Innholdsfortegnelse for March 7, 2024 i The New York Review of Books

Matthew Aucoin is a composer and conductor. His newest piece, Music for New Bodies, based on the poetry of Jorie Graham, will have its premiere in Houston in April. John Banville’s novel The Singularities was published last year. Miron Białoszewski (1922–1983) was an acclaimed Polish poet, playwright, and prose writer, a volume of whose work will be published in English in 2025. Clare Cavanagh is the Frances Hooper Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern. She received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature for her translations of Polish poetry. Michał Rusinek is a translator and writer and the Director of the Wisława Szymborska Foundation. He teaches at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Dean Browne’s chapbook Kitchens at Night was published in 2022, and his first collection…

Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 361 pp., £30.00 In 1978, at the age of seventy, Barbara Comyns jotted down a new idea for a novel: I’ve an idea for a book—“Waiting.” Elderly people retiring to a new little house on a garden estate waiting to die but things keep happening. They feel even more intensely than when they were young. Some good things happen, some exciting and some almost horrifying. A year later she sent the manuscript, which sounds a bit like Beckett’s End-game, to her agent. Publishers said they liked it, but no one took it on; they didn’t think it would sell. Comyns protested: “There may be a revival of interest in my books in the not so distant future. Remember…

The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789 by Robert Darnton. Norton, 547 pp., $45.00 Some events refuse to wither and die in our collective memories. The French Revolution is one of them. It prompted admiration and loathing—many observers felt both at once—because it linked the dazzling new dreams of democracy, human rights, and universal education with the equally novel nightmares of the Terror and the inexorable guillotine. No wonder, then, that novelists and filmmakers still find the revolution rich in material and that scholars continue to wrestle over understanding it. These epochal events have always hovered on the edge of the historian Robert Darnton’s concerns. Rather than make his way through the frequently down-and-dirty disputes and polemics about the revolution of 1789, he has chosen to dig up information about earlier, lesser-known…

O gush of bushfire, O quintuple denim sea, sun pressing like a button on us all,O moon mirabilis, unmirrorable mirrorball, O, you, most bottomless of wholes,O arch as high as Maslow’s hierarchy, O I-wide eye, surround-soundness ofoh what’s happened this time, yet O timeless bigtime, day that lasts forever and a day,O, you, beforehand of all forehands, red and long and firm, O, you, beforehead of allforeheads, crowned or bound or nightcapped,the most little and forgettable of all the its you made makes these great claims of you:…

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney. Picador, 359 pp., $18.00 (paper) Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. Picador, 424 pp., $19.00 (paper) In the opening scene of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, Rooney’s main character, Alice, is having a drink at a hotel bar with a man named Felix, whom she has met online. Afterward, when they return to Alice’s house, Alice reveals that she is a novelist. “What kind of people do you write about, people like you?” Felix asks. The tone of the question is difficult to fix. Is it contemptuous? Appreciative? Is he flirting or insulting her? Alice’s response is similarly, deliberately vague: She looked at him calmly, as if to tell him something: that she understood his game, perhaps, and that she would…

The Novel Prize, a biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English, rewards novels that explore and expand the possibilities of the form. Open to published and unpublished writers around the world, the winning books are proudly published by New Directions, Fitzcarraldo, and Giramondo. THE CO-WINNERS: “Sad, shocking, funny, prophetic, visceral, and deeply human.”—JEFF VANDERMEER “I was absolute putty in this book’s hands.”—ALEXANDRA KLEEMAN “A thought-provoking, artfully constructed narrative enriched by the mysteries that expand and proliferate throughout. It’s a deliciously fraught tour de force.”—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (STARRED) “Affecting, carefully drafted, quietly tumultuous.”—TLS NEW DIRECTIONS INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER SINCE 1936 NDBOOKS.COM…

Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created Nancy by Bill Griffith. Abrams ComicArts, 265 pp., $24.99 As a boy growing up in the postwar American ur-suburb of Levittown, Long Island, the cartoonist Bill Griffith learned to read through Ernie Bushmiller’s sublimely absurd and gloriously minimal Nancy comic strip, which ran in the daily newspaper alongside strips like Blondie, Dick Tracy, and Terry and the Pirates, tickling readers across the country seven days a week. Nancy’s main characters included the titular mischievous girl, her aunt Fritzi, and her pal Sluggo; its perfectly generic fences and houses seemed to resemble the view outside Griffith’s window. The strip was Bushmiller’s decades-long exercise in joke construction, accomplished with a rigorous set of rules and an absurd imagination. As Griffith writes in…

The basil plant scenting the window ledge. You could watch itsuccumb for months. To a raffle of aphids. To heat.You could take cuttings to garnish your bruschetta with sweetcontingency. You could love how to it it must seemrisible mooning after trumpet when all there is istriangle. Ding. Flattened and blemished it laments nothing.Spirited piecemeal from evergreen, no no. It cost youtwo quid in the supermarket’s godless fluorescence.Why not sniff. Be late to the appointment sniffing.It smells like old guitar dusted and restrung. Smells of yesand meant. A modicum of some former ah restored.It could charcoal fast here. You can’t reversethe herb’s miniature demolition, but roll it round your goband wake your palate with mouthfuls of window. Of hinge.…

Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History by Peter Brown. Princeton University Press, 713 pp., $45.00 A man looks back on half a life, beginning with his childhood, his schooling, and his higher education. As a student he is absorbed by theological questions, and for many years he rejects the Christian faith of his youth before eventually returning to the church. In the meantime we hear of his migrations as an illustrious teacher between cities on two continents, and the narrative ends with his mother’s death. This is a famous story, but it is no longer Saint Augustine’s alone: the renowned medieval historian (and frequent contributor to these pages) Peter Brown hews close to Augustine’s Confessions of 397 CE in his own more entertaining memoir, Journeys of the Mind. And…

To the Editors: It’s unfortunate that David Cole thought his point about the dangers cancel culture poses to free speech in America would be strengthened if he could link me—someone he identifies as a “prominent liberal”—to the “staunch Republican” Elise Stefanik’s humiliation of three university presidents [“Who’s Canceling Whom?,” NYR, February 8]. To that end, Cole wrote that I “joined” Representative Stefanik in denouncing the response the presidents gave to the congresswoman’s question about whether their universities would tolerate students on campus calling for the genocide of Jews. I did, indeed, describe the presidents’ failure to answer that simple yes-or-no question as “hesitant, formulaic, and bizarrely evasive.” Far from joining the congresswoman, however, I criticized Representative Stefanik’s hypocritical and opportunistic attack on universities; defended Harvard’s initial decision to resist what…

Mountains of Fire: The Menace, Meaning, and Magic of Volcanoes by Clive Oppenheimer. University of Chicago Press, 357 pp., $27.50 Is there anything as terrifyingly majestic as an erupting volcano? The ground shakes, fountains of incandescent lava spurt skyward, and roiling clouds, alive with lightning, grow with alarming speed. Volcanoes are so much larger than anything human, and they care nothing for us, as revealed by the body casts of Pompeii and Herculaneum, in which the death agonies of some of their victims are frozen forever. In Mountains of Fire, Clive Oppenheimer, a professor of volcanology at the University of Cambridge, recounts a life spent studying volcanoes up close. He is an extraordinary individual who somehow finds serenity in the chaos at a volcano’s crater and admits to feelings of loss…