Innholdsfortegnelse for December 7, 2023 i The New York Review of Books

Nitin K. Ahuja is an Associate Professor in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the University of Pennsylvania. Edward Chancellor ’s most recent book is The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest. Caleb Crain is the author of the novels Necessary Errors and Overthrow and the critical study American Sympathy. Aminatta Forna ’s books include the memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water, four novels, and the essay collection The Window Seat. She is Director of the Lannan Center at Georgetown. Adam Hochschild ’s latest book, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, was published last year. Julia Kornberg ’s first novel, Atomizado Berlín, will be published in English next year. Perry Link is Chancellorial Chair for Teaching Across Disciplines at the…

When I told you the crab on the beach was dead you asked me what’sdead I said This is his shellbut you must have heard soul a yearlong misunderstandinga summer later unable to sleep you said No, you told me the body’s the part that goes,the soul stays. And I said No, you have it backwards, the shell staysand becomes the beach again. I waited for you to ask after the soul, where the crab goes. Practiced in my head an inconsolable hourI don’t know or No- where, scraping my mortal voice like bright meatwhen suddenly you shot up from the covers done crying. Sothe going is forever?…

War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated from the German by Greg Nissan. New Directions/Isolarii, 137 pp., $16.95 (paper) In a recurring dream, I discover that my apartment has a room I’ve never noticed before. It’s fully decorated, mysteriously forgotten. Depending on my mood that night, it’s either heaped in dust or sparkling clean. Delight collides with regret. How could I overlook an entire room? How did I neglect so much extra space? The astonishment has been especially piquant when in waking life I lived in a studio apartment. This is a dream about possibility, but also about the fear of missing what’s close enough to touch—of overlooking what rightfully belongs to you, at least until your lease is up. Only recently did I learn that this is a standard-issue dream,…

NEW TRANSLATIONS FROM nryb CLASSICS LIES AND SORCERY Elsa Morante Translated from the Italian by Jenny McPhee “What made this door-stopper of an Italian soap opera feel like great literature to large numbers of sophisticated readers 75 years ago? The same thing that makes it wonderful today. The writing, pure and simple. Each plot development is surrounded by acres of commentary whose richness and intensity—deep, dense, psychologically penetrating—provides the story with transformative values, converts melodrama into metaphor.” —Vivan Gornick, The New York Times Paperback • $24.95 ARIANE, A RUSSIAN GIRL Claude Anet Translated from the French by Mitchell Abidor “By turns passionate, callous and not a little unnerving, Ariane is an astonishingly fresh object lesson in the perils of permissive morality, one that time and again invokes the reader’s own…

The Cultural Legacy of the Pre-Ashkenazic Jews in Eastern Europe by Moshe Taube. University of California Press/Luminos, 139 pp., $34.95 (paper); available for free download at doi.org/10.1525/luminos.137 In a late-fifteenth-century Russian collection called the Academy Chronograph (a kind of chronicle1), there is a story about the persecution of Israelites under Antiochus IV, the Seleucid ruler of the Hellenistic Syrian kingdom, whose attack on Jerusalem in 168 BCE led to an uprising and victory by the Maccabees—which gave us the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. As part of their repression campaign, the Seleucid authorities were said to have “ordered Israel that everyone who has an ox should write on its horns that he has no stake in the God of Israel.” In response, to avoid committing idolatry, “the Israelites slaughtered their oxen.”…

The Woman Back from Moscow: In Pursuit of Beauty by Ha Jin. Other Press, 719 pp., $21.99 (paper) This book will be denounced in Beijing. Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow is a novel based on the life of Sun Weishi, an adopted daughter of Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, whose brilliant mind and intensive study in Moscow of the Stanislavski acting method brought her to the pinnacle of China’s theatrical world during the Mao years. Her beauty and effervescent personality attracted powerful men—not only Zhou, who doted on her, but also Lin Biao, the Chinese Communist Party’s leading general, who divorced his wife in order to propose marriage to her (unsuccessfully), and Mao, who apparently raped her during a long rail trip. She had several other suitors and eventually…

