Innholdsfortegnelse for September 21, 2023 i The New York Review of Books

William Dalrymple is a Codirector of the Jaipur Literature Festival and a cohost of the podcast Empire. He is the author of The Company Quartet, a four-volume history of the East India Company whose titles include The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 and, most recently, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. Justin Davidson has been New York magazine’s architecture and classical music critic since 2007. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2002 and is the author of Magnetic City: A Walking Companion to New York. Ariel Dorfman, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Literature at Duke, is the author of the play Death and the Maiden, the poetry collection Voices from the Other Side of Death, and, most recently, the novel The…

Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour translated from the French by Emilie Moorhouse and edited by Emilie Moorhouse and Garrett Caples. City Lights, 217 pp., $22.95 (paper) Aside from the fact that they’re all dead, the women of Surrealism have had a banner couple of years. In 2021 Leonora Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet was reissued by New York Review Books, while her designs for a tarot deck were published in not one but two handsome volumes. In 2022 Meret Oppenheim’s work had its first US exhibition in twenty-five years at the Menil Collection in Houston, and an edition of her complete poems was released earlier this year. Dorothea Tanning had a retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2019, Frida Kahlo at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art in…

Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets by Burkhard Bilger. Random House, 314 pp., $28.99 Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends by Linda Kinstler. PublicAffairs, 282 pp., $30.00 Genealogy is fun, but it has never been an entirely innocent pastime. The establishment (or fabrication) of pedigrees has been essential to the policing of social and racial hierarchies. The Nazis, however, made it a murderous obsession. A banal family record could be a license for advancement or a death warrant. According to the historian Eric Ehrenreich, “It is probably not an overstatement to say that by 1945, aside from the very old and the very young, virtually every Reich citizen, or would-be citizen, had made an ancestral proof at one time or another.” During their…

You are afraid to be touched becauseand that’s a reasonable fear, a woman oncebrushed past me in the aisleor stairs, I’ve repressed the encounterin amber, she said, and I was destroyedAnd in the second dream she was holding the dogback from a mourning dove and over usthe sky had what I can only describe asexposed beams, and she said if he doesget a bird, a squirrel, he doesn’t snap the neckor worry it, just stares at me becauseholds it in the mouth, the tension betweenwhat he has been taught and what he feelsand the word for that gap is The vain travail. It’s the one poem I’veby heart, she said, the way the magicianthe way the uncle finds the coin in your earor you’ve been holding the card this whole…

the tidal forest is the wholepresent tense—the first winter fullmoon in october gossamer overcastthe wind catches—one tree & then the next—a tide that reaches the sky— a desire path—a splitinfinitive—intertidal fricative * form is content—content is form—the onlycommandmentbut there is no shape to days the long border of an evening intertidalnever resolves itself never dissolves never solves for any variable—it is simply stretched beyond recognition or usefulness—a king of nothing& nowhere—but if we want process not product—which we do—thenit will be evening all season & we will stretchinto it * the whelked & jinxed intertidalfurbelows seaweed— a boat neaped—you’ve got to bekidding me I say five times a day waved like the enridged sea—if I could take the sound of you into my mouth I wouldwork double tides— on the…

Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena by James Hankins. Harvard University Press, 430 pp., $55.00 The Sienese political theorist Francesco Patrizi wrote in 1471 that a republic’s strength was in its numbers: a popular government can “see with many eyes, work with many hands, and stride with almost numberless feet.” But whose eyes, whose hands, whose feet were to be involved in the work of governing? A Portuguese visitor to Siena was fined in 1451 for insulting the republic, saying that it was ruled by “grocers, tanners, shoemakers and rustics”—plebs, in a word, who together formed un reggimento di merda (a government of shit). Everyone in fifteenth-century Italy, from shoemakers to princes, had their own ideas about what separated a good government from…

The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky. Europa, 451 pp., $27.00 The high-speed train from Naples to Rome takes a little over an hour and costs about ten euros; you can run up for a breakfast meeting and still make it back in time to pick the kids up from school. In Domenico Starnone’s novels, though, that journey has overtones of danger and myth. Naples, where the writer and many of his principal characters grew up, comes across as a hot-breathed, dragon-like city that keeps its children bound even after they escape. The capital, meanwhile, is a source of laurels and legitimacy, booby-trapped with humiliation. The chasm between the two cities forms the terrain for The House on Via Gemito, the tenth…

In the Act by Rachel Ingalls. Storybook ND, 61 pp., $18.95 Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, with an introduction by Rivka Galchen. New Directions, 111 pp., $13.95 (paper) Binstead’s Safari by Rachel Ingalls. New Directions, 218 pp., $15.95 (paper) No Love Lost: Selected Novellas by Rachel Ingalls, with a foreword by Patricia Lockwood. London: Faber and Faber, 463 pp., £9.99 (paper) It would be easy, if you were a person who read women often but spoke to them rarely, to imagine that contemporary women hate men. Scholars write books and essays about how tragic heterosexuality is; queer writers in and out of the academy pity straight girls, who, in turn, bemoan their fate on social media or in personal essays that go viral there.1 Some go so far as to…

