Innholdsfortegnelse for December 22, 2022 i The New York Review of Books

Christopher R. Browning is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942. Simon Callow is an English actor and director who has written about Richard Wagner, Orson Welles, Charles Dickens, Charles Laughton, and Oscar Wilde. His latest book, with Derry Moore, is London’s Great Theatres. Ama Codjoe is the author of the poetry collection Bluest Nude. William Dalrymple is Codirector of the Jaipur Literature Festival. He is the author of The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857 and, most recently, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. Merve Emre is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence…

John Edgar Wideman is that splendid thing, a black intellectual—full of grandeur and agony, rage and poise. He’s also a man. He writes about fathers, brothers, fugitive boys: a harrowing fiction of masculine hurt. But his heroes are often middle-class writers who try to do research. They take notes, tape interviews, or delve into archives, hoping to end their alienation and raise the dead. These are ruthless books. Wideman wants to capture black history and somehow heal the pain—but the writing snaps, chokes, slides, flees. It brims with allusions and rends its own flesh. A sentence can be coiled, limpid, clenched like a fist, or burst through its levees and stream down the page. Plots veer and recur or are bluntly abandoned in this rigorous program of textual scrambling, which…

1. Art Nouveau—the phantasmagoric “new art” that emerged in the twilight of the nineteenth century and flourished during the dawn of the twentieth—quickly wrapped itself around the popular imagination with all the tenacity of the winding vines that became its predominant motif. Although it remains one of the oddest and most recognizable manifestations of the Modern Movement, historians have never been able to fully explain its anomalous nature or consign it to a neat place in accounts of cultural “progress.” Now, more than a century after its short-lived heyday, a new generation of scholars is finally offering insights into its varied origins, its far-flung diffusion, and its deeper meanings. Art Nouveau (a catchall term for the variously named but closely related styles that had a pervasive impact on architecture, painting,…

I have been interested for a long time in theology and also in science. These two brilliant fields of thought have been at odds, supposedly, since the rise of what might be called the modern period, say, beginning in the nineteenth century. For the next one hundred years and more science flourished, applying its model of rationalism to every question, while increasingly religion struggled to find any way to justify its existence in the face of triumphant demystifications of reality. Then an odd thing happened. With one brilliant advance after another, science burst out of the constraints of rationalism and found itself in the terrain of quantum theory, which everyone says no one understands, but which is very robust and has been put to all sorts of practical uses. Rationalism…

The Threshold by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 107 pp., $26.00 “Threshold” is an old word for a simple thing: a horizontal floor strip, a doorsill, to mark the boundary of an entryway. Out of such simple things are the deepest metaphors made, often overdetermined or contradictory, imbued with preternatural power. A line of poetry, too, is a threshold, signaling its formality, tapping into uncanny origins: just as verse is made up of “feet,” the etymology of “threshold” contains the old Germanic word for “to tread.” The Egyptian poet Iman Mersal’s title poem, “The Threshold,” occurs halfway through her first book for English speakers, translated by Robyn Creswell. It is a reminiscence of her youth in 1990s Cairo metaphorically compressed into one…

A sudden shock of rain in Bologna that poursquite literally just like a storm on the frigid seaway up north. Scarcely a drop and it instantlydevastates the plan on the face of a tourist, furrows with skill the up-to-now concealedmap of the homeland: clear cuts, pastures, barren tracts,a swollen storm front looming above the atlas,a tractor meant for rescue stuck up to its axle. The legs of a girl who happens to be shelteringby chance under this same colonnade—from atop her knee a drop admires the leg’s cascade,a spyglass sent from heaven by our great voyeur. The drop reflects what he demands of the world,everything set in a dance under the stars,but only briefly—according to the laws of gravitythe daisies await the drop impatiently.…

PEN2PAPER PRESS www.pen2paperpress.com; (917) 237-6991 MARATHON by John Herbert The young man steps on the cinders and flies around the track. He’s unaware that one has to learn how to fall before he can fly. 978-1466962200 • Hardcover, $48.00 • 654 Pages • Inspirational/Self-Help Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Author’s website: www.marathonjohnherbert.com NEW COLONIES MEDIA 1, LLC (800) 909-9002 THE “DO FOR OTHERS” DAY by Roger Hukle & Elizabeth Hille An ”officially-official” declaration by the village Mayor for residents to trade jobs for a day result in unintended and humorous consequences for the community. 978-1957943947 • Paper, $10.99; 978-1957943954 • Hardcover, $16.99; 9781957943961 • e-Book, $3.99 • 26 Pages • Children’s Book Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. THE FOOD PIRATES by Roger Hukle & Elizabeth…

The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, October 10, 2022–January 8, 2023; the Cleveland Museum of Art, February 26–May 14, 2023; and the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, June 24–September 24, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition by Elizabeth Cleland and Adam Eaker, with contributions by Marjorie E. Wieseman and Sarah Bochicchio. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 352 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) To an Italian who traveled to England in the late sixteenth century—say, one of the artists commissioned to paint portraits of the Elizabethan elite—the island might not have appeared, as it had to the ancient Roman poet Virgil, “wholly separated from all the world,” but it would certainly have seemed strange. In London the visitor…

