Innholdsfortegnelse for April 18, 2024 i The New York Review of Books

Anatomy of a Fall a film directed by Justine Triet Unlike her contemporaries, Justine Triet, the Academy Award and Palme d’Or–winning writer and director of Anatomy of a Fall (2023), is not interested in the jeune fille. The women at the center of her first three feature films are unmarried mothers just shy of middle age, brisk, pragmatic, professionally self-assured, and sexually magnetic. Each is orbited by a cast of mostly inept, self-absorbed men who clamor for help and approval, and who provoke in her conflicted feelings of exasperation and tenderness. They are, however, handy babysitters. Casually, she asks or expects them to hang around her dirty, cluttered apartment and look after her daughters, whom she loves—about this, there can be no doubt—but with an air of constant preoccupation. Much…

The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland. Penguin Press, 339 pp., $29.00 As a physician, when I care for patients I often wonder what thoughts and feelings I’m not hearing from them. What inner dialogue is running, what worries do they have, not only about their symptoms but also about the present and the future, about how their illness will unfold and change their lives? Andrew Leland, a writer with declining vision, offers an eloquent inner dialogue of stark honesty in The Country of the Blind. Leland has a condition called retinitis pigmentosa (RP), which causes degeneration of the retina. The disorder primarily affects its photoreceptors: the rods that mediate vision at low light and the cones that are active at higher…

Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair by Maurice Samuels. Yale University Press, 209 pp., $26.00 One of the indirect consequences of the latest horrifying bloodshed in the Holy Land has been to intensify responses far away. Divisions of opinion have been so acute and arguments so fraught as to threaten relations among friends or within families. To be sure, such divisions have happened before: the Spanish Civil War caused bitter quarrels far from Spain; twenty years later the Suez Crisis caused more angry dissension in England, and so, in the following decade, did the Vietnam War in America. But no such episode has ever quite matched what history still knows simply as l’Affaire: the controversy provoked by the conviction for treason of the French army captain…

The dead man’s wife explained why the couple had ingested fish tank cleaner: “I saw it sitting on the back shelf and thought, ‘Hey, isn’t that the stuff they’re talking about on TV?’” The bottle that killed Gary Lenius and sent Wanda Lenius to the hospital on March 22, 2020, contained chloroquine phosphate. Days earlier President Donald Trump had touted chloroquine as a possible “game changer” in the fight against Covid-19. “The nice part,” he assured the public, “is it’s been around for a long time, so we know that… if things don’t go as planned, it’s not going to kill anybody.” Pharmacies saw alarming increases in prescriptions for chloroquine products. In those first days of the pandemic, Trump repeatedly made dubious medical claims, in press conferences and on Twitter,…

Gaia’s Web: How Digital Environmentalism Can Combat Climate Change, Restore Biodiversity, Cultivate Empathy, and Regenerate the Earth by Karen Bakker. MIT Press, 279 pp., $29.95 Environmentalism from Below: How Global People’s Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet by Ashley Dawson. Haymarket, 302 pp., $55.00; $22.95 (paper) The Grevy’s zebra, which lives primarily in the grasslands of northern Kenya, is distinguishable from the world’s other two species of zebra by its stripes, which are narrower, more closely spaced, and altogether more elegant than those of its cousins. The most endangered of the zebras, its population was reduced by overhunting and habitat loss from an estimated 15,000 in the 1970s to around 3,000 in the mid-2010s. Like many vulnerable species, it is also threatened by data gaps: Grevy’s zebras are…

Volcanic: Vesuvius in the Age of Revolutions by John Brewer. Yale University Press, 528 pp., $40.00 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the final ascent to the summit of Mount Vesuvius was across crumbling, slippery ash: at every stop you slipped backward, and the wind, the steep slope, and the sulfurous fumes made it painful to breathe. Professional guides tied belts around visitors’ stomachs and dragged them on. The alternative was a sedan chair, equally hard work for the guides. It took a team of twelve men, changing every ten minutes, to lug the corpulent Duke of Buckingham—the “gros marquis”—to the top. It was rash to go it alone. In 1834 the Swiss teenager Catherine-Valérie Boissier, a future novelist, proudly declined assistance, and while the guide mocked her…

Two years after the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, I was on a night train crossing the country from Dnipro to Chełm in Poland, writing notes and organizing my impressions. I had twenty-four hours of travel ahead of me, so there was plenty of time. Serhii is dead. Iryna is crying. Mila is ok. “Ha ha! He is sunbathing!” (He is dead.) The front line is more or less where it was at the end of 2022, but the Ukrainians are under severe pressure, and some are convinced that the Russians are about to punch through and capture a lot more territory. In the Black Sea, on the other hand, the Ukrainians have pushed most of the Russian navy from its base in…

La Forza del Destino an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, directed by Mariusz Treliński, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, February 26–March 29, 2024 There was a time when I daydreamed about La Forza del Destino without ever having heard a note of it. My earliest experiences of opera were not of live performance and were barely musical. While I paid fitful attention to the recordings and radio broadcasts that my eldest brother listened to with the devotion of a precocious musicologist, I was gripped more securely by the plot synopses found in his issues of Opera News and a well-worn copy of Milton Cross’s Complete Stories of the Great Operas. These seemed fairy tales of a peculiar sort, cruel but colorful, each set in its own alternate world where nearly…

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer. Penguin Press, 523 pp., $32.00 The seed of a United States world order was first planted in the middle of the western hemisphere. Long before the advent of nuclear weapons and spaceflight, the tropical lands of Latin America beckoned to ambitious Yankee adventurers, entrepreneurs, and politicians, who set out on military and commercial expeditions in search of glory and profit. On assorted Caribbean islands and above all in the verdant valleys of Central America and its “banana republics,” a United States world order began to take root. William Walker was among the first gringos to notice the potential of Central America. In 1855 the Tennessee-born lawyer sailed south from San…

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside, and with an afterword by Claire-Louise Bennett. New Directions, 239 pp., $16.95 (paper) “Today, the fifth of November, I shall begin my report. I shall set everything down as precisely as I can…. I don’t expect these notebooks will ever be found. At the moment I don’t even know whether I hope they will be. Perhaps I will know, once I’ve finished.” Already, before we’ve finished the first page of the Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer’s novel The Wall, we see that someone wants to write down what happened. There are obstacles in their way: memory is imperfect, precision impossible. What exactly does this person want to write about? Why write without being sure that the writing will be…