The Fraud by Zadie Smith. Penguin Press, 454 pp., $29.00 I don’t remember much about our day at Stowe, whether it was rainy or dry, where we parked, what the road from Oxford was like. The house was closed, that much I know, but we’d come for the gardens, and today a few keystrokes give me some images I recognize: a footbridge we crossed, a series of so-called temples at which we lingered. That was a kind of joke, “Temple” being the family name of the first Viscount Cobham, who called this eighteenth-century landscape into being. But the only thing that sticks in my mind is the ha-ha, the hidden fence that was designed to preserve an unbroken view, an illusion of pastoral, even as it kept the animals in…

The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel. Riverhead, 278 pp., $28.00 This past spring a science museum in Amsterdam unveiled an unusual exhibit: a giant meatball created with DNA from the woolly mammoth. The work of an Australian cultured-meat company called Vow, it may be the most whimsical of several mammoth revival ventures now underway, most in the US or Russia. Hoping to promote the environmental benefits of lab-grown meat, Vow introduced snippets of the DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin—one of the proteins that creates muscle—into sheep stem cells and grew them into workable quantities of “meat” containing genes of both animals. The process took about two weeks. Thanks to CRISPR gene-editing technology and a flush of new funding, de-extinction efforts are developing so rapidly that they’re (almost) no longer science…

The Few Who Made It To the Editors: In “The Millions We Failed to Save” [NYR, June 22], Ruth Franklin’s otherwise excellent review of the documentary The US and the Holocaust, the author neglected to mention the American government’s official response to the Holocaust: the War Refugee Board (WRB). Following public pressure and urging from parts of his administration, Roosevelt signed an executive order in January 1944 announcing a new policy of the rescue and relief of Jews and other persecuted minorities and creating a new government agency tasked with this responsibility. Over the next seventeen months, the WRB staff—almost all young Treasury Department lawyers encouraged by Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.—saved tens of thousands and aided hundreds of thousands more. They streamlined humanitarian aid to Europe; launched a propaganda warfare…

Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE–400 CE an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, July 21–November 13, 2023; and the National Museum of Korea, Seoul, December 22, 2023–April 14, 2024. Catalog of the exhibition by John Guy. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 343 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) In 2003 Indian archaeologists working on a remote hilltop in the southern state of Telangana uncovered a remarkable early Buddhist monastic complex. Phanigiri, “the snake-hooded hill,” had clearly been one of the most important Buddhist monasteries in India. All around were found spectacular fragments of sculpture, including substantial sections of elaborately carved ceremonial gateways and a torso now judged to be one of the masterworks of Buddhist art. Many of the statues had been…

Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson. Vintage, 197 pp., $16.00 (paper) Music and literature give shape to young people’s identities as they begin to build libraries of their interests. In the late 1970s in the UK, cultural preferences seemed binary: Did you prefer Joni Mitchell or Joan Armatrading? James Baldwin or Jack Kerouac? There was no consensus, but among the cognoscenti, apparently, arguments over whether Ella Fitzgerald or Billie Holiday had the more attractive voice could be settled by judging which of them best demonstrated duende—the ability to transmit a profoundly felt emotion that resonates with the listener. As time goes on young adults refine their lists and sensibilities, and along the way find their own voice, their people, their tribe. But surely there are so many moving parts…

The Philosopher of Palo Alto: Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC, and the Original Internet of Things by John Tinnell. University of Chicago Press, 347 pp., $29.00 Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris. Little, Brown, 708 pp., $36.00 Before California was a place, it was an idea. A rocky island, inhabited by Black women, filled with gold—this was the first California, as imagined in Las Sergas de Esplandián, a popular Spanish novel published in 1510. Some years later, Spanish settlers gave the same name to a section of the Pacific coast. For centuries they thought it, too, was an island. We don’t know for sure whether the first California inspired the second, but it would be fitting. If there were ever a spot on earth…

When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America by Heather Hendershot. University of Chicago Press, 390 pp., $30.00 It is no secret that the news media are in crisis, with troubling implications for American democracy. Jobs for reporters are scarce, partly because local newspapers are fast disappearing; in many communities local government proceeds with no journalistic oversight at all. News has largely migrated from print to cable television and the Web. Until a few years ago, Starbucks sold local and national newspapers at its eight thousand–plus locations in the United States, but it has abandoned the practice for lack of demand. Most young people get the news from social media such as TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. News websites do attract many visitors, and nightly news broadcasts on…

In Familiar Stranger, Stuart Hall’s memoir (written in conversation with Bill Schwarz), which was published in 2017, three years after he died, Hall recalls a crucial sight on a London street in 1951, shortly after he had left Jamaica for Britain to take his place as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. As he passes Paddington Station he sees “a stream of black people spilling out into the London afternoon…too poorly dressed to be tourists.” “Who were they,” he asks, “and what were they doing here?” It turns out they were the “advance guard” of the “black Caribbean, post-war, post-Windrush migration” that would transform the face of Britain. But the young black student feels no affiliation with these migrants who have arrived in the UK from a part of the world…