Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2, 2023 i The New York Review of Books

1 Published on the occasion of Avedon 100, a recent exhibition at Gagosian, New York, organized in commemoration of the centenary of Richard Avedon’s birth, this book celebrates his enduring influence on photography and makes clear his profound impact on visual culture worldwide. It features a foreword by Larry Gagosian and essays by Derek Blasberg, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, and Jake Skeets; over 275 illustrations, including documentary images of Avedon working behind the scenes; and statements by cultural figures invited to select a work by Avedon that is significant to them, including Hilton Als, Naomi Campbell, Elton John, Spike Lee, Sally Mann, Polly Mellen, Kate Moss, Chloë Sevigny, Taryn Simon, Christy Turlington, and Jonas Wood. Softcover, 318 pages, $100 USD Use code NYRB20 for 20% off book orders of $60 or…

Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961): Poetry Is Everything an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, May 26–September 24, 2023 The Blaise Cendrars show at the Morgan may have been contained in a space about the size of a studio apartment, but it seemed much larger, because like its subject it pointed in so many different directions at once. Cendrars was a poet who was also involved, in various capacities, with painting, music, film, photography, and even advertising. As the curator, Sheelagh Bevan, wrote in a wall text, he “never aligned himself with a single school of art, though his career was intertwined with figures tied to Cubism, Orphism, Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism.” Cendrars was a lightning rod for all the artistic currents that blew through Paris between about…

Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante, translated from the Italian by Jenny McPhee. New York Review Books, 775 pp., $24.95 (paper) The English-speaking world isn’t all that familiar with the work of Elsa Morante, but in her native Italy she became more famous than her very famous husband, Alberto Moravia. Her writing won important prizes—and yet there seems never to have been any consensus of opinion about it. Lies and Sorcery is the second, and very welcome, English translation of her first novel, Menzogna e sortilegio, originally published in 1948—an enveloping tumult of a book whose forcefulness and utter oddness throw some light on the noisy discord of responses to her work. Let’s say (it’s an undemanding hypothesis, anyhow) that novels generally set themselves in motion with a problem that…

Simon Callow is an English actor and director who has written about Richard Wagner, Charles Dickens, Charles Laughton, and Oscar Wilde. His most recent book, with Derry Moore, is London’s Great Theatres. The fourth and final volume of his biography of Orson Welles will be published next year. Anne Carson was born in Canada and now lives partly in Iceland. Wrong Norma, a new collection of her verse and prose, will be published in February. Andrea Cohen’s latest book of poems is Everything. Her next collection, The Sorrow Apartments, will be published next year. Mark Danner is the author of Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War and The Massacre at El Mozote, among other books. He holds the Class of 1961 Distinguished Chair at the University of California at Berkeley…

Left Is Not Woke by Susan Neiman. Polity, 154 pp., $25.00 For almost all of its thirty-year duration, it seemed quite natural to think of the conflict in Northern Ireland, unfolding just a few dozen miles away from my hometown of Dublin, as an anachronism. The local joke was that when planes landed at Belfast airport, the pilot announced, “Welcome to Belfast. Put your watches back one hour and three hundred years.” This was part of the fascination for outsiders of what was otherwise a rather intimate catastrophe. The Troubles seemed a strange temporal regression, a rip in the fabric of European history through which the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had entered into the enlightened, secular present. White Christians who spoke the same language, lived cheek…

I always think of Pauline goingdown the stairs I always holdon thinking how going downshe must have tripped shewas always going fast afterall we called her the Flashand when her husbandfound her it didn’t matterthat he was an ER doc hemight as well have been a postdoc in art history he might aswell have been a windowwasher or mortician thereshe was at the bottomof the stairs with that bustedsack of onions sweet onionsshe’d have sliced and criedover and eaten raw with a littlesalt and she’d have handedyou a slice like a sliverof moon and if youwere in a darktime she’d havesaid hey friend holdon…

Bourbon and scrambled eggs for breakfastUpstairs in their dowdy suite at the old Boston RitzAs guests of Brahmin old-fart trusteesOf the Harvard Advocate, 1955 or maybe 1956. I was the magazine’s Pegasus, the literary editor.I knew these sophisticates were hicks.I was from St. Louis—nineteen years old.Ezra Pound was my movie star. Chintz daylight filled the roomAnd the deep mahogany bourbon we sipped.Edible scrambled eggsWe ate while we got ripped. We children wore the beautiful bourbonLike a beautiful turban.…

Does it havechlorophyll or notif it has.Chlorophyll does ithave anythingbut twisted metalvisible abovethe waterline ornot if.Anything buttwisted metal isvisible above thewaterline are itsangles in a closedangle rootor not if its anglesare in a closedangle.Root does it shine ifit shines mightyou find Dark Agebone fragmentswithin onehundred miles ornot. IfyoufindDark Age bonefragments withinone hundred milesis it.A sad irony or notif it is a sad ironydoes that implysecondary heatfeelings in additionto rats chuckling.All night in thetwisted metal ornot if it does implysecondary.Heat feelings dothey harrow eventhe keenest mindseven. Thejudges of the dead.If they do notharrow.Even the keenestminds even thejudges of the deadis.There a manifestoof feeble love andbitter love andwas it paid forwith bootyor if not paid forwith booty is it awalnut.If it was a walnut letit bare a coaxing bosom.And.By God.Stop the bells…

Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book by Emma Smith. Oxford University Press, 379 pp., $26.95 Shakespeare’s Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare by Chris Laoutaris. Pegasus, 516 pp., $35.00 Shakespeare’s Syndicate: The First Folio, Its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade by Ben Higgins. Oxford University Press, 291 pp., $95.00 In late 1623, when the first printed copies of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies were presented to browsers in the bookstalls of St. Paul’s Churchyard, Sir Edward Dering bought two for a pound apiece—about $240 in today’s dollars, and as much as a London laborer might make in a year. (Dering also spent half a pound on a pair of stockings and bought a shilling’s worth of marmalade.) In…

