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

As war rages in Gaza and the Middle East as a whole is skittering on the brink of a wider conflagration, the fate of thousands of Palestinian shepherds and farmers on the West Bank looks grim. Neither the government nor the army has done anything to stop rampaging Israeli settlers who are hell-bent on driving these people—some of whom are my friends—off their lands. By now the situation has been reported widely in at least some of the Israeli media as well as in the international press.1 President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have both warned that this settler violence has to be curbed. On November 8 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made an empty public gesture : “There is a tiny handful of people,” he said, “who…

Antagony by Luis Goytisolo, translated from the Spanish by Brendan Riley, with a prologue by Ignacio Echevarría. Dalkey Archive, 1,122 pp., $29.95 (paper) In the first volume of his memoirs, Forbidden Territory (1985), the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo describes a moment in Paris in the late 1950s when he and some friends were watching news and documentary films about the Spanish Civil War, including footage of the aftermath of the aerial bombing of Barcelona by fascist forces on March 17, 1938. “In the foreground,” he writes, “the camera slowly pans the victims’ faces and, soaked in cold sweat, you suddenly realize the harsh possibility that the face you fear may suddenly appear.” Goytisolo’s mother, Julia Gay, had gone to visit her parents in the city on the morning of the…

The Mysteries by Bill Watterson, illustrated by John Kascht and Bill Watterson. Andrews McMeel, 72 pp., $19.99 Calvin and Hobbes ended, nearly thirty years ago, in white: snowfall has turned the woods into a “brand-new” world, as Hobbes puts it, “like… a big white sheet of paper to draw on!” The enormous final panel is half empty, with just a few bare trees in one corner, and Calvin and Hobbes rocketing off on a sled. “It’s a magical world,” Calvin famously declares. “Let’s go exploring!” The Mysteries, Bill Watterson’s first book in the decades since he brought his masterpiece to a close—practically his first publicly released work, barring a few scattered images, cameos in other people’s comic strips, and a handful of essays—is hemmed in on all sides by black.…

Nature and Imagination in Ancient and Early Modern Roman Art by Gabriel Pihas. Routledge, 173 pp., $170.00 “Does the world ever speak?” My grandson—an impossibly inquisitive four-year-old—once stopped me in my tracks with that. Years later, I still wonder how best to have replied. The world can surely be interpreted. If not, then we would hardly have science, and a large share of poetry would also be in vain. But does the world offer statements to which we should listen? If we paid attention to all that surrounds us, could we learn where to place our trust and how to direct our actions? There was a time, argues Gabriel Pihas, when we believed that we could. We no longer do so now, though, for modernity is a cultural condition in…

Sometime around 1520 Ferdinand Columbus, second son of the famous Christopher, wrote to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V (Charles I of Spain), requesting money for a universal library—a place, Ferdinand explained, where “all the books will be gathered, in every language, and concerning all the sciences and the arts that can be found both in Christian and in non-Christian nations.” Attached to the court since childhood, Ferdinand had accompanied his father on his calamitous fourth voyage as a teenager, but then devoted himself to a life of scholarship and diplomacy. Crisscrossing Europe on missions for the crown, he amassed more than 15,000 books and 3,200 prints, the most complete repository of verbal and visual information in Europe. The five hundred livres that Charles V eventually coughed up aside, this…

The Lights by Ben Lerner. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 117 pp., $26.00 The Auburn Conference by Tom Piazza. University of Iowa Press, 193 pp., $17.00 (paper) Imagine a festive dinner near Topeka during the fall of 1879 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Kansas Territory, with Walt Whitman as a featured speaker. Partially paralyzed by a stroke and described as “reckless and vulgar” by The New York Times—Leaves of Grass was soon to be banned for indecency by the Boston district attorney—Whitman, who had just turned sixty, may well have wondered why he, instead of some respectable graybeard like Emerson, was invited. Was it because he had defended John Brown, the hero of free-soil Kansas? Or was it hoped that a visit might inspire something like…

