The Forgotten Iron King of the Great Lakes Eber Brock Ward, 1811–1875 Michael…

Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins. Knopf, 875 pp., $37.50 In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism by J. P. Daughton. Norton, 368 pp., $30.00 In the heyday of colonialism decades ago, when the British Empire controlled so much of the world, it was tempting to think of it as more benign than its rivals. Surely those civilized Brits did not turn their African or Asian subjects into forced laborers, as the Belgians did in the Congo, or wage genocidal warfare, as the Kaiser’s Germany did in what is today Namibia. The empire’s foot soldiers had fewer illusions. “I was in the Indian Police five years,” wrote George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, “and…

The Real Christie Mystery To the Editors: I am loath to argue with Lucy Worsley, whose work on television is very appealing, but have trouble believing that Agatha Christie was not aware of what she was doing during that famous episode [Frances Wilson, “Agatha Christie’s Nightmares,” NYR, October 20]. On December 3, 1926, Christie drove her car into a chalk pit in Newlands Corner, Guildford, Surrey. She evidently left it there with her suitcase, fur coat, and driver’s license. Some few days later she was found in excellent fettle at a hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, 250 miles away, registered as Mrs. Teresa Neele from South Africa. This feat was said to be accomplished while in some sort of fugue state, of which she had no memory. I suppose it is…

In the past quarter-century a great debate that dominated the visual arts for a hundred years has faded, but without a conclusion. On one side were the abstractionists, with Mondrian demanding an art of “pure plastic” relations. On the other side were the representational painters and sculptors, with Giacometti, in the 1940s, at the very end of Mondrian’s life, celebrating salvation through a return to the figure. Nothing less than the future of painting and sculpture was at stake in what amounted to a war of ideas. And now? Many artists, curators, critics, and gallerygoers seem to feel that we’re so familiar with the strategies of representational and abstract art that any attempt to dig deeper into the roots of an artist’s choices belabors the obvious. When I look at…

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 343 pp., $30.00 John Donne was a contemporary of Shakespeare. This is strangely difficult to remember, for they had contrary relationships to poetic traditions and trends. Like other English writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Shakespeare works fluidly with formal and emotional vocabularies inherited from the Italian poet Petrarch and his followers. His Dark Lady and Fair Youth—the addressees of the sonnets—exist undeniably in the same world as Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Edmund Spenser’s courtly and pastoral personae, shaped by the same history and giving voice to comparable ideas about love and sex, art and nature, and the battle between our angelic and animal qualities. Donne’s poems, by contrast, are from outer…

The Radical Potter: The Life and Times of Josiah Wedgwood by Tristram Hunt. Metropolitan, 323 pp., $29.99; $19.99 (paper) In my cabinet I have a cream-colored soup plate, purchased in the early 1990s at an antique store in Greenwich Village. For me it was rather expensive, despite two chips on the rim, but I had to have it. When I pick it up, the potting feels surprisingly thin: earthenware, fired at a low temperature, weighs much less than a porcelain object of similar size.1 The chips reveal the soft white of the clay body, otherwise covered by a luminous transparent glaze. Six brackets define the profile of the rim, each shaped after an original Chinese form, later filtered through William Hogarth’s “line of beauty”—an S-curve that embodied all that was…

When Hilary Mantel died suddenly of a stroke on September 22, one of the most distinctive voices in fiction fell silent. Here is Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall (2009), peering at the baby who will grow up to be Elizabeth I: Ginger bristles poke from beneath her cap, and her eyes are vigilant; he has never seen an infant in the crib look so ready to take offence. Here is the Champ-de-Mars in A Place of Greater Safety (1992), set during the French Revolution: parasols, sticky-fingered children, people clutching coconuts, then blood blossoming horribly on the grass, fingers under stampeding feet, the splinter of hoof on bone. It is over within minutes. An example has been made. A soldier slides from his saddle and vomits. Here is Morris, the smelly…

Salka Valka by Halldór Laxness, translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton. Archipelago, 624 pp., $23.00 (paper) Independent People by Halldór Laxness, translated from the Icelandic by J. A. Thompson, with an introduction by John Freeman. Everyman’s Library, 501 pp., $26.00 It is not uncommon for a novel to try to convince its readers that they should care. It is far less common for a novel to suggest that they shouldn’t. The beginning of Halldór Laxness’s Salka Valka, originally published in two parts in 1931 and 1932, is an exercise in lowered expectations. On a snowy day a steamship glides toward an unremarkable Icelandic village nestled between two mountains. A pair of smartly dressed travelers are sitting in the first-class smokers’ lounge. “When sailing on such a cold and bleak…

To the Editors: Unfortunately, my new book The Pope and the Holocaust received a review in your pages [NYR, October 20] that rather reflects the bias of its author than the content of my work. Tim Parks compares my book with David Kertzer’s The Pope at War and wonders why Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia or Italy’s invasion of Albania was not mentioned in my timetable. Obviously he ignores the fact that my book focuses on the Holocaust and not on World War II, two subjects that are certainly not identical. Furthermore, he blames me for not mentioning the secret negotiations between Pope Pius XII and the Prince of Hessen, who was sent to the Vatican by Adolf Hitler to prepare the meeting of Reich foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop with…