Innholdsfortegnelse for August 17, 2023 i The New York Review of Books

Julian Bell is a painter based in Lewes, England. His latest book, Natural Light: The Art of Adam Elsheimer and the Dawn of Modern Science, was published in June. Joanna Biggs is a Senior Editor at Harper’s Magazine and the author of A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again, which was published in May. Clare Bucknell is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Her book about the social history of poetry anthologies, The Treasuries, was published in February. Adom Getachew is a Professor of Political Science and of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination and the coeditor, with Jennifer Pitts, of W. E. B. Du Bois: International Thought. Peter…

Pale syllables driftthrough the ear, reticulateand mercurial as moonlight’s ladderglitching across the water:skeletal rigging of a doomed schoonercrewed by the damned, the phantomlace of mermaids who have evanesced tobone-white spindrift, foamscudding leeward; un- canny descant ofwhales braiding down the spiralFibonacci stair- case of the hollowednautilus; sea dingle ofthe eldritch sea witch, her garden of stingsand fleshy polyps crisscrossedwith neon wiggles, the trireme’s openrib cage spilling amphoraecheckered with coin light; or do they involve,instead, the waterlogged soulsof drowned migrants locked in the rust bucket’svomitous hold—mothers andminors, cohort of seventeen-year-oldsheld for ransom by smugglerstill families paid four thousand a headfor their sons’ passage to no-where, the deepest trench off sandy Pylos,to be chum, sea-worm mumbled,queasy shades thridding wakes of superyachtsand ferryboats sardined withred blistered tourists? Yet they’re real: frayed websof nylon…

It was all so Orfeothe other night.When the face you carryis not your ownand the history in thisis a history ofhaunted ground.The world is a veil.Its effects totalthe imagination.What have I been doingwithout meall this time?Don’t know ifI want to anymore.I wonder distanceand its discontents.I trouble distancenevertheless.The poet is abuzz.The poet becomesa bug in air.How did I lose youbetween the rugon my floor andthe sun settingout the window,between the radiatorand a duskykaleidoscopic light?To wander that lightingenuous before dark.To wonder the beautifulso close to death.Where do you gowhen I don’t see you?Or who am I whenyou’re not around?…

Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to Be Seen by Gregory J. Gbur. Yale University Press, 280 pp., $30.00 Transparency: The Material History of an Idea by Daniel Jütte. Yale University Press, 502 pp., $45.00 Some twenty years ago the radio program This American Life asked listeners which of two superpowers they would choose: flight or invisibility. These are “two of the superpowers which have fascinated humans since antiquity,” said the host, Ira Glass. It was a test of character and a probe of the zeitgeist. The humorist and actor John Hodgman explained that he had been asking people this question for years at meetings and dinner parties, and that their choice revealed primal desires and unconscious fears. He was disappointed that no one wanted to use their…

Free Elizabeth Tsurkov! To the Editors: In late March Elizabeth Tsurkov, a thirty-six-year-old Israeli-Russian researcher and doctoral student at Princeton University, was kidnapped in Baghdad by an Iraqi Shiite militia close to the Iranian regime. As far as we know, she is still being held in Iraq, although reportedly there have been attempts to take her to Iran. As an academic who works on the Middle East, I’ve crossed paths with Liza before. I’ve never met anyone who knows her and doesn’t have words of praise for her. She is fiercely intelligent, daringly courageous, and unmistakably kind. Many researchers affiliated with Western institutions look down subtly on the Middle Eastern people and cultures they’ve made a career of studying. They refuse to learn our languages and shy away from meeting…

Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin. Simon and Schuster, 418 pp., $29.99 Ronald Reagan’s pronouncement, in his first inaugural address in 1981, that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” marked a signal moment in what has become the most successful political counterrevolution in modern American history. Having won a smashing electoral victory, Reagan acted as if he were the latter-day inverse of his long-ago political hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Summoning the American people to “a rendezvous with destiny”—a line he had shamelessly filched from FDR in the 1964 speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign that established him as the Republican right wing’s future leader—and pretending that the stubborn stagflation of the 1970s was a crisis of…

I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be: A Memoir in Eight Lives by Colin Grant. London: Jonathan Cape, 241 pp., £18.99 In 1987 Maya Angelou delivered a poetry performance to a packed theater in Lewisham, South London. The theme of the evening was love—“romantic love, agape love, sensual love, familial love, and self-love”—but also what she called “love for what might seem to be unlovable.” Angelou was thinking of how some people felt toward their Black forebears who had suffered degradation, who had been forced to make a show of their subservience just to survive. “You all know that Black Americans for centuries were obliged to laugh when they weren’t tickled and to scratch when they didn’t itch,” she told the audience. “And those gestures have come down to…

Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice by Cristina Rivera Garza. Hogarth, 305 pp., $28.00 I was telling a chatbot I was feeling sad the other day and it asked to change the subject. I was hurt, but I also understood—there is only so much of another person’s grief even an auto-regressive language model can take. There are many things said about mourning: that it comes in waves, that you have to let your life grow around it, that it is the price we pay for love. All true. But the experience is unruly. You might find yourself talking to chatbots; you might find yourself programming one to speak to you as your beloved once did, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported a thirty-three-year-old Canadian did in order to…

The Illiterate by Ágota Kristóf, translated from the French by Nina Bogin, with an introduction by Helen Oyeyemi and an afterword by Gabriel Josipovici. New Directions, 68 pp., $13.95 (paper) The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie: Three Novels by Ágota Kristóf, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan, David Watson, and Marc Romano. Grove, 478 pp., $20.00 (paper) Collected Plays by Ágota Kristóf, translated from the French by Bart Smet. Oberon/Bloomsbury, 215 pp., $29.95 (paper) Years ago, when assigning my graduate students Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook (1986)—a hair-raising novel told from the perspective of identical twin boys in an unnamed war-torn country—I’d joke that they shouldn’t confuse it with the identically titled Nicholas Sparks best seller. It was fun to imagine one of them renting the film adaptation…

Information Desk: An Epic by Robyn Schiff. Penguin, 125 pp., $20.00 (paper) Pity the American cockroach. Though it is the largest of cockroach species (averaging about 1.6 inches long), is one of the quickest insects on its feet, and can fly when it reaches maturity, it is mostly harmless and hapless. Also misnamed: native to Africa and the Middle East, it arrived on our shores in the seventeenth century thanks to the slave trade. When it encounters the emerald cockroach wasp—also known as the jewel wasp—it is stung, stupefied, and dragged to a burrow, where the wasp lays eggs on its body and then inters it. Over the course of a few days the hatched larvae eat their way through the living host to its internal organs, when it finally…