Innholdsfortegnelse for December 16, 2021 i The New York Review of Books

Objects of Desire by Clare Sestanovich. Knopf, 214 pp., $26.00 Clare Sestanovich’s debut collection of stories, Objects of Desire, begins with Iris, a young woman, flying home from college. “She is seated between a married couple,” we’re told, because the man prefers the window and the woman prefers the aisle, and they are the kind of people, she discovers quickly, with strong preferences. In general, Iris is the kind of person with mild preferences—preferences that can be painlessly ceded to someone else’s. While the characters in the eleven stories gathered here have a range of ages and situations, most think of themselves as having “mild” or irresolute wants. Bolder personalities bounce against the less willful ones, often in startling ways—including on the plane ride, when the woman returns from the…

Virtue by Hermione Hoby. Riverhead, 307 pp., $27.00 Luca Lewis, the narrator of Virtue, Hermione Hoby’s second novel, speaks to us from seven years hence. Despite mention that the world has by then suffered not one but two major pandemics, 2028 doesn’t feel much different from 2021. But Virtue, a retrospective millennial coming-of-age story, is about Luca’s life more than a decade earlier, when he was twenty-three. He lets on that the person he is today was formed by the experiences he is telling us about, and from his tone alone it is clear that his present self is an unhappy one, burdened with shame and regret. At one point Luca looks far beyond 2028 to imagine himself in his final hours, in a hospital bed, remembering a particular moment…

Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri, translated from the Italian and with an introduction and notes by Mary Jo Bang. Graywolf, 365 pp., $20.00 (paper) Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri, translated from the Italian and with commentary by D.M. Black, with a preface by Robert Pogue Harrison. New York Review Books, 459 pp., $19.95 (paper) After Dante: Poets in Purgatory: Translations by Contemporary Poets edited by Nick Havely with Bernard O’Donoghue. Todmorden: Arc, 288 pp., £19.99 (paper) Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno by Rachel Owen, edited by David Bowe. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 135 pp., $40.00 A few years after publishing his superb translation of Dante’s Purgatorio (2000), W.S. Merwin told me he was toying with the idea of also translating Paradiso, but added that he had some reservations. The first was that the canticle…

Steffani Jemison: Broken Fall an exhibition at Greene Naftali, New York City, November 4–December 4, 2021 In Steffani Jemison’s split-screen video In Succession (2019)—the most recent, longest, and largest work in the multimedia artist’s first show at Greene Naftali in Chelsea—four Black men (it took me a long time to decide there were four), all dressed more or less identically in starched white button-down shirts, khaki pants, and black sneakers, are engaged in a mysterious choreographed activity on the lawn of a large white house (we often see shots of cornices and gables; we often see shots of the grass from above). The motion of the video is gently slowed. The tightness of the framing and the juxtaposition of different perspectives on the divided screen mean we never see the…

Cuban Memory Wars: Retrospective Politics in Revolution and Exile by Michael J. Bustamante. University of North Carolina Press, 304 pp., $95.00; $29.95 (paper) Dancing with the Revolution: Power, Politics, and Privilege in Cuba by Elizabeth B. Schwall. University of North Carolina Press, 298 pp., $95.00; $34.95 (paper) The annual congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) is usually a staid affair, but this year’s was rocked by controversy. In early May, two weeks beforehand, Guillermina De Ferrari, a professor of Caribbean studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, posted a petition online calling on LASA’s leadership to publicly condemn human rights violations in Cuba, specifically the escalating repression of dissident artists and intellectuals. LASA, the most important organization of Latin American studies in the hemisphere, does occasionally comment on political…

