Innholdsfortegnelse for May 23, 2024 i The New York Review of Books

Matthew Aucoin is a composer and conductor. His newest work, Music for New Bodies, based on the poetry of Jorie Graham, premiered in Houston in April. He is working on an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Demons, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera. Joanna Biggs is a Senior Editor at Harper’s Magazine and the author of A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again, which was published last year. Stephen Breyer recently retired as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Christopher Byrd lives in Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. Pamela Druckerman is the author of Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting. Ansel Elkins’s first book of poems, Blue…

Divine Days by Leon Forrest, with a foreword by Kenneth W. Warren and a preface by Zachary Price. Seminary Co-op Offsets/Northwestern University Press, 1,140 pp., $28.00 (paper) For the experimental novelist Leon Forrest, the sermon was a major source of inspiration: a flexible form, especially as refined in the African American tradition, that lends itself to both lofty rhetoric and common speech, mingling history, personal observation, moral assertion, and the interpretation of myth—to say nothing of the joy of allusion. In “In the Light of Likeness—Transformed,” an autobiographical essay collected in The Furious Voice for Freedom (1994), he wrote of discovering “a kind of cosmic totality within the monologue of the Negro preacher, which might, in turn, lead to a cosmic consciousness of the race.” The characters in Forrest’s novels…

Madonna: A Rebel Life by Mary Gabriel. Little, Brown, 858 pp., $38.00 I was eight, and I wore a black tulle petticoat from Marks and Spencer. Madonna’s Blond Ambition Tour came to London’s Wembley Stadium for three nights in July 1990, after Tokyo, Los Angeles, Paris, and Rome. My mother took me after having spent hours on the phone to get tickets, which had a silvery seal when they came. I still have the stub, as well as the Like a Virgin cassette that was pretty much the only thing I played in my brown Fisher-Price tape recorder. The BBC broadcast the second show live to the nation, and asked Madonna not to swear—so she did, fourteen times in one minute. What I remember from the concert I went to…

American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden by Katie Rogers. Crown, 276 pp., $30.00 Jill: A Biography of the First Lady by Julie Pace and Darlene Superville, with Evelyn M. Duffy. Little, Brown, 308 pp., $29.00 When I was a child, my grandmother used to tell me in her South Carolinian drawl, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.” The refrain captured the idea that good girls like us should project a genteel, unthreatening sweetness, with no hint of our true inner lives. This advice was already dated when she gave it to me in the 1970s. I was born just late enough to more or less ignore it. Jill Biden was born in 1951. Growing up, she probably…

An Enmy of the People a play by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Amy Herzog and directed by Sam Gold, at Circle in the Square, New York City, March 18–June 23, 2024 It’s not for nothing that the best English-language movie adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 drama, An Enemy of the People, is the one with the giant man-eating shark. One review of the first London production of the play in 1893 quoted a “distinguished actress” who, during the intermission, complained that “this is my first Ibsen play, and I do not like it! I hate plays all about drains and water-supplies, with dirty scenery and no feminine interest in it.” Steven Spielberg solved the drains problem by making the danger that threatens the prosperity of a tourist town not tiny microorganisms in…

It was there since the beginning:the white rope, eye spliceuniting usbetween two bodieswe were sewntogethertetheredby a singlefratricidal heartone treewe splitintwoI dreamed rebellion(to pare the pair of us)our parallel livesa double-barreled shotgunI had to free myself from you mein the mirrorI held your facein my eyelike a hostagewe livedtogether as strangers for yearsside by sidein schoolshoulder to shoulderin the grocery storeon the escalatorour shadow monstrousbeneath the streetlightuntil nowI see my face in your fearbrother, between usthere’s a bridgewhere I waitacross a wideconfluenceof riversthat carries usin the tumulttogether…

A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing by Hilary Mantel, edited by Nicholas Pearson. Henry Holt, 419 pp., $40.00 If it is true, as Saint Augustine says, that the dead aren’t absent but merely invisible, then somewhere round about, as I write about her and you read about her, Hilary Mantel is present. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that she is present not only if Augustine’s statement is true but if I believe it, or if you do. Mantel believed it: she quotes it twice in her 2017 BBC Reith Lectures on the art of historical fiction, which are included among the essays and reviews that make up A Memoir of My Former Self. Elsewhere she says, apropos Princess Diana, “For some people, being dead is…

I was given an idea of the goodand I was taken quickly fromthe same idea, though at first it was as simpleas a tree I saw the ground, conserving summer,populate with geese, some deer, the pachysandra.The good was what I had without myself.When I describe it now, the whole scene strikes meas the remnants of the kingdom of ends.Or the Marian lyric when the help for painhas only recently departed. I was givenunderstanding without mercy, over and over.Understanding only ever changed the treeto a darker color, light and darkand light and dark and darker stilllike a manifestation of the March wind.I was given waiting for the person I loved,for children, given time, and I was takenhostage by the elements of time before I knew it.I was placed without my knowledge…

Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. Astra House, 259 pp., $26.00 “I was wrong to buy this notebook, very wrong,” writes Valeria Cossati, the heroine of Alba de Céspedes’s novel Forbidden Notebook, published in 1952. She is worried that someone might discover the diary; keeping it is taking a toll: “If it’s true that the hidden presence of this notebook gives a new flavor to my life, I have to acknowledge that it isn’t making it any happier.” Valeria lives in Rome in the economically strained years after the war, trying to meet the demands of being a wife and mother in a middle-class family, despite the fact that her husband and children disrespect and dismiss her: “In the family you have to…