Innholdsfortegnelse for July 11-18, 2022 i The New Yorker

“Yes,” she said. “It’s incredible.” It was quite stupid of people, she thought, to make everything, even conversation, so interrelated and dependent that she could not say merely that it was incredible but must be referring to something preceding or obvious; nothing exists, she thought, unless it depends upon something previous; people are incapable of realizing anything that does not bear upon that interrelation. In this case, it was the number of warm days that was incredible (warm days being a factor in anyone’s understanding), instead of anything more important, and there seem to be so few important things, she thought desperately, besides the weather. “I like it, though,” said her mother. There. Her mother liked it. In the pattern which existed around and in and was a part of…

Emmanuel Carrère, who writes with the clear-eyed judgment of someone who has trained himself, against instinct, to take an interest in other people, was eating lunch one day last fall in a restaurant in northcentral Paris. Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, a film director and Carrère’s partner, had joined him; they live nearby, in an apartment as spare and as sunny as one in a yogurt commercial. The restaurant, her choice, was more modish and vegetarian than he might have chosen. Carrère’s manner was measured, almost courtly; his smile resembles a wince. After lunch, he would walk a mile and a half south, to the Palais de Justice, to spend the afternoon at the trial of men accused of involvement in the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks that killed a hundred and thirty people,…

He was on a low road next to the French Broad, which divided the town in half. He thought about how with small cities, like this one, that were split in two by a river, you added the word “West” or the word “East” to the half that was less desirable, the half that was not the commercial center. He had been on this road before, twenty years earlier. The damp and teeming feel was familiar and unchanged. There was almost no development here, just tall trees and railroad tracks. His windows were down and the river felt close, as if its green water were breathing on his skin. He arrived at the railroad crossing—he remembered this crossing—as the gates were descending. He waited. The sound of a train horn…

Lapvona, by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Press). In this novel of medieval grotesquerie, Lapvona is a realm where cruelty reigns. Marek, a disfigured boy, and his father, Jude, a shepherd, live a life of squalor until an accident results in Marek’s being adopted by Lapvona’s slovenly lord, Villiam. While Marek grows fat on the castle’s delicacies, Jude and the other villagers go hungry during a drought. Alternating between scenes of idle decadence and of desperate struggle for survival, the novel abounds with violence, cannibalism, and magic, while human compassion flickers only occasionally. Moshfegh’s brutal vision can make for grim reading, but it has a coherence that is rare in contemporary fiction. Horse, by Geraldine Brooks (Viking). One of America’s first champion thoroughbreds, Lexington (1850-75), stands at the center of this deft…

FREIGHT OVERBOARD As a former longshoreman, I was intrigued by Kathryn Schulz’s article about how container ships have radically changed international trade during the past six decades (“Shipping News,” June 6th). I am concerned that some readers may come away from the piece with the impression that longshoring is no longer part of the shipping industry. In fact, longshoremen and -women, drawing on a combination of skill and brawn, continue to play a vital role in making sure that containers get where they need to go. Lashers—the workers who secure containers to ships with rods and turnbuckles—are particularly important in preventing containers from falling overboard. Other dockworkers operate huge cranes that move containers from land to ship; many develop back pain from constantly leaning over in their small cabs as…

You’ve caught the morning’s first flight and your car is late, but Aiden told you it’d be there and five minutes later it is. He’s filming in Georgia, because apparently everyone’s filming in Georgia, which means he’s sleeping on set, which means you won’t catch him during daylight hours—but he still puts you up in a hotel on Piedmont for the weekend. It’s like Montrose, he texted, but gayer. You’re surprised he even remembers the neighborhood. And you start to ask if he isn’t worried about having his name on the reservation, given the fag of it all. Then you remember that he probably made an assistant do that shit for him. Your driver’s a tall Black dude. He helps with your bags. When he says, You don’t need that…

The dead are what’s absent,forgotten, inert.A bell rings outits loneliness swaying amid the roses.The dead come out at nightor they come out in the afternoonto feed from gourds,from lecterns,from other people’s throats,from guitar pegs,from the key and the calabash,from scissors blunted by use,on the concrete of plazas,on savage smells,on nectar,on bone.In the drop of waterappears the face of the dead.In the fragment of the sea that the passerby glimpseslies hidden the universe of the dead.The dead hang from the hours.They slake the thirst of a poet friend.The dead endure.The dead sing. (Translated, from the Spanish, by Pamela Carmell.)…