Porn: An Oral History by Polly Barton. Fitzcarraldo, 356 pp., L13.99 (paper); $17.95 (to be published in the US in April) Even apart from its punning subtitle, Porn seems to have the makings of one of those dubious inquiries into sexual experience whose high-minded claims to sociological or scientific interest will be undermined on every page by the hot, pervy details of people’s sex lives. But Polly Barton’s oral history turns out to be something different. A British translator of Japanese fiction, Barton interviews nineteen friends and acquaintances of different ages, genders, and sexual identities about the place of pornography in their lives. There isn’t really any history, and none of the participants is involved in making pornography—the interviews are all about its consumption. Barton’s interviewees describe their first, sometimes…

Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann. Penguin Press, 355 pp., $30.00 What kind of life should an artist live? In a way this is a nonquestion, in that the only serious answer is whatever life might facilitate the production of art. But it’s a question that presented itself to me with maddening insistence as I read the German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s extravagantly titled new memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All. Herzog is a figure of such storied romance and such implacable charisma that to read about his life is to feel that you yourself have been going about the thing all wrong—certainly if you are any sort of artist, and perhaps even more so if…

What Have You Left Behind?: Voices from a Forgotten War by Bushra al-Maqtari, translated from the Arabic by Sawad Hussain. Fitzcarraldo, 204 pp., $17.95 (paper) The words “she cries” show up sixty times in total in Bushra al-Maqtari’s What Have You Left Behind? The men in the book seem to weep less: “He cries” appears twenty times. These phrases, which al-Maqtari, a Yemeni journalist, puts in italics and between square brackets, read like terse, tragic stage directions, embedded within reams of oral testimony from victims of the civil war in Yemen. There are so many that she is never in danger of running out. The conflict is now in its tenth year; some 377,000 people have died. In 2018, the United Nations called the war the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,…

Prehistoric Planet a BBC Studios series streaming on Apple TV+ Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday. Random House, 385 pp., $22.00 (paper) One early myth about the dinosaurs was that they would return. In 1830 Charles Lyell—earth scientist, Scot—gazed into the far future and posited as much in his Principles of Geology, arguing that since the planet’s climate was cyclical (or so he believed), vanished creatures could yet be revived, along with their habitats, when the right conditions came back around: “The huge iguanodon might reappear in the woods, and the ichthyosaur in the sea, while the pterodactyl might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree-ferns.” As to whether people would get to witness the spectacle of this resurrected bestiary—well, if Lyell was never drawn to…

Constitutional Contagion: Covid, the Courts, and Public Health by Wendy E. Parmet. Cambridge University Press, 235 pp., $75.00; $24.99 (paper) The public health profession uses the term “social determinants of health” to describe the social conditions that combine to influence the health of individuals and communities. These include such measurable elements as education, housing, and economic stability as well as environmental quality, structural racism, and other forms of systemic discrimination, some of which are less quantifiable. In Constitutional Contagion, Wendy Parmet demonstrates that among these elements we also need to include law. It was a given that legal issues would arise in the course of the US response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In the spring of 2020 governors and mayors almost immediately drew on explicit or assumed legal authority to…

Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Thread gill and Brent Hayes Edwards. Knopf, 403 pp., $32.50 I bought my first Henry Thread gill album in 1988, after seeing him in an advertisement for Dewar’s scotch. At sixteen I couldn’t buy Dewar’s, but as a fervent parishioner of the jazz church, I was intrigued by the ad’s description of Thread gill, a Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist and composer in his forties who had just finished reading John Cage’s Silence and had invented something called the “hubkaphone.” The ad also included his impertinent riposte to the ancestor worship of jazz purists like Wynton Marsalis: “Tradition is a background of ingredients; in itself it’s nothing. If you can’t make something out of it, the world can do without it.” I…

Time Without Keys by Ida Vitale, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Pollack. New Directions, 182 pp., $18.95 (paper) To the Letter by Tomasz Różycki, translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal. Archipelago, 127 pp., $18.00 (paper) “Poetry,” Ida Vitale remarks in the essay included in her new collection, “like death, perhaps, is surrounded by explanations.” Now living again in Montevideo, Uruguay, where she was born in 1923, Vitale can take poetry’s prestige for granted. Over the past century or more Latin America has commanded a world stage: the writings of César Vallejo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Pablo Neruda, among others, hardly require explanation or defense. Her own cohort, the Generation of 1945 (the “Generación Crítica”), was instrumental in keeping Montevideo abreast of cosmopolitan developments in literature, theater, and critical…