The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson by Robert S. Levine. Norton, 312 pp., $26.95 The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation by Brenda Wineapple. Random House, 543 pp., $20.00 (paper) Who were America’s worst presidents? In a 2021 survey of historians, C-SPAN found that Andrew Johnson ranked next to last, just above James Buchanan and below Franklin Pierce, who was tied with Donald Trump. A 2021 ranking of “the 10 worst US presidents” by US News and World Report put Johnson third from the bottom, ahead of Trump and the perennial loser, Buchanan. Johnson wasn’t always viewed this negatively. The so-called revisionist historians and biographers of the Jim Crow era saw him as a man of conviction…

Tongolele no sabía bailar [Tongolele Had No Rhythm] by Sergio Ramírez. Madrid: Alfaguara, 344 pp., $19.95 (paper) Sergio Ramírez, the illustrious historian, novelist, and former vice-president of Nicaragua, could well have been among his unfortunate friends and many other members of the opposition arrested by the regime of President Daniel Ortega and his weird wife and vice-president, Rosario Murillo, beginning in June. But in view of the fate of their friends and colleagues, Ramírez and his wife, Tulita, decided to leave Nicaragua. It was a wise move: in September Ramírez learned that he stands accused of money laundering and something called “provocation, proposition, and conspiracy.” Ramírez is seventy-nine, and it is a cruel fate for someone who loves and has served his country as consistently as he has to know…

The Werewolf in the Ancient World by Daniel Ogden. Oxford University Press, 261 pp., $32.95 During the wild party at the center of Petronius’s Satyricon, the host, Trimalchio, invites his friend Niceros, a freed slave like himself, to tell the company what once happened to him. Like the best spooky storytellers, Niceros begins with humdrum circumstances: he’d fallen in love with a married woman and one day, when his master was conveniently absent, he set out to join her in the countryside. However, not wanting to travel alone, he persuades “a soldier, as brave as the devil … to accompany me as far as the fifth milestone.” They leave at dawn and are walking past the usual tombs lining the suburban road when the soldier stops for a pee against…

Matrix by Lauren Groff. Riverhead, 260 pp., $28.00 It is hard to pin down Marie de France, though many have tried. The best-known woman poet of the Middle Ages is a chimera, pieced together centuries after she lived from stray clues in the poems that are attributed to her. In the story most often told about her today, Marie was a learned French émigré connected to the court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine in late-twelfth-century England. She wrote a collection of animal fables, translated a religious treatise on Purgatory and a life of Saint Audrey from the Latin, and composed a series of twelve short tales in verse, called lais, about passionate love. We do not know if a single person wrote all the works ascribed to “Marie,”…

In 1712 King Louis XIV of France signed the lettres patentes that formally established Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences, Belles Lettres, and Arts, a social club of intellectual inquiry and public edification. In contrast to the more conservative University of Bordeaux, whose primary objective was to educate the country’s priests, doctors, and lawyers through lessons compatible with Scripture, the Bordeaux Academy saw itself as “enlightened”: its objective was advancing scientific truth as part of a larger program intended to promote “mankind’s happiness.” Every year, the academy organized an essay contest that it publicized throughout Europe. In 1739 the members announced the subject of the competition for 1741: “Quelle est la cause physique de la couleur des nègres, de la qualité de leur cheveux, et de la dégénération de l’un et…

Maria Lassnig: The Paris Years, 1960–68 an exhibition at the Petzel Gallery, New York City, November 4–December 17, 2021. Catalog of the exhibition with an essay by Lauren O’Neill-Butler. Petzel, 79 pp., $35.00 Maria Lassnig: Film Works edited by Eszter Kondor, Michael Loebenstein, Peter Pakesch, and Hans Werner Poschauko. FilmmuseumSynema Publikationen, 189 pp., $35.00 (paper) Many female artists—most recently Carmen Herrera, Faith Ringgold, and Lorraine O’Grady—have had to wait a lifetime to be accorded the recognition of a major museum retrospective. The Austrian painter and filmmaker Maria Lassnig abided many decades of curatorial slights and oversights before being granted one at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2008, six years before her death at the age of ninetyfour. Astonished by the revelation of Lassnig’s extreme paintings, with their sometimes bilious…