The Sea Trilogy: Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson, edited by Sandra Steingraber. Library of America, 743 pp., $40.00 The first generation of divers freed by the Aqua-Lung to rummage in coral reefs and plumb the dimmer depths of the sea found themselves at a loss for words when asked to talk about what they saw. “It’s not possible. You can’t describe it,” said Philippe Tailliez, a pioneer of oceanic exploration and a leader, with Jacques-Yves Cousteau, of the French navy’s underwater research group in the 1940s. Speaking to his fellow divemaster Philippe Diolé—as Diolé recounts in his memoir The Undersea Adventure (1951)—Tailliez then asked for a volume of verse by Rimbaud, leafed to “The Drunken Boat,” and pointed to this…

Fossora an album by Björk. One Little Independent, L9.99 Is anyone a Björk fan for life? Beginning with her 1997 album, Homogenic, the Icelandic singer and producer has put out records of such uncompromising intensity that it can be hard for even the most ardent fan to maintain enthusiasm over several years. If Björk’s early hits had the exuberance and ephemerality of the London club scene in which they were forged, Homogenic marked a turn to the stately, the formidable, and at times the intolerably self-serious. While one album could hit you squarely in the solar plexus, by the next the conviction that Björk alone understood your crisis would have passed, never to return. Consider the cultural horizon over which Björk’s star first rose. It was, however briefly, the age…

Fake pearls dangle over my unclasped breasts, so realthey hang above my waist. From time to time,I clutch them. Mornings, I grasp for the feelingof being touched: thumb strumming my ribcage,fingertips smoothing my hairline. I can barely graspthe concept of time—light given off by a cold star.I feel naked without a watch. My father gambledhis gold watch away. I too have flung my body until,bruised, it learned to fall. Pearl was my great-grandmother’sname. She forbade my mother from playing cards.The difference between a gambler and a dreamer is time.Wanda Coleman ends “Dream 924” with the linei did not wake up today. A line that sends the reader backto the beginning. The tenderest touch I’ve feltwas in a dream. I couldn’t prevent my motherfrom being bruised, her eye like the raccoon’swho…

The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter. Random House, 628 pp., $35.00; $20.00 (paper) Keynes Against Capitalism: His Economic Case for Liberal Socialism by James Crotty. Routledge, 397 pp., $160.00; $46.95 (paper) If eros, as Freud believed, is what binds us to the world, creating ever-larger units of society, economics could be seen as the child of eros. So it has been at least since the eighteenth century, when “commerce” and “intercourse” began to be used interchangeably and the modern idea of the economy was born in the writings of philosophers such as Adam Smith, whom I discussed in the first of these articles.1Hume saw merchants and money as the instruments of an expansive and intimate contact among peoples from…

Coastal Shrines and Transnational Maritime Networks Across India and Southeast Asia by Himanshu Prabha Ray. Routledge India, 255 pp., $170.00 Esoteric Buddhism in Mediaeval Maritime Asia: Networks of Masters, Texts, Icons edited by Andrea Acri. ISEAS Publishing, 465 pp., $70.97 (paper) The Creative South: Buddhist and Hindu Art in Mediaeval Maritime Asia, Volume 1 edited by Andrea Acri and Peter Sharrock. ISEAS Publishing, 375 pp., $39.39 (paper) Sometime in the early tenth century, a ninety-foot-long, three-hundred-ton trading ship sank off the coast of Java, probably the victim of a sudden monsoon storm. The ship went down with all hands. The crew and the cargo lay on the floor of the Java Sea undisturbed until 1997, when marine archaeologists located the wreck near the Intan oil field. In due course, the…

The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man by Paul Newman, based on interviews and oral histories conducted by Stewart Stern, compiled and edited by David Rosenthal, with a foreword by Melissa Newman and an afterword by Clea Newman Soderlund. Knopf, 297 pp., $32.00 The Last Movie Stars an HBO documentary series directed by Ethan Hawke In 1989 the producer Ismail Merchant and the director James Ivory asked me, as a standing member of their informal company of players, to appear in their upcoming film, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. Everything about the project was irresistible, not least the casting of two bona fide movie stars, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, husband and wife, as the eponymous couple. Especially intriguing was the prospect of how they would respond to Jim and Ismail.…

A Left-Handed Woman by Judith Thurman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 415 pp., $32.00 The novelist rings at the door and spirits you off; the essayist invites herself in. Her wrap lands somewhere in the vicinity of the coatrack. She perches on the arm of your chair; she whispers in your ear. If she flashes her credentials, it’s while you’re in the next room, brewing the tea. She may agree to a stroll, but don’t bother suiting up. It’s always a languid day in essayland, where the weather is overcast, verging on melancholic. You can count on snacks; the essayist subscribes to the all-appetizer menu. While she may be breezy, she is not unmannerly. She won’t overstay. She will coax meaning out from the corner, where you least suspected it was…

When will we begin to read like Westerners?From mud and boredom, from spit and fear of enemies,from bones pulled out of sand and stolen quicklimewe’ve fastened a golem. Nothing’s enough for him— a share of eggs and vodka, a seat in the henhouse,monthly visits from virgins and schoolboys.He pesters us while cooking, barges into the bedroom,panting, puffing, grunting, but he can’t pronounce a single word. He’s speechless, set in motionby a complex code of letters, now unknown,forgotten along with spelling rules in the constantcrisis of education, the shortages and lack of humanistic subjects. For who can molda string of signs so that even a rolled-up papergun can open fire, bringing down the ghostwith a round of explosive sound, a flash of meter?…