The Pole by J. M. Coetzee. Liveright, 167 pp., $26.00 The Pole is a seventy-two-year-old pianist named Witold Walczykiewicz, a last name that his hosts in Barcelona cannot pronounce; so “call me Witold,” as he tells them over a postconcert dinner. He has huge hands and “a chest that seems to burst out of his jacket”; his hair is “extravagantly white”; but he moves more easily than many men his age, and his “long, lugubrious face” and “faded blue eyes” recall those of the actor Max von Sydow. Witold records for Deutsche Grammophon and specializes, inevitably, in the work of his countryman Chopin. Only it’s Chopin with a difference, and not to everyone’s taste. His version is neither Romantic nor Modernist, neither intimate nor subtle: a composer who offers no…

The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life by Clare Carlisle. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 369 pp., $30.00 A savage, drunk, bullying husband (a pillar of his society) who has abused his wife and pushed her out of doors in her nightgown and bare feet on an icy winter night is having a terminal attack of delirium tremens. He thinks she’s coming at him in the form of giant snakes: “Let me go, let me go,” he said in a loud, hoarse whisper; “she’s coming….she’s cold …. she’s dead …. she’ll strangle me with her black hair. Ah!” he shrieked aloud, “her hair is all serpents …. they’re black serpents….they hiss….they hiss …. let me go …. let me go …. she wants to drag me with her cold arms ….…

The sun smote him by night. He was writing a letter to his father in ENGLAND: “Dear… ” the stars mirrored what he wrote but kept their distance. He shook his jam jar of fireflies blinky blinks and heard heavy cannonade blasting from the direction of HEREIRA. Bursting shells danced on the ridges behind ATAWINEH REDOUBT. He remembered that BELLAM was BETHLEHEM pitching between alms and lust. But he couldn’t remember if Jesus was of NAZARETH or of BETHLEHEM or of GALILEE. A lateral skanking natty dread at the bus depot in GOLDEN GROVE told the boy that Jesus was of no place but here and touched his chest. It was around this time No. 2292 Pte. Herbert Morris aged 17 was executed for desertion by firing squad composed of…

Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces by Patrick Mackie. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 360 pp., $30.00 Biographies of composers are a relatively recent genre; those of Mozart were among the first examples. Though his life was not as sensational as that of Gesualdo, for example, who murdered his wife, Mozart was, from his early years, an international celebrity whose very personality posed questions beyond the eternal riddle of creativity. How could a mere child—he started performing publicly on the clavichord at the age of six—be so astoundingly versatile? As he toured Europe, going from court to court and salon to salon with his father, Leopold, and his older sister, Maria Anna—a talented musician as well—the delightful little boy in his nattily embroidered outfits enchanted his listeners,…

The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology by Nita A. Farahany. St. Martin’s, 277 pp., $29.99 Reading Our Minds: The Rise of Big Data Psychiatry by Daniel Barron. Columbia Global Reports, 150 pp., $15.99 (paper) This past June The Wall Street Journal ran a piece with the headline “Magic Mushrooms. LSD. Ketamine. The Drugs That Power Silicon Valley.” Though titillating, it should not have been surprising. For years, the tech elite’s predilection for brain hacking has been part of their mystique; more recently, Elon Musk touted ketamine as a better antidepressant than anything in Big Pharma’s armamentarium. Since the 2018 publication of Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind and its subsequent Netflix adaptation, conversations about psychedelics have gone mainstream. So…

The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime by Nicholas L. Syrett. New Press, 336 pp., $29.99 Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist by Jennifer Wright. Hachette, 334 pp., $30.00 On a gloomy New England afternoon last winter, I climbed the stairs of the Adams Free Library, a grand Beaux Arts building in the Berkshires, to join in a historical commemoration. The venue was itself historic, a designated Civil War Memorial, its second floor originally the meeting hall for Post 126 of the Grand Army of the Republic, the association of Union veterans of Adams, Massachusetts. The post’s high-backed chairs are still on display, along with flags, swords, and…

My first glimpse of Colombia was in the summer of 1973. I’d been living in New York City and was on my way to Chile, to a promised scholarship at a university in Santiago. Some New York friends put me in touch with an Orthodox rabbi, an enthusiast of world revolution with a sideline as a purveyor of slightly dodgy plane tickets. Over a long afternoon, the rabbi and I planned an itinerary that, compared to a direct flight from New York to Santiago, would save me some much-needed dollars. Or so I was assured. After a stopover in Miami, I’d fly to the Colombian coastal city of Santa Marta; from there a train would bear me into the gray heights of the capital, Bogotá, where I’d board a third…

The Villa Farnesina: Palace of Venus in Renaissance Rome by James Grantham Turner. Cambridge University Press, 501 pp., $125.00 Few of Rome’s marvels are more marvelous than the Villa Farnesina, the riverside villa built in the early sixteenth century for the Tuscan banker Agostino Chigi, who commissioned this enigmatic retreat at the peak of a dazzling career. The Italian merchants of the Middle Ages were the most advanced in Europe, but Chigi used recognizably modern economic methods to connect finance, culture, and statecraft on an international scale. Born in 1466 as the eldest son of Mariano Chigi, a wealthy banker from Siena involved in Vatican finance and Tuscan politics, he moved to Rome around 1487 as a permanent expatriate, working within a tight-knit group of Tuscan “merchants following the Roman…