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

Helen DeWitt is the author of The Last Samurai, Lightning Rods, Some Trick, and The English Understand Wool. She lives in Berlin. Anne Enright is Professor of Fiction at University College Dublin. Her eighth novel, The Wren, the Wren, was published last year. Michael Gorra is the author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece and The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, among other books. He teaches at Smith. Fintan O’Toole is the Advising Editor at The New York Review and a columnist for The Irish Times. His book Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life was reissued this year. Tim Parks is the author of many novels, translations, and works of nonfiction. His novel Mr Geography will be published in the…

In an ancient book there was a man who lived onlocation in the desert. At noon he wrestled withthe sun the way Jacob wrestled with a hot humanangel all night long. When he got up from the dust, he had a newname that rhymed with his old one. Paul wasthe exemplary convert. On film it’s Pauline who’s in the wilderness—aconfused ideal of vulnerability and strength, ofgenius and foolish luck. The perils of her serialized life unfold amongother encounters with identity staged on nearbysets. Oscar Apfel and Cecil B. DeMille are codirectingwhat is said to be the first full-length featurewhose centerpiece is not Pauline’s starched curlsupon the rails, but a frontier pileup of cultural,sexual, and class anxiety in the interracial West. Conquest and ruin are the stars of a new experi-ence…

The Novices of Lerna by Ángel Bonomini, translated from the Spanish by Jordan Landsman. Transit, 159 pp., $17.95 (paper) In 1973 a small anthology was published in Argentina, its cover featuring the head—in kaleidoscopic quintuplicate—of a Victorian gentleman sporting a Vandyke beard. It was a collection of fantastic literature, a genre broadly defined as fiction that blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy, with a tendency toward metaphysical speculation, embraced with special fervor in Argentina in the mid-twentieth century.1 The anthology was edited by Alberto Manguel, a young bibliophile and writer who has gone on to edit many more volumes in the fifty years since. It is an eccentric object, with footnotes crawling up nearly every page and lengthy introductory sections preceding each story. The commentary is not just Manguel’s.…

The vitriolic disputes taking place around the world over the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza result in part from disagreements about the moral perspective from which to evaluate it. One way to find common ground is to analyze the conflict from a stance that is neither pro-Israeli nor pro-Palestinian but pro-civilian. To do so we can use the standards of international humanitarian law, also called the laws of war. Largely codified in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977, those standards are not merely aspirational rules. They were drafted by the world’s leading militaries, reflecting their view of the best way to protect civilians. Virtually every government, including the United States, Israel, and Palestine, has endorsed them, either by formally ratifying them or by…

Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen: On the Novel and Journalism edited by Christopher Ricks. Oxford University Press, 258 pp., $210.00 One is so used to hearing of the virtues of storytelling and the transformative power of fiction that it comes as a surprise to open a collection of essays entitled On the Novel and Journalism and read: “For art of any kind I have never cared . . . For literature, as such, I care hardly at all.” Why, one wonders, is the eminent critic Christopher Ricks offering us such a lavishly annotated edition of this man’s work? James Fitzjames Stephen was born in 1829 into a family of distinguished English lawyers, historians, and reformers. His grandfather was a leading figure in the antislavery movement, and his father drafted…

I feel an obligation not to cryaround my dogelse she gets frightened and shakes. I’m not comparingchildren to dogs like Israel does,but they share emotionality and deep sensitivity and her shakingreminds me of the videos I downloadedonto my phone of Gazan children shaking in fear in hospitalsthat had only weeks left untilUS-made bombs destroyed them. I dreamt someone waswriting on my eye,the tip of the ballpoint pen silently scribbling what I knewbut couldn’t seeto be Arabic calligraphy. Half-ticklish, half-squeamish,I was drugged or otherwiseparalyzed, sunk in a fluffy bed. If I was Christian I might thinkit was the intake processfor heaven, my virtues and sins entered into the record. The eyewritingbegan to feel like paper cutsI couldn’t flinch from. I was going to heaven blind andparalyzed. That might’ve been worsethan whatever…

Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter by Gary Saul Morson. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 492 pp., $37.95 Gary Saul Morson is the world’s leading authority on Tolstoy and Dosto-evsky. In his latest book, conceived as a stocktaking magnum opus, wonder confronts certainty and triumphs decisively. But is the contest fair? Certainty is represented by the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia and its Bolshevik successors, wonder by the questions posed in Russian realist prose. Both are remarkable for their maximalism and urgency. As Ivan says to his brother Alyosha in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, “Russian boys do nothing but talk of the eternal questions. Isn’t it so?” It is, says Morson. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, “the Russian tendency to take ideas to extremes magnified…

Flip had not wanted a New York agent, but there had been no help for it. She’d been scribbling up in the nursery when Roddy came in, incensed, because some feller had got the number of Champneys by nefarious means and rung him up on the blower. She had refused to come to the phone. She hated phones. She refused the first five times, but in the end Roddy had insisted she talk to the feller to put an end to it. “It’s awfully kind of you, but I couldn’t possibly expect you to put up with my crotchets,” was the sentence released into the hated mouthpiece. “Well, that’s settled then! I’m thrilled!” were the sentences that emerged from the hated earpiece. The only way to end the conversation was…