1. In my first years in the U.S., my parents take me to the library to encourage my learning of English. With my mother’s guidance, I check out ten, fifteen books every weekend. Though I gravitate toward picture books, my mother pushes me to start reading more advanced chapter books. “Just the words themselves should be enough,” she says. “If you can’t think up the image on your own, then that’s a failure of imagination.” This is how I come across “Iron & Silk,” recommended by a librarian as an adult book that’s easy to read. It’s a memoir by Mark Salzman, a wushu enthusiast who was among the first wave of Americans accepted into China in the early nineteen-eighties. He travelled to Changsha and taught English at the Hunan…

The blurring of gender—and other—binaries is central to Rivera Garza’s work. The “Torso of Adèle” is among the smallest and most sensual of Auguste Rodin’s partial figures. She has neither head nor legs; her body reclines with its elbows raised and one arm flung across her neck, her back arching into the air. The eye seeks the point that balances her movement. Skimming her breasts, her ribs, her navel, it comes to rest on her iliac crest, the bone that wings its way across the hip. “From there, from Ilion, from her crest, Odysseus departed on his return to Ithaca after the war,” thinks the narrator of “The Iliac Crest” (2002), the second novel by the Mexican-born writer Cristina Rivera Garza. To his wandering mind, “Iliac” summons Ilion, Homer’s Troy—a city…

JULY 6 – 19, 2022 Since 2008, the Fandango Fronterizo Festival has brought musicians from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border together to play son jarocho, regional folk music from Veracruz, Mexico. In 2018, the jazz maestro Arturo O’Farrill met with the festival’s founder, Jorge Francisco Castillo, to arrange a special jam session that was captured in the HBO documentary “Fandango at the Wall.” O’Farrill and his eighteen-piece Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra reunite with musicians from Veracruz for a free concert on the lawn of Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Pier I, on July 9. As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. ART Joy Episalla “Foldtogram,” a portmanteau of “folded” and “photogram,” is a term coined by this New York artist to describe their novel addition to the long…

Carlos Cevallos, eighty-four, and his brother Miguel, eighty-one, make whimsical, hand-drawn signs and posters for a living. The other day, they were sitting in a booth at a coffee shop in Lenox Hill. The brothers, who live together nearby, were dressed, as they are every day, in baggy suits and neckties. They both used a knife and a fork to eat a corn muffin. Seated across from them was their friend and helper, Aviram Cohen, fortyone, who asked, “You want me to show you the jobs for next week?” The brothers gravely nodded. Then, using a mixture of English and Spanish—the brothers are Ecuadorian but were raised in Colombia, and speak limited English—Cohen outlined six signs that were to be made, including one for a gastropub in New Jersey called…

Though she knew no English,or only little, I could put my small hand intoher leather glove to read the rabbit in snow, fur so cool and sweeteven winter faded.That was my favorite thing. In summer, I could pick out her kitchenfrom the street, through the air, open window,cabbage and more cabbage, a lovely green though it paledas the boiling did something.Many times I saw her carry one newly picked, hard and roundas a head you’d reach forto save the whole body from drowning. On the boat over, she came alone as a childis the story, years before they calledthe war great then morphed it merely first, a second one arriving in mud and rainlike a trumpet unmutes, sothey had to rewrite the world, count it up all over again. Ma,…

Now here’s how to open a novel: “Quite like old times,” the room says. “Yes? No?” There are two beds, a big one for madame and a smaller one on the opposite side for monsieur. The wash-basin is shut off by a curtain. It is a large room, the smell of cheap hotels faint, almost imperceptible. The street outside is narrow, cobble-stoned, going sharply uphill and ending in a flight of steps. What they call an impasse. I have been here for five days. I have decided on a place to eat in at midday, a place to eat in at night, a place to have my drink in after dinner. I have arranged my little life. Who wouldn’t want to keep reading? The spiked enigma of the details is…

During the final months of the Second World War, the publisher Alfred A. Knopf commissioned a reader’s report, consisting of a form on blue paper with a few queries, regarding a translated novel it was considering by an Icelander named Halldór Laxness. Section B of the form instructed the reader, “If you recommend us to publish the book give your chief reason in a single sentence.” The reader replied, “Those who read this book will never forget it.” The novel, “Independent People,” tells the story of an Icelandic farmer who renames himself Bjartur of Summerhouses, after the wretched farm that he has managed to buy for himself following eighteen years of servitude. No obstacle of God or man will separate him from his independence, even if he pulverizes himself…