Innholdsfortegnelse for February 27, 2025 i The New York Review of Books

Colin B. Bailey is the Katharine J. Rayner Director of the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. His books include Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris and Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting. Christopher de Bellaigue’s latest book is The Lion House: The Coming of a King. Christopher Benfey is a writer and critic based in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is the author of Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay, a family memoir. Irina Dumitrescu is a Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn and the author of The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature. James Gleick’s most recent books are Time Travel and The Information. He is working on a history of the telephone. Vivian Gornick is the author, most recently, of Taking a…

Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, March 26–July 14, 2024, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 8, 2024–January 19, 2025. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Sylvie Patry and Anne Robbins with Kimberly A. Jones and Mary Morton. Musée d’Orsay/National Gallery of Art, 287 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism by Sebastian Smee. Norton, 370 pp., $35.00 “The Impressionist painters, especially Monet and Sisley, had delicate sensations, quite close to each other; as a result their canvases all look alike.” Henri Matisse’s reservations were shared by other early-twentieth-century advocates of modernism. Clive Bell criticized Monet for his “bad science” and the Impressionists in general for leading artists down a “blind…

The Swiss author Markus Werner—beard, curls, grizzle, glasses, absence of affect, we corresponded but I never met him—was a cult writer at the turn of the millennium, the sort of writer whose books traveled by word of mouth among readers, a Geheimtipp in the German Sprachraum. Yes, he had some qualified admirers (not in the sense of qualified admiration, but—you know), experienced and intelligent critics like Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Helmut Böttiger, and he won the odd prize, but his reputation was not one of those seeking to be imposed from above. Rather, Werner’s name was passed around among grateful and slightly incredulous readers—incredulous that something could be this swift, this bleak, and this deadly. The literary production of Werner, who lived from 1944 to 2016, consisted of seven short, barbed…

Blood Test by Charles Baxter. Pantheon, 209 pp., $28.00 Philip Roth famously worried that good satirical fiction was impossible to write in America because actual America was too absurd and too extreme to effectively parody. In an essay published in Commentary in 1961, he wrote: The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist. Of course, much good satire has been written in America, notably by Roth…

Instead of a Letter by Diana Athill, with an afterword by Lena Dunham. New York Review Books, 232 pp., $16.95 (paper) In 1962, when she was in her midforties and one of the best-known book editors in the English-speaking world, Diana Athill published Instead of a Letter, the first of the nine memoirs she would write before her death in 2019, at the age of 101. It is to my mind the only one of the lot that is fully realized. Athill was born in 1917 into an upper-middle-class English family and raised on their country estate in Norfolk, amid a crowd of relatives about whom she either speaks well or remains silent. In just one regard does she pass judgment. Though most members of the family had neither power…

Paper pusher, I’ll tell you what it feels likeTo spend the exact cash you make the same Night you make it. That sky velveted asAn empty ring box. Disintegration coming out Of the speakers again. Neck-deep in the quarry swimmingHole. This thing between us like snapping a bar of cold Chocolate. I like wading into my weakness &Treading there like the final girl. This life no Bigger than a drugstore makeup aisle, than wakingOnly to learn of the late-night car accident. Who said To stitch shut is to mend. Each morning the dogs keptUs alive, even when we hadn’t planned it. The room slow Spun the way the water had moved around us, & the bareLight on the water, those apparitions—our love’s Strategy, a deer tendering into the kitchen throughA…

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi. Norton, 267 pp., $17.95 (paper) One late August day in 1985, Lea Ypi climbed a tree in search of peace. Her parents, branded as “intellectuals” in Communist Albania thanks to their bourgeois family histories, were feuding with their closest friends. The object of their contention—like the golden apple that caused the Trojan War—was an empty Coca-Cola can. Ypi’s mother had brought the can home and placed it on an embroidered cloth to brighten their apartment. This was a treatment that most Albanians reserved for photographs of Enver Hoxha, the brutal dictator who ruled the country for over forty years. Despite little Lea’s enthusiasm for “Uncle Enver,” her parents did not subscribe to Hoxha’s personality cult. No photo, just…

Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future by Ian Johnson. Oxford University Press, 381 pp., $27.95; $19.99 (paper) The word “China,” as used by Western journalists and government officials, almost always refers to the thoughts, values, positions, and plans of high-ranking members of the Chinese Communist Party. This is the case when one reads of “China’s” position on Ukraine, “China’s” effort to stimulate domestic consumption, and so on. In Ian Johnson’s bracing book Sparks, “China” means something else. Johnson writes of Chinese people who uncover momentous truths about their country’s modern history and risk their careers, indeed their lives, to do it. Their values and actions are continuous with ancient moral traditions as well as with the daily life that lies beyond official reach today. They, too,…

Great Adaptations To the Editors: A rather significant factual gaffe by reviewer Jessica Riskin [“Turtles All the Way Up,” NYR, February 13]. She writes: Despite such seemingly deistic moments in his writings, Darwin took a great interest in the capacity of animals to be their own creators, transforming themselves, one another, and their environment, and so influencing the course of evolution. An example is his idea of “use and disuse”: animals strengthen and enhance their body parts by using them, or weaken them by declining to use them, then pass these changes on to their offspring. This was expressly not Darwin’s view, but rather that of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. For Darwin, adaptations were the result of mutations leading to trait variation among individuals in a population, which were then filtered through…