Innholdsfortegnelse for February 22, 2024 i The New York Review of Books

David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor of History at Princeton. His latest book is Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. Robyn Creswell teaches comparative literature at Yale and is the translator, most recently, of Iman Mersal’s poetry collection The Threshold. Ava Kofman is a reporter at ProPublica. Ange Mlinko is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Florida. Her latest poetry collection, Venice, was published in 2022. Jim Moore’s most recent book of poems is Prognosis. Gary Saul Morson is the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities and a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern. His latest book, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers…

Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West, with a foreword by Alejandro Zambra. Penguin, 311 pp., $18.00 (paper) The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West, with an introduction by Leonardo Padura. Penguin, 226 pp., $18.00 (paper) A grim silhouette looms on the prow of a ship: “Door-without-hinges…a meager frame with a set square, an inverted gable, a black triangle, and fixtures of cold beveled steel.” The year is 1794, and a guillotine is on its way to the island of Guadeloupe. In Alejo Carpentier’s riddle-like opening to his 1962 novel Explosion in a Cathedral, the Machine, as he calls it, yawns against the sky like some Deist mechanism or Dada readymade, an Old World construct…

I am the bat that vanishesunder the bridge in late September.I’m the little dancer in night air, drunkon insects. See me over there by the couple drowningin each other on the bench under the pine tree?I am the velvet thing that brushes your earlobes.I am at home in a cave, a whisker in a dark hole.I am encircled by rain, owned by wind.I am a blossom only if you see me.And autumn folds up my wings and carries meto the underworld, the lightest death you’ll ever knowis not your own. I am your shadow,your melancholy, your eyes closedagainst the world. I am your littlest mouse selfgiven wing. I squeeze through the keyholeof your fear, you who remember the boywho drowned twenty years ago: togetheryou worked for a month to build…

Camus in Wartime To the Editors: In her flavorful review of Albert Camus’s Travels in the Americas [“Camus on Tour,” NYR, November 23, 2023], Vivian Gornick touches a bit cavalierly on the writer’s wartime life. Gornick writes that “when the war started [Camus] joined the Resistance and soon became the editor of Combat.” But the Resistance publication Combat only appeared in 1944, which is hardly “soon” after the Nazi occupation of France in 1940. Moreover, except for this late (and wonderful) Resistance journalism, Camus’s involvement with La Résistance remains somewhat murky. He himself was reluctant to talk about it, even with his friend former Resistance fighter Germaine Brée, who wrote one of the first books on Camus and consulted him about it. On the other hand, what is known is…

The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos by Mark Chiusano. One Signal/Atria, 284 pp., $28.99 When masquerading as someone else, one should never be sloppy. One must become a master of the alternative facts. Dress, for instance, as the other man would dress, practice his diction, and know his history as well as you know your own. The guide in these matters should probably be Tom Ripley, the hero of Patricia Highsmith’s creepy novels, who brings something supernatural to his manic over-identifications. Ripley is the king of prep. Excited by the possibility of ordinary doubt, he stuffs his characterizations with a level of detail so fine it begins to tickle speculation. In Ripley Under Ground, while impersonating the dead painter Philip Derwatt, he…

Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature by David Anthony. Oxford University Press, 200 pp., $85.00 Antisemitism has appeared in many times and places—and, as David Anthony shows in his informative, unsettling Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature, in many genres. Anthony has unearthed hostile portraits of Jews in various realms of US culture during the two decades before the Civil War: in pulp fiction, in novels about southern plantation life, in political cartoons, in stage performances, and in literary works like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun. Anthony demonstrates that the Jew as villain—materialistic, scheming, sometimes sexually aggressive—was a common stereotype in the pre–Civil War era. But he also reveals that many non-Jews expressed ambivalence, depicting Jews as menacing yet enticingly exotic. Much of Anthony’s focus is…

On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of al-Andalus by Eric Calderwood. Harvard University Press, 345 pp., $45.00 Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Averroës’ Search” begins one afternoon in twelfth-century Andalusia, in the shady Cordovan home of Ibn Rushd, later known in Europe as Averroës. The philosopher is at an impasse in his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics: two words, “tragedy” and “comedy,” are everywhere in the Greek but opaque to the Arab, who has no notion of dramaturgy. At a dinner party that evening, the subject of poetry comes up again: a guest argues that the Bedouin verse of pre-Islamic times, the foundation of Arabic literature, is obsolete for poets living in sophisticated cities like Córdoba. When the sixth-century poet Zuhayr compared destiny to a blind camel, the metaphor…

Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by Camille T. Dungy. Simon and Schuster, 317 pp., $28.99 The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth by Elizabeth Rush. Milkweed, 397 pp., $30.00 What is the radicalizing potential of motherhood? This was a central question in Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, published in 1976, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 332 parts per million and feminism’s second wave was cycling toward its third. Her answer: The mother’s battle for her child—with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life—needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival. Rich was thinking of the…

Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World by Ulinka Rublack. Oxford University Press, 448 pp., $36.00 When fire broke out in the royal palace in Munich in 1729, it destroyed a painting of the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin made by Albrecht Dürer between 1507 and 1509. This is the “lost masterpiece” of Ulinka Rublack’s title. It was the central panel of the Heller altarpiece, commissioned for the Dominican church in Frankfurt by the merchant Jakob Heller, and the acrimonious exchange over it between Dürer and his patron serves, Rublack explains, as “a lens through which to view the new relationship developing between art, collecting, and commerce in Europe” in the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries. To illustrate this relationship,…

The rain trees are pink again.They litter with a shrug,unorthodox for October, whose vintage is Keatsian,clammy with muscat fug;the rain tree’s blush is sober. In the north a torch is passedfrom maple to oak to beechas geese begin their processional; the rain trees aren’t classedwith myths we preacheither of the Idyll or the Fall. A matte sound sounds like rain too—rustling dessicants, seeds dehiscentconcuss on the gutters of the ear, as Heaney with his rain stick knew.Rain everywhere is heaven-sentbut rain trees portend dry months here, flinging skirtfuls of potpourri—soiled toe-shoe pink, muhly grass pink,sow’s ear pink, a silk purse made: Can rain trees slake a parti prisfor elegy, for rain’s right clink,and claim spring’s shade?…

How Not to Study a Disease: The Story of Alzheimer’s by Karl Herrup. MIT Press, 257 pp., $21.95 (paper) Being cognitively sophisticated and also long-lived has its dark side. The distinctly human style of navigating existence, our facility for reason, memory, empathy, and imagination, depends on a vast and still unfathomed network of cells in the brain. If too many of these cells die, we become unmoored. Memory falters, personality changes, language slips, the grasp on complexity vanishes. Humans are not uniquely susceptible to diseases of neurodegeneration, but I’d wager we’re unique in our fear of them and in the magnitude of the attendant suffering. Dementia, roughly meaning “out of mind,” the major consequence of profound neuronal loss, comes in many and overlapping forms. The most prevalent by current definitions…