Innholdsfortegnelse for March 23, 2023 i The New York Review of Books

Francisco Cantú is the author of The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border. Charles Glass is a former Chief Middle East Correspondent for ABC News and the author of They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France. His new book, Soldiers Don’t Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War, will be published in June. Colin Grant’s latest book is I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be. He is the Director of WritersMosaic, an online magazine for new writing and a division of the Royal Literary Fund. Will Harris’s second book of poems is Brother Poem. Anjum Hasan’s new novel, History’s Angel, will be published in July. She is the author of…

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery. MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 260 pp., $27.00 On July 16, 1975, Jamaica’s conservative newspaper, The Daily Gleaner, published an ominous headline paraphrasing Prime Minister Michael Manley, the leader of the leftist People’s National Party: “No One Can Become a Millionaire Here—PM.” In an ill-tempered story, the paper fizzed with fury at the heresy of the prime minister’s anti-individualistic and anticapitalist vision for the country, reporting that his advice to “anyone who wants to become a millionaire in Jamaica” was to “remember that planes depart five times daily to Miami.” Manley, The Daily Gleaner concluded some months later, was “the most messianic figure in Jamaica’s political history”; he had courted Fidel Castro and brazenly aligned Jamaica with Communist Cuba. A few days after the…

Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell. HarperVia, 603 pp., $29.99 In Tomb of Sand, the first Indian-language novel to win the International Booker Prize, the Hindi writer Geetanjali Shree combines linguistic energy with unflagging wit to uncover the secrets and lies of Indian family life. To this are added frequent interpolations on the out-of-joint times, marked as they are by “the jacking and hijacking of roles; the back-tofront of related relationships. How does mankind soldier on,” she wonders, “or animalkind, or lock, stock, and barrelkind?” The book, Shree’s fifth novel, begins as a comedy of manners set in an upper-class family that would likely consider itself middle-class. They come from old money—they even, in the case of the man of the house, a senior government…

Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees by Jared Farmer. Basic Books, 432 pp., $35.00 In the past, when a candidate for the title of the world’s oldest tree was discovered in the United States, many predictable things tended to happen, varying slightly by historical era. The tree was usually found on land that had been given away or sold cheap by the federal government—and then had to be repurchased at very high cost. If the tree happened to be on ancestral indigenous land, someone invented racist, pseudo-indigenous fictions to lend the tree an aura of romance. Scientists examined the tree, and now and then one of them behaved badly. A road was built to the tree. Visitors flocked there, and in so doing they compacted the soil and damaged…

Mussolini’s Daughter: The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe by Caroline Moorehead. Harper, 405 pp., $32.50 Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, came to power in the parliamentary elections of September 2022 through the coalition of her right-wing party, the Brothers of Italy, with Matteo Salvini’s far-right Lega and Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right Forza Italia. Although the Italian far right has always disavowed its links to Fascism, Meloni began her career in the openly neo-Fascist Italian Socialist Movement (MSI), formed in 1946 by erstwhile supporters of Benito Mussolini. Her party retains the MSI logo and is happy to proclaim a slogan heard everywhere in the Mussolini era: Difenderemo Dio, patria, e famiglia (We will defend God, country, and family). In Mussolini’s Daughter: The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe, her timely biography of Mussolini’s “eccentric, clever…

The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker. Black Cat, 241 pp., $17.00 (paper) Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture begins with a paragraph of stage direction, establishing the scene that will make up the entirety of the novel. The story takes place in a hotel room “somewhere in middle America.” The room is dark, and its king-size bed holds three bodies: On the left lies a man, in the middle a girl, both on their sides and sleeping. On the right: a woman on her back, awake. Her eyes are either open and staring at the ceiling, or else closed; at any given moment, it’s one or the other. She lies perfectly still, not making a sound, but inside her head, things are busy. A lecture is about to begin. There’s something…

