Innholdsfortegnelse for April 6, 2023 i The New York Review of Books

Christopher de Bellaigue’s most recent book is The Lion House. Alejandro Chacoff is the author of Apátridas, a novel, and the Literary Editor of piauí magazine. He is based in Rio de Janeiro. Andrea Cohen’s latest book of poems is Everything. Her next collection, The Sorrow Apartments, will be published in 2024. James Fenton is a British poet and literary critic. From 1994 until 1999 he was Oxford Professor of Poetry; in 2015 he was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize. He is the author of School of Genius: A History of the Royal Academy of Arts and, most recently, Yellow Tulips: Poems, 1968–2011. Martin Filler’s latest book is Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume III: From Antoni Gaudí to Maya Lin, a collection of his writing on architecture in these pages.…

One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World by Michael Frank, with illustrations by Maira Kalman. Avid Reader, 227 pp., $28.00 One evening in 2015, the writer Michael Frank rushed in late to a lecture at the Casa Italiana, the home of New York University’s Department of Italian Studies in Greenwich Village. As he plopped into the sole remaining seat around a long table, the elegant older woman next to him asked, in a thick Italian accent, “Where are you coming from that you’re in such a hurry?” A French lesson, he replied. She followed with two more questions: “Might I ask why you are studying French?” and then, “Are you interested in knowing how French served me in my life?” (Evidently the Casa Italiana observed…

The lilies above the girls in white look like girls in white,dancing. The girls hang paper lanterns in the garden, carefulwith the candles inside. They watch the small flames flicker, kept safefrom the drifting wind by white and red paper.The sky is cooling; the gnats and flies have grown stillamong the flowers. The girls lower their faces toward the lanterns.Nothing else moves, although the dancing lilies pretend to.In the fading sunlight, every color appears bluish,like a universal shadow, but the pink rosesare stubborn. The pink roses stay pinkeven in the dark.…

English Garden Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan. London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 392 pp., $40.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) What counts as eccentric in the garden, and what counts as a folly? As a child I used to be taken on Sunday walks to the Needle’s Eye in Wentworth, South Yorkshire, a kind of sharp pyramid of stone some forty-five feet tall and pierced by an arched passage. It was erected in the early eighteenth century by the Second Marquess of Rockingham, who wanted to make good on a bet that he could drive a coach-and-four through the eye of a needle. If he could do that, the implication was, it shouldn’t be hard for him,…

John Bronzina, Ithink you could save me.You have green eyesand have completedyour training for CPRfor children and adults.John, I am in the lattercategory, and thoughmy breathing is finenow, things change rapidly.You know this because youhave a card for emergencyroadside service. John,it is expired. Youhave a dental appointmentin six days. Don’tmiss it. You havecredit cards and debitcards and what you doat the Lemming Emporiumis your business. But Iwonder: What were you doingwhen you lost that wallet?When I found it, I’d stoppedmy car on Ocean View to lookat a house being built on stilts.It’s behind a fence that saysKEEP OUT. Nearby there’s a pileof beer cans and I wonderif you had somethingto do with that. Maybeyou sat back under the scrubpines getting drunk with friendsor on your own. Maybe youwere imagining you…

an argument arosewhat is that loud buzzing in the skyas if from an old abandonedgarden behind the houseon the market square—an airplane or a helicopter?—a helicopter!—no, an airplane!—no, a helicopter!—yes, an airplane!—yes, a helicopter! and thenso that there would be no two ways about ita helicopter peeked in through the windowand decided the argument now one can peacefullygo walk in the parkand tell the starlingsapartfrom the thrushes…

The Complete Eightball: Issues 1–18 by Daniel Clowes. Fantagraphics, 528 pp., $49.99 (paper) 1. The comic book really is a perfect consumer item. It’s portable, flexible, cheap enough to be disposable, durable enough to last several lifetimes with proper archival care, lightweight, colorful and simple (no packaging or shrink-wrap required). Think in terms of the entire package, the structural cohesion of every component (from page numbers to indicia, etc.) —“To the Young Cartoonist,” Modern Cartoonist (1997) In 1989 a two-dollar comic book called Eightball debuted with the aggressive subtitle “An Orgy of Spite, Vengeance, Hopelessness, Despair and Sexual Perversion.” True to the letter, the five vices suffuse its thirty-two black-and-white pages. In the surreal opener, “Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron,” our hero gets blindsided by a creepy bondage…

Che khov Becomes Che khov: The Emergence of a Literary Genius: 1886–1887 by Bob Blaisdell. Pegasus, 444 pp., $29.95 What makes Chekhov stories so wonderful? When did the humorous anecdotes he wrote for money become great art? And at what point did Chekhov appreciate his talent? Bob Blaisdell’s new book, Che khov Becomes Che khov, focuses on the years when it became evident, first to others and then to Chekhov himself, that a literary genius had emerged. How straightforward Chekhov stories seem, and yet how strangely moving. Like the soul as he understood it, they appear simple but are profoundly mysterious. In her splendid book Reading Che khov (2001), Janet Malcolm stresses how, for him, each person’s soul harbors a secret accessible to no one else. She quotes the passage…