The New Life by Tom Crewe. Scribner, 390 pp., $28.00; $18.00 (paper) Why bother writing a historical novel, with its added burden of research and its added risk of anachronism, when every novelist has her own life to plunder, which no one else will ever be able to plunder so well? One noble motive is to reconstruct the consciousness of a person who at the time would not have been represented from the inside. Tom Crewe’s debut novel, The New Life, imagines what it felt like, day to day, for two late Victorians, the belletrist John Addington Symonds and the sexologist Havelock Ellis, to collaborate on Sexual Inversion (1897), one of the earliest English-language monographs on homosexuality to be written in a tolerant, scientific spirit. Symonds and Ellis were an…

In July the Florida Board of Education issued new standards for teaching public school students about slavery. Among other things, these declared that slaves assigned to certain types of work “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Outraged critics denounced this as one more egregious episode in the campaign against “woke” education that Governor Ron DeSantis hopes will carry him into the White House. But it was much more than that. It was the latest skirmish in a struggle that has been going on for a century and a half. As with so many other conflicts in American life, from the Scopes trial to the fury against multiculturalism, at its core has been a war over textbooks. And although she is little remembered today,…

Politics in the Classroom To the Editors: I read with interest Erin Maglaque’s complimentary review of my recent book, Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena [NYR, September 21]. Her main point of disagreement, which seems to issue from an extreme form of moral relativism, lies with my contention that what I call “virtue politics” might have a contemporary application. I won’t argue that point, since I have an extensive discussion of it in the next issue of The Good Society: A Journal of Civic Studies. I do, however, think that Maglaque misleads her readers when she characterizes the classical education movement as a right-wing political project. In my view classical education (a misnomer for traditional liberal arts education) is something that thoughtful progressives…

A Silent Fire: The Story of Inflammation, Diet, and Disease by Shilpa Ravella. Norton, 340 pp., $30.00 Flush: The Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure by Bryn Nelson. Grand Central Publishing, 421 pp., $30.00; $19.99 (paper) The Anti-Viral Gut: Tackling Pathogens from the Inside Out by Robynne Chutkan. Avery, 257 pp., $27.00 Right before their colonoscopies, with the stress of a bowel prep still rumbling in their bellies and a mental image of the procedure beginning to sharpen, some patients will ask me why I chose a career in gastroenterology: “What made you interested in this?” The reason I usually give is that you could go all your life without a heart problem, or a lung problem, or a kidney problem, but not without a bit of nausea, constipation, or abdominal pain.…

NEW WRITING FROM nryb NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS LOVED AND MISSED Susie Boyt “A single mother navigates custody of her granddaughter—and tries to correct mistakes she made the first time around—in this gentle but heart-wrenching story…. Readers who are averse to crying in public be warned: You’ll want to sit with this astounding story at home.” —Kirkus starred review “It is one of the great charms of the book that, while Boyt is clear-eyed about the compulsions driving Ruth’s caregiving, the descriptions of this caregiving remain so seductive. Much of the novel depicts, with exquisite detail, the prosaic patterns of Ruth and Lily’s home life—quotidian routines between grandmother and granddaughter that are mildly intoxicating.” —Jane Hu, The New Yorker Paperback • $17.95 ABOUT ED Robert Glück “The masterly latest from…

Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell. Riverhead, 191 pp., $25.00; $18.00 (paper) In “Casa Tomada” (“House Taken Over”), a 1946 short story by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, a woman named Irene and her brother live together in an enormous house. As they enter middle age, the spacious rooms surrounding them are the only thing they have: Irene has rejected two marriage proposals, and the brother’s girlfriend has passed away. They are quintessential porteños—Buenos Aires natives, in this case descended from the aristocracy. “The quiet, simple marriage of sister and brother,” the latter narrates, “was the indispensable end to a line established in this house by our grandparents.” In this vaguely incestuous relationship, she knits one sweater after another while he makes a…