I swam without ceasing around the rocks guarding the island, the looming black rocks slick with surf. In sunlight they shone like onyx, as if polished. In a storm they were flat and dull as slate. I used to search for an opening in the rocks, some small gap through which to slip my body, in the hopes of finding calmer waters, because the seas were so choppy then, the waves churning as if in anger, the foam roiling up to the rock tips, but the rocks made a wall around the island, a wall that seemed impenetrable. I swam around the rocks with my thrashing crawl—I was never a good swimmer—always wondering where my strokes would take me, the sun like a deity watching my slow progress, scratching its…

The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification by Anne Gray Fischer. University of North Carolina Press, 298 pp., $29.95 Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life Before Stonewall by Anna Lvovsky. University of Chicago Press, 337 pp., $105.00; $35.00 (paper) We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba, edited by Tamara K. Nopper and with a foreword by Naomi Murakawa. Haymarket, 206 pp., $45.00; $16.95 (paper) At the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island, where I taught for twenty-three years, I consistently had police officers, their partners, and their children as my students. Most were Italian American or Irish American, but in recent years I saw more Latino, Asian,…

L’invenzione del colpevole: Il “caso” di Simonino da Trento, dalla propaganda alla storia [The Invention of the Culprit: The Case of Little Simon of Trento from Propaganda to History] an exhibition at the Tridentine Diocesan Museum, Trent, Italy, December 13, 2019– September 14, 2020. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Domenica Primerano and others. Trento: Museo Diocesano Tridentino/Temi, 368 pp., €45.00 Nieobecni—Z Dziejów Społeczności Żydowskiej w Sandomierzu [The Absent: The History of the Jewish Community in Sandomierz] an exhibition at the Regional Museum in Sandomierz, Poland, October 23, 2020–April 2, 2021. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Karolina Gara and Tomisław Giergiel. Sandomierz: Muzeum Okręgowe w Sandomierzu, 199 pp., available at sandomierskiszlakzydowski.pl/galeria.htm Trent, in northern Italy, and Sandomierz, in eastern Poland, are hundreds of miles apart but share a ghastly connection: both…

The Portraitist: Frans Hals and His World by Steven Nadler. University of Chicago Press, 365 pp., $35.00 Frans Hals clearly had an eye for faces, but he doesn’t seem to have been very interested in turning it on himself. Unlike his great contemporary Rembrandt van Rijn, whose some eighty self-portraits comprise a richly inventive visual memoir extending from his young manhood to the year of his death, Hals is generally credited with just two, one of which survives only in copies. The lost original, probably painted in the 1640s when he was in his mid-sixties, appears to be the single occasion on which he devoted a canvas solely to his own features. The other self-portrait is a small image in a work with ostensibly more ambitious aims in view: Officers…

We were sitting on the floor. I started writing as the window darkened and the grass grew bright. By morning, half the trees were submarine. What was it about being young and wanting to write? You said it wasn’t choice, it was dictation. You had to ask. A frog leapt through the cat flap taking refuge by our feet. You knew I had a brother, though we’d only met that night. Each time you forget and remember the experience becomes truer. Like lightning in reverse the fuse blew. I was stirring a pot of dal, your dog Annie asleep on the floor beside me, snoring. We went to a café whose name rhymed with dal, me playing with a small saltshaker, you talking about your brother. He had to go…

To the Editors: One of the curious facts about Virginia Woolf’s writing is that on several occasions she published quite different versions of her novels in the UK and the US. Edward Mendelson [“Life, Death, This Moment of June,” NYR, December 8, 2022] points out that Merve Emre has taken it upon herself to create a version of Mrs. Dalloway that exists nowhere outside Professor Emre’s imagination (but now given concrete form by her publisher, who we have to assume also cares little for Woolf’s own decisions about her work). There are significant textual differences in other Woolf novels, such as, for example, in To the Lighthouse, where the first section (“The Window”) ends: “Yes, you were right. It’s going to be wet to-morrow.” She had not said it, but…