The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid. Riverhead, 180 pp., $26.00 Of the South Asian authors of his generation, none has staked a bolder claim to being a “world writer” than the Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid. Starting with his second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), his books have unhesitatingly tackled think-tank-worthy international subjects such as September 11, economic growth, and the migrant crisis, using his home country as a backdrop rather than a subject in itself. In Hamid’s work you rarely find direct references to Pakistani landmarks or historical events; Islam’s inner controversies are elided. This is generally not a problem, because Hamid is a tireless renovator of the Anglophone South Asian novel. Eschewing the genre’s traditional forms—the family drama, the historical saga, the political doorstopper—he has favored sleek, formally…

To the Editors: I read John J. Lennon’s review of Sarah Weinman’s book Scoundrel [“Peddling Darkness,” NYR, March 9, 2023] with great interest, being the son of one of the principals in the story, the editor Sophie Wilkins. He states, at one point, that he suspects that I must now regret having turned over to the author the letters from Edgar Smith to my mother. I certainly cooperated with Sarah Weinman, thinking that it was a story that deserved to be told and feeling that there was no way I could stop it, but I did not give Sarah any letters. I had given all my mother’s letters to Butler Library at Columbia University in 2003 after her death; she corresponded with hundreds of people in the literary world and…

The Diaries by Franz Kafka, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin. Schocken, 670 pp., $45.00 Kafka wrote bedtime stories in the sense that he wrote about the terrifying things that might happen in bed. No sooner has the father in “The Judgment” pulled the covers high over his shoulders than he condemns his son to death by drowning; the doctor in “A Country Doctor” is tucked in by the villagers beside a patient with a worm-ridden wound in his side; the huge stoker in “The Stoker” suggests to Karl, lost in the bowels of the ship, that he stretch himself out on the bunk because “you’ll have more room there.” K. in The Trial is in bed when they come to arrest him, and Gregor Samsa in “The Metamorphosis”…

The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis. Knopf, 594 pp., $30.00 Bret Easton Ellis first saw the Paul Schrader film American Gigolo in February 1980, the month it opened, when he was fifteen years old. He has since seen it more than thirty-five times. “Looking back,” he wrote in the essay collection White (2019), “the impact American Gigolo had on me is impossible to tally.” Many of us were permanently marked by the culture we consumed at fifteen—or ennobled, or enlarged, in some cases even perverted or ruined, if we were unlucky or foolish enough to imprint on the wrong object. What American Gigolo handed Ellis was a loaded sensibility. It had to do with masculinity and sex and Los Angeles and the way that Richard Gere’s sad, blank, beautiful Julian…

Black and Female by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Graywolf, 158 pp., $23.00 Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Graywolf, 298 pp., $16.00 (paper) The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Graywolf, 302 pp., $16.00 (paper) This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Graywolf, 284 pp., $16.00 (paper) The mental derangement of colonialism was Doris Lessing’s first subject. In her early stories, set in Southern Rhodesia, where she grew up nearly a century ago, racism is learned behavior. The white child is taught to take black people for granted. They are as remote as rocks. Except that they aren’t. As white children become socially conscious, white mothers rush to keep them from playing with black children. For a white youth to accept the brutal hypocrisies of the way things are is a rite of passage.…

Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City by Lucy Sante, with photographs by Tim Davis. The Experiment, 197 pp., $24.95 We are living, as we know, through a global water crisis. Climate change has brought droughts to large areas and floods to others; water scarcity has led to the privatization of this precious commodity in some countries, and with it an increased economic burden on the poor; factory runoff and aging lead pipes contaminate drinking water; regions and nations fight over the allocation of river rights, as do agricultural and urban interests. Given the complexity of land use and water politics, it seems almost a miracle that residents of New York City can rely on a dependable stream of clean, good-tasting water in…

Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson. Princeton University Press, 2 volumes, 1,913 pp., $120.00 The two volumes of Poems by W. H. Auden (edited by Edward Mendelson, his tireless literary executor) contain all the poems that he published, submitted for publication, or sent to friends for “posthumous” publication from 1927 until his death in 1973, along with Mendelson’s scrupulous textual notes. The books run, in total, to almost two thousand pages and come seven years after the sixth and final volume of Prose, which gathered the essays, reviews, and autobiography.1 Mendelson edited all of them—publishing the first volume of Auden’s prose (1926–1938) back in 1997—and wrote the definitive and fulsome critical biographies Early Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1999). Mendelson has been studying, explicating, and collating Auden’s…