Innholdsfortegnelse for January 19, 2023 i The New York Review of Books

Alexander Burns is the Associate Editor for Global Politics and a columnist at Politico. A former National Political Correspondent for The New York Times, he is the cowriter, with Jonathan Martin, of This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future. Sherrilyn Ifill is a civil rights lawyer and scholar. She served as President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund from 2013 until 2022. She is now a Senior Fellow at the Ford Foundation. Tim Judah is the author of In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine. He has reported for The New York Review from Ukraine, the Balkans, Niger, Armenia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Karl Kirchwey’s most recent book is Stumbling Blocks: Roman Poems. He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Boston…

Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Cities and Vanished Villages by Matthew Green. Norton, 358 pp., $27.95 Mudlark’d: Hidden Histories from the River Thames by Malcolm Russell, with photographs by Matthew Williams-Ellis. Princeton University Press, 223 pp., $35.00 In the introduction to her now classic Pleasure of Ruins (1953), the British writer Rose Macaulay conceives multiple reasons for the complex pleasure we take in decay, from the imaginary reconstruction of a ruin to the “masochistic joy” in common destruction. Nearly seventy years later the American literary critic Susan Stewart, in The Ruins Lesson, was still asking why “we so often are drawn—in schadenfreude, terror, or what we imagine is transcendence—to the sight of what is broken, damaged, and decayed.”* In Matthew Green’s Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Cities and…

Skin by Sergio del Molino, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead. Polity, 238 pp., $25.00 In March 2021, as the New York winter refused to quit and tiny husks spread across my skin, plastering first my elbows, then my upper arms, underarms, eyebrows, eyelids, nostrils, and shins, I booked a room at a cheap hotel in Nassau for a week. I was in the Bahamas nominally to renew my US work visa, but the trip’s secondary objective was, in a way, more urgent: to expose, within the limits of local regulations on public nudity, as much of my body as possible to the sun. By the time I landed on the island the rash had swarmed across my face, forearms, and waist, scabs succeeding each other to form archipelagoes…

Once you gave them to the children:those stems of pallid moonsfrom your seaside garden, and they stood there exultantwith their chandeliers of Hoststurning this way and that, their elbows and knees stifflike moments in a dance,moving to the shuffle of tiny drumheads in an orchestraof pearlescent rhythm,or a tree of bleached semaphore, or manna’s parchment fall,blotting each child’s beauty.Your expression is unreadable, under the straw hat brimin the deep midsummer shade.One fragile diaphragm puckers at its edge and strains;another is punched outlike a spectacle lens. I know all this will follow,but instead I look harderinto the veiled hollow for your eyes, your smile, a glimmerof nothing withheld or withdrawn.They might as well learn wonder.…

The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts by Silvia Ferrara, translated from the Italian by Todd Portnowitz. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 289 pp., $29.00 Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present by Johanna Drucker. University of Chicago Press, 380 pp., $40.00 Last summer a group of scholars announced that they had cracked Linear Elamite, a Bronze Age script used in the trading cities of Elam in the highlands of southern Iran, through which Central Asian tin, a crucial ingredient in bronze, was transported north to the Mesopotamian kingdoms of Babylon and Assyria.1First identified by archaeologists in 1903, it’s a beauty: stark geometric characters composed of diamonds and triangles, circles and straight lines. It has also long resisted decryption, not least…

I didn’t pin it as grief at first, the feelingof imagining placing myselfin the path of that truck, but of courseit was grief, grief for myselfin the future—not being arounddown the road to feel it, I had to startfeeling it now, I had to make sure I would not leave the world with my feelingsunfinished, that everything needingto be sensed would have beenfully sensed, and by me, the way that Tin her old age explainedshe always paid off the electric billpromptly so as to save her dear ones the trouble of runningaround in her absence ascertainingwhat was owed and to whom—I couldhave responded that zero and zeroonly is owed to any extractiveconglomeration, but she had no momentto hear this, nor to hear anything—she was too busydying, too busy workingto leave…

Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta by James Hannaham. Little, Brown, 311 pp., $28.00 The title of James Hannaham’s new novel is at once a potential deterrent to fainthearted readers and a bold declaration of its author’s unwavering fidelity to his heroine’s forceful voice, her highly energized inner life. If Carlotta Mercedes—a Black and Colombian trans woman—could turn her personal history into “a Lifetime TV miniseries event,” Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta is what, she says, she’d call it: a one-sentence summary of what she discovers when she’s paroled from prison in upstate New York and sent home to find Brooklyn greatly changed from the place she left twenty years before. Carlotta has been wrongly incarcerated for robbery and assault with a deadly…

Tár a film written and directed by Todd Field During the first ten minutes of Tár, it is possible to feel that the critic Adam Gopnik is a better actor than Cate Blanchett. They sit together on a New Yorker Festival stage. Gopnik, playing himself, is a relaxed and fluid interviewer. His interviewee, the (fictional) conductor Lydia Tár, is stiff and self-conscious—actorly, even. As Gopnik recounts Tár’s many achievements, her face remains fixed in its pose of false humility, and when she speaks, she offers her audience a series of eloquent but overly rehearsed bons mots: We don’t call women astronauts “astronettes.” Time is the essential piece of interpretation. You cannot start without me. See, I start the clock. But Blanchett has it exactly right. She is doing what the…

“Yesterday, the gigantic rocks of Montserrat glowing red in the distance…”; “four days ago, I was looking at the great glow outspread in the night sky over Berlin…”; “the vast deserted square, bathed in a strange, extremely pale blue dawn glow…”; “a great red glow from the tumultuous squares…”; “the Popo puts me in mind of the Kazbek; the reddish glow over on the plains at the foot of the mountains of the valleys of Georgia…”; “on the evening of the verdict, the sky above the city glowed purple. I walked towards the glow: the whole of the San-Galli works was in flames…”; “the sky glowed white until sunrise, captivating every glance…”; “a glow of pink watercolor shimmers between the heavy clouds and spreads over the small city…”; “a dull…

La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern by Lynn Garafola. Oxford University Press, 661 pp., $39.95 In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf imagined “what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister.” She concluded that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. In the centuries since there have been gifted sisters whose lives were less anguished—Maria Anna (“Nannerl”) Mozart, Fanny Mendelssohn, Gwen John—but who were long overshadowed by their more eminent brothers. In our time, however, these sister-artists are being given fresh attention and revaluation. None is more remarkable than Bronislava Nijinska, the radical dancer-choreographer sister of…

Brisbane by Eugene Vodolazkin, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz. Plough, 343 pp., $26.95 The Aviator by Eugene Vodolazkin, translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden. London: Oneworld, 387 pp., $26.99; $16.95 (paper) Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin, translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden. London: Oneworld, 365 pp., $17.95 (paper) Solovyov and Larionov by Eugene Vodolazkin, translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden. London: Oneworld, 404 pp., $26.95; $17.95 (paper) Having won the Solzhenitsyn Prize, the Big Book prize, and the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award, as well as having been short-listed for the National Bestseller Prize and the Russian Booker Prize, Eugene Vodolazkin has emerged in the eyes of many as the most important living Russian writer. A literary scholar as well as a novelist—or, as…