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

Gregory Afinogenov teaches history at Georgetown. His most recent book, Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power, was published in 2020. Natalie Angier is a Pulitzer Prize–winning science columnist for The New York Times. She is the author of The Beauty of the Beastly: New Views on the Nature of Life, among other books. Philip Clark’s biography of Dave Brubeck, A Life in Time, was published in 2020, and he is currently working on Sound and the City, a sonic history of New York. He won the Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writer’s Award in 2022. Suzy Hansen is the author of Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World. Michael Hofmann is a poet and translator from the German. He…

The Short End of the Sonnenallee by Thomas Brussig, translated from the German by Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson, with an introduction by Jonathan Franzen. Picador, 137 pp., $16.00 (paper) It’s occurred to me from time to time that the experience of Hell would be like going around a world’s fair of national humor. In an especially bleak place, there would be German humor. This would be chiefly the inflicting of pain, toilets, and schadenfreude. Young man, remorseless masturbator, slips on some ejaculate, falls down a stairwell, breaks both his arms and legs, and newly immobilized (and infantilized) must have his bottom wiped by his mother. That kind of thing. (The instance is from Thomas Brussig’s novel Heroes Like Us.) Oh, reader, how I guffawed. The German weekly Der Spiegel, not…

Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris by Alicia Foster. Thames and Hudson, 272 pp., $39.95 Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris an exhibition at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, England, May 13–October 8, 2023 In one painting, a wicker chair stands at an angle by a window, below a sloping attic roof. Lace curtains hang to the ground, the light filtering through; a parasol, a shawl, and a bunch of flowers on the table suggest a trip to the exterior that we cannot see. In a second work, painted like the first between 1907 and 1909, the viewpoint is slightly farther back. There is more space in the room and the window is open—or rather half open, revealing the green of trees outside. A coat…

When my father—a shy, stern man—Died, his features were unrelenting.I’d barely known my mother.I was nearing twenty. So I took up writing … but I keptHearing that demon TruthWhistling over my efforts: “These effusions,My dear boy… really… have you not done?” I hadn’t the heart to get married, feelingFor myself only bitter contempt.And they proved real sticklers—in-Flexible—however much they seemed to be in ecstasy! Which is why I gad about, dither, somehowSurvive, a weather vane buffeted by the thirty-six seasons,Too many for me to cope with…. Take heed, I say,Of my dismal example, O youth of today! —Jules Laforgue (translated from the French by Mark Ford)…

Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace by Alexander Mikaberidze. Oxford University Press, 789 pp., $34.95 Military history written for a general audience is a predictable genre. When you purchase a fat biography of a hero of the Napoleonic Wars, you know exactly what to expect: paragraphs about how such-and-such committed his reserves and pushed so-and-so back against the river, paintings of people in gold braid, and above all lots and lots of maps with little boxes and arrows. (The legend is rarely provided, but it is assumed you know that blank or x-ed boxes represent infantry, boxes divided diagonally represent cavalry, and artillery units are tiny stylized cannons.) It can be hard to remember that each of those boxes contains hundreds of individual lives, that within the slender arc…

To the Editors: Joshua Leifer [“Whose Constitution, Whose Democracy?,” NYR, May 11] writes that in the 1947–1948 period, “Zionist forces were fighting a war of expulsion” against “the Palestinians.” This is not inaccurate—except that omission sometimes is inaccuracy. The 1948 Arab-Israeli War began on May 15, 1948—the day after Israel declared independence—when Egypt bombed Tel Aviv and five Arab armies invaded Israel. Their goal was not a Palestinian state (which the partition plan sought to establish), and certainly not a binational one. Their goal, openly and proudly proclaimed, was to crush the institutions of the Yishuv and kill the people who built it. Abd al-Rahman Azzam Pasha, head of the Arab League, promised that the coming invasion would be a “war of extermination”—this, less than three years after the last…

Nature loves to hide—stopping on a trailI spot a horned lizard that, stilled near my shoesagainst the rubbleof sandstone and quartz, blends in; heading uphillI mark a buddingpincushion cactus and tips of piñonsgreener after rain—the green of trinitite holds a trace of the tower;an observer remarkedthe heat at twelve miles— before I reach the runof pinecones down a slopea coyote, head turned, tail bobbing, traverses ahead—was like openinga 500-degree oven— below the overlook I stopwhere someone setrocks in a semicircle, and cupping my hands overinvisible flames,gaze up at black black stars. —Arthur Sze…

Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War by Phil Klay. Penguin Press, 252 pp., $27.00 Missionaries by Phil Klay. Penguin, 407 pp., $18.00 (paper) The act of killing people was once taken so seriously, Phil Klay writes in Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War, that after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, a Penitential Ordinance was imposed on Norman knights: “Anyone who knows that he killed a man in the great battle must do penance for one year for each man that he killed.” Klay, a forty-yearold veteran of the war in Iraq, considers such rituals beneficial not only for the psychological health of soldiers but also for their communities, because after a war the traumatized perpetrators “must reconstruct a view of faith,…

Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America by Brendan Ballou. PublicAffairs, 353 pp., $30.00 These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner. Simon and Schuster, 383 pp., $30.00 In February 1897 a New York City lawyer named Bradley Martin and his wife, Cornelia, decided to host a costume ball at the Waldorf Hotel. New York had been staggering economically since a national depression began in 1893, and the Martins conceived of their soiree as a form of trickle-down economics: they would spend lavishly on food and labor, promise to hire local musicians, and issue invitations not long before the event, so women would have to order costumes from New York dressmakers rather than from Paris. Rarely has a social event nominally for a…

At your parents’ your daughtercut angels out of paper plates. Angels have paper wings so they can flyup to God, but no one believes in thatgod anymore. Now god iswhatever Blake said. What would an updated angel look like?Someone screaming TREAT ME BETTER The angels stood on their owneach in a side stretch, a play on graceasymptotes make, the beautiful approachthat follows a line it will neither reachnor run parallel to, and the new angelsdon’t laugh, they encourage you. —Jessica Laser…

Chuck Berry: An American Life by RJ Smith. Hachette, 415 pp., $32.00 In 1959 the guitarist Chuck Berry plucked a young girl off the streets of Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican town across the border from El Paso, Texas. Janice Escalanti was fourteen and had been making money as a sex worker. Berry later claimed that he had pitied Escalanti and wanted to help her, offering her a job as a hatcheck assistant at the nightclub he had recently opened in his hometown of St. Louis. Had it ended there, everybody involved would have been saved a lot of trouble. Instead, Berry, by now a rich and successful musician, had become infatuated with Escalanti. If she wanted to take the job, he told her, she needed to leave town with him…

Gray Area To the Editors: In Anahid Nersessian’s review “Poems to Wake the Corpses” [NYR, September 21], I was surprised to read her insinuation that Joyce Mansour’s use of the French word nègres in a poem first published in 1955 might indicate the author’s hateful and racist attitude, and that my use of the word “blacks” hides these intentions. When making this point, Nersessian fails to consider the poem and context in which Mansour uses the word: Cry little manYour boat is for saleYour wife is soldAnd the fresh milk of your cow Red with the blood of blacksMakes your children pissTheir hate. In 1955 African and Asian colonies were demanding and achieving independence. The Paris Surrealists were staunchly antifascist and anticolonialist, and the movement’s founder André Breton promptly expelled Salvador…

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz. Liveright, 272 pp., $28.95 One of my favorite novels is by Compton Mackenzie, a Scottish writer known today, if he is known at all, for his whimsically comic Whisky Galore (1947) and his ambitious early novel Sinister Street (1913). The one I love, however, is Extraordinary Women: Theme and Variations (1928), a satirical roman à clef about the sapphic adventures of the unorthodox and eccentric inhabitants of an island modeled after Capri during World War I. After Sappho, a novel by Selby Wynn Schwartz that was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, is many things, none of them satirical, but I kept thinking of the title of Mackenzie’s book as I read it. The basic story of After Sappho is both simple and engaging:…

The Alice was created in 2013 by the late Joan K. Davidson as an annual award for the exemplary publication of an illustrated book. The $25,000 Alice award is administered by Furthermore grants in publishing, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund. Books shortlisted for the award receive $5,000. Futhermo pavides philanthropic funding for nonfiction books concerning the t history and the mural and buit environment Submissions for the Alice open 1 January and close 1 April 2024 and are made at www.furthermore.org 2023: Jewish Museum New York: 1962-1964 2022: Alphawood Foundation Reconstructing the Garrick: Adler & Sullivan’s Lost Masterpiece 2021: University of Chicago Press Strata: William Smith’s Geological Maps 2020: University of California Press Infinite Cities: A Trilogy of Atlase San Francisco, New Orleans, New York 2019: Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art Southbound: Photographs…

The Love of Singular Men by Victor Heringer, translated from the Portuguese by James Young. New Directions, 180 pp., $15.95 (paper) What’s the point of a story if you already know how it ends? What about a life—why go to the trouble? “I was born posthumously,” claims Camilo, the narrator of The Love of Singular Men, a novel by the Brazilian writer Victor Heringer. “I’ve always believed I didn’t come into the world to be, but to have been, to have done.” Camilo is a lonely, wistful man, middle-aged and ailing, ready for his inevitable end. He knows how the story goes. The world and everyone in it can be whittled down to a bare predictability: How tedious, people. The artists on TV, in the sci-fi films and mystery dramas, the…