Innholdsfortegnelse for October 7, 2019 i The New Yorker

I was visiting London, a magician friend told me that I had to see the English mentalist Derren Brown, who was appearing in the West End, in his one-man show “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” Brown had become famous for an astonishing ability to seemingly read the thoughts of his fellow-humans and to control their actions. In a series of TV specials, he’d reinvented a waning branch of magic—mentalism—for a new generation, framing his feats as evidence not of psychic powers but of a cutting-edge knowledge of the mind and how to manipulate it. A few days later, I was sitting in a capacity audience at a theatre in Covent Garden. A slim, pale, vulpine man in his mid-thirties, with well-tended light-brown hair and a goatee, came onstage, dressed…

Remember how divisive reality television was, before it became just television? In Norway, an intense debate is taking place about virkelighets-litteratur, or “reality literature,” a putatively fictional strain of writing that draws on identifiable characters and events. Critics of reality television complained that it was overproduced; the argument against reality literature is that it is insufficiently artificial, exposing and misrepresenting people who never consented to be a part of it. The country’s most flagrant transgressor of the code of plausible disclaimability is Vigdis Hjorth, whose prickly, persuasive novel “Will and Testament” came out in Norway in 2016, and has just been published in English, by Verso. Earlier this month, the translation, by Charlotte Barslund, was long-listed for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. “Will and Testament” was a…

William Forsythe’s “A Quiet Evening of Dance”—which I saw at the Venice Biennale earlier this year, and which comes to New York’s Shed arts center on October 11th for two weeks—concludes with a joyful balletic piece to music by the eighteenth-century composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. It is the kind of dance we rarely see anymore, one that leaves audiences elevated, energized, overcome by the sheer pleasure of movement and music. Who would have expected this from an American choreographer who has spent the past four decades in the trenches of the European avantgarde, deconstructing ballet’s fundamental premises? Forsythe’s tendency to push his dancers to physical extremes, and his use of electronic sound scores by his longtime collaborator Thom Willems—to say nothing of his taste for German Tanztheater and French post-structuralist thought—have…

BEARING WITNESS I read Zuzana Justman’s Personal History about her experience in the Terezín concentration camp with interest and gratitude (“My Terezín Diary,” September 16th). I was one of those fortunate German-Jewish children whose parents were able to arrange for emigration before the tragedies began. We moved first to France, a few months before Kristallnacht, and then to the United States, four months before the German occupation of France. Until recently, I did not consider myself to be a Holocaust survivor. But as the Holocaust recedes further into history—and as Holocaust deniers seek to rewrite that history, and white supremacism once again rears its ugly head—we, the survivors, are still here to bear witness and to make our voices heard. Your magazine’s role in giving those voices an opportunity to…

Of course I have a lot of memories of my father. It’s only natural, considering that we lived under the same roof of our not exactly spacious home from the time I was born until I left home at eighteen. And, as is the case with most children and parents, I imagine, some of my memories of my father are happy, some not quite so much. But the memories that remain most vividly in my mind now fall into neither category; they involve more ordinary events. This one, for instance: When we were living in Shukugawa (part of Nishinomiya City, in Hyogo Prefecture), one day we went to the beach to get rid of a cat. Not a kitten but an older female cat. Why we needed to get rid…

The night after Jerome’s brother turned up on a Southside sidewalk, bloodied and babbling in and out of consciousness, Tiny took Jerome’s hand, sat him on a stool, wiped tears from his cheeks, draped a towel over his shoulders, and whispered, Relax, baby, you can’t go to the hospital like that. Your brother’ll wake up to that damn bird’s nest on your head and fall right back into another coma. For the next two hours, Tiny sheared away Jerome’s knotty beads until his head appeared smooth and black, with orderly hairs laid prone by her soft, smoothing hand. Back when they met, she’d told him she cut hair, said she was damn good, too. Jerome had nodded, smiled a bit, as if to say, How cute, and changed the subject.…

Wherever I step I am stepping “W into a place that was just finished at the moment I arrived,” the American poet Fanny Howe wrote, a decade ago, in “The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation.” This temporal dilemma, which skews past and future, has preoccupied her sixty years of work: “If I freeze here, one foot poised to go forward, to land on the path, I will at least be living in the present and the past will know it.” Writing poetry has been her way of knowing, and of knowing that she knows. Her latest collection, “Love and I,” is further proof of this knowledge. Pragmatic but blessedly naïve—she calls herself “gullible”—Howe’s poetry takes a line-by-line approach to managing existential fear. Her work calls to mind a child’s…

The sci-fi fantasias of Japanese video games, the pulsing bodies of E.D.M. raves, the mystical spaces of Nigerian shrines, and the bygone music chain Tower Records all figure into the wildly ingenious new work of the young American artist Jacolby Satterwhite (pictured). On Oct. 4, Pioneer Works, in Brooklyn, opens “You’re at Home,” an exhibition of digital projections, performances, sculptures, and music by the artist, who recently directed an animated music video for the singer Solange. THE THEATRE Kingfishers Catch Fire Irish Repertory Inspired by historical events, Robin Glendinning’s two-hander pits the former S.S. officer Herbert Kappler (Haskell King) against the Irish clergyman Hugh O’Flaherty (Sean Gormley). It’s 1948 and Kappler is serving a life sentence in Rome, where he used to head the local Nazi police. But “pits” is…

So how’s dating going? Are you on all the apps? There are so many now. I know, it’s crazy! Are you on the app where girls have to send the initial message, and then guys are only allowed to choose from twenty preapproved words for the first hour? That way they can’t say anything overtly sexual or offensive until after you’ve spent an hour talking to them. My friend Amanda met her boyfriend on it. I get it—it’s tough out there. Dating seems so different now from the way it was when I was doing it. I was just reading somewhere that young people don’t even go on real dates anymore. They just “slide” into one another’s Blue Apron accounts, and if you “like” the same recipes as someone else…

We’d been talking about how back in the day we’d nothing much of anything,Though what there was to wear—the uniform!—was too big. The sleevesDrooped well below the fingertips. It gave you room to grow into. Years loomed.Day after day, summer after summer, days were immeasurably longer then,And the one tin bathful of hot water did the several children one after the other.Then it seemed in no time at all you were into your teens. Because your birthdayFell a week before Christmas—December the 18th—you’d have to make doWith the merest token of a family present. A set of bath salts, maybe, or a barOf lemon soap the simulacrum of a lemon, and we tried to rememberIf such a thing came wrapped in tissue paper like the fruit itself, or was itSee-through…

Why do we have so many words for parties, a slewof them once you start looking: shindig, bash,meet-and-greets, raves, blowouts, barbecues,and more tepid functions, receptions, luncheons, and do’sof all kinds, though, let’s face it, most people have no clueabout how to throw a party, like the friend who was complainingbecause her husband wanted to have lots of food at the brunchthey were planning, but she knew people didn’t goto parties to eat, and Marsha and I had to break it to herthat brunch was the combination of two meals,so her guests were expecting to eat double, and you can’t believethe shock on her face, but her husband put out a great spreadand everyone ate and talked, though we’ve all been to those partieswith the bowl of dead chips and the…

The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett (Harper). This warm intergenerational saga transplants fairy-tale tropes into a mid-century mid-Atlantic setting. The house of the title, in the Philadelphia suburbs, is the childhood home of Maeve and Danny, who are banished from it by a spiteful stepmother, after their mother leaves them and their father dies. Former members of the house’s domestic staff watch over them like fairy godmothers, but the siblings must depend on each other for support through angsty college years, the vicissitudes of adulthood, and the sudden reappearance of their mother, after more than thirty years. Through it all, the house exerts an almost magical pull, drawing the siblings back to contemplate its influence; it is, Danny says, “the hero of every story, our lost and beloved country.” A…

The theatre is a paradoxical place to go in search of empathy. While the actors are up there, working to make us feel, through their acute particularity, what it is to be human, we are down here, elbow to elbow with fidgeting, gum-chewing, symphonically coughing specimens of our own kind. The divide can seem vast—one ringing phone can be enough to make you want to cancel everybody, everywhere—and theatre-makers try to bridge it in all sorts of ways. They deconstruct the stage and break the famous fourth wall, enlisting audience members to participate in the action, to varying degrees of success. (I’m thinking of the radically confrontational ending of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s recent “Fairview”—and also, with pity, of the outraged theatregoer I saw complaining to an usher